About those ads ...

LET’S say you wanted to build an advertising-supported online media business that took in $50 million a year in revenue. How many users would you have to attract to get there?

It sounds like MemeStreams may have the right approach:

It may be better for one or two people to create a relatively simple site — say, a hobbyist blog for guitar enthusiasts — and use a service like Google AdWords to, hopefully, make enough money to live on.

Here's the analysis.

Popularity Might Not Be Enough

The audience for this is not people who care about the world, but people who believe it is important to care about the world. When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious. They mean they wish, by whatever means, to be taken seriously.

'The Economist' as a Meme

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

This quote is relayed by Richard Saul Wurman in My Architect [2]. I enjoyed the film and would recommend it to those with an interest, but some architects seemed to want less personal journey and more architectural analysis.

Wurman also mentions this quote in the April 2001 issue of design matters:

Louis Kahn said to me shortly before he died that an idea that does not happen is no idea at all. Late in his life, Mies van der Rohe told a student interviewing him about his work that the secret to his success was to "do good work."

Other mentions of this quote: 1, 2, 3, 4.

More photos at Google.

I also liked this exchange, from the film:

Nathaniel Kahn: I think you've built way more ... you've had way more success ... rate, in terms of your buildings that you --

I.M. Pei: [sighs] Oh, building doesn't mean success. Building ... three or four masterpieces [is] more important than fifty or sixty buildings. ... Quality, not quantity.

One day, Douglas Rushkoff looked in the mirror and screamed.

"I suddenly realized that the people who had put my books on best-seller lists were not those Mondo 2000-era hackers and Internet homesteaders I so admired, but rather the public relations and advertising industries," he said. "I had been selling 'cool' to corporate America. My books were primers, required texts for young executives on how to take advantage of new media to do the same old thing they were doing before. That's when I realized that we were in an arms race and that I was just as caught up in it as everyone else."

Rushkoff apparently made the mistake of thinking that hackers read books.

I don't read books on a regular basis. I seem to read the internet instead. I'm quite well informed on current events, but I tend to prefer my information in bite sized morsels.

Isn't it ironic that Rushkoff trained the ad wizards to feed you those morsels that seem to keep you away from his work?

Lamentations of a Successful Author

I think somebody is the weest bit skeptical ... (it's a word -- look it up)

WHAT TIMING! Just when the attorney general and the president were coming under fire for the politicized dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, the Pentagon released a transcript of a March 10 hearing in which Guantanamo detainee Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks. Now we can get back to the Bush administration's preferred topic: What a heck of a job it's doing in the war on terror.

... The 9/11 commission report noted the "grandiose" nature of KSM's "true ambitions." ... What he longed for "was theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star."

"We will disrupt their workday with a mildly offensive blinking neon light!"

"Death to America!!!!"

"Death to America!!!!"

What impeccable timing, KSM!

Dave Eggers is funny.

Are you a parent? Are you thirsty? Too many of us allow our infant sons and daughters to lay about idly: napping, drinking milk, and sometimes "turning over." Why not have them mix you a cocktail?

Tots will be entranced by the shapes and colors, all the while learning how to write a check. An essential purchase for expectant parents, harried mothers, hungry fathers, and overly involved grandparents.

Baby Mix Me A Drink

Move in to the Cambrian House. The home for you to develop ideas, to grow business ventures, to contribute to projects, and to earn your just rewards. If you are an inventor, a marketer, a coder, a creative, or just want to work with others to change the world here's what's in it for you.

You can download an interview with the CEO, Michael Sikorsky.

If you're always thinking up new businesses, here's where you pitch, drum up interest and find people to help build it. If you've already taken an idea past its initial stages and need help with the make money part, you're welcome too.

Good ideas are apparently pretty rare.

Cambrian House, Home of Crowdsourcing

My siblings and I weren't especially close, but we always had that book in common: it was our secret shared nerd bible.

Check out the excerpt.

Back to the review:

I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking, but it's also an extraordinary tribute to the memory of romantic love: The Year of Magical Thinking for mathematicians.

Of course you'll remember:

My fellow nerds and I will retire to the nerdery with our new Hofstadter book.

The Year of Mathemagical Thinking | TIME

Under [Vannevar] Bush's plan [of the 1940's], universities researched basic science and then industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to market. The idea of R&D as two distinct activities was born. Firms soon organized themselves along similar lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy engineers.

This approach was a stunning success. AT&T's Bell Labs earned six Nobel prizes for inventions such as the laser and the transistor. IBM picked up three, two from its Zurich Research Laboratory alone. And Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) devised the personal computer's distinctive elements, including the mouse, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet protocol for computer networking (although it was criticized for failing to commercialize such leaps forward).

Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they were. Companies tinker with today's products rather than pay researchers to think big thoughts.

You tinkerer, you!

The "smart people on the hill" method no longer works, says Eric Schmidt. "This is getting to be a new kind of game," says John Seely Brown.

This reflects IBM's transition into "services science". The services business is becoming commoditized, as hardware did before it, and IBM knows it must add intellectual property to its offerings.

And not just IBM, of course. I argue that Cisco's moving in this direction, too.

The fusion of research and development is meant to solve the central shortcoming of Bush's plan: how to turn ideas into commercial innovations. Great ideas may moulder without a way to develop them.

Hmm, mmm.

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Mr Schmidt.

Yes, yes, yes!

Out of the Dusty Labs

Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll on nuclear terrorism.

At some point, perhaps after the expenditure of a great amount of money, it will probably be cops like these, and not scientists or defense theorists, who decide where radiation detection should rank on the long and diverse list of counter-terrorism techniques. The Department of Homeland Security recently announced an initiative to experiment with the installation of radiation detection at some bridges, tunnels, roadways, and waterways leading into Manhattan; later, the department hopes to surround other cities. The N.Y.P.D. fears that the sensors might prove to be too costly and would generate too many false alarms. Nearly three hundred thousand cars and trucks cross the George Washington Bridge in both directions on an average day; without an efficient way to process radiation alerts, a single convoy of banana trucks could jam up traffic for hours. "There are a lot of possible concerns that could surface with it," Raymond Kelly, the NYPD's commissioner, told me. Yet, he said, "we see this as something certainly worth trying." Kelly wants to deploy rings of sensors fifty miles or more from New York, so there would be a better chance of spotting an incoming device. In February, he held talks with his counterparts in Connecticut and New Jersey. Still, Kelly said, the entire project remains "very conceptual in nature."

See also this recent conference on the subject. No briefing materials are directly available, but the participant/speaker list is a good set of pointers.

The Unthinkable | The New Yorker