Posts related to blogging
I love WordPress.com. I love this template. 3 columns, one on the left, one on the right.
There is only one problem that is annoying me to now end: this template does not display the sub-title of this blog.
It should be:
Psychohistory
The personal blog of Adam Nash
Does anyone know either:
If you do, please let me know.
Thanks.
One of the earliest investment posts I wrote on this blog was about why I love timber as an asset class.
I bring it up because this article appeared today in the Nuwire Investor, “Top 5 Recession Investments: How investors can protect themselves in the event of a recession.” In it, you’ll find the following paragraph about timber as an investment:
Timber is a solid commodity with steady demand that does well during stock market declines because it is not correlated to the market. Its returns reliably outperform the market, and its value increases over time, even without investor input.
Adam Nash, a timber investor, said owning and harvesting timberland is essentially a classic fixed-income investment. The land acts like principal, he said, and the timber acts like a perpetual dividend.
Yup, that’s me. Adam Nash, timber investor.
So, the backstory here is interesting, and directly related to this blog.
Back in early 2007, I was contacted by one of the journalists working on Nuwire Investor, for it’s launch. They had read my blog post on timber, and wanted to interview me. Initially, I begged off, explaining that I wasn’t an investment professional, and I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be an “expert” on the topic. Still, we ended up doing a 1 hour phone interview in March.
In May, this article on timber investing came out in Nuwire… but no mention or quote from me! So, I forgot about the whole thing… until the article today showed up in my “adam nash” Google Alert.
Very exciting, and a little fun for the day. I’m glad Nuwire contacted me.
So for today, you can call me Adam Nash, Timber Investor.
From John’s blog:
It goes without saying that I’m excited by the challenge of my new job. I’ve thought an awful lot about the role of MoCo (our shorthand for the Corporation) in supporting the Mozilla mission and manifesto, as the coordination point for our work on the platform and on Firefox. We’ve got a lot to do in the coming years, starting with getting Firefox 3 out the door, and then swiftly followed up by our work in mobile and services. Mozilla2 will be a major step forward on the platform after that, not to mention our new experiments in Labs and the work that we’re doing to move the whole Web forward with Javascript 2, HTML 5 and other standards work.
John’s post is here.
Mitchell’s post is here.
After running this blog for almost 18 months, I’m realizing that it’s confusing for people to have to remember a URL like “psychohistory.wordpress.com” to find this blog. It’s my personal blog, and people expect to find it by typing “adamnash.com” into their browsers.
I haven’t decided to 86 adamnash.com yet, but as of today, this blog is going to start being served off:
The Psychohistory title and URLs will remain, as well.
I didn’t even notice last week that my post on Activision & Blizzard Entertainment was my 400th post. What started as a 30-day resolution to start blogging again in August 2006 has turned into quite a collection of topics & content.
Some of the basic stats to date:
I think the weirdest thing about my 400 posts is the strange collection of search terms that now lead people to my posts. Check these 20 out from the last 2 days:
Today
Search Views
south park 10
high dividend mutual funds 3
boston accent 3
craigslist depreciating asset 3
pretty colors 2
marissa mayer 2
south park wii episode 2
electoral college chart 2
wii damage 2
PICTURE OF JACQUILINE KENNEDY 2
Yesterday
Search Views
south park 51
High dividend mutual funds 10
hot movies of 2007 6
wii damage 6
South Park 4
ntfs mac 4
hottest movies of 2007 3
battlestar galactica theories 3
battlestar galactica final five 3
us state map 3
Overall, I seem to hover now between 500-700 hits per day, with about 100+ people subscribed through RSS, 20+ through email. Not bad for a personal blog with a mixture of topics ranging from game theory to Battlestar Galactica to coin collecting…
The 14-month quest for the identity of Fake Steve Jobs is at an end, and the answer is somewhat of a surprise.
I won’t spoil it here, but you can read about it directly on the FSJ blog. The announcement from Forbes.com is here. The New York Times coverage that outed him is here.
I find the FSJ blog extremely humorous on most days. It’s a little sad to have the illusion popped.
I feel like he deserves one of those “Real American Hero” spoof commercials for Bud Light…
So here’s to you, Mr. Fake Steve Jobs…
It sounds so much more official that way… much better than, “My mom posted on the LinkedIn blog today…”
Either version is true – today’s post on the LinkedIn corporate blog is from my mother, Dr. Sharon Nash, Ph.D. After my initial post on the corporate blog, I was surprised at how many people sent in comments about the fact that my mother was on LinkedIn. Since she is a relatively new user to the site, and a professional expert on relationships and people, we thought it would be an interesting user story to tell.
Considering that it is her first blog post ever, I think she did quite well. In fact, I think the bigger dilemma for her was picking the right picture to use. 🙂
The fact that my mother has enjoyed LinkedIn so much that she has recommended it to over 85 (and counting) colleagues and friends is incredibly validating. I spent four years at eBay trying to break her of the typical e-commerce habit, and never succeeded. Not even eBay Express, I’m afraid.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that the opportunity for LinkedIn goes far beyond the site as it stands today. There is a very real human interest in connecting with your trusted colleagues and friends in a professional environment. We have only scratched the surface of the interesting and useful applications for professionals built over this platform. Right now, most software and web applications are still based around a model that assumes that data & information are the basis for getting things done. However, in the real world, most problems are solved by referral and advice from the people that you trust & respect. LinkedIn enables exactly that type of model, and that makes me incredibly optimistic about the future for the site and the platform.
Or if you don’t believe me, ask my Mom. 🙂
I’m trying out a new idea, borrowed from My Blog Utopia, Randy Smythe’s blog.
A couple months ago, I realized that I was accumulating far too many blogs to read through the My Yahoo interface. Over 100 at last count. I needed a blog reader, and based on popularity of the blog readers hitting this site, I went with Google Reader.
Google Reader has been fun, especially with the Firefox modification to make it look and feel more like Mac OS X.
Well, on Randy’s blog I saw that he had a widget that showed the blog articles that he was reading. I have seen this type of “clipping feed” on several other blogs, but WordPress doesn’t seem to have that feature.
Then I noticed it was generated by Google Reader, and I thought, “Maybe there is a way to get Google Reader to spit out an RSS feed, and then I could put it into a sidebar widget on WordPress.com”
Turns out, it just works. I figured out how to flag a blog post as “Shared” on Google Reader, and now, on the left-hand column of this blog, you’ll see the last 10 blog articles that I have flagged. Should be fun, since it saves me from just posting “read this” type of articles. I can focus just on areas where I have more significant commentary.
So check it out… it’s on the left side, under the header “What I’m Reading”
Let me know what you think.
I’ve mentioned the official LinkedIn blog here before. Well, as of today, I now am one of the contributors to that blog as well.
Check out my first post.
Yes, I know that readers of this blog will recognize the joke about my Mom being on LinkedIn. What can I say? I think it’s really interesting how excited she is about LinkedIn and connecting with all of her professional contacts. In fact, last night, she was already explaining to me all the new features she wants for the site.
This is surprising to me, since even after 4 years at eBay, I was unable to ever get my Mom to successfully bid on an auction, or buy an item on eBay Express. But LinkedIn for some reason has grabbed her, and I think that speaks to the power of connecting with people.
I really love the fact that LinkedIn has an official blog. Now that I’ve been blogging here for almost a year, I really regret not having official blogs at eBay for the products and teams that I was responsible for. It’s such a great way to tear down the walls that normally separate people creating products from the people using them. It makes the web more human, and I think that type of open communication really benefits both the community using the product as well as those working tirelessly to improve it.
In any case, I’ll now be posting from time to time on the official LinkedIn blog about new features or about new ways to use LinkedIn. As always, I’ll be keeping this blog to primarily personal content.
Well, several reasons. But mainly for stuff like this:
Yes, I know it has been on Valleywag quite a bit. And yes, I know its just a publicity stunt to build demand for this book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody
But it’s really funny. Check it out.
StumbleUpon is more powerful than I first thought.
In case you haven’t tried it, StumbleUpon is a fairly unique new tool to help browse the web. It’s a toolbar that you can easily download and install in your browser (IE or Firefox). With it, you can easily vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on any web page you go to, kind of like Tivo. As you vote for websites, StumbleUpon compares the sites you like to the sites that other people like. Then, when you click “Stumble!”, it automatically takes you to other websites, most likely ones you haven’t heard of, but that StumbleUpon thinks you’ll like.
My first impression of StumbleUpon as a user was positive – it very quickly started taking me to Mac-related sites, many of which I hadn’t heard of. It was neat, but since I rarely have time to just randomly browse the web, I didn’t use it much.
I didn’t give StumbleUpon much more thought, despite all of the eBay/StumbleUpon acquisition rumors, until today.
For the first time, this morning I decided to actually vote for my own blog, Psychohistory, with StumbleUpon. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Why not a little self-promotion?
Tonight, I checked my blog statistics, and the number one referring site to my blog today was… StumbleUpon. 29 hits out of 380 total. That might sound like a small number (it is), but I’m just shocked that a single vote could bring traffic to my blog.
Something real is going on here… reading the WordPress forums I see that a lot of blog authors are getting thousands of hits a day from StumbleUpon. If any of that is hitting my blog, then there must be a fairly significant flow sourcing from StumbleUpon users.
In any case, if you haven’t downloaded StumbleUpon yet, it’s worth checking out. And if you run a website, it’s worth thinking about how to best get people to vote for your site in StumbleUpon. This page on the StumbleUpon site helps you integrate their tags into your pages.
Click this link below to vote for this blog… 🙂
I don’t have time for a full post right now, but I’m finding this firestorm at Digg over the posting of the HD-DVD AACS Key incredibly interesting.
Here is a really good interview with the Digg CEO on the issue.
I’ll post more links & articles later. But in case you haven’t read about this yet, here is the deal:
In particular, this statement from Digg is really powerful. For any online company that depends on their community, this is something to really think deeply about and internalize. Here is the post from the founder:
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
Amazing.
Surprisingly, I find myself stuck in the airport with at least 90 minutes to kill. I’m leaving today for London, to help participate in some of the global reviews happening this week for eBay, and my itinerary ended up being somewhat compressed.
Leaving:
4:50 PM on Tuesday, April 24th from San Francisco. Arrive at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, April 25th in London.
Returning:
10:50 AM on Thursday, April 26th from London. Arrive at 1:40 PM on Thursday, April 26th in San Francisco.
BAM! That’s a quick trip.
In the meantime, this is my first time flying British Airways, so I’m trying to absorb as much as I can. The lounge seems pleasant, kind of like a hotel lobby with lounge chairs facing the tarmac and a stocked snack bar with soft drinks & cookies.
No wireless access in the lounge, but direct connect at these little cubbies. So, instead of lounging and reading, I am blogging and surfing.
To each their own.
Now this one is a lot of fun…
I moved my blog reading from My Yahoo to Google Reader about 6 weeks ago. It has been tough to adjust to the new habit – my instinct is to always go to My Yahoo. But My Yahoo just wasn’t scaling for the number of blogs I like to keep tabs on (now over 100), and I noticed that a majority of the people reading my blog were now using Google.
Thankfully, Firefox has made this easier. The ability to quickly change the behavior of “adding a feed” to Google from My Yahoo made the transition simple for new feeds.
For exporting my old feeds from My Yahoo to Google, I found a nifty tip online on how to export an OPML file from My Yahoo and import into Google Reader. Just spent a few minutes categorizing all my feeds, and I was ready to go.
Well, today I discovered a new trick.
This post shows you how to skin Google Reader using CSS to look like Mac OS X. It’s really neat, although it’s a little weird that the author’s name is Adam Pash.
On Firefox, you basically want to go here and download Stylish. Stylish is an add-on that lets you customize the CSS for any website.
Then, go here to download the Mac OS X theme for Google Reader.
Once you unzip, open the CSS in a text editor, and copy & paste it into Stylish. On Mac OS X, I had to do this manually by opening the Add-Ons dialog, and open the Stylish preferences, but I got it to work.
It’s pretty neat, and I like the new look & feel of Google Reader. It’s also pretty neat to see CSS as a form of “lightweight plug-in” for websites. I’ve got to show this to some of the front-end folks on eBay Express – we use CSS heavily, and I bet you could come up with some pretty neat skins for the site using Stylish.
Many thanks to Will Hsu for his post today for pointing me in this direction.
Please check out this summary write-up on the O’Reilly site on the philosophy and theories of Amy Jo Kim, PhD, based on her discussion of Game Mechanics and Online Communities at ETech.
Kim discussed five key mechanics of game design, why they are important and powerful, and examined examples of how they can be used in other settings. The five game mechanics discussed were collecting things, earning points, providing feedback, exchanges, and customization.
Many of these mechanics speak to very primal response patterns inside the human psyche, which is why they can be so powerful. Another key point is that games are designed to be fun and engaging, and whenever you can make any system or appliation more fun you’ll likely improve the user experience and get them using the system more regularly and for longer times.
I can’t tell you how closely Kim’s assessment of how to build compelling engagement matches my own. In fact, some of her assessment of the mix of understanding of video games, behavioral finance, and online behavior vaguely mirrors my own concept and theme for this blog.
I’ve long believed that people have underestimated video games as a new medium not only for entertainment, but for engagement. Video games have often been on the forefront of experimental and exploratory attempts at bridging the gaps between new technology and human interaction. Audio, Color, 3D, economics, story telling… video games have managed to incorporate these elements in the human/technology interaction long before any other classes of technology products have.
Kim lines up five types of game mechanics in her talk that she directly traces to the success of online communities like MySpace:
It’s worth the full read here. Sounds like eBay, doesn’t it?
I’ve read some great material from Susan Wu at Charles River Ventures, and Wil Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. But Kim’s overview is squarely aggregates quite a few of the insights I’ve been working to rationalize over the years.
I’ve got to look into this more deeply, as this captures so many of the threads in human computer interaction that I’ve personally been most interested in since my days in computer science at Stanford.
Update (4/5/2007): Amy Jo Kim has a blog… why not go direct to the source?
Stumble it!
Psychohistory 