So, I installed the Yahoo Powered Shortcuts Plug-in. So far, its suggestions have not been that impressive, but maybe this post will get some if I write about Google and Flickr. I will leave it to the reader to say if it’s useful.

I was down at the local Honda dealer getting my oil changed today. So, I wandered into their showroom, where I found a dark blue Mugen Honda Civic SI. It’s a sharp looking car, but who really wants a $30,000 Civic? Also, why the hell did they do this to a four door instead of a coupe? Anyway, here’s some pictures:

You can see larger versions in this Facebook gallery.

I just heard from Mager that Uncov is shutting down. That’s a huge loss, and I wish he would reconsider.

Scott Karp is going to use Twitter again, and has published a long post explaining why. I didn’t know that he had left. But, I’m glad he’s back.

If you are a developer of web content sites, then you must read Data and the Future of the Web by Scott Karp and Database Gods Bitch About MapReduce by Rich Skrenta. Scott provides the vision of where you need to go, and Rich provides an explanation of the new tools that are going to get you there.

Right now, most publishers provide commodity data (i.e. the same news that you can read on 1,000 other sites) without adding any value to either their users or their advertisers. As Scott notes, Google is the king of extracting commodity data. That has given them the power to also extract most of the revenue. But, there is another kind of data, the personal data that is created by a community of users on sites like Digg and Twitter: “it’s the data that’s still in our heads, the data that we have not put in digital form.” As Scott sees it:

“The future of the web will be determined by companies that can overcome people challenges — to bring EVERYONE’S data online, and make it useful. “

This is the primary challenge content producers face! How to mine the data their users provide them, in order to produce a better content experience that, in turn, provides more value to their users, and advertisers. The ability to do this will be the key to building a great content business in the web 2.0 era. And, it’s why I feel so strongly that content sites must embrace social media.

If Scott shows us the goal, Rich shows us the technical means to get there. Right now, most content producers have a database driven content management system (CMS), combined with a traffic reporting tool like Google Analytics. While this is perfectly good for serving content, and measuring your traffic, this combination will not allow you to do the kind of data analysis that will be needed in the future. The data is going to grow exponentially, and only a system based on technologies like mapreduce, HDFS, and Hypertable will allow your data analysis infrastructure to grow with it (at a cost you can afford).

Gathering increased amounts of data, and building the infrastructure that allows you to analyze and act on that data is the future of large scale content on the web. The only other alternative is content at an individual scale targeted at a niche audience (i.e a blog). At that personal level, the author can truly understand and respond to their audience. At any higher level, you need more, and the most successful publishers will be the ones who have the necessary tools.

Here’s a flash poem by M.

I have a guest post up on MetzMash called Three Reasons Content Publishers Need to Embrace Social Media. Thanks are due to Don Marzetta who generously shared his thoughts on the issue. Now, I eagerly await Dan Zarrella’s comments.

UPDATE: The post has now been picked up by Social Media Today as the choice of the day.

I normally avoid political discussions. But, after reading Terry Chay’s post on Ron Paul, I felt compelled to post something. I sympathise with Terry’s frustration with doctrinaire libertarians. Like unreconstructed Marxists, their insistence on finding the solution to all problems in a single principle is a relic of the nineteenth century: a time when the idea of a scientific explanation of society was new enough to excuse this reductionism. Like Marxism, Libertarianism is an excusable enthusiasm in the young, but at some point we all have to grow up. As Terry points out, we have had over one hundred years of development in economics since the nineteenth century, and libertarianism ignores all of them.

In the past, I have compared Ron Paul to Cato the Younger, and I still believe the comparison apt. Like Cato, Paul has never compromised, even when it would have cost him little. It was Cicero’s judgment that Cato’s unwavering commitment to principle did as much, if not more, to destroy the Roman Republic as it contributed to the effort to save it. Similarly, Paul’s intransigence has harmed his cause even as it has led to an unprecedented (for Libertarianism) success. I have no doubt that, should Paul, by some miracle, be elected, he would be an ineffective president. Yet, despite this, as you have probably already noticed, I have a Ron Paul banner in the right-hand column of my blog.

The reason that banner is there is that I believe all politics is contingent: when the house is burning down you don’t advocate pouring on more gasoline. The United States is on a path to bankruptcy, the dollar is debased, and continued foreign interventionism is supported by every major candidate. Paul is the only candidate whose positions would do anything to address these problems. So, in the rather vain hope that he might possibly influence the future path of the country, he has my support.

Guess this explains the post-dated email I got from Dreamhost: $7.5 Million Billing Error at Dreamhost.

So, the Parade magazine that came with today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a cover story about Benazir Bhutto. Unfortunately, the magazine went to press before she was assassinated, so the story was all about how she was the U.S’s best hope against Al Qaeda, and that she was expecting to win the election on Tuesday.  Just more evidence that newspapers are completely done.