Testing post to my wordpress blog.

Testing.

test

Since the beginning of March, I’ve been back on my bike for my daily commute. The other day, after nearly getting taken out by a careless driver, I thought time for a blog post about biking in the city.

Plus today is the last Friday of the month, so it’s Critical Mass day here in San Francisco when bikers take to the streets, and remind folks there are other ways to get about the city than in cars.

Before I get to my biking bullet points, a quick look at my lovely ride (this one isn’t mine, just the model):

It’s a lovely Redline 925, an affordable single-speed steel-frame commuter, with a flip-flop hub if you prefer to ride fixie and quirky mustache handlebars. I’ve loved the commute on it, the simplicity of the bike and stiffness of the frame make it a blast to ride.

But riding in the city can be a drag, and here are some of the things I wanted to write down after a recent ride in to work:

1. Bikers Rule
One of the really delightful things about commuting by bike is the community of cyclists. It’s fun to chat with other bikers at the stoplights, admire their rigs and answer their questions about how I like the weird handlebars on the 925. Only occasionally do I encounter a rude cyclist on the commute (out riding with the spandex warriors on the weekend is a different story).

2. Pedestrians Rule, Too
It’s nice to ride into work, and see people walking to work. Corollary to point one above: the most offensive thing a cyclist can do is put a pedestrian in danger by riding on sidewalks, or blasting through cross-walks with people in them.

3. People who talk on phones and drive suck
I know there are lots of reasons people have to drive.  I own a car, we drive it, I get it. But there is no excuse for driving and talking on a phone. You might as well load up on a couple of sixers and a pint of gin. I see more stupid driving by folks on their cell phones than any other type (equalled only by people texting and driving).

4. Life is cheap
Riding your bike to work, you quickly learn just how cheap your life is.  One odd result of insurance is that people seem to be more careless in their driving, particularly towards pedestrians and bikers. Folks don’t think (much) about what they’d owe if they hit you, because they probably won’t have to bear the cost personally. More likely, they are thinking about the cost of being late to where they’re going, or the frustration of being stuck in traffic, the pleasure of rolling through the stop sign without a complete stop, the supposed convenience of being able to talk while they drive.

It’s those marginal benefits that measure the worth of your life in our world of cars and their drivers.

This looks really cool and very amazing.And it’s personally interesting for me. I worked with Curtis Wong in the 1990s, in one of my best jobs to date, producing a series of fun — and ground-breaking — interactive CD-ROMs (remember those?!). Nice work, Curtis!

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

I agree totally with this:

 To me its really simple. You can’t monetize web services very well until you have an audience of scale. Jason Calacanis suggests that 10mm monthly uniques is where you have scale. I think it can be less in some cases (highly targeted services) and more in some cases (social nets). But every ounce of time, energy, money, and brainpower you spend on thinking about how to monetize will take you away from the goal of getting to scale. Because if you don’t get to scale, you don’t have a business anyway.

From Fred Wilson’s blog today.

Here’s Barack’s final appeal to Iowa voters. Should be an interesting night.

from tpmelectioncentral.c

Announced today: something called “Open Media.”

Real naming chutzpah here; makes me think of this list of operational code names.

These two posts have the analysis about right, I think.

South Park has been hilarious recently. Stan’s dad tries to get the boys interested in playing a real guitar but gets told:

“Real guitars are for old people.”

from pod.vodpod.com

A little over a year ago — sometime last August or September — I started faffing about with Twitter, as early adopters here in SF started to spread the word about it.

I liked it immediately, thought it was perhaps a wee bit twee. But we liked enough here at Vodpod we built a way to let you “tweet” a video from vodpod last December, just weeks after we launched our service. And we spent a great couple of hours dissecting its appeal with some very smart lads, Matt Webb and Jack Schulze.

Twitter really exploded in the Spring of this year, championed by Scoble and getting a lot of attention at SXSW. Funny, though, my interest in and attention to the service waned about then.

So I’ve been delighted to re-engage with it the past week or so. In part, it’s been for prosaic reasons. I saw that Rafe Needelman was doing a Twittercast from Web 2.0, and I’ve been checking out the various AIR (totally loving Twitterific) and iPhone clients and playing with twittering from the road. The Twitter folks get an A+ for their API work, something we’re trying to emulate here at Vodpod.

It’s fun to be back using the service. For my money, it’s a far more interesting than the other hyped up service of the day. In the end, both are really about communication, but there is a richness and layered-ness to Twitter I just don’t find with Facebook. And interesting lesson given how much more complex Facebook is, and how simple Twitter is by comparison.