Amazing Race Season 10 – Episode 1

If having racers rappel up the Great Wall of China on the first leg is any indication, the Amazing Race is on an upswing. The lame events, purposeless pitstops, and music-video editing might be a thing of the past – much like the awful Family Edition.

Despite my continual confusion between the cheerleaders and the beauty queens (half way through Return of the King I asked, “Are two sets of hobbits in the Lord of the Rings?”) the character and distinction between the rest of the teams was nicely accomplished.

I thought the introduction of Peter and Sarah did a great job of laying out both their strength (experienced tri-atheletes) and their weakness (3 legs between them). With Tyler and James a second – ex-addicts turned male models. The rest of the introductions felt like cheap match-making reads;

Likes: travel, a million dollars
Dislikes: the other teams

How un-Amazing.

The introductions not-withstanding, this feels like the most diverse groups of racers yet, devout Muslim team, Indian-American married team, black single moms, and rural Kentuckians! . That said, the stereotypes are still there; a gay couple, white chicks, brothers, a dating couple where he’s probably gay, parent and child, moms. Again, hopefully, the show will transcend the stereotypes.

Oh, and Lindsey – I’d eat the eyeballs.

    Garrick’s Favorites:

  • Peter and Sarah
  • Tyler and James
  • Duke and Lauren

To make it interesting, I say Rob and Kimberly are Philiminated in the 4th show.

Tags Less For Me and You, More For Us

In working with FeedSeeder, and interesting transformation has happened.

I actually see value in tagging text.

For video, audio, and pictues – text tagging is a no- brainer. There’s really no better way to get the media categorized than by asking the community to do it. Text for me was a much tougher sell. I kept asking – aren’t the tags already in the text? Can’t text parsers pull them out and ‘tag’ appropriately?

I still think in 95% of the cases the answer is yes. In those cases, tagging isn’t really useful – in-fact, it’s annoyingly redundant.

What I’ve discovered is a great desire to tag not for me (I’ll just post it on my blog) or for everyone in the word (that’s what Google is for) but rather tag for a small, defined, active group, in a folksonomy that only makes sense to them. This translation, re-organization, and re-contextualization of all information (whether image, audio, or text) leveraging words (and meanings) unique to a specific group – this is where I see the real value in tagging.

As an added benefit, it reduces the synonym problem (‘movies’ vs. ‘film’ vs. ‘cinema’).

Out of My Demographic

An open apology to our 13-year old babysitter this evening,

We’re a Mac OS X household with Safari as our primary browser. As you noticed, AIMExpress is not supported within Safari.

I’m sorry.

Though it may not be obvious, Firefox is also available on all the computers in the house.

We’ll have it loaded up next time.

Again, we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Pruning the Beanstalk – Feedreaders Need to Grow With Us

“Odeo will work fine for new subscribers, but as soon as you’ve been subscribed for a few months, it’s impossible to use.” – Michael Mahemoff

Michael’s got an excellent point there.

If you’ve following my writing, you know I have a similar problem with the 300+ subscriptions in my NetNewsWire (up from 250, up from 200, etc). This overload problem isn’t unique to either of these applications, it’s feedreaders across the board, hell, it’s inboxes across the board. Unable to make intelligent decisions about importance – they give us everything…except what the world has declared spam.

Pretty rudimentary.

We’ve developed great aggregation tools, now the filtering tools need some work.

With Feedseeder, I’m more interested in making the 143rd use pleasant than the first. Not that it’s easy to do, but eating my own dog food helps.

Success Equals Being Acquired and Losing Control?

Check out this one line in ZDNet’s coverage of TechCrunch’s Arrington web winners/losers list:

Winners (got acquired)

Now, I don’t know if that’s Arrington’s perspective (I suspect so) or ZDNet’s (also likely), either way the sentiment is disturbing.

If this is the mentality of the Valley, then I celebrate every project on the “Very Good Bets” list that has dismissed multi-million dollar buy out offers.

On a personal note, while I have stagnant accounts on many of projects on Arrington’s combined list, I actively only use 3; Skype, WordPress, RocketBoom.

Leading to me further question the items in his ‘Avoid’ list. I read the list to mean Arrington doesn’t see any room for game-changing innovation in those areas. Since I don’t actively use many of the existing offerings…I respectfully disagree.

Oh, yeah, and FeedSeeder will be an online feed reader.

I think I’ll follow Dave Slusher‘s lead and un-sub from the west coast Web 2.0 VC mentality.

With Comments Like These…

Chuck posted a comment (and his response) on a MNStories video he posted.

I’ve had my share of baffling comments and well, I generally keep them from you. The most baffling ones are usually drive-bys – without a real url, real name, or real email. Add in a comment that isn’t co-hesive and well, it doesn’t get approved. Simple as that. On the flipside – I’m far more lenient on trackbacks.

That said, all media – like we the people ourselves – are biased. That doesn’t mean we can’t share the camera with someone we disagree with. If anything – that should give us license to do more of it.