Dan Wilson’s Blog

The Name iPad – Appears the name never crossed the desk of a female employee in Cupertino, assuming there are any. I was bummed to see that ipadjokes.com was already squatted on.

iWork – At first I was befuddled by this. Why the hell would you want docs and spreadsheets? Then it came to me. The iPhone was never, and never will be, a PDA (personal digital assistant). The iPhone was never for road-warrior working-stiffs, it’s for people with liberal arts degrees to look cool while dressing like hipsters. This is the reason the iPhone never had an app for a todo list, Exchange synching and all. My WinMo phone I had back in 2006 was able to view and edit docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Not ideal, but was useful occasionally at airports reviewing docs before getting on a plane. The WinMo phone was an extension of all the (boring, non-hip, Microsoft) productivity stuff I used to do my job. Jobs described this as a void filling device, I see it as making up for the non-PDA void that is the iPhone.

Google Voice – All of a sudden, the controversial rejection of Google Voice to the iPhone app store makes a helluva lot more sense. You have a device with Wi-Fi and optionally AT&T 3G, adding a Google Voice app is an invitation for VOIP that would cannibalize AT&T service plans and even iPhone sales.

iPhone OS, not OS X – This is the big one for me. And it infuriates me, and I propose revolution. Bear with me a minute. If you are a rock star, you make it big, you end up being a slave to the record label and you make them rich. If you publish a book, in exchange for advances and distribution and marketing you make a publisher rich. Then comes the Internet and the digital revolution. Now the rock star can sell on iTunes and Amazon without a record label and get close to 100%. The author can sell directly to e-books without a publisher and keep almost 100%. This is theoretical and a simplification, but I do have a point here. Now suppose you are a software developer. You create an awesome game or web site. There is very little cost to sell this game, host it on Kongregate, shareware it, etc. It’s a win-win. You as the developer get most or all of the bounty for your wares while there is little or no cost to distribute. The end user gets creative games that can be made by anyone with the talent, dedication, and creativity to entertain. Same story with a web site or web app. Hosting applications and serving costs are minimal. All you need is a great idea, and it scales to the sky. The model is simple for developers: no middleman between our work and our audience.

Apple decided with the iPhone that if you want to develop an iPhone app, it will cost you $100 up front to become a “developer” and then they will take 30%. Sound familiar? It’s a middleman, extortion, a racket, whatever you want to call it. The worst part, for me at least, is that they duped the very industry that has worked to remove middlemen in every other industry. I once heard that the app store was successful because and only because iTunes trained users for micro-payments. The way Apple sold apps on the app store has also done something profound to developers: it has trained them to pay off middlemen. So far, developers have held their noses and written their $100 checks, received their 70%, and been thrilled to be on the “platform”. But now that “platform” has become a moving target. Intel has decided to make a netbook app store, with a similar revenue share. The iPad, I believe, is setting the stage for all applications having a middleman.

This is the centralization that our industry has destroyed for other industries. It puts power in the hands of the Apples, Intels, Hps, Sonys, and Dells to print money off the backs of the talent that creates the apps (Note: I didn’t mention Google, but they could easily follow suit if it becomes accepted).  Printing money is not an exaggeration either. The claim made by Apple at today’s event was that “already our customers have downloaded 3 billion apps.” That’s in about 18 months, and the overhead is the staff that reviews them, hosting the apps, and building and maintaining the app store and SDK. Also ask if the availability of apps didn’t help Apple sell more hardware. Doing some simple math, at 3 billion apps if the average price (accounting that many apps are free) were $0.10, that’s a cool $90 million, or $164,000 a day. If it’s more than a conservative $0.10, well, you get the idea – it’s a pyramid scheme.

You’re up, you’re down, but in the end the house always wins.

No Camera – This one I am waiting for my a-ha moment, but it isn’t coming to me. I have theories:

• The next iPhone will have that front-facing camera we’ve all been waiting for, and an iPad with a camera would cannibalize that.
• The price point they were so proud of dictated its omission.
• They weren’t ready, both in terms of a touch version of iMovie and providing one that is to be desired (high mega-pixel and fps).
• iPod Nanos and iPhones shoot video. And all MacBooks have cameras. If the device is filling a void between the iPhone and MacBook, not replacing either devices, then no need for a camera on the iPad. Hmm, maybe this is my a-ha moment.

Price – I see the price as filling a void (void filling is such a theme). With MacBooks starting at $1000, and iPhones and Touches in the $100 to $400 range, the iPad’s $500-$820 range fills the void almost perfectly. BTW, the “rumor” that the price was $1000 was an Apple plant, and I wish a non-fanboy journalist could prove it.

Wireless Internet – AT&T? Really? I really, really can’t wait for the fine print on the “unlimited” plan. That will create a stink to high heaven.

Connectivity – No USB or SD. That’s beyond disappointing and almost a slap in the face. No HD video out? I was surprised, as I often plug my laptop via a single HDMI to an HDTV for a great, easy experience. But, why would you not want to watch on the device? Sure, I guess.

The docks do seem interesting. Like the keyboard stand, or the leather case/stand. Seems a little un-Apple, however.

Touch Keyboard – I have heard on numerous occasions that the touch keyboard on the iPhone is just an issue of “getting used to” over a couple of weeks. It’s been a year for me, and I still long for the days of my Blackberry/Palm/T9/Anything but touchscreen keyboard. If your use for the device doesn’t require lots of typing, I forgive. But as a primary email or document editing device? Not so much.

Reality Distortion Field – Just watch this video. Talk about drinking too much of your own magical kool-aid.

Verdict – I will not be getting one, at least for this generation. It does not fill any void for me. I do hope its release will help improve the iPhone, not stymie it in the name of validating the void.

Balloon Boy dad’s national media blitz ends at jail, Sheriff says – The Denver Post.

Richard Heene is hitting up all the news shows and claiming it wasn’t a hoax right before having to report to jail on Monday. He claims he only pleaded guilty to prevent his wife from getting deported. The real reason he is proclaiming his innocence is to help his future TV reality show career. Jail time appears to be an acceptable price to pay for Larry King et al. appearances to this man. I assume these are paid, which sickens me.

I proposed at the time the hoax was revealed that his court ordered punishment should be:

Richard Heene shall not be allowed to make any TV or radio appearances for 15 years, paid or otherwise, including but not limited to in-person or phone interviews, news shows, reality shows, press conferences, statements, or any other television appearance. Failure to adhere to this punishment will result in violation of probation, jail time, and all money received plus ten percent will be seized and donated to charity.

I am pretty sure that this doesn’t fall under cruel and unusual punishment. I believe this is the worst possible punishment this man could receive in his deranged, attention-seeking world. I say that knowing that the death penalty is legal here in Colorado.

It would also set a much needed precedent that attention seeking for the gain of personal celebrity at the expense of the public will not be tolerated. What if someone died trying to rescue little Falcon during the event? What if someone dies next time these is a hoax? Maybe the Octomom will die after her next 8-kid birth, and leave 20 or so kids orphaned and on the dole. These crimes in the name of attention getting need to be punished not by taking away liberty, but by taking away celebrity. I don’t feel justice has been rendered when I see this man on CNN.

Since I purchased my iPhone late last year, two iPhone games showed the promise to make me forgot about any portable gaming device on the market. One lived up to that promise, the other fell flat. Let’s start with the disappointment: SimCity.

SimCity (iTunes link)

This was a favorite game of my youth, going back so far I remember being blown away by its graphics on a VGA screen. The iPhone version of SimCity is the same of a real, big-boy version once available on PC. When I first opened up the app and started building my city, I was truly impressed – at first. I was making power plants, zoning, managing public services. All was well.

Then the minutiae took over. I have fat gorilla fingers, with thumbs that at their largest can take up a fifth of the iPhone touch screen. What was once a fun city management experience quickly turned into fumbling and bumbling and zooming and pinching and panning (repeat) to make sure every tile had water and power lines and little itty-bitty water pumps and so on and so forth. This was an acceptable chore in PC versions of the game. When I am using a touchscreen that fits in my pocket using thumbs that barely fit in my pocket, this isn’t just a chore, it is an impossible, cumbersome punishment.

I understand the ease of porting a game by exactly duplicating its functionality. I understand the desire to be true to the original. But when I have a little time to kill, spending 20 minutes pinching and zooming and navigating menus and drop downs just to provide 3 city blocks with water, well, no one is going to have a lot of fun with that.

Moral of the story: just because you can port a game exactly, doesn’t mean you can forget the form factor and how it has a very real impact on the experience.

Civilization Revolution (iTunes link)

The Civilization franchise I picked up in the early 2000s, and quickly fell in love. Playing god on a scale of the world’s best empires provides a great degree of challenge and reward. This version of the franchise may be an exact port from the Nintendo DS (anyone?), but it finds a great balance of being true to the gameplay while working within the constraints of screen size and touch screen input.  Pinching, panning, tapping, contextual buttons, and the side buttons are very intuitive, and you can tell a lot of thought was put into the design and UI.

The game difficulty settings are spot on. One complaint I have with many games is that the jump from a difficulty of hard to hardest is non-linear, i.e. hard is too easy, hardest is downright impossible, frustrating, or unfair. This game trains you and works you up to the level in a very natural way. Another great feature is the different scenarios; basically tweak some of the attributes of the game to accelerate the experience, whether in science, military, or monetary achievements.

I still do have a few complaints about the game. The lack of futuristic military units is a disappointment. The game can also crash occasionally, which seems to occur later in a game when there is a lot going on and you are about to win. Also, the slow load time makes it hard to squeeze in a few turns while spending a couple of minutes on the throne. Finally, the game drains the iPhone’s battery faster than any other task you could do on the phone.

For any future ports of game franchises to the iPhone, I hope Civilization Revolution is the model for which they base their design. I could see the platform truly becoming a gaming force if the form factor is used as an advantage (Civilization) and not a constraint (SimCity).

Kyle Orton’s QB rating: 100.7

Kyle Orton’s QB rating, if that last pass had been batted down and not tipped to Brandon Stokley: 72.91

On the bright side, Jay Cutler’s week one QB rating: 43.2 – ouch!

(Hat tip to QB Rating Calculator)

If you download an unusually long named podcast on the fly, where exactly do you get to see the whole name? Note episode 1000 below.

– Post From My iPhone

Texans sign QB Grossman to one-year deal | Sports | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

That would leave Chicago with Cutler, and backups that have a total of: 1 Game of NFL Experience. If they don’t pick up a veteran backup, that is just incredible.

There is much hubbub coming out of Google I/O from its big bet on HTML5. Techcrunch weighs in heavily, and there is a general consensus that Google is pushing forward with HTML5, trying to shame Redmond into adoption. Unfortunately, shame will not motivate Microsoft, especially since it believes Silverlight is the future, despite the loss of high profile contracts.

Now if shame will not bring Redmond into submission, a shot to Internet Explorer’s marketshare will. So how does Google do this? Google is not in the content business except for a little property it bought back in 2006, YouTube. Google could release the following statement:

Beginning in 2010, YouTube will no longer support Flash, and will require a browser that supports HTML5′s video tag.

Now maybe that is a game of chicken that Google is not willing to play, what with all the monetization lost from those YouTubing eyeballs. But if it does, that does put Redmond in quite the pickle. Does Microsoft conform, giving more functionality to all of Google’s competing services like email, docs, and chat? Or does it stay out of the HTML5 fold, and risk losing tremendous browser market share to every visitor of YouTube.

And lose they will. A visitor to YouTube already at one point had to install Flash, so being told to install another browser isn’t much of a stretch. Google has already been peddling Chrome to visitors of YouTube. Choosing between YouTube and Internet Explorer is a pretty obvious choice, as no one is a fan of IE, they usually just don’t know any better.

This is the first step in a major turning point. I came to the realization a few years back that everything I use a desktop application for now I will eventually be using a web app for in the future. I gave up Thunderbird for webmail once Yahoo updated it to Ajaxian goodness.  I find myself using Google Docs more and more and MS Word less and less, because Google Docs are available on every computer I use, all the time. Back in the 90s we even had Encarta installed on the family computer, which seems like a quaint antiquity now. Think about this. Four years ago these things were toys, a technological mix of html, javascript, Flash, and other plugins and extensions. Now is when Google, Mozilla, Palm, and Apple plant the flag and say, “The next generation of the web begins now, it is HTML5, and we won’t wait for Microsoft’s blessing”.

There was an pretty graphic included in the above linked stories.

Now I think this is misleading. Showing that Google Chrome had more impact on UI experience than Ajax is a huge stretch (Google Spreadsheets on Google Chrome often crashes for me). I find the following tables I created a little more telling:

You can see what I am getting at here. By the time IE9 hits the market, Firefox and Chrome will be around version 5, and will be supported on Windows, Linux, Mac, and a widening array of the mobile operating systems. By that time, IE9 will have caught up to where browsers are right now (on Windows only), and will likely be behind where all the other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) will be by the end of this year.

So why this long rant? I, like many others, make my career because of what people do in the browser. When doing so and pushing the envelope of what is possible (in small and big ways), you often hit the impossible or impractical. Now that ceiling is about to be raised, with only Microsoft resisting for greedy reasons, the very company that set the gold standard in greed. Internet Explorer does have 67% of the market share, and with that plurality, does still have the ability to dictate what the web is and is not. For now.

Google is now in the unique position to dictate what the web will be. All it has to do is march YouTube up Mount Moriah.

So if Chrysler goes bankrupt, the US Government will guarantee warranties on cars purchased from Chrysler. But what about other companies? I propose a similar fund for burritos, as I am personally affected by this:

That’s right. What you see above is a punch card that is three punches away from a free burrito, for a restaurant that is now closed. Juan’s is yet another casualty from the down economy. I am now left with 70% of a free burrito that I will never realize.

I must say I am sad to see Juan’s closed. Ironically, I lived in the building two and a half years and never ate there, but visited regularly once I started working again in the CBD. The characters working there were one of a kind (the twins, the older gentleman assumed to be Juan), the green chile was nice and spicy, the indoor patio that tried to be like outside, all will be missed.

Hopefully the space won’t be sold and turned into another check cashing place, because there are way too many of those there already.

Obama Plans To End Shuttle Flights In 2010 – msnbc.com.

The purpose of NASA is to bring about new technology and inspire the next generation of engineers. I am an engineer, and in my lifetime I can’t say I have ever been inspired by anything NASA has done. I have only known the Space Shuttle Program, which:

• Started before I was born. Seeing it continue missions today, I think that something that old is not a testament to what cutting edge technology can accomplish.
• Disintegrated during takeoff in 1986. I watched this live in elementary school, with a local news station covering us watching it since it was the first time a teacher was sent to space. At age 5, we were a little confused as to what we were watching.
• Disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. The most shocking part of this for me at the time, was how they had not perfected the Shuttle after nearly 25 years.

NASA’s future plans include returning to the moon by 2020ish. This is supposed to inspire young people to become engineers? Really? I already have a great recruiting message for NASA:

Become an engineer for NASA, and you could have the chance to accomplish a feat so technologically amazing, it was only accomplished 6 times starting back in 1969.

There is also the Orion Project. This will supposedly get us to Mars, but Danstradamus tells me it won’t happen in my lifetime. Even if it does, movies I’ve seen tell me it is not a good idea.

This is assuming the stats and image listed here are correct, but they match up to this listing.

Palin’s Daughter Bristol Splits From Fiancé – NYTimes.com.

This completes the charade. I wouldn’t pick on these poor people, but Sarah Palin said something in her campaign that struck great offense on me. “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity,”. I heard this, and read, “I want to be the leader of the United States, but I consider 79% of its population to be hedonistic, dishonest, insincere, undignified human beings”. Well, I guess us evil city folk don’t have the good sense and correct values to raise children like you did there in Wasilla. So to sum up:

Good = 18-year-old daughter getting pregnant while her and redneck boyfriend are in high school, drop out of high school and put into shotgun wedding arrangement so mom can try to win election, then call it off once the campaign is over to raise fatherless child.

Bad = Not being from a small town.

TechCrunch Hates on Blu-ray. Sarah Lacy also draws on some parallels in the demise of satellite radio, another technology I have a hard time believing will work. Post also touches on some points I missed in my earlier anti-Blu-ray rant, most notably that fighting a competitor cost the whole market’s potential.

VentureBeat is reporting WinMo 7 will be released in 2010. I liked WinMo 5 when I used it on a Palm Treo 700W a few years back. The hardware could have been beefier for a better experience. It had a lot of functionality, integrated seamlessly with Exchange/Outlook, and had what seemed like infinite customizations and configuration options (ahem, Apple iPhone). The media capabilities on WinMo 5 were good enough for airplane travel, but not iPod-easy enough for day-to-day use. It lacked sexiness, but I could get a lot done with it.

I give it praise, because if I were to leave my iPhone for another, WinMo would have been on the short list. Operative words being ‘would have’. Knowing the next version is at least a year away, it is obvious that Microsoft can’t move fast enough anymore in this (and many other) arenas. Internet Explorer is another example I have touched on before, and I will revisit those same arguments and new developments with IE8′s market position in a future post. The Office Suite is still using a naming convention that includes the year number. The only other market I can think of off the top of my head that does that is the auto industry. And its web initiatives? Another rant for another day, but they seem to re-brand their sites and properties more often than release relevant upgrades. Silverlight? Would have been a good idea 6 years ago. You know, before Flash was on more than 95% of browsers and Java 90%.

But getting back to WinMo, Microsoft is trying to use its OS pattern in the mobile phone world. That couldn’t be more off the mark, especially with today’s competition. The iPhone is getting a couple of firmware improvements a year with a yearly major release. Android is in its infancy, but seems to be on top of updates and constant incremental improvements. Both of these platforms are also a breeze to write applications for. Doing so for WinMo is really difficult from what I gathered looking into it a few years back, and there is no distribution model. This is a real tragedy, because WinMo could have made easy app development and distribution a capability years ago, before iPhone and Android were even rumors. Also coming along is the Palm Pre, which is too early to tell, but I can say this: Palm did more to refresh their OS from the previous version to the current than Microsoft had done since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I would mention Blackberry, but after the train wreck of the Storm, they have a long way to go playing catchup when they are a distant 4th in the buzz race.

So how far is WinMo being left behind? Think about iPhone, Android, and the Palm Pre as they exist now. Now think it is 12-18 months from now. Even if WinMo could catch up (unlikely), it will already be another generation or two behind by then.

As our government is about to drop roughly $800,000,000,000.00 on an economic stimulus, I thought I would drop my thoughts on how we should spend (and not spend) public money on a green agenda. A green economy will create jobs, and increase productivity. These items are in line with my own interests, but a common theme among them is getting cars off roads, and the U.S. off of oil. A lot of problems can be attributed to our addiction to foreign oil: trade imbalance, world stability, pollution, and congestion just to name a few.

• Wind Power – A few billion on this is a smart investment. Wind turbines don’t require fuel once built, just nominal maintenance. An injection of scale into the industry could also make it competitive with its fossil fuel burning competitors. Also, we need laws prohibiting nimby-ism regarding obstructing views. I could maybe sympathize with compensation for lost land value when views are lost.
• Solar – Same story as wind, but this diversifies our green energy. Solar also has chances of lucky efficiency breakthroughs given enough research and large scale production. Likewise, same anti-nimby laws for mounting on people’s roofs (if possible) against HOAs and covenant controlled neighborhoods.
• Nuclear – For all its energy consumption, the northeast lacks much open space, wind, and sun. Nuclear could fill that gap, especially since we have settled for a single repository for nuclear waste.
• Smart Grid/New Lines – This is needed for the above three to work. High winds and scorching sun aren’t always close to the existing grid and population centers, so new power highways need to be built. Also, I am willing to bet power management software could be made to optimize what we already have.
• No New Roads or Highways – From what I understand, it is a lot easier for politicians to get money for new roads and highways than to improve or widen existing highways. It was this very structure that created suburban sprawl, and creates incentives to buy houses further and further from jobs. This needs to be absolutely reversed. It needs to be impossible or nearly impossible to get federal money to build new highways.
• Roads Improvements Within Close Proximity of City Centers – This is where road improvement money needs to be spent. The top 100 cities of the U.S. should be getting almost all of the road improvement money, and only for improvements within 10-20 miles of their CBDs, distance varying by size of city. This has a huge impact for productivity gains, wasted fuel, and pollution. Cities with a million people or more can cut down on commute times with wider highways and thoroughfares in their cores, giving a much larger populations more time to work and less wasted time sitting in their cars.
• Traffic Optimization – At what speed are cars least efficient? Zero. Every stop light and highway on-ramp should be fitted with cameras and wireless networking. All these would be networked to a computer that manages traffic on a macro and micro level. This could clear congestion on intersections when one direction is stacked up 3 blocks while the other direction has 3 cars waiting. And driving around at 3a.m. while the only car on the road could lead to no red lights.
• No Plugin Car Infrastructure – This is a waste of time and money – for now. It is years away before it is even needed, and by then technological advances may render it useless. For all we know, in 5-10 years there could be a car that charges fully from a wall outlet in 5 minutes. Once there are enough electric cars on the road, the market will take care of this on its own.
• Kill Corn Ethanol – The best way to do this is kill farm subsidies, kill ethanol subsidies, and move the primary caucuses from Iowa to somewhere that doesn’t make corn. Ofcourse, moving the caucuses to Idaho would probably result in millions of dollars for potato and potato ethanol subsidies (sigh).
• Save Tesla – This company could very well die while we continue to shell out billions for the Detroit automakers. This seems like a no-brainer. Give them how ever many hundred millions they want to build a factory and produce sub $40k all electric sedans within 3 years. Also pay for relocation assistance for Detroit autoworkers to move to California and work for Tesla. I think our country can have a viable auto industry, but it does not include the big three.
• Higher MPG – This needs to get really high. Like 50+MPG high within 10 years. If you are an automaker and want access to the largest car market in the world, you will find a way. And no more exemptions for trucks and SUVs on the fleet. If a regular driver’s license allows you to drive the truck or SUV, then it counts against the fleet’s aggregate MPG.
• Pay for Trains – Top 100 cities should be given grants to build or improve upon existing trains or subways. One to five billion a piece, depending on size of city.
• Bus Over Service Pilot Program – This is just an experiment, but try upping a busing system in a medium sized city to ridiculous. Have every line run every 10 minutes for 6-12 months and look at the results. It could teach us the service tipping point where busing could become a feasible alternative for most Americans. Also, install credit card swipers on every bus.
• Telecommute Tax Incentives – In a few years, I don’t see why anyone would need to go to an office. Let’s get there quicker with broadband investments for cities (not rural areas, that is a huge waste of money with minuscule ROI) and tax incentives for companies to keep their employees at home. The government could start by setting up telecommuting for its own employees.

Even as I write this, I know a lot of it is out of the question, because our country is really that broken. The coming two years will probably see vast highways built, connecting exurb communities to other exurb communities, while our cities cores’ highway systems (many of which are older that me) decaying and congesting further and further. Tesla will die, the big three will become welfare in all but name, and we will continue to export all our wealth to the Saudis. Fastracks will still be short of money, and I will not be able to take a train to work in my lifetime. The national debt will eventually cause the dollar to crash, and all we will have to show for it is the Green Valley Ranch Expressway.

Please offer me some hope in the comments, or share your other ideas on what the government should do.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism shares my effort to try to embrace Twitter, but also shares my concern and disdain for it. She even makes 1984 comparisons, and explores its relationship with our short attention span culture. She preludes to a post I want to write about Twitter as a phenomenon, but for all the wrong reasons. Good read, check it out.

A-Rod admits using drugs – The Denver Post.

This is a real disappointment to me. I have ranted and raved and raged against Bonds for this same thing. I did read an article several months back, however, that gave me hope that A-Rod would break Bond’s record since his trajectory made it more than likely. It would have been redeeming to the sport and American athletics as a whole had the record been wiped out by a clean and pure player. Now that this is shattered, I hope the sport pays dearly for it. The sport is a farce. Not a display of athletic achievement, but of artificial chemical engineering of humans.

Delayed again. At what point will we admit that there are just some people that are incapable of absorbing this kind of public announcement? You know these people. They can hear something a hundred times telling them that “this does affect you. Yes you!”, and they brush it off. Nothing they hear will be a cause to action, even being called out specifically by name. Don’t believe me? Then you have never gone through the disembarking process on a cruise ship.

No matter what public education campaign the government pushes forward, some people will miss this boat. They will turn on there TV one day, and wonder (ironically) why Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? isn’t on and all they see is static. I would guess as high as 10% of the people affected. The only way to get these people to take action and get converters is to take away the boob tube for a night. With nothing else to do, they will get wise real quick.

Most every one of us has done it. It’s called the vanity search. You go to Google, and search for your name to see what comes up. It can be exciting, and can give you a perspective on your online presence. Or, at least that is how I imagine it. For some of us, this is not possible. We have really common names. If you are a Smith or Johnson (#1 and #2), forget about it unless you have a one in a million first name (~2.5 million, actually, for Smith). Wilson comes in at about #8. So why are we, the commonly named folk, not allowed to partake in this vein ritual? Someone else inevitably wins Google search algorithm roulette with a profession in sports, entertainment, literature, medicine, law, or any other highly linked or directory-happy profession.

But what about your wink, pipl, zoominfo or even better Facebook or MySpace? That all depends on where you have lived and how long you have lived there. If you have bounced around a lot from city to city, where does one search for you? Big cities also render these services useless, as there are hundreds or thousands of Smiths, Johnsons, and Wilsons in major metro areas. Even small to medium sized towns can have a disproportionately large number of any last name with a common ancestral background. Profession and education could help filter down, but lack thereof on your online profiles can also filter you out.

Maybe people with common last names can take comfort in their option for more online anonymity. If a John Smith, or Kevin Rose, desires not to be found on the internets, they can easily be non-existant. Much like living in New York or Chicago, you can just keep your head down, keep yourself to yourself, and be just another brick in the wall. But some of us are trying to build an online presence. Trying to make a name for ourselves. I am beyond trying to make a brand out of myself, and working towards making a religion around myself . We have no option but to hustle our way online, thinking SEO, and having to be exponentially more loud and nasty just to stick. And it is unfair. Uniques have the option to easily hide, commons must struggle to be seen, and only at the expense of fellow commoners.

I hope to look back at this post in a few years and say: “The Semantic Web sure solved that one”, but I am afraid it will not. Already, suggested searches are leading to narrowing information into niches of a certain topic (read: person), not filter results. For example, if you go to ask.com, and do a search of Kobe Bryant, you get related searches of “Kobe Bryant Girlfriend”, “Kobe Bryant Biography”, and “Lakers”. What if you are looking for information on Kobe Bryant, the electrician in Houston. A search for “Kobe Bryant Houston” will have more to do with the Houston Rockets than electric sockets. Even doing the Google trick of subtraction, “Kobe Bryant -basketball”, which says “give me the words Kobe and Bryant without the word basketball”, will give you nothing but links related to Kobe Bryant, the basketball player. My point is this: search is best at finding what people want, not what you don’t want. Until the web is self describing enough to say what something isn’t, us commoners won’t be able to find ourselves anytime soon.

Colorado lawmakers fight over how to tax driving for road and bridge repairs. Interesting. My vote is gas tax, registration cost based on miles driven, and no toll roads. Why the support for taxes? Two reasons: Our roads here is Colorado suck. Its amazing when you travel to other states, how well kept they seem (even snowy states). Example in point. Second reason: here is a picture of my car from this week. I have had it 5 years as of this April.