Six Wonderful Things About Games

December 8, 2009
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Games are a wonderful medium. Like music, literature, film and theatre, games do a great deal to help make life worth living. In Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is quite useless.” He said this to illustrate that yes, art has little to no practical value. That does not mean that [...]

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Google DNS Benchmarking and Rationale

December 7, 2009

Google just announced that they are making available their own public DNS server.  For those that don’t know, that stands for Domain Name Server, one of the central services that makes the Internet work.  It basically takes a domain name like “radoff.com” and translates it to the numeric IP address, which allows you to connect [...]

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Startups Need to Give you More than Money

December 6, 2009

The other day I read a blog post by Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, the largest online distributor of independent music.  Derek sold CD Baby several years back.  What you might not know is that prior to the sale, Derek placed his stake in CD Baby—valued at $22 million at the time he [...]

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Chutzpah of Israeli Startups

December 5, 2009

The Freakonomics blog posted a great summary of Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, a new book on the ingredients that have gone into vigorous startup environment over in Israel. A few key facts from the Freakonomics write-up that you might not be aware of:
Israel has the highest density of tech start-ups [...]

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Chinese Characters in Wordpress

December 3, 2009

Chinese characters do not work in Wordpress by default if you didn’t originally setup your Wordpress to handle Chinese.
However, it is pretty easy to get it working. I didn’t see it documented elsewhere, so I thought I’d post instructions on configuring Wordpress to allow posting Chinese.

Using a program (like phpMyAdmin) to administer your database, [...]

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Exploring China’s Online World

December 3, 2009

我是美国人, 可是我正在学中文！
For the past few months, I’ve been taking a great course over at Harvard on Chinese. It’s been extremely challenging but a lot of fun.
The main reason I’m doing it is because I’m interested in Chinese culture and really want to understand a completely different way of communicating and viewing the world. [...]

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Intellectual Property rights harm innovation?

December 2, 2009

The Guardian has it pretty wrong in today’s opinion piece on intellectual property by John Sulston (with some piling-on by the guys over at Techdirt):
The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring [...]

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How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?

December 1, 2009

The above title was the name of an FTC workshop that just finished its first day. Get past the thought that it seems like a funny title that seems more at home in the 90’s. Journalism, in its current form, is definitely changing. But is it really dieing? Is there [...]

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New Twitter math: followers don’t matter

December 1, 2009
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Most companies who aren’t still running their business on a PDP-11 have figured out that they need to be present in social media if they want to have a more personal and meaningful relationship with customers. However, most have been looking at the wrong statistics.
The number of followers you have on Twitter doesn’t really [...]

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A Brief History of Paywalls

November 30, 2009

A paywall is a digital mechanism to separate content that one has to pay for from the rest of the content on the net.  Think of it like the Internet equivalent of the Berlin Wall: a few unknowns, stifled by their overlords, exist on the inside–yearning to join the free world beyond.

Boingboing revealed some of [...]

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