Ryminate

New Baby

Just when I had built up some momentum blogging, my wife and I had a baby. Yep, this past Saturday we had a baby girl 2.5 weeks early. Everything went very well for both mom and baby. I joked with my wife that I could live-blog the whole event since they had wireless internet at the hospital. Maybe next time.

Fixing Social Content Sites

I agree wholeheartedly with Dharmesh Shah’s assessment of social content sites like Digg. The problem is the content–-it's completely random, and while often interesting, it is NOT particularly relevant to me.

To illustrate, check out the current headlines on Digg:

Google says Vista Search Changes not Enough

One of THE COOLEST Guitars (PIC)

Why Wal-Mart Won't Sell You More Than Two Prepaid Cell Phones

The Weird Things People Eat Around the World

Stolen Homer Simpson Statue Found

Like I said, these stories are random, interesting, but not particularly relevant to me. The social content sites have responded by creating story categories (e.g., entertainment, technology, sports), BUT they really can’t slice the content narrow enough to solve the relevance problem.

How do you fix this?

One idea is to create a PLATFORM, where users can create social news site pages containing content relevant to any type of vertical market. The content on these pages could be anything from all things labradoodle for labradoodle lovers, Notre Dame Football for Notre Dame fans, a local political candidate for supporters, GTD, even a nucleotide of interest to particular group of researchers. Content within these user created, vertical market sites would be voted upon just like Digg, Reddit, Truemors, thereby incorporating the value of the wisdom of crowds.

There are those out there trying to create this PLATFORM, (e.g., coRank), but I think a MUCH less complex model would be much more viral. I envision a basic site where...

1. users can create their own pages using the platform;
2. news stories are listed in two basic categories: the latest (the latest submissions), and the greatest (the voted upon results); and
3. the site would allow for interaction among users (e.g., comments, chat, forum clouds, meetups)

The content on these sites would be VERY relevant to its users, because unlike the other social content sites out there, you’ve gone one step further and empowered the users to create the categories. This is taking user generated content to another level.

There is a bit of a dilemma here: as you increase focus and thereby increase relevancy, such focus may cause a site to fall below the critical mass of users required to keep it going. This dilemma might be able to be bridged. For example, it may help in such situations for the "latest" stories to auto-propogate with content based upon user defined Google News Alert keywords, and then the voters could take over.

Austin based startup Thoof may be building something that principally meets some of what I've described above. We'll have to wait and see.

If you're a startup trying to build something along these lines I'd love to talk.

Beautiful Internet... Beautiful Caselaw?

Check out this gorgeous map of the Internet, compiled by researchers studying the Web's connectivity. The dense nodes in the center represent the core of the Web through which most traffic flows. The study's novel finding: Taking away these core connections wouldn't crash the net. The 'mantle' and 'crust' of connections would keep humming, albeit a little slower, through peer-to-peer connections. Furthermore, the increased use of peer-to-peer communications could improve the overall capacity of the Internet and make it run much more smoothly. More BitTorrent will save the Internet? Hmm...

Findings aside, I think this is an intriguing picture. But is it art? I think so. Being a lawyer, I think would also be very interesting to be able to graphically represent a particular case. The center would represent a particular decision (e.g., Brown vs. the Board of Education), and then it would be linked to all decisions cited in the decision (i.e., precedents), as well as all cases which subsequently cite the decision. If there's anyone out there that is interested in pursuing this I'd love to have a picture of a few cases on my wall.

Old Man Running

I've been running with a friend for about a month now. We run first thing in the morning--a great way to start the day. Both of us are former high school cross country runners, which doesn't mean we run at break neck speed, rather it means that while we run we talk about how we used to run at "x" pace and regularly did "y" workout. I still have not given up the idea that if I run hard enough, I may be able to match or even eclipse some of my high school PRs.

Well, the other day we decided we would do a circuit workout. This consists of running like the dickens for say 3 minutes and then jog for two, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Recent studies have shown that such workouts can dramatically improve cardiovascular fitness and raise the body’s potential to burn fat. On our first circuit, we took off like a bat out of hell. We did 4 of these circuits and they were brutal.

On the jog home my knee gave out for a moment. I didn't break anything, but something in my knee was very unhappy with the workout. This was a few weeks ago and since then my knee has been acting up. On this morning's run I finally decided I need to stop running for a while to let this heal. This is the first running injury I've ever had and its probably a taste of things to come. Getting older stinks--at least in this regard.

This means I'll be swimming in the morning instead, which actually could be a nice change of pace. Plus, I never swam in high school so I don't have any unrealistic PRs in my head that would color my workouts.

Nations who have not yet adopted the Metric system