Russell Dicker

Who Me?

A while ago my dear friend Andrej Gregov posted five things about himself as part of a meme circulating where people would post such narcissistic internet detritus and then tag others to do the same.  In his post, Andrej tagged me.  Well I was busy and so I'm not getting around to it until the life had been sufficiently beaten out of that horse.  So here I am.

However instead of posting five things about me, I'm going to post six.  One of them will be false, and the rest will be true.  I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which.  Without further ado:

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1. While in college, I petitioned Guinness to recognize me as the record holder for "longest time spent walking up a down escalator".  Unfortunately my petition was denied with the reason that the record would not be "sufficiently notable".
2. I was in the upper deck of Camden Yards when the scene from the movie Dave was filmed there.  When the high definition version of that film becomes available, you might even be able to find me.
3. When I was a child a had a number of oral surgeries that required Novocain shots.  I developed such a distaste for the Novocain that when I finally needed my first filling at age 20 I had them fill the cavity without it.
4. I was once quoted in Rolling Stone magazine as an expert in human computer interaction.
5. Because I had childhood asthma, doctors suggested that I may be allergic to Penicillin and Aspirin.  Although I have never tested this hypothesis, I once developed a bad case of hives after eating an overly ripe and potentially fungus infested orange.
6. During a routine screening in middle school a nurse diagnosed me as having Scoliosis and stated it would be unlikely that I would ever be taller than 5' 8" (I'm 6' 3" now).  Later visits to a orthopedic surgeon determined that her diagnoses was incorrect and based on unusual muscle structure I developed as a medal winning kickboxer.

</drumroll>

If anyone wishes to continue this tired meme (either in its original or new and improved form) I would nominate Ian Sefferman and Buster McLeod.

Amazon and Fark

This is clearly on of my favorite Fark headlines in a while:

U.S. to reposition satellite over Amazon. Seven out of 10 people found this information helpful

And just today Scott Ruthfield was chiding me for having not "grown out" of Fark.

Amazon Gets Scobleized

Amazon has ongoing series of internal events known as the Amazon Fishbowl where people stop by and promote their new album, book, or whatever by talking to or performing for a set of interested Amazonians. For example, Monday had Ben Harper stopping by to promote his his new album. Unfortunately I missed Ben Harper while recovering from jet lag, but I was able to attend today's talk from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel about blogging and promoting their new book on the subject, Naked Conversations.

Overall I thought it was an interesting talk, and it was definitely fun to read Robert's take on the talk afterwards, including the ribbing he got from our CTO. He even posted a pair of pictures on Flickr from the event. The observant might find part of my head in the second to last row one from the left in the second picture.

The talk was, as might be expected, a "rah-rah, go team" about blogging and why everyone should do it. Fair point and obviously apropos. Despite the fact that I generally liked what they had to say, I think they missed the mark on two things.

First, Robert and Shel got a great question about Apple and how they are an example of a company that is extremely closed lipped but still gaining momentum and generally well loved by bloggers. Their response was a pretty quick dismissal of Apple as a flash in the pan. Robert even made the statement that he thought Microsoft had a better chance of being around 100 years from not than Apple does. The stock market agrees, but what made it a non-answer is that they ignore the fact that Apple is well loved and does have a teflon reputation despite doing some not very nice things.

Apple has sued bloggers, runs a monopolistic music business, and has produced products that break easily or even light on fire. Still the next time that Apple calls everyone together for a "fun" announcement, Gizmodo will once again be there, blogging it live. The question of how they can do this is an interesting one and flies in the face of what Robert and Shel are trying to promote. I don't expect them to necessarily know the secret behind Apple's mystique, but that they seemed uninterested in even addressing it left me disappointed.

The second issue I had was their example of a small online bookstore in Japan (I'm sorry I don't recall the name) that saw their sales increase when they started blogging about their thoughts on books. Shel encouraged us to do the same. With all due respect to my co-workers, most are not literary geniuses. In fact I would say that, on average, most Amazon employees (myself included) are poorly suited to commenting on most books, so this felt very much like square peg pounding to me.

Are Amazon employees really the best people to be informing you about books on, say, Russian literature? If they are, is a blog the best format to do it? I would answer 'no' to both of these questions.

One beauty of blogging is that because the barrier to entry is so low, it allows anyone to participate. This, of course creates an attenuation problem that the reverse chronological ordering of blogs are poorly suited for. Customer reviews that are ranked on usefulness (see my still open reputations jobs) seem like a much better format.

This isn't to say there is no place for the blog-style communication on Amazon. In fact with AmazonConnect I think we found a great place for it.

When Amazon employees write informative reviews of books they will naturally float to the top, just like any other customer of ours. This makes sense to me, a blog on the subject doesn't.

This sounds like a lot of criticism. In reality, as I mentioned above, I thought it was overall a good talk and it was nice to meet Robert and Shel. But in the spirit of open communication, I know that Robert and Shel will be happy to read my thoughts.

The Throwdown

My best friend, John Stafford, was talking trash on me yesterday for not updating my blog frequently enough. This will be my sixth post since I officially started on January 28th, 2006 - that is one post every four days. Admittedly not the most active blog in the world. But at least I now know there is a market, however small, for the content put forward here.

Talksbig von Deliverslittle, on the other hand, promises to post at least once a day once he gets his blog started. You see John's blog, disintermediate_us, hasn't really gotten off the ground yet. John is still waiting on the professional designer he hired (yes that is jealousy in my words) and his programmer to finish configuring his MovableType installation. Of course given that he is in Stanford's graduate school for journalism, we would hope that John would take the time to write once a day - it is probably for course credit.

One beautiful thing about the blog format is the permanent record of events. So I'm going to call it out here, WWE style: I will have 31 total posts on my blog before John does.

It's go time little man! BLAARGH!

Blog Started

Ok. After a few false starts and a ton of learning about TypePad, I am close to officially declaring my blog as started. There is still a bit of work that I need to do though:

1. Get the domain name mapped.
2. Write a biography
3. Get a better tag line
4. Build a new design/stylesheet.
5. Oh yes, think of something to say.

The last two will be the hardest. I'm not long in the making things pretty department, so I imagine I'll steal borrow a bunch of ideas from various sites that I find attractive. I'm not sure exactly what design I would like but, with apologies to Potter Stewart, I'll know it when I see it.

As soon as I have my first couple posts that are not about the blog, I'll add it to my 43 things account and notify Andrej who has been begging me to start a blog for over a year now.

So at least someone thinks I'll be able to do #5.