About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
This week, after driving through the Warehouse district then picking up a few things at my local Target I thought – “this will never be a condo.”
Today’s warehouses have no windows, no walls, and nothing interesting.
Unfortunate. Feels like artificially hijacking the circle of life.
First off, I never contributed millions (or even thousands) to public radio. A couple hundred bucks here and there. And I know a couple people employed by the Minnesota Public Radio. Heck, I even helped them usability test their site a while back. Kinda fun sitting on the other side of the desk.
That said, I haven’t contributed recently nor do I foresee doing so. I don’t agree with their Next Standard in Public Radio campaign. I especially don’t agree with their copyright infringement suit against Current.TV – the audience-generated, Al Gore-backed Current TV Network. His project to “democratize television.”
I wish MPR felt the same way about radio. Oh well, back the podcasts.
Thanks to Tod Maffin for the tip.
My personal favorite comment on the topic over at MNSpeak:
“Get a grip MPR. Are you going to sue NPR next because it’s one letter off from your name?”
Other food for thought from the discussion – ‘the Current’ is the new ‘JackFM’
Since I won’t be making it to the SXSW, I’ve been waiting all year for this. Anxiously checking and re-checking the SXSW website like a kid at Christmas.
I even ‘bookmarked’ the page like it’s 1998.
Then, today, it arrived. This year’s 2.5GB BitTorrent of showcase musicians (and 667MB of film trailers if you prefer).
Now, where am I going to find 2.5GB?
Jen and I like vacationing in Europe – our heritage pretty much dictates it. We don’t really care when we go. We’ve got a general idea of what we want tickets to cost and are happy to build a vacation around that price.
As Dave points out the “I don’t care when, just how much” traveler has been stuck hunting-and-pecking arbitrary calendar dates on the various travel sites finding something that makes sense.
My experience with Orbitz gave me first-hand knowledge of the volatility of airfare prices. Just like at eBay, you’re not really sure what the final price is until after the transaction.
Hopefully, once FlySpy launches, those days will be over.
Google just gave me this alpha link.
UPDATE 16 May 2006: podcast of my interview with Robert Metcalf
Just got word there’ll be an Open House at 2701 31st Ave NE, St Anthony, MN from 2-4pm this Saturday, Feb 25th. This one’s open to everyone.
If you want to check the place out, mark your calendars. Especially if you’re looking for a great starter house for you and your dog.
No, we won’t be there.
If you can’t make Saturday, come by Sunday between 1-3pm.
Nine parties came by for the open houses total, with an additional showing on each day. Today (Monday) there’s another showing. There’s a good chance 2 parties are interested. Hope so.
If you sell real estate and want to take a the house, there’s an agent open house tomorrow – Tuesday, Feb 21, 2006 from noon to 2pm. Come by, check it out.
For more info on the place, review my past house posts.
I received the preview password to EdgeIO.com today, Mike Arrington‘s new project to aggregate all blog posts using the tag 'listing' at a single site, all organized and such as you’d expect from a classifieds site.
Since I’m trying to sell a house and blogging about it, seemed like a perfect opportunity to test it out.
It’s a slick system. I added ‘listing’ to my WordPress categories, flagged the post with it and a handful of other categories, hit Publish in WordPress, and EdgeIO sucked them right in.
After that, I claimed the post and added a handful more tags and the price. I had more luck with the hidden span claim method than the xml-rpc method.
The most interesting bit – despite having the ZIP Code and address throughout the post, EdgeIO didn’t know the location, until I set my location in my profile. Then like magic it was updated. Good thing my current location and the location of the house is the same.
If you have a preview password, you can check out the EdgeIO listing for the house.
The idea that work I’m doing already (writing to my blogs) can be leveraged in a useful way is very powerful. I can see the same type of aggregating-the-edges system for reviews (music, movie, product).
There’s an undercurrent of concern EdgeIO highlights – multiple silos of tag clouds. The same word in Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, 43Things, et. al, bring up very different types of information.
EdgeIO has essentially declared ‘listing’ to have a specific, universal meaning (“something for sale”). If another, existing tag cloud agreed – hell – if all of them agreed on the same meaning, EdgeIO turns invisible. Either becoming the enabling technology behind all the other sites (as NavTech is to mapping) or disappearing altogether.
Let’s say you bought the house we’re selling in St. Anthony Village. If you did, you wouldn’t be a Minneapolitan – you’d be a Villager. St. Anthony Village is it’s own 3-square mile city – St. Anthony, MN to be specific.
Yes, NE is in address and the post office will deliver to a 2701 31st Ave NE Minneapolis, MN address (think of that as a fringe benefit). This is different than NE Mpls in a couple of ways:
Plus, the City Hall/Community Center is just 4 blocks away (coincedently, so is Mpls proper).
We like this city so much, we’re staying Villagers. I suspect this is also why very few houses go on the market in the Village.
There’s been a few parties interested in our house, I’m surprised to learn from our agent how unstructured, the agent-to-agent feedback process is. Sounds like the listing agent has to initiate the contact with the showing agent, rather than the showing agent providing it by default.
As a seller, I want to know what prospective buyers are saying about the place – maybe there’s some small improvements that’ll make it more attractive? For the listing agent, the feedback helps refine the house’s marketing and positioning.
Blog comments and trackbacks automate this process, by collecting all the feedback on a given property in a single location – whether it’s written the listing agent’s blog or the showing agents’.
Extending this idea, houses themselves should have an ongoing blog, not only for buying/selling events, but documenting improvements (“when were new windows installed?”).
Jen says, “Oh, like CarFax.com.”
Health coverage as a benefit of employment no longer makes sense – financially for employers or employees. Expecting employers to foot the bill and not expecting them to minimize their expense might be a sign of mental illness.
My problem with employer-sponsored plans is their lack of portability. The instability of employers in the dot-com era meant switching plans and doctors every 18 months when I switched business cards – annoying to say the least.
The three benefits I see of individual sponsored plans are:
I don’t see these points conflicting with a national health care plan. To me, healthcare is the same type of problem as roads/highways and defense.
J Wynia has a good write up of choosing an individual healthcare plan.
Malcolm Gladwell takes the healthcare = transportation metaphor one step further.