Rogers Cadenhead reports:

Radio Userland Kick Start arrived in stores this week and had the highest first-day Amazon rank of any book that I’ve written – it was at around 2,300 when I decided that three hours was enough time to spend reloading the page like a crazed day trader.

Congratulations Rogers. I did my part – my copy arrived yesterday.

I put it aside because I’m in the midst of coercing Standalone Trackback to support the Radio Userland server interface. I’m planning on moving things off the Userland Radio Community Server to my hosted space. And I’d like to be able to edit my trackback links as well. Comments are next, and then I plan to dive into Radio Userland Kick Start.

Looks like Dave is getting pretty excited about the Tree of Knowledge. But I’m just a wee bit confused about what he’s proposing. I think that determining the structure of the directory is much harder than determining where everything goes in the directory. If everyone works with their own structure, then you’ve got a helluva merge problem. And defining one true structure is going to require one true architect – something that I’m not too optimistic about.

I wonder what would happen if the tree was split into [potentially disjoint] nodes and the task divided into defining structure and identifying members. Then anyone could set up camp as an expert in glotxotomy and assert a structure for it. People who agreed would identify sites in each branch and/or extend the structure deeper. And people who disagreed would propose their own glotxotomy structure and cultivate their own followers.

“The content of the Google directory is based on the Open Directory and is enhanced using Google’s own technology” – from the Google Directory (present at the bottom of every page that I’ve looked at). But just because there is a process to incorporate the Open Directory into the Google directory doesn’t mean that the process is working.

My Java Tutorials were added to the Open Directory’s Java Beginner’s Tutorials on May 23. Around that same time, a link was updated on the Open Directory page that is still out of date on the Google Directory’s corresponding Java Beginner’s Tutorials. And while the current page has no Page Rank, the old page on the Radio Community Server currently enjoys a Page Rank of 5.

So I’m glad that Dave’s raising a fuss about the Google directory of weblog tools. Because something isn’t working and its failure doesn’t reflect well on Google and the Google Directory.

The New York Times reports that $100 Textbooks Cost $50 Overseas.

The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions … entrepreneurs have begun what are essentially arbitrage business to exploit the price differential.

I’m sure that the publishing industry will fight. But the reality is that these pricing schemes are doomed. I accept the reality that US jobs will be outsourced overseas. Because fighting it would be like pushing water up hill – there is too much demand for outsourcing to keep it bottled up. But turnabout is fair play. Just as local jobs go overseas, so will overseas goods come ashore.

A few months back, John Patrick wrote:

[This] highlights the major impact the Web is having on how business is being done and from where it is being done. The bottom line is that a successful distribution business has to have available bandwidth and be on the route of UPS and FedEx or Airborne. If you have that you can build a business wherever you can get the kind of employees you need or increasingly where you want to live.

Local companies can still compete on service. But as shipping becomes less expensive, the competition comes from farther and farther away. Because on the web, everything is only a click away.

Hmmm, maybe listening to Mike and the Mad Dog has made me a bit sensitive on the topic of Billy Beane. I don’t think that either of them is capable of mentioning his name without including the word idiot. But Ryan clarifies that it is idiotic and counter-productive act for Beane to use the small market excuse yet again.

Now, if I were to put on my amateur psychologist hat, then I’d be tempted to say that the small market is Beane’s personal security blanket. I’d be tempted to say that one of the reasons he walked away from the Boston Red Sox position was to preserve his security blanket. And I’d be tempted to say that he’s trying to manage expectations so that he can meet them next year.

I just hope that he realizes his advantage is disappearing. He’s going to lose the Big Three to the Big $$$. His widening circle of disciples are competing for his players. The A’s future is rapidly becoming now.

It’s always important to understand the food chains that you live in. Google is not part of the internet, search is part of the internet. Google is the strongest manifestation of search and currently at the top of the Internet Food Chain. Similarly, Weblogs are a part of the internet with the various implementations only manifestations. Which is a very roundabout way of saying that trackback is now part of the internet.

The internet is many Small Pieces Loosely Joined and trackback is an important part of that joining. Conversations span many places and trackback allows the conversation to be followed from beginning to end – rather than from middle to beginning. And if that means that Google needs to change, then that’s what Google is going to have to do.

But one of things that I learned while working alliances is that you really need to understand your place in the Food Chain. And since Google is at the top, weblog software needs to make accommodations for it. So it’s probably a good thing that TypePad embeds comments and TrackBack pings within the individual entry page. On the other hand, they should expect trackback spam to join the current comment spam. They need to address this before the cure becomes worse than the problem.

I’m a bit fuzzy where BlogRolling and Technorati reside in the food chain. So I can’t use that to say who needs to do what so that the two will play together. But as I endeavor to transfer Google PageRank from my old home on the Radio Community Server to IdeoPlex, I’ve noticed that Google and Blogrolling don’t seem to play together either. The backward links to my old home don’t seem to include fredshouse.net. It seems to me that BlogRolling needs to make sure that it plays well with Google [and Technorati].

Finally, it seems that Joi-san is a PageRank rainmaker. Since it was months before I got any PageRank, I thought that I would look into it. I don’t know whether Joi-san’s pages are dynamic, static, or a blend of the two. But I suspect that the Technorati inbound links on each page are PageRank bingo – good timing leads to lots of GoogleJuice. If this is the case, then it seems to me that Joi needs to hide the inbound links from Google.

It seems that Billy Beane is a topic on which all baseball fans have an opinion – Ryan Daigle thinks that Billy Beane is an Idiot. And as a fellow A’s fan, I feel his pain. Unfortunately, I’ve pitched my tent over by the genius camp.

It’s easy to conclude that Billy Beane is an idiot. The A’s have had 9 games over 4 years to advance to the LCS and have failed every time. And in each series you can identify games in which they beat themselves through bad play. It’s hard to hit .300 and it’s hard to win 20 games. But how hard is it to remember to touch home plate? And how hard is it to remember to run out every play?

But Beane has taken the A’s and their scrawny payroll to the playoffs four straight years. He’s endured the loss of impact players. And he’s made the moves that have allowed the A’s to weather their customary bad start and finish with their patented end of season rush. Now, I’ll grant you that his teams have been flawed in each of those years. But when you play the blame game, you need to identify revenue neutral moves that he can make to eliminate those flaws.

I think that the biggest flaw in the A’s is the lack of a real closer. Beane has been using the closer position as a cash cow – using a superior team to rack up saves so that he can sell off his closer each year. But that’s not much help in the late innings of playoff games. Unfortunately, that’s not going to change. Closers mature later than starters, so the A’s can’t gain one through the draft. And they can’t afford one either.

The other big flaws are defense and fundamentals. Unfortunately, Beane thinks that defense is over valued in the market so don’t expect improvement there anytime soon. And improving the fundamentals is going to require a manager who can teach the fundamentals. Not so easy to find when he also has to agree to play the style that Beane’s roster moves dictate.

I suspect that the question will never really be resolved. We would have had an answer if Beane had gone through with his move to the Red Sox. But now we’ll just have to wait for Beane to tire of using the small payroll excuse and leave for a big payroll team.

Periodically, people try to define what a weblog is – but to my way of thinking, that is not nearly as interesting as what a weblog does. Because weblogs act as a catalyst to enable communications that would not otherwise occur. Weblogs provide anyone with internet access their own personal soapbox to proclaim their views.

In today’s world, it’s too easy to feel lost in the crowd. Perhaps you’re not comfortable speaking in public. Or perhaps you’re insecure. But on the internet, no one knows that you’re a dog. And with a weblog, everyone has an opportunity to proclaim their views and find an audience.

But a weblog is the medium not the message. If a weblog provides a personal viewpoint, then it is only reflecting personal views within the author seeking expression. The weblog doesn’t provide a magic looking glass into the author.

Which is why it’s a mistake to expect weblogs to transform politics – especially Presidential politics. The popular weblogs come from authors with personal messages seeking a medium to convey that message. A Presidential candidate has plenty of ways to convey a message and is looking for the right message to convey. And political handlers polish and position any personal messages before they’re aired in public.

So I think that it’s great for campaign staffers to blog about campaigns. Because I believe that you can judge a man by the people with whom he surrounds himself. And I believe that the compromises made in establishing a position are often more revealing than the position itself. And a staffer weblog could just be the catalyst in conversations about either.

A couple of weeks ago, I was scouring the internet in search of a sports bar in the Norwalk Connecticut area. The internet came up empty for me, but a helpful bartender pointed me in the direction of the East Side Cafe. The East Side Cafe has 9 TV’s, pretty good burgers and is located next to the East Norwalk Train Station on East Avenue.

Spam is pernicious because email is free. If there was a cost associated to email, then spam would become manageable. Of course, everyone gets antsy once you add money to the equation. So let’s consider some other ways of adding cost to email and see if we can’t find something that is good enough.

If we allow computers to respond, then challenge-response can be good enough. Suppose we were to build a Challenge-Response E-Mail Network (as opposed to Don Park’s Trusted E-Mail Network or TEN). Trusted nodes pass messages between themselves without challenge. But when an untrusted node passes a message to a trusted node, then a challenge is generated for every destination address. While not as effective as TEN, I think it avoids some of TEN’s bootstrapping issues.

Or how about artificially forcing email to be a one-to-one medium. We could require that each message had to be xor-ed with the destination email address for uniqueness, and hashed just to add some cost.

As technologists [and perfectionists], it’s hard to accept that good enough is good enough. But the economics of spam are based upon free email. If we can increase the spammer’s costs, then we can change underlying economic viability of spam.