ConEd win this years prize for worst customer service.

Having waited on the phone for half an hour because they don't take credit card payments over the web (I mean my corner store does that), they don't take credit cards over the phone - despite the fact that they say they do.

Not just that - but if you change your bank and your payment doesnt go through, in their infinite wisdom, they decide that they will stop you from being able to pay by phone for six months. They basically don't want your money.

Please, please let Con Edison go bust.

The Wistslist is a metalist, a top ten of top tens.

the Wistslist 2005

"This map of the world is made from sunburnt skin peeled from my backside during a holiday in Central America."

SkinPieceProject

Don't read lists of how to be more productive.

The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel's 'Google Book Search Hack', which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to 'get Digged' - and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract 'Diggs', but no actual information.

Steve's post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine.

So the irony is this - by posting a description about how to do something 'technical' that isn't and using words like 'O'Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google', you can become one of the top links on a techy links site.

This may seem trivial - but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated.

Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O'Reilly's Hacks Books for Free Using Google

The new version of Kinja is out and its much better, putting all the stats about blogs in one place and allowing recursive discovery of related blogs with continuous clicking.

In fact the only thing I don't like are what constituted the original Kinja - the digests. The new Kinja is useful as a reading list discovery tool. I'd like it to become the best of breed tool for creating and sharing reading lists, something that noen of the RSS search engines or aggregators have done properly. - The digest (or 'personalized newspaper') idea then follows that.

Kinja, the weblog guide

My father and I always look forward to competing on who can finish it first, every year:

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | And here's the hard one ...

Why would I argue that this is a bad thing when 1. I think that children are better off if they are not fed ideology of any sort in schools and 2. I think that Intelligent Design is clearly religion and therefore ideology?

To begin with, we clearly haven't heard the end of this. One of the main reasons that the US seems to be the only civilized country with a recent pandemic outbreak of religion is that the left DID go too far in making things like prayers in schools unconstitutional. This makes the constitution a reactionary secular ideological doctrine, similar in form but more diluted from Soviet anti-religious doctrine. What makes a constitutional democracy good is that it is not a doctrine but a process of reason.

If you believe in science, and therefore in reason, then you do not need to legislate from the bench, if you believe that laws are absolute then you have to. God is both judge and law maker, the ultimate legislator from the bench. People who believe in reason should not turn the constitution into ideology, they should defend the process of amendment as being ongoing rather than in order to correct mistakes.

The constitution will always be flawed and should not be worshipped, it is a reflection of current consensus, nothing more. If you believe in progress, then the consensus moves into a better place over time. For America as a whole current consensus is better than when the constitution was written, because the vast majority of people think slavery is wrong. The majority currently do not think that Darwin was right, but they will eventually, if progress in America continues. Without solid consensus the constitution is fragile at the edges and cannot continue to move forward.

Secondly - imagine a virus which spread more when attacked but which was badly built for a current environment, having not mutated much in a couple of thousand years.

If you legislate that someone cannot have their kids taught about the foundation of their entire way of life and moral framework, then that person will look really hard at what their kid is taught. Religion thrives off persecution, in churches around the world people worship in front of the biblical equivalent of an electric chair. If you attack religion it will get stronger.

On the other hand, religion is necessarily poorly adapted to the modern world. Because it is faith based rather than reason based, it doesn't change much.

The morality of the bible is based in a more primitive era, when society groups were not large enough to learn to tolerate minorities like gay people or transport shellfish quickly enough that it didn't go bad. If we leave religion alone and offer reasonable alternatives it will look increasingly absurd. Because religious texts are not amendable they will wane in relevance and therefore importance, naturally. As Dawkins points out, we are all atheists in the eyes of an ancient Roman.

I am linking to the very secular Christian Science Monitor coverage, for the irony value:

Banned in biology class: intelligent design | csmonitor.com

Evolution fight puts suburb in spotlight

Evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy's fascination with dinosaurs.

"He was really into 'Jurassic Park'", his mother recalled. The trouble was, "we kept reading over and over that 'millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth", Marjorie Rogers continued. "And that's where I said, 'Hmm -- wait a second".

Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that the Earth is several thousand years old.

I find it hard to find decent videos on the open web, so have been drilling through sites like Youtube and Google Video with a view to providing a wists list of good stuff to stream.

Youtube is 99.9% crap and 0.1% memes that have been around for years, or commercials.

Google Video is also mostly crap snippets, but I did manage to find some good programming - stuff on Evolution, and Science and interviews with good people like John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker.

After searching for practically every architecture, design and science name I know, I kept getting the same content so realized that there is hardly anything in Google video longer than 3 minutes.

When I actually looked at the science stuff, something strange became obvious - a large percentage of it was funded by Intelligent Design groups or religious organizations.

If people are frightened about young people's minds being corrupted by porn on the Internet, they should also check out what the god squad are pushing.

Perhaps the Internet is for all the things you shouldn't talk about over dinner, after all - sex, politics and religion.

My google video wist list

To say that Wikipedia is OK, that it is about as accurate as Britannica, not fantastically better or worse, is not much of a news story.

Much more melodramatic to say that Wkipedia is a disaster, a threat to civilization, full of lies etc.

The reality is that a system that is open for anyone in the world to try to post a lie, that has only been going for a few years, whose contributors don't get paid has only managed to produce a couple of pretty obscure hoaxes.

The truth is that it is a much more accurate reference tool than the Internet as a whole, than most books and, as has just been suggested in a blind test, its pretty much as accurate as Britannica.

Its true that the Britannica test was only for scientific articles - but to be honest, if anybody seriously believes that topics like history are absolutely objective, then they are hopelessly naiive.

Bottom line - considering the way Wikipedia works, its unbelievably, gobsmackingly successful.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wikipedia survives research test

Not yer average gift guide:

The Cribcandy holiday gift guide is up - quirky, unusual or good value gifts for around the home, with some good stuff by emerging young designers.

Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home

Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa:

$1 per CPU hour consumed.
$1 per gig of storage used.
$1 per 50 gigs of data processed.
$1 per gig of data uploaded.

John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game

Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter.

It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors'. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term?

Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com

The worst mistake we made at Moreover was to raise too much money.

The Bay Area prides itself on the sophistication of its investment structure, but most of the successful Web 2.0 'exits', from a founder perspective, have been non-Bay Area companies or ones that didn't raise too much cash.

Perhaps the further you are from Mountain View, the less likely you are as an entrepreneur, to be seduced by Bay Area style startup investment.

If you are in a casino and you are $5M up, the best thing you can do is walk away from the roulette table.

If you are a young entrepreneur $5M is a life changing experience and selling a company after bootstrapping or a seed round of investment can give you that. A series B round could very well give you more - but it is a much bigger gamble and as recent evidence suggests, puts you out of range of the big 5 (Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Ebay) without revenues, strong revenue predictions or extensive due diligence.

If you really have a $100M plus idea, you may need a decent VC and plenty of cash, but there are a lot more $10M ideas, and 50% plus of $10M may be a much more realistic goal than 25% of $100M.

A VC is making a very high risk investment and will want to think he or she can get a 10x return and will possibly have preference shares that force you too to make that gamble - i.e. you only get a payback if there is a significant return.

If you raise money - pretend mentally that you have borrowed the cash on a charge card at 20% APR - you should be confident that you could pay that off. If you don't feel that pressure then there is something wrong.

Similarly, because VC money is high risk - but the risk spread accross a portfolio of other companies it is in the interest of the investor to push for a business strategy that aims for that 10x return at the risk of making nothing. In other words the investment was high risk to start with, so why should the VC re-gamble with lower odds.

There is a current batch of Web 2.0 startups that have been snapped up quickly by companies like Google and Yahoo for a price that for them is sometimes justified to get really good people, but which is payday for founders that still have a large percentage of equity.

This perhaps changes current tech. startup equation, although one should never start a company to be bought, but because you really believe in it. And if you really believe in it you should surely max out your credit card and raise cash only when you really need it.

Here is a list of some current 'web 2.0 ish' startups, the common themes that stand out - the ones that have 'exited' are not dominated by Bay Area companies and didn't raise several rounds of cash:

Dodgeball:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes

Delicious:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes

Flickr:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes

Gawker:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No

Weblogs Inc.
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: Yes

MySpace:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: Yes

Friendster:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: No

Xanga:
Bay Area: No; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No

Technorati:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No

Six Apart:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: Yes; Acquired: No

Odeo:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired: No

Oddpost:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired

Bloglines:
Bay Area: Yes; Second round finance: No; Acquired

Congrats to Josh Schachter and all at Delicious.

Of couse if you bootstrap a company from scratch without any investment, like Gawker, then you are not under any pressure to 'exit', you have what everyone should strive for - a real business.

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!

Sam Harris' Atheist Manifesto.

Most of what he says is reasonable, however, the editor suggests that Harris argues that religious toleration is a menace - this is not a defensible argument since it empirically leads to persecution.

Its true that there is not a single ideology that is truly tolerant of other ideologies, therefore an anti-ideology like atheism can be more tolerant by making no absolute claims of its own but adaptable guidelines based upon evidence and reason.

One should not be intolerant of belief itself but unreasonable acts based upon it. However, since ideological dogma, of which religious dogma is a subset, is not based upon reason - its acts are very often unreasonable and intolerant.

A consistent maxim for an atheist would be to be tolerant of religious faith, but intolerant of intolerance itself.

This is not a nihilist view, but a defense of moral relativism. Its also the basis of American democracy. What makes the constitution its foundation is that, unlike the bible, the teachings of Chairman Mao or the divine mandate of an unelected monarch, it is allowed to be challenged and amended.

Surely on this basis, one could argue that anyone who is against moral relativism is against constitutional amendment and therefore un-American? This charge, however, is usually the other way around.

All of this may be missing the point. The central problem with Sam Harris' atheist manifesto or any atheist manifesto, or anything I write here is that reason may be a vaccine against blind faith but it is not a cure, and it is not clear what is.

Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven't had a makeover since the dotcom days.

Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components - the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs.

Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval.

Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search.

Google has a bunch of tabs and a search box, so does riffs. The problem with Google's tabs is that they are somewhat randomly distributed between what appears on the front page and what trails off into the neverland after the 'more' link.

I would bet that this time the publishing tools are going to create the right environment figure out what are some of the new tabs that are eventually going to be standard at the top of Google.

Riffs: Your Social Recommender - Ratings, Rants, Raves, and Reviews

"Attention shoppers - some Web sites ditch the online cart and offer new experiences"

"it isn't just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists (www.wists.com) allows users to bookmark pages visually via a small image and summary, which can then be shared with other users. This sort of thing makes sharing wish lists of goodies with others easier, for example."

If you are a completely miserable git - like me, you will love consumerist. Its a blog that will focus consumer frustration, spraying lame companies with virtual offal.

Along with Sploid, its a Gawker media property that I will actually read - in fact this time i may actually contribute.

The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back

In Worldnet Daily's 'lets rape unfaithful women' OpEd is the following sentence:

"There may be a genuine moral argument against rape to be made outside of the Judeo-Christian ethic, but I have yet to hear it."

- how very deaf you must be.

I've noticed increasing reference to the so called 'Judeo-Christian' tradition. This lumping of Judaism with Christianity together with the claims of Millennium Christian radicals is an insult that could possibly lead to injury, since historical precedent suggests that jews will eventually get the blame.

Given that there are three religious sects that worship the same deity and find common ancestry in Abraham: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, reference to the Judeo-Islamo-Christian, or, more elegantly, 'Abrahamic', tradition makes some sense.

The permutation: 'Judeo-Christian tradition' stems, obviously, from the fact that Christianity supersizes the Torah into its own edition, whereas Islam rewrites it.

But what of the other alternatives:

Given that Jews come from the same region and lived peacably with Arabs (even with a community in Mecca) while Christians tended to persecute Jews as outsiders, reference to a Judeo-Islamic tradition would have made sense historically.

Given that Muslims and Christians believe Jesus was a prophet and have religions that are far closer in date of origin than Judaism, then perhaps an Islamo-Christian tradition makes sense.

Judeo-Christian is a term used to sound inclusive, when in fact it conpicuously excludes Islam while including Judaism as a possibly reluctant and vulnerable ally.

It is a politically incorrect attempt to be politically corrrect, by those who complain about political correctness.

WorldNetDaily: The morality of rape

"if a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic"

I'll paraphrase this nonsense because the writing is so bad:

'A woman who considers, for a second, the possibility of sex outside of marriage is no better than a man who actually rapes her.'

This is what some people who call themselves Christians actually believe. As an aside, the guy who wrote the article describes himself as a Christian Libertarian (i.e. someone who both rejects and blindly worships authority).

Here are some other advertisers who appear on the Worldnet article, feel free to contact them, ditch their products or drain their bank accounts by clicking on some of their Google ads and not buying:

Netflix, Tickle, Shutterfly, Apartmentguide.

WorldNetDaily: The morality of rape