Chris Motes' Blog

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Hydrogen: The future of energy... or not?

The Hydrogen Myth

View more presentations from Stephen Fleming.

The Past Month Of My Life

A lot has happened in the last month. It's worth writing about.

1) My son Calum was born. He is amazing.
2) At work, I led a deep dive review of Y! News, presented to a big group of Y! News people from all over the world and presented to the CEO for the first time. I made sure that I presented to her as early as possible on Tuesday... because at 4:45PM on June 16th I closed my laptop and grabbed a taxi back to the city to get lisa and head to the hospital.
3) A week later at work, the Health Check. Another big presentation to important people.
4) Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Karl Malden, Billy Mays and Steve McNair all passed away.
5) TrueBlood debuted with a new season, and Lafayette didn't die.

I'm hoping for a calmer, less eventful July.

Definition of Success

My definition of personal success has changed a lot in my short 36 years.

Thirty years ago: Convinced father to purchase Star Wars Hammerhead action figure for me. Success! (side note: the next day, was playing with hammerhead in giant sand pile. left hammerhead in sand pile. sand pile used in cement for swimming pool. hammerhead still in that pool somewhere...)

Twenty years ago: Successfully constructed my own personal beer bong from some plastic tubing and an oil funnel. Named bong "robo-bong". (side note: robo-bong was destroyed in 1992 in a freak accident. thankfully.)

Ten years ago: Brave enough to get on a stage and try to perform Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne" guitar solo. I thought it went well. (side note: I taped that performance. it didn't go well. ten years later i still make mistakes on that solo).

Yesterday: Registered my facebook vanity URL with my full name, no spaces, no underscores, dashes, dots. nothing. just my pure clean name. awaiting seo credit impatiently.

Looking forward to 2019!

Google Squared: Structured Search

Check out Google Squared: http://www.google.com/squared

http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=presidents

http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=mountains

Rule #1

(junk post to test why my blog design is jacked)

Everything organic has potential to become something's dinner. So as general rule, do not hang out with things that are capable of eating you for dinner.

Example 1: Tigers. Very cute until about 4 months of age.
Example 2: Any shark greater than 5 feet long.

Remember this rule always.

Reputation And Interestingness On Twitter

I just got followed on Twitter by someone who has 10,000 followers, bringing my follower total to a whopping 60-something.

So who is more popular on Twitter: the guy with 10,000 followers or me with 60-ish?

I don't think there is enough information here to answer the question.

I'm following about 100 people, a mere 1/10,000th of Ashton Kutcher's herd as of a week ago. I only follow people whose comment streams are of interest to me. I also follow people who follow me, but only if I know them and they qualify as interesting (I'm sure there are a handful of people who have followed me that I am unintentionally not following - sorry about that and wow is this sentence confusing me).

The guy with 10,000 followers is following like 40,000 people. That's a lot of Tweets. The guy found me after I started following someone famous. He's looks like someone who is just trying to hoard reach so he can blast out junk. He's a Twitter spammer, which I'll call a Twatter (thanks Jon Stewart!).

So who is more popular, me or the Twatter? Or instead of 'popular', who is more *interesting*?

I think that someone really smart could build a system to answer this by calculating people's interestingness score using Twitter data. Some of that data would include:

1) # of people following you that you aren't following back (# one way fans)
2) # of tweets re-tweeted, or % of posts re-tweeted (syndication factor)
3) Negative score for # users blocking you as a % of total people you follow (spam factor)
and all of these scoring factors would be weighted by
4) the popularity of the people following you, blocking you, or re-tweeting your stories, as measured by the above factors.

It's like PageRank for people.

To avoid the circular reference in 4 you could see the system with a few preset popularity scores for people like @ev and @biz.

Interestingness score could be used as a proxy for reputation. If there was a service that could calculate a person's interestingness score on Twitter, and make it publicy available... there are loads of cool things you could do with that data:

• Show me all news links sent to me by people with reputation scores >5.
• Don't show me any Tweets from people with reputation scores <1.
• Mark any email sent from someone with reputation <1 as a spam.
• Show me the most interesting people in the world of entomology.

Take On Me

Take On Me
Originally uploaded by Chris Motes

I'm flashing back to the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards...

A-ha's video for Take On Me was memorable. It's still impressive 23 years later.

To see what I would look like in black and white cartoon format, I went to befunky.com and put a few photos of me and Carla in. One of them is front and center on this blog now.

Ping Pong Advisory

When the ping pong players get too hard core... my advice is to write them a note. A BIG freaking note.

Thanks Nina!

Ping Pong Advisory
Originally uploaded by Chris Motes

Decide!

Bob Lefsetz says it nicely:

"I’m so busy researching, making sure I get the right thing, that oftentimes I buy nothing at all.  What’s worse?  I’d say my behavior. Life is about making mistakes.  If you always have to get it right, you don’t accomplish much, you’re stuck."