jamtoday.org

Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:24:32 -0500

Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay:

(via jacobjoaquin)

This is a big deal. Scholastic and The Gates Foundation surveyed a truly massive number of teachers. The resulting mass of data paints a picture that simply wasn’t possible to paint before.

•Only 10% say tenure — a kind of job-for-life security based on a few years of satisfactory job evaluations — is a “very accurate” indicator of teacher quality;
•71% say paying teachers more for improved student performance would have only a “moderate” impact or no impact at all.
•97% say supportive leadership is an “absolutely essential” or “somewhat important” factor in teacher retention, while only 25% say the same about pay tied to performance.
•And while most teachers say that traditional textbooks help student achievement, fewer than half say textbooks “engage my students in learning.”

Seth Godin on eBook Platforms

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:27:23 -0500

“I think what’s going to happen is as we move to a more app-centered world, someone you and I have never heard of is going to build some killer apps that are free but become a conduit - just like cable TV is a conduit to content - that people will eagerly pay for, and it will be customizable, networkable, viral, and tribal.”

— plenty of insights from Seth Godin on the latest Reading Edge Podcast

"The latest iteration of NewsScope “scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information”..."

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:19:43 -0500

“The latest iteration of NewsScope “scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information” from US corporate press releases, eliminating the “manual processes” that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment.”

- The rise of machine-written journalism (via iamdanw)

Jesse Schell Describes The Future of Games

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:08:06 -0500

School is a game, right? You go, you get scores. You come out, there’s a leaderboard.

He (Lee Sheldon) doesn’t give out grades for each assignment. He gives out experience points. And you level up through the class. So class attendance is up. Class participation is up. Homework is turned in better. Because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.

— via fury.com

Thoughts on RightSide Capital

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:52:00 -0500

MobileCrunch reports that David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee are starting RightSide Capital, a new seed-stage fund that will make 100-200 investments per year

Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.

I have mixed feelings about whether or not RightSide has a good model. On one hand, I do somewhat agree with the HN commenter who wants “our capital markets to look more like our mortgage markets: you get your history read by a computer, numbers get crunched, and you get a take-it-or-leave-it offer presented to you by a junior employee of the firm.” Or at the very least, our capital markets could look like this at the most accessible, lowest-common-denominator stage. And for millions of people, this would be wonderful.

But for those of us really trying to change the world, what we need most is time with experienced mentors, and not just a little bit of cash. If RightSide can find a way to scale mentoring to a few hundred founders per year without sacrificing quality, they really could shake up the angel market.

I’ll be eager to see whether they can do it.

One Person Profitable

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:44:00 -0500

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder

— Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup

What Is One Person Profitable?

There’s a lot of single founders out there, and an increasing number of them are managing to get their startups or micro-ISVs ramen profitable while maintaining 100% equity and incurring no debt. I’ve picked up the habit of calling this milestone “One Person Profitable”.

I’ve found the origin story of Admobs to be a particularly inspiring example of how a one-person shop was funded by Sequoia, quickly grew, and was recently acquired by Google. I’ve also found that there are plenty of Hacker News readers who have successfully bootstrapped as a single founder.

Ramen profitability is always a milestone, but it’s another thing altogether if you can achieve One Person Profitable. If someone has pulled it off, I want to see it on their resume or bio in clear, unambiguous terms. In fact, if you’re building webapps or mobile apps and you have the technical chops to do all the development yourself, there’s usually no reason why you can’t reach profitability as a single founder.

The Multiple Founder Arguments

So why are incubators implicitly or explicitly requiring teams to have multiple founders? Here are two main arguments that come to mind:

There’s Too Much Work (or Moral Weight) For One Person

This is the most easily debunked argument. If developing an MVP for your startup idea is too much work for one person, maybe you’re just doing it wrong. I still remember the amazement I had while sharing an office with Disqus at how their two-person co-founder team managed to be incredibly productive by making quick decisions and being able to frequently say “no”. Even just one of them could probably pull off ramen profitability as a single founder.

Of course Disqus, Tumblr, and all the other successful two-people startups out there have all had the added benefit of a two-person labor division. But like Paul Graham says, the most important role of your co-founder is to help you navigate through the rough patches. The moral weight has proven time and time again to be too much for one person.

My only rebuttal to this is that the faster you can become one person profitable, the less likely you are to feel the full pressure of being a single-founder. If you reach one person profitability and then bring on four co-founders the next week, you’ve still achieved the one person profitable milestone.

Your Co-Founders Are Your Biggest Investors

This argument can’t be debunked because it’s true that having solid co-founders and advisors is always a positive indicator. Co-founders and early employees make the biggest investment of any stakeholder, and if you can’t sell your vision to co-founders or employees, then how are you going to be able to sell to customers and follow-up investors?

Conclusion

I find the co-founder as investor argument somewhat troubling only when I consider that investors have no reason to encourage you to reach ramen profitability as a single-founder. You’re more prone to failing or selling at an “acquhire” price, while startups that are five-founders deep at launch time can’t usually be successful unless they’re the type of huge success that investors desire.

Single founders tend to end up with a lot more control of their venture once it does become successful. And control, from what I understand, tends to be the most valuable asset to founders who really care about their ventures. Owning all your equity is just about as pro-founder as it gets, and while good seed-stage investors and incubators are pro-founder, I’m not so sure they are pro-founder enough to enthusiastically support the One Person Profitable approach.

I think it’ll be worthwhile to explore the idea of One Person Profitable further. If we really want entrepreneurship to be as accessible as more traditional career choices, I think it makes sense that there should be at least one decent resource advocating the advantages of being a single founder.

The E-Book Pricing War Heats Up

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:52:29 -0500

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer. Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore. From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler. From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

— via antipope.org

The e-book pricing conflict has been around for a while, but it has now reached an unprecedented intensity. This is an issue that, like the Google Books settlement, could actually have fairly wide-reaching consequences. Let’s say that the publishers just aren’t willing to budge, but Amazon and Apple still want a way to maintain acceptable margins on book sales. The result might resemble the unfortunate “minimum advertised pricing” rules that end up making shoppers have to jump through hoops in order to view how much an item will cost.

But ebook shoppers would refuse to support such annoyances. Maybe I’ll put a $300 digital camera in my shopping cart so I can see if I get 10% or 15% off retail price, but for a book with a hardcover price of $15? Fuggedaboutit.

I bet there are some more creative, innovation solutions here to please the publishers, vendors, shoppers, and even the authors. And I’m sure the publishers may need some help to come up with them.

How about opening up the playing field by offering your inventory via a flexible digital content affiliate platform? Even with the agency model - especially with the agency model - let the developers run wild with this stuff, and come up with 1,000 new ideas that will rejuvenate the publishing industry. After all, wouldn’t it be a shame to waste this perfect storm of an opportunity?

Metagaming

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:50:00 -0500

Achievements — system-level awards for certain gameplay goals — are explicit metagames. Many players find that they are substantially less rewarding than the metagames they create for themselves.

After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not knowing if it’s even technically possible to accomplish your goal.

It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van with a popped tire to go fast enough to jump over that river? Let’s find out!” One is follow ing instructions, the other is invention.

— Sleepover, San Francisco (via marco)

Rumors Of An Apple Affiliate Platform

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:47:00 -0500

I was pleased to hear the circulating rumor that Apple will announce a powerful affiliate platform on its January 27th press conference. Perhaps this platform will be not just for marketing, but also for selling items directly. And since these sales will likely lead to paid content downloads in a seamless real-time experience, it has the makings of yet another Cupertino game-changer.

Sure, there is already an iTunes affiliate marketing program, just like there’s already a popular affiliate marketing program for Amazon’s web-based store.

But these affiliate marketing models have more or less remained the same for the last 10 years. I think it’s about time for a change.

The Platform Opportunity

A new market is going to soon pop out of thin air, just like it did in 2008 with the iPhone. And just like in 2008, there’ll be a market vacuum. One of the new questions many people will be asking themselves is “how can I get good stuff for my tablet?”

This new question is a big opportunity for developers such as myself (and presumably, as the analytics suggest, my readers.) Of course, there will be an official store, just as there is now. And certainly the iPhone App Store and iTunes are both a pleasure to visit. As is Amazon.com. And owning the store itself is the simplest, most obvious way for Apple and Amazon to both control the user experience and generate revenue from a cloud-based content platform.

And yet, these stores must always be one-size-fits-all, and that’s not enough for me. “Pants on the Ground” would not have happened if Apple had some devious way of controlling all the internet memes through its own official gateway. And neither would Ushahidi. Yes, “the wisdom of the crowds” may be so very 2006, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

The Example of Local News

iTunes has done a phenomenal job getting high-quality educational podcasts into the iTunes store. But YouTube EDU also has fantastic content, and so does does Academic Earth. And I don’t doubt for a second that publications like the New York Times would fit very well into the iTunes model, and perhaps even farther down the long tail. It works great for music, after all. Why not for news?

Because news, in our age, proliferates in mysterious ways. If you look at the process of selling news as a funnel, it is complex and individualized. I suspect that people will never again all go to one place to find (and buy) their news, and that there’ll never be another Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Medill and NYU and Berkman and CUNY and Columbia and heaps of others have all drastically overhauled their curriculum to confront this sea change. In a new post titled “Information Finds a Way, but Does Revenue?”, David Cohn does a great job of encapsulating t

In this age of experimentation, which we all agree is happening, there are certain assumptions we make that steer the direction of our thought.

One of those assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information. That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to “sell” the news.

I don’t claim to have all the answers about how to solve this problem. But I do have a couple potential answers I’d like to try out. And if there was a simple, extensible affiliate platform that could be woven into the fabric of the web, 10,000 other developers and myself could all experiment and iterate and compete and come up with some great vertical, highly-contextualized ways to sell different kinds of news in different circumstances to different kinds of customers.

I’ll end this post by calling out one of the few people who really may be in the position to influence the course of events, fellow Berkeley resident Dave Winer. Dave recently announced that he’s going to teach at NYU and he’s involved in a secretive NYC-based journalism project:

NYU and Manhattan are going to be very interesting places in the coming months and years, in exactly the areas I’m interested in. There are projects getting underway that I can’t talk about yet, but when you hear about them you’ll probably understand why I had to go.

I don’t know anything about the project he speaks of, but if it involves a platform - and if it’s Dave it almost definitely does - I doubt that it has anything to do with the part of actually selling content and subscriptions. The platform is probably related to distributed microblogging of some kind, and it’ll probably be wonderful for what it does.

[ Update: Judging by the Rebooting the News essay Dave posted this morning, it seems like the project relates to user-generated-advertising. I can see why he’s so excited about it, as it really is a fantastic idea. ]

But will this project help local news organizations find a sustainable business model? Given the conversations I frequently have with colleagues working in world-class newsrooms, and especially given the desperate, grasping-at-straws vibe Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seems to give off , I don’t have an excess of confidence.

But this new Apple affiliate platform launch rumor is vindicating. I eagerly await the chance to try it out.

PR vs. CYA

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:35:00 -0500

Any organization in the business of certification runs into the problem of having to market the reliability of certification while also covering their bums.

Google’s Qualified Developer Directory

Google just released a new directory for its Qualified Developer program.

This program has been public since last year, but it’s only recently been marketed. A message marketing the program popped into my inbox a couple weeks ago:

Dear Developer, Congratulations on your acceptance into the Google Qualified Gadget Ads Expert program! This program is designed for professionals who are currently developing Gadget Ads. This qualification can provide credibility and help promote your development expertise in Gadget Ads.

For more details on the program, please visit http://code.google.com/qualify/

Achieving and maintaining qualification consist of acquiring points in four areas:

1. Your references

2. Active development examples

3. Community participation

4. Qualification exams

It’s pretty obvious why Google is interested in having a stronger presence in developer certification. They want to make sure that its easier for skilled developers - skilled particularly in Google APIs - to get jobs, because what’s good for the internet job market and internet web application usability is good for Google.

But it’s more illuminative to look at what specific APIs and platforms Google is offering for certification. They’re clearly encouraging qualification for Adsense Gadgets, which are like customizable interactive widgets that usually helps increase CTRs.

I have a hunch - just a wild guess - that the new Developer Directory will get high rankings for any relevant searches, and that Google has a big, shiny, and probably fully achievable vision for their Qualification program. It’s certainly exciting to think of the possibilities. I actually think that Stack Overflow Careers is eating Google’s lunch (with money salad on the menu) as far as useful recruitment data is concerned. Crowdsourced peer validation is tots malots the best form of certification.

But to get back to the point of this post, there’s a conflict that comes up with certification programs of this nature. As usual, HN commenters wittily and succinctly addressed the issue in the discussion thread for the new directory site:

“Qualified Developers are thoroughly vetted by Google … and meet rigorous qualification standards.”

Followed three lines later by…

“Google does not make any representation, endorsement or warranty regarding the services of these developers.”

These statements seem at odds with each other.

Skill certification is one of the more obvious areas where this conflict arises, but it appears surprisingly often. Safety products or products that are potentially dangerous are another example of marketing making strong, unequivocal promises (Our bungee jumps are safe, tots malots) while legally dodging responsibility (If our bungee jumps kill you, your family can’t sue us because we’re warning you that our bungee jumps suck. Caveat emptor, bitch. )

Healthcare and medical services and products also fall into this category, and it’s the area where the PR/CYA paradox is at its most frustrating, as medical malpractice lawsuits have helped aggravate the status quo of draconian healthcare policy.

Can you think of any other product spaces where the legalese and marketing aren’t allowed within a 100 mile radius of each other?

Location Based Networks: Fighting Over the Same Audience and Living On Borrowed Time

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:57:52 -0500

dbreunig:

One of these days, location based networks are going to wake up and realize their numbers and games are meaningless once Google or Facebook flips a switch. So far all of these companies keep targeting the early adopter, game-loving, geek crowd. People that will trade privacy for a mayorship.

Until these companies create a product that provides a real value to a niche, active audience, they’re living on borrowed time. The early adopter geek will jump ship for Google in a heartbeat.

Any of the following audiences would love a specialized service. Pick one and build your company. Hell, build it on top of Twitter. You’d be spending almost nothing and devoting most of your time to designing features within the interface:

Bicyclists

Interior designers

Foodies

College kids

Truck drivers/delivery men

Skiers

etc.

The Google.cn Decision Is Not About IP

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:34:00 -0500

Journey To The West

Drewbot on Google & China

The excuse given for their previous censorship efforts was that Google plans to adhere to ‘local laws.’ This sidestepped the issue and ignored the big question: do these local laws harm or impede people or their rights.

Only now, when their own intellectual property is threatened, do they act. The fact that Google actively champions itself as the leader of an “Open Source” movement makes this story all the more ironic.

I don’t believe for a second that this really, truly has to do with IP. My own experience with Google as an organization is that it strives to practice its mantra of “Don’t Be Evil”, and as compliance with states like China has shown, sometimes not being evil is tricky indeed.

Google didn’t have to do this. They didn’t have to walk away from many millions of impressionable (pun intended) Chinese people. But they did. And that’s why this is indeed a huge story, with extraordinary possible ramifications of historical scale. The original post used the phrase “we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities”. I wouldn’t be surprised if these authorities consulted went as high up in the authority chain as the Secretary of State.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about this subject to speak at length without turning into a talking asshole, but I do have one point that I believe should be raised.

Was this brute force attack carried out by the Chinese government? I’m sure there’s a good chance it was. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was done by savvy dissidents engaging in the Art of War. Perhaps even Google itself, providing itself with an excuse for shareholders and a better position for future negotiations with the Chinese government.

Outside of such groundless speculation, I am resigned to watch this develop, and I’ll be excited to see where it goes from here. Hopefully in a progressive direction, because as Drewbot wrote in his post, “the only losers in this debacle are the Chinese people.”

At the very least, this incident gives us a better subject of collective sympathy than Conan O’Brien.

Update: My speculation was indeed groundless. The Hacker News discussion has come up with a lot of great links and facts about what appears to a be a massive coordinated attack on “the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical”.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:22:48 -0500

I had the chance today to catch up on some reading I had queued up, and I found Tahdg Kelly’s thoughts on Zynga from a couple weeks ago to be a surprisingly validating read.

Zynga’s coffers are deep, as are Playdom and Playfish’s, but at the heart of their model are some deep weaknesses that are going to let a lot of the air out of their Fast Food business models. The audience expectations are going to shift, the key factors enabling the business model likewise, and while it’s been a great short term success this year, viral gaming doesn’t seem to have any more easy wins left.

Now comes the hard part. Diversification, experimentation and deep design breeding interesting ideas do not grow on trees and companies need to commit to them to see them through. Right now that’s not the Zynga way.

Twelve months from now it will be the companies that have managed to diversify, build strong followings and create real value that will be the new darlings of the scene. Those that do not adapt will still be there but their story will be one of difficulty. As social games come to the end of their beginning, Zynga is increasingly look like an Atari-era publisher leading the charge but unlikely to capitalise in the longer term because they’re too busy thinking they’re in the burger business.

It’s easy to doubt your focus on building rich, meticulously designed products when developing social games these days.

Thank goodness people like Tahdg (and Jason Fried) are there to remind us that the best long position to take is in creating relationships that last.

The Rules of the Game

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:03:00 -0500

A fantastic Rands in Repose post called Gaming the System published last week is all about making a game out of otherwise mundane jobs like bug tracking. But much of the advice given is also relevant to the design of actual games as well as applications intending to offer an incremental learning curve inspired by game design.

The entire post is well worth reading. One of my takeaways from it is that a game is a contract. The rules of this contract can be changed - carefully and transparently - but should never be broken.

Here’s a few of my favorite quotes from the post:

Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can’t let them win, even though that’s exactly what they think they want.

In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read “Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing”. They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.

In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.

Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it’s an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.

(via BuzzMachine)

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:33:53 -0500

(via BuzzMachine)

Coughing Up Phlegm

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:08:00 -0500

I got pretty sick last week. While the timing was not good - when is it ever a good time to get sick? - I found myself more willing than usual to do dirty work.

When I wasn’t coughing up chunks of lung and stomach tissue, I somehow found myself taking a strange glee in the unearthing of technical debt, the debugging of weird edge cases, the discovery of strange (or just downright rotten) smells,and other nutritious but distasteful types of work. Maybe it was just that I felt so gross, even the tasks I normally dislike could make me feel better.

Or maybe it just takes a sick mind to really make sense of the code I write.

One Lucky Winner

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:52:00 -0400

I was discussing my latest project the other day with a friend, who told me about something he heard about where you could win $10,000 in scholarship money, just by tweeting.

It turns out that he was talking about a CollegeScholarships.org offer to award students a little over $1000 in a Twitter-based raffle. (The $10,000 figure given in their press material is inconsistent with what the site says).

When I was very young, the idea of winning the lottery fascinated me. With a chance to be lucky enough to become an instant millionaire, who could resist the allure of buying lottery tickets? My opinions luckily changed as I learned more about probability and behavioral psychology, but I still frequently see entrepreneurs pitching ideas that involve some element of a sweepstakes, or a contest, or a raffle.

I’m definitely interested in game mechanics, but not these types of games. If being a winner of your game involves a special rare stroke of luck, it’s probably a game that’s best left unplayed.

Playing with Fwix and Twilio (and an App Engine CacheCompress utility)

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:30:00 -0400

This weekend, I had a chance to play with two platforms that have been on my “to-play-with” list: Twilio and Fwix.

The result is a simple app I’ve made called PhoneFwix. The workflow is simple. Call (415) 483-1286. Type in your zipcode. Listen to news. The Python code is only a couple hundred lines, including all of the geocoding, fetching, processing, and little utility methods. Pretty good, Fwix and Twilio. Pretty, pretty good.

The setup on the Twilio website was very straightforward, thanks to some awesome documentation. I did have to pay a minimum of $20 to open a full account, but you can barely buy lunch these days for $20, so that’s certainly a fair deal.There are a couple of improvements I’d like to see from Twilio, such as an interactive debugging mode where I can call from a developer phone number and get some on-the-fly introspection. And, of course, Google Voice integration. (Actually, I’ll just go out and predict that Twilio will be purchased by Google by the end of 2010. You heard it here first.) On the whole, I’m very pleased with Twilio and have already thought of a few more exciting things I could do with it.

A lot of the Twilio apps I’ve seen so far involve lead generation and other sales-oriented type things. Which makes sense, considering the huge savings you’d get from Twilio compared to the expensive enterprise phone systems that charge upwards of $5 per call received (whereas Twilio charges a few cents for an average call).

Fwix’s API only has a few methods, and has a ‘geo_id’ schema that’s slightly more awkward than it might be, requiring at least two calls to get anything done. And it formats integers as strings and sometimes sends strange fragments as titles or summaries. And while these can easily be automatically flagged and discarded, they could also be flagged and discarded on Fwix’s end.

But enough with the complaining, already! Fwix does a good job in the most important area: the content. All of the geographic areas are well-seeded with (mostly) relevant information, and this is quite a feat for a Chop Suey application.

The hardest part about making this application was taking a zipcode and figuring out which Fwix location was closest to it. Luckily, geopy made this task a piece of cake:



@memoize()
def get_coordinates_for_zipcode(zipcode):
    from geopy import geocoders  
    g = geocoders.Google(GOOGLE_API_KEY)
    place, (lat, lng) = g.geocode(zipcode)
    return place, (lat, lng)

 
 
@memoize()
def get_closest_geo_id(lat, lng):
    from geopy import distance as geopy_distance
    from models import GeoID
    geo_ids = GeoID.all().fetch(1000)
    distances = []
    for geo_id in geo_ids:
      distances.append(
      {'distance': int(geopy_distance.distance(
      geo_id.coords(), (lat, lng)).miles),
       'geo_id': geo_id.geo_id,
       'place': geo_id.key().name()
      })
    distances = sort_by_key(distances, 'distance', reverse=False)
    return distances[0]['geo_id']

get_coordinates_for_zipcode uses the Google Maps API to (drum roll) get coordinates for the given zipcode.

get_closest_geo_id is the one that really saved me from having to brush up on my Dijkstra algorithm skills. It takes two (lon, lat) tuples and automagically finds the distance. The resulting list is sorted by the ‘distance’ dictionary key, so that the first sorted geo_id is the least distance from the given zipcode.

One annoying thing about geopy is that it’s full of print statements that I had to comment out. Honestly, who does that? You can’t just print things wily nily, geopy. Then there would just be anarchy. That’s why we have logging: to avoid anarchy…and print statements.

On a slightly unrelated note, I’ve also made a simple module for compressing GAE datastire entities into their binary representations, and decompressing them. It’s inspired by Nick Johnson’s recent post about the db.entity_pb module. (By the way, if you do any development on GAE and you don’t read Nick Johnson’s blog, you, sir or ma’am, are a crazy person.)

The problem with Nick’s sample code is that, well, it’s sample code. In real life, I’m memcaching pretty much everything I can, and in lots of cases, it’s just arbitrary data.

So I made two helper methods to conditionally compress entities into their binary equivalent. If the data is a list, it figures out if the list contains entities by looking at the first few entries for a db.Model object. If so, it individually checks each item and converts it if it’s an entity.


 
def to_binary(data):
  """ compresses entities or lists of entities for caching.

  Args: 
        data - arbitrary data input, on its way to memcache
  """ 
  if isinstance(data, db.Model):
    # Just one instance
    return makeProtoBufObj(data)
  # if none of the first 5 items are models, don't look for entities
  elif isinstance(data,list) and find_first(
  lambda i:isinstance(i, db.Model), data[:5]):
    # list of entities
    entities = []
    for obj in data:
      # if item is entity, convert it.
      if isinstance(obj, db.Model):
       protobuf_obj = makeProtoBufObj(obj)
       entities.append(protobuf_obj)
      else:
       entities.append( obj )
    buffered_list = ProtoBufList(entities)
    return buffered_list
  else: # return data as is  
    return data

I use custom classes ProtoBufObj and ProtoBufList so that it’s very easy to identify the types of data that need to be decompressed:



class ProtoBufObj():
  """ special type used to identify protobuf objects """
  def __init__(self, val, model_class): 
    self.val = val
    self.model_class = model_class 
    # model class makes it unnecessary to import model classes
  
class ProtoBufList():
  """ special type used to identify list containing protobuf objects """
  def __init__(self, vals):
    self.vals = vals

def makeProtoBufObj(obj):
  val = db.model_to_protobuf(obj).Encode()
  model_class =  db.class_for_kind(obj.kind())
  return ProtoBufObj(val, model_class)

I initially didn’t have the model_class attribute of ProtoBufObj objects, but then I started getting KindError exceptions when an entity was being decompressed but the model definition import for that given entity was behind the memoize() decorator, where it wasn’t being executed.

It’s easy to rectify this issue by making sure that model imports are being called from outside of the memoized methods, and then you should be fine to remove the model_class attribute.

** Download the CacheCompress module here. **

This utility makes for a great example of the well known time/space tradeoff, since it takes a little more time to compress and decompress the entities, but saves a good amount of space in the memcache. It actually might negate the additional time required since the amount of data that needs to be retrieved from the memcache is considerably less than it would otherwise be, so it likely takes less time to complete the memcache calls. I’ll probably have to do a test with some huge amount of entities to get a definitive answer to see how it affects performance.

A Chance to Be Good

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:25:00 -0400

In his essay on being good, Paul Graham first introduces two Y-Combinator principles of “Make Something People Want” and “don’t worry about the business model”, and considers at length the similarities (and differences) between why these principles, seemingly descriptive of a charity, also describe a successful startup.

The passage below is one that I find to be particularly insightful:

The most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?

Here’s the answer: Do whatever’s best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do.

It’s even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money. If you’re a good salesman, you could try to just talk them into it. But the more reliable route is to convince them through your users: if you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that will convince any investor.

The advantage of being good that pg missed was your goodness will be your ace in the hole when it comes to challenging an establishment.

Good for Newspaper Readers

The story of the fall of newspapers is a perfect example. The internet was just so darn good for newspaper readers that newspapers did not have nearly the sort of bargaining power they imagined they would have had.

For one of my last classes at Medill, I read op-eds and essays about internet journalism from the mid-nineties that made not only the mistake of underplaying the new medium’s true strengths, but also greatly overestimating their own ability to bargain their way to the top, because they mostly denied the possibility that the web would be so good that people would simply be willing to see newspapers fail.

After all, what would it be like to live in a country where most small cities didn’t have their own newspaper?

Good for Students

I think the next example we’ll see of something extraordinarily good happening will be in classrooms.

Teacher’s unions have claimed that it’s their job to help students by helping teachers, when they block new technologies from entering the classroom that vaguely appear to be a threat to the livelihood of teachers.

So the only way to get such a thing into a classroom would be to have something so good for students that it would just make the teachers unions look bad to be anything but enthusiastic about it.

This is another chance to be good that has finally arrived.

There's No Shame in Chopping Suey

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:05:51 -0400

Last week, I wrote about what I loved about Fwix:

Fwix doesn’t even bother with the pretense of asking its users for original content. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any places within the Fwix.com site where you can post stories.

There’s a good chance that Fwix actually will introduce tools to post original content, but why should they bother? Right now, you’re expected to post them on your Facebook or Twitter feed, but that’s where everyone would rather be posting news links anyways. In fact, that’s where people are already posting news links!

The mental cost of switching can have huge ramifications about user adoption, and leads to rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer effects. Friendfeed suffered, for example, because it had too high of a mental cost of switching for most people, even if it was very easy to use Friendfeed together with other services.

It’s refreshing to see a site that doesn’t even pretend that you’re going to want to use yet another tool on the web.

Yesterday, I read about Artwiculate:

Every day a new word is chosen, and simply sending a tweet containing that word will enable your update to appear on the Artwiculate site. Once there, other users can vote whether your usage was “liked” or whether it was inaccurate.

Chop Suey

Artwiculate is another member of what I now call the Chop Suey class of application that doesn’t require people to do anything besides what they’re already doing. This class of application isn’t really new. Google’s flagship search product is literally a textbook example of adding value to crowdsourced data, and Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Kelly and many others have been evangelizing collective intelligence for well over a decade.

But it’s now getting to the point where you’re at an obvious disadvantage when you do anything but use things that are already there. Artwiculate works even if no one uses it, and that’s a crucial distinction that may help it survive the valley of despair.

Unfortunately, the Chop Suey approach has largely not yet been absorbed in academic settings, and is lagging behind the vanguard even in the best case scenarios.