Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s new book The Long Tail is hot. It is a provocative and innovative book that attempts to show an economics that the web has created, where the sales of “non-hits” can cumulatively be larger than the sales of hot selling items. While his ideas are germane to many areas of business, such as the dessimination of information and, perhaps other areas as well, it has also wagged the tail of many “new economy”-type people and has inflated the personal bubbles of many web 2.0′ers. In what follows, I will respond to one of the main themes in the book, in which Anderson uses Amazon as one of the examples.

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First off, I love M. Night Shyamalan movies. I love his storytelling, cinematography, his great sense of timing, and his knack for putting things together when you least expect it and not typically how you expected it; his movies are fun to watch and can be quite moving.

The Lady in the Water was good. The marketing of the movie clearly show it as more scary and terrifying than it is — it wasn’t scary at all. It was a decent story, but definitely not scary.

IMDb provides a quick preview of the movie:

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The New York Times published an article comparing Yahoo! and Google’s products and their development times. It was an interesting read. In that article, the Ash Patel, Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!, mentioned Scrum as a method used to reduce development time:

Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days.

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Jeff Bezos, during a pre-peak meeting once said to a small group of us that there will be many, many winners on the internet. He said that some follow the close-follower mentality and those companies focus on the competition. He continued to say that Amazon has and always will be customer obsessed. He vowed that neither he nor Amazon would ever focus on the competition. He said that customer happiness is the right and only solid thing that we could ever hope to spend our time on. Focusing on the customer breeds innovation and ensures healthy direction. In creating great products, software, or companies, his words are good words to live by.

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Continuing what I began a while ago on the Things I learned from Google Trends, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned from Alexa Traffic data. I stopped at 6 search items, because I wasn’t creative enough this morning to think of more, but I’m sure you’ll be able to think of other interesting traffic comparisons. But, first . . .

What is Alexaholic?

Alexaholic is not affiliated with Alexa, but wholly depends on Alexa data in order to render their charts. It’s a great tool; it’s a free version of comscore, is how I like to look at it. Here are some other reasons to like Alexaholic according to the ‘About’ Page:

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I’ve long ranted about Amazon’s 2-Pizza Team, which is defined as the following: a team where the team size is no larger than 2 pizzas can feed. Amazon realized early on that in order to cut software development time, the solution was *NOT* to put more people on the project. What is required is a team, where the roles are defined and each member has the right skill for that role, and following a lean, agile, method — all focused on the customer.

Agile Methodology

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What is a Captcha?

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Alan Turing (1950) is one of the Artificial Intelligence researchers who proposed a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. CAPTCHA’s are basically a challenge test to tell between a robot and a human. They are typically manifested by an image with distorted characters that a human must enter and submit correctly in order to proceed.

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Okay, there are many toolkits available now for Ajax applications. If you’re the brave type, you’ll develop in straight javascript, which is a pain and can get messy. I’m not brave, so I’ve decided to play with several toolkits available.

For a good run-down on the toolkits curnocopia, turn to Max Kiesler — he gives a great summary, though it’s incomplete, since new toolkits and frameworks are surfacing almost daily.

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