A MarketPlace of Ideas

I grew up in a small town where you did not have to lock your doors.  You really should lock your doors in that same town years later now.  There is absolutely no coincidence between the growth of lib policies and this phenomena. 

Lib policies encourage replacing the word theft with the idea of confiscation or taxation.  They also encourage doing anything that has a percentage in it even if its not right.  Its sad.  As we have gone from a self reliant people to a people who look for the gimme at any turn the nation has degraded.   When you couple this with our neurotic baby boomers that think they will live to be 1000 years old if they avoid second hand smoke it leads to incredible amounts of gaming the governmental system to gain an edge. 

Voting Republican only seems to retard the process but not to eliminate it.

When you shift the cost of anything such as procreation away from the people doing the procreating you encourage a run away condition where upon the responsible of the world are left fending for more and more irresponsible people.  This can not go on. Not in an age where information travels so quickly.

Social networks may be the key to liberating mankind from this shit-fest it appears the dems are so eager we wallow in.   With social networks one can choose an association that is extra national.  With the ability to choose a nation wherein our taxes are negligible.  Where if you want to give all your earn to the chilrun you can join a different meta-nation.  

I hope it happens during my lifetime.  I can’t wait to hear the moans of the lib-takers.

Ebay bought www.Craigslist.org  (fractional)

                  www.Gumtree.com 

                  http://www.stubhub.com

Google bought www.YouTube.com

Yahoo bought www.bix.com   ( I do not see why! this one will go out of style rapido ! )  

— original arty at  http://mashable.com/2006/11/16/yahoo-buys-bixcom/

Yahoo has just bought Bix.com, according to an email that came in tonight. In a deal to be announced by the company on Friday, Yahoo will acquire the site, which was founded in January and launched in August. The Palo Alto-based company, formerly known as 900 seconds, has 16 employees and took funding of $6.77 million from Trinity Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. The price hasn’t been disclosed, and the plan is to keep Bix independent, while also pursuing integration with some of Yahoo’s other properties - I imagine something similar to the way relevant questions from Yahoo Answers are posted across Yahoo sites, although the Bix integration may follow a different path.

Bix is a bit like YouTube for contests, and is in a similar market to SingShot or Fox’s karaoke site KSolo, but I wouldn’t say it’s directly competitive. In addition to entering competitions, you can add comments and post the clips to MySpace, hi5 and the rest - based on the massive amount of activity on the site, it seems that the community has grown fast. Bix has also been a fairly ugly site for most of its existence, but now they seem to have tidied things up substantially, and made the site much easier to use. At the time of writing, the contest on the homepage is a “faceoff” between two classic TV series - that’s a similar idea to European startup BattleOut, and I think both will appeal to a wide audience (although BattleOut is badly located, being over in Germany). Bix.com has a business model, too - like SingShot, Jumpcut (another Yahoo acquisition that has some similar ideas) and Eyespot, they’ve been running sponsored contests to promote certain brands. Mashable covered one such event in October, when famous rapper “The Game” launched two contests through Bix.com to find a dancer for his video and a rapper for his next mix tape.

Why would Yahoo buy? They don’t have a great deal going on in the YouTube arena, and they did try launching Yahoo Talent Show in October, a contest staged through Yahoo Video - clearly, they think this is a hot space. It was probably cheap, too ($10 million?), and it makes sense to snap up these properties early, before the price tags balloon to YouTube-esque levels. Personally, I think both Bix.com and SingShot have massive mainstream appeal, although the latter was a bit late in dropping its insistence on paid accounts, which probably slowed their growth.

Yahoo bought  www.MyBlogLog.com  for a guestimated 10 Million Dollars

Aquisition Reasoning: Original arty at:  http://martinjwells.wordpress.com/2006/11/18/mybloglog-sold-for-10m/

<---- Yahoo have announced that they will be aquiring MyBlogLog for a (rumoured) $10m. Wow! Meteoric or what? The YouTube deal fed the big dreams, MyBlogLog is feeding the small ones. It was founded in March, but only really got moving in October when TechCrunch profiled them. Since then they’ve exploded in growth. An incredibly simple idea that in hindsight (always is) was obvious. Let people reading your blog expose themselves to others, then leverage that into a social network. They played on one of the core motivations of blogging: self-promotion.

So is it worth $10m? At first I thought it was crazy, but when you think about it this was one of those land grab deals. Another service will really struggle to overrun MyBlogLog because it already has most of the big blogs and is gaining serious traction. For Yahoo to come out with its own product (2-3 coders could write MyBlogLog in a couple of months) would have been technical possible, but they would not have gained traction against an existing service, let alone the Yahoo brand probably working against them.

Yahoo buying MyBlogLog has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with betting on a winner — if they keep going the way they are now, the product could well unify the entire blogosphere. The value then would be 2x-20x what they are now. Yahoo are making a smart bet and showing they have their ear to the ground.

Congratulations to Scott, Eric and Todd — your hourly rate for this project was $1543.209. (3 people averaging 60 hours per week for 9 months) —->

Description of MyBlogLog: Original Arty at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/10/mybloglog-adds-myspace-support/

<----

As 2006 closes in, my favorite web service of the year is MyBlogLog. Despite Yahoo! acquisition rumors a few weeks ago, the company is still privately-held. If I were in the web M&A business, they’d top my list along with music social networking service Last.fm.

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks:

1. MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile.
2. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web.
3. How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website.

The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website).

A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team? —->

Wind energy is a mildly viable form of alternative energy.  No amount of twirly pinwheels will fix our energy problems but since capitalism is showing it viable it should be allowed a free run to reach the highest production levels possible on solely private investment. 

You would think a member of the global warming crowd would be all for wind power. Hell Teddy Kennedy IS wind power personified.  He probably in in favor of wind energy unless its within sight of his neighborhood.  Only a femmy lib could think one of these techy marvels made by GE wind systems is not a beautiful work of art. 

http://www.gepower.com/businesses/ge_wind_energy/en/index.htm 

The testosterone levels in me soar when I see machines as large and well designed.

 Teddy Kennedy and Mitt Romney conspired to thwart installation of wind generation off of Martha’s Vinyard.  As far as I am concerned this alone is enough to disqualify Mr. Romney from any public office. 

Mitt….you are intellectually neuter.  Manly men include in their toolkit calculus.  Politicians so often appear to me as a middle age house wife concerned with serving koolaid and cookies.  All smiles with a pretty empty head.  Put your apron on Mitt.