Monthly Archives: August 2007

When men break up (in public, on their blogs)

Posted on August 12, 2007 by rashmi| 3 Comments

The Jason Calacanis – Dave Winer breakup news popped in my bloglines (its on the top page on TechMeme!). Does anyone else think that blogs have unleashed something in men? They have a tiff, sometimes there are hysterics, sometimes its more dignified. But these disagreements, tiffs, ends of friendships are all laid out for us to view, comment on, support or not. I don’t know about you, but I think this is different than what I have observed with men in my private life (many a time I would have appreciated more openness) :-) Has anyone else noticed this trend – men being more open on their blogs?

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Posted in Misc

Getting metrics right for social media sites: how to count the embeds?

Posted on August 10, 2007 by rashmi| 4 Comments

Typically web analytics has dealt with metrics like page views, unique visitors etc. For the new generation of social sites, e.g., video, slideshow sites, this is not enough. There are videos embedded all over the web. How do you count those? This article about comscore metrics describes how analytics companies are starting to take embed views into account. It describes the ratio of embeds to views on the site itself and how it is very different for different video sites (1.52 for YouTube, compared to 4.92 for Revver).

This embed metrics issue operates somewhat differently for videos than for slideshows.

On the site itself, everyone counts the number of times the video or slideshow page is viewed. The question is how to count the views on an external site. You could count every time the page with the video embed is loaded, but that going to lead to inflated numbers. The second option is to count every time the video is played. That seems more reasonable. But its still going to be an overestimation if the video is set to autoplay. So seems like for video, its hard to avoid the inflation due to autoplay.

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Posted in Uncategorized

How feature creep ruined the moleskine city notebook

Posted on August 6, 2007 by rashmi| 8 Comments

moleskine_sf.jpgWhen I heard of Moleskin City Notebooks, I thought it was a brilliant idea. Your regular moleskine with maps! After leaving behind my moleskine on a plane, I bought the Moleskine San Francisco notebook (as we were going to the move to the city soon). The first disappointment was that the city notebook was not available in square paper, and I had to buy the plain paper. But everything since has been a disappointment as well.

My previous Moleskin notebook was standard pocket size. Almost all of its 192 pages are for writing. There is an accordion pocket and a plastic band to hold it together. Simple, unipurpose – for writing down thoughts and notes.

With the city notebooks, seems like the designers got much more ambitious:

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Posted in Design

Guy Kawasaki at BayCHI

Posted on August 2, 2007 by rashmi| Leave a comment

The next BayCHI will feature Guy Kawasaki talking about Truemors.

Title: By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

Abstract: In this talk Guy will explain why and how he launched Truemors.com using open-source software, contractors, favors, and cajoling. He will also cover the current entrepreneurial and venture-capital funding conditions.

Whether you like or don’t like Trumors (I do!), this will be an interesting, fun talk by one of the legends of Silicon Valley. Guy is a very entertaining speaker. And this talk will have something for everyone whether you are an entrepreneur, designer, developer, vc or marketer. RSVP on upcoming if you are planning to be there.

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Posted in BayCHI