Look out.
(Apologies to anyone who follows this blog via RSS for just wasting 30 seconds of your life. You should just bite the bullet and join Tumblr.)
Update: Now almost 50 people lighter. Feels good!
AngelList Scouts - Venture Hacks
Posting to let you all know that I am now officially the NY area Scout for AngelList. If you have a startup that you think is ready to be pitched to angel investors, let me know and I’ll do what I can to help.
Little Garden: Odd Drawings to Make You Happy
These odd drawings DO make me happy!
Love this.
Really, guys? I mean, really.
My job was to game Digg using infographics, voting networks, and bait-and-switch. It was the company's core business, and it was sleazy as hell.
tedr:
If you don’t know that using infogrpahics to game digg and google was a highly employed technique, then this whole thread will be fascinating to you. (Scout’s honor, we’ve never done this, but have mapped out doing it. Where the whole infographic-strategy got whacky is when sites would make entirely unrelated graphic topics that still linked to their site, such as the history of the candy bad that links to a cash-for-gold site)
We’ve been approached a number of times to publish a infogrpahic that someone would get on digg for us. It been a cottage industry since the beginning of the year.
Also fascinating the read is the raking-over-the-coals the reddit community thinks they are doing. The ‘facts’ they think they are pulling out, when this stuff happens all the time in their community as well. But it’s nice to see earnestness none the less.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
TAOS - Menomena, Mines
Digging the bari sax. Give it a full 1 minute before giving up on it - if you get that far, I bet you’ll listen all the way through.
Going on an unfollowing binge.
It’s been a while since I’ve reblogged one of Jamie’s photos… but they’re all great! Click through and dig in.
In today’s age, we don’t judge books by their covers. We judge them by their thumbnails. We also judge videos, e-books, software, and people the same way. Engaging an audience demands engaging them visually, no matter the medium. Some of our peers in the online video community recently noted that Tumblr allows the display of thumbnails for YouTube embeds on their dashboard, but other popular video sites, such as Vimeo and Blip.tv, are currently left out from showcasing their user videos with a thumbnail image.
Rocketboom R&D, the development unit of the Rocketboom network, has created a simple solution: a browser add-on that allows Tumblr users to see any video’s known thumbnail in their Tumblr dashboard. There’s no platform favoritism; this enables nearly every other common video platform the ability for thumbnail display. The add-on was created using Mag.ma, our own video aggregation service, to do thumbnail lookups for numerous video platforms with our simple API methods. The results? Uniformity for Tumblr users and creative support for content creators.
Get your browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and visit the Tumblr Video Thumbnails add-on page for information, installation help, and more. Special thanks to our friends at Vimeo, Blip.tv, and Wreck & Salvage for their testing and support.
Nice work, keep those Tumblr add ons coming.
Is There Anything Good About Men
This is the best article I’ve ever read on the differences between men and women. It’s very long but really worth reading.
Highlights:
- The distribution in ability is naturally different in men and women. There are more men at the top AND bottom of society. There are more men at the top AND bottom of IQ.
- Men are genetically predisposed to take more risks than women, which means those who succeed (and become extra rich or powerful) tend to be men. It also means more men are absolute failures.
- Evolutionarily speaking, wombs are rare but penises are plentiful. In other words, one man can father 100 children but one woman cannot product 100 offspring. Therefore, it is rational for men to take risks which, if they pay off, afford them the opportunity to have lots of children from lots of partners. It is also rational for women to “play it safe” (don’t take potentially fatal risks) and do whatever necessary to attract these men, because then they will create offspring with these successful men.
- Women prefer intimate one-on-one relationships whereas men prefer broader, shallower networks. Early on in human history, it was necessary for women to be this way, as it led to the creation of healthy offspring (born to fathers who had many partners and never were around).
- Success in business / politics / markets tend to favor those who take risks and have broad, shallow networks. Men tend to have those qualities, which is why you find men at the top of those fields. What isn’t so obvious is the number of failures in those fields, and how many failures are also men.
(I think psydoctor8 originally posted this, but I can’t find it.)
