Stuart Robinson’s Weblog

What Viacom were thinking of paying for last.fm: $450 million

Yahoo CEO Semel’s compensation for the last 5 years: $550 million

Weight user tags by how much attention the user pays to the content, so if you listen to a song a lot, your tag is weighted more heavily. If you listen to Paris Hilton you have more of a say on what shows up on her tag cloud.

Attention data is a good filter for user generated content.

FOWA 07: Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia - Lessons from the Building of the Worlds Largest Social Music Platform Last.fm. Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns in the chaos

The UI for the OLPC project looks great. Designed so that literacy is not required. The focus on collaborative features is refreshing.

Widgets are the explosive charges laid under the walled gardens

The beauty of widgets is not in their technology, which is - at best - a hack, a hole through the browser security model. The beauty is in their ability to subvert central control. They are, essentially, the decentralisation of features. Meaning: identity becomes key, whoever hosts identity can easily allow their users to add the widgets they desire to expose their digital self.

Interesting idea among a bunch of random predictions for the coming year:

Someone will write a Wordpress plug-in to automatically disable comments if the referrer is Digg or Slashdot.

Tech and Blogging Predictions for 2007 « //engtech

Visitors invading a community, and commenting with no sense of context is a growing problem, and this would greatly limit it. It’s not solidly secure of course, but would be enough of a deterrent to be useful. Reminds me of metafilter, whose daily-new-membership-quota kind of provides this feature, and additionally slows membership growth to a integratable rate.

• OpenID - getting us closer to fixing one of the biggest usability issues remaining (sign-up)
• Mobile web - predicted every year for at least the last 7 or 8, but now with flat-rate access and high-res devices, all we need are killer-apps (and they are starting to emerge)
• Widgets - not so big for the over 30s, but massive with the kids
• Offline web apps - just hacks for now, but with Firefox 3 support things should pick up quickly

A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp (GG) was in trouble … most analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold. Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle. Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property, McEwen did something unheard of in his industry: He published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The “Goldcorp Challenge” made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates.

Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration

I have at least 3 dead yahoo accounts and no motivation to sign up for a new one. Why?

1. When signing up for yahoo you have to give a ton of personal info. To protect my privacy, I lie.
2. If you forget your password, you have to answer your personal question and give your date of birth. I forget what my false date of birth was.

Sure, I could make a note of the date of birth somewhere. By why bother? Well, now that flickr is starting to suck I may have to.

Update [8th Feb]: looks like I spoke a little too soon

Asked by the judge to describe what the figure on the light box was doing, Grossman said, “Colloquially, he was flipping the bird, your honor.”

Two plead not guilty to Boston hoax charges