174 karma · joined February 26, 2008
The PG community is a lot of things, but I think “dominated by commercial interests” is not one of them.
Disclosure: I work at EDB :)
Take a look at:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=python%2C+perl%2C+ruby&ct...
vs
http://www.google.com/trends?q=cpan%2C+pypi%2C+rubyforge&...
Google Trends isn't a great measurement tool, but the 3 languages have similar search volumes (with Perl declining, Python stable and Ruby ascending), yet CPAN is has a much higher volume than either RubyForge and PyPI. I think the relevance of each repository to its language community isn't comparable.
A prescription for newspapers is specialization. Let the AP be replaced by a looser agreement for content sharing between sources. Every paper focuses fiercely on its locality.
And hire some people that understand BOTH journalim and the web.
How much of your traffic and content at windycitizen revolves around major news sources, Mr. Flora? Do you think that your community would be considerably less rich without them?
(Also, what was the address to that journalism startup aggregator that you built? I seem to have lost the link. Many thanks!)
@jacobbijani: I'm not sure if you care much, but Firefox users can remove the start.io menu from their pages by adding a display:none tag to it in their layout. Also, users can write javascript in the layout editor. Mine is currently redirecting all visitors to google... Perhaps the layout editor should be restricted to css?
Anyway, outside of the marketing-counter thing, I would suggest that the initial layout for a user's start page is the same as the one that is so prominently displayed on the sample images (with the grey background and color bars). Not that it was difficult to change, but it was a little disappointing when I found just a simple white layout with my single forlorn link to HN on it instead of the stylish advertised one... I almost took off right there. Perhaps selecting a layout could be a more prominent initial setup step?
Why do you need my email when I sign up? The signup doesn't ask for a password re-entry as well, which I found strange.
What do the ampersands mean?
Nice work. Looks great, too.
[edit] Why should I use it? Chrome and Safari (and FF in the near future) offer close to the same functionality.
The government won't just 'take control' of a public company; it may attempt to break it up, perhaps, but the Internet is, as of now, about as much of a free market as exists anywhere. If Google has near 100% market share, perhaps it deserves it?
Open source is successful with not-for-profit models because people like hacking on open source. I don't think that's necessarily impossible for a social network, because people like to waste a lot of their lives on social networks, but are open-source hackers going to be interested in working on a project they aren't interested in using? I'm assuming that the primary appeal of social networks has long moved past the techie demographic.
The author of ots isn't really interested in working on it anymore. A couple of the features are deprecated, but this isn't documented.
Additionally, for a lot of people, Google's not just a source of information, but a gateway to the Internet. Twitter, I think, can't do that. I think that this whole real-time news & Twitter search thing might prove interesting and fruitful, but it's not a threat to Google.
Perhaps I can think wishfully of one of them chiming in... ;)
(I'm not trying to be antagonistic, just interested.)
I always get blank stares when I try to explain why I abhor OSX Firefox; Count me in for another vote ;)
Additionally, you're still choosing arbitrary values, and there are still going to be data points 'just outside' your selection - it may be more smooth, but it's just a weighting of the same metrics.