garry’s subposterous

Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators—sites like Drudge Report, Newser, and countless others—don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original.

Think about this for a minute. The aggregators and the old-media guys are competing for the same advertising dollars. But the aggregators compete using content that the old-media guys create and give to them at no cost. This is insane, right? It's like fighting a war and supplying the enemy with guns and bullets.

I hope bookmarklets and blogs remain exempt from this firefight. ;-)

He displayed a fabricated headline from that same newspaper, this one supposedly drawn from a couple of decades ago: “Presidential Action Saves Computer Industry”. A fake article beneath it describes government intervention to prop up the ailing mainframe industry. It sounds ridiculous, of course. Computer firms come and go all the time, such is the pace of innovation in the industry.

Yet for some reason this healthy attitude towards creative destruction is not shared by other industries. This is just one of the ways in which Dr Grove believes that his business can teach other industries a thing or two.

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Thank you science for confirming the obvious.

Thread was originally called Frintro (like “Friend” combined with “Intro) but decided to change its name in an arrangement that could set an unusual precedent for other start-ups. Thread.com was already taken, but they negotiated with the owner to lend it to them for two years. If they turned it in to a successful business, the original owner will take a share of the company. But if they don’t, the owner will get his address back.

Frinto raised $1.2MM from Sequoia and is in the current set of fbFund startups. This is a pretty ingenious arrangement, but as an entrepreneur it still pisses me off.

Success can raise the bar for a company until the pressure for big results kills all creativity. It's that kind of pressure that prevented J.D. Salinger from writing a follow-on to The Catcher in the Rye. It's also why Robert Pirsig took thirty years after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to write his second book. And it's why James Cameron is only now wrapping up his first real movie since Titanic made him the king of the world.

In a business culture that likes to talk up big innovations, we may be lacking appreciation for the beauty of the small idea. Outsized ambitions can set you up for failure in a big way when you spend most of your time rejecting your own thinking. No one bats a thousand at coming up with big, disruptive innovations, so you need to explore all your ideas to find the great ones. Not only that, most really big ideas often look small to start. In their book The Granularity of Growth, strategy theorists Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit, and Mehrdad Baghai note that most billion-dollar business ideas look like $200 million ideas at the outset. Big growth happens when a lot of little things catch fire together.

The report says that there are 8,800 billionaires in Beijing and 7,000 in Shanghai. These are billionaires in Chinese dollars. A Chinese Yuan equals about $150 million U.S. dollars.

The typical rich family in China has a 43-year-old dad, 42-year-old mom and one 14-year-old child. The rich in Beijing need to spend at least about $12.7 million in U.S. dollars on property, cars and other luxury goods to be regarded as an aristocrat. The majority of their spending is on real estate, furnishings and fabrics, according to the report.

Oh, man, I can see it now -- Gossip Girl: Beijing Edition.

Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted. In a region of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), neurons must fire continuously for people to avoid being distracted. But this is very energetically demanding for VLPFC neurons, just as a car’s engine eats up fuel when going up a mountain road. Moreover, continuous firing can cause neurons to break down, just as the car’s engine is more likely to break down when stressed. Studies of depression in rats show that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying neurons with the fuel they need to fire, as well as preventing them from breaking down. These important processes allow depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage, which may explain why the 5HT1A receptor is so evolutionarily important.

Many other symptoms of depression make sense in light of the idea that analysis must be uninterrupted. The desire for social isolation, for instance, helps the depressed person avoid situations that would require thinking about other things. Similarly, the inability to derive pleasure from sex or other activities prevents the depressed person from engaging in activities that could distract him or her from the problem. Even the loss of appetite often seen in depression could be viewed as promoting analysis because chewing and other oral activity interferes with the brain’s ability to process information.

Pretty interesting! Sometimes when you feel a bit depressed, it might just be a neurological phenomena that helps focus you on the problems at hand so that you can solve them and move along with your life faster.

Use a Constant Theme
When all of your content is able to fit within the same constant theme this makes it easier for search engines to recognize the difference between the theme and the content itself, and in the long run makes it easier for search engines to index your content. If possible, keep your theme consent throughout the entire website.

Just saw this on a list of ways to get better SEO -- turns out using one common theme for all content makes it easier for search engines to determine what's content and what's formatting.

Posterous has only one theme (for now), so we certainly take advantage of that SEO quirk.

Read more about how SEO is affected by domains and URLs here.

More than 52,000 bicyclists have been killed in bicycle traffic accidents in the U.S. over the 80 years the federal government has been keeping records. When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault — a result of reckless or aggressive riding. But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes. Among the leading causes: running a stop sign or traffic light, turning into a cyclist’s path, or opening a door on a biker. This shouldn’t come as too big a surprise: motorists cause roughly 75 percent of motorcycle crashes too.

Riding in traffic is relatively nuts -- you have to assume that all the cars around you are sociopathic homicidal maniacs that don't see you and don't care if you die.

But if you get passed that, cycling is fun.