More things that piss me off about Google Knol

Okay, I’m pissed because I care. Or something like that.

You see, as a purveyor of fine health information, it is my job, nay, my calling, to wade through the trenches of health websites. There’s good ones (WebMD, Mayo, NIH sites, etc.) and then there’s the really bad content (don’t even get me started).

That’s why I was giddy like a 13 year old going to see Hannah Montana when I first previewed Google Knol. Seeded with a few hundred health topics written by physicians, the content quality and depth is unbelievable. It puts Wikipedia to shame. It puts everything else out there to shame.

Only problem? Doctors write when actively courted by Google (who doesn’t love a little love from our overlords?); they probably stop writing when they find that the AdSense ads surrounding their content monetize at 10 dollars a year.

Yeah. Doctors are people too, and sometimes wretchedly money-grubbing people. Fair enough.

So to really measure Google Knol’s quality since takeoff last week, we need a better way to navigate and access the site.

• What were the last five (or five hundred) Knols created? If they were about how to sell snake oil as opposed to medical topics, uh, I’d kinda like to know so I don’t syndicate that.
• How many Knols exist overall? Note that Wikipedia provides a pretty easy way to get to that number. Its called a full database dump and my company Kosmix uses it. Knol? Umm no. Evil much??
• Nav for the site is pretty retarded. I mean, look at this: http://knol.google.com/k/knol/directory-000#. Where is the categorization?
• Good Lord, there isn’t even a way to SORT the goddamn link above!!!
• Final offense: the title says “Collection of Featured Knols”. That means that the tip of the iceberg could be shiny and pretty while the rest of the iceberg is trying to sell me Viagra on the cheap. Come on, Knol, stand behind your product!

Things that tick me off: gratuitous office whiteboard usage

The whiteboard is a sacred Silicon Valley office artifact. No matter how scrappy your startup, if you ain’t got 2 whiteboards for every warm body in the office/garage/homeless-box, you ain’t a real company.

The whiteboard is a company’s mission statement, its values, its creed and its soul rolled into a smooth white surface. Whenever I walk into a startup’s office, I look at their whiteboards like women look at their date’s shoes. Are they squeaky clean because the admin has a mild case of OCD (no joking matter, btw)? Are they littered with pseudocode scribbles because some engineer drank down a 40 and decided to show off? Did someone draw a naughty version of Dijkstra’s shortest path (don’t ask)?

As with shoes and men, you can tell a lot about a company from their whiteboards.

That’s why I’m pissed off when people use whiteboards for stupid, obvious shit that discredits the written form. I’m in a meeting and we’re brainstorming ideas, discussing tasks for a project, figuring out timelines. Someone will invariably stand up suddenly and motion excitably with a hand wave; they’re looking for a marker.

At this point, I get myself primed! I clear my brain; something interesting is about to happen. Maybe he’ll write down an algorithm that will solve my problem. Maybe he’ll just scrawl a mathematical formula John Nash-like and demonstrate to me superior intellect while I nod along like a chump. Sometimes, I just blank my brain and get ready to be schooled like I’m back in junior high.

But then they pick up the stupid marker and start making a dumb list. Or put down a stupid non sequitur like “Its about persistence”. Or start drawing a crude Gantt chart, which just makes my head explode.

People: whiteboards are for math, code and software architecture diagrams that are simply too beautiful to be put down on Visio. Do NOT draw dumb “strategy boxes” on them.

This shit has to stop (random aside, I’m thinking about copyrighting that line. Idea of the year?).

Dear Google: screw your day care, can you please just pay for my meals?

As a card carrying yet-to-surrender-to-buy-and-large (thanks Wall-E) member of the startup cult, I’m just giddy over this.

First, Valleywag started bitching over Google’s callous “disregard” for children and for fleecing employees by charging a boatload for daycare.

Then, The New York Times (please pronounce propuhly) dove right in for a nice hatchet job. Brin is evil. His sister in law is a witch. Parents are pissed off and are holding their now-neglected poor kiddies up towards the sky, Simba-like, in a desperate prayer for deliverance.

WTF?

Now - I get it. I’m 26, irresponsible, immature, nowhere close to even considering marriage and absolutely worthless as a potential father. Sometimes, I pay 80 dollars for a shirt while completely forgetting that I came from NOTHING. In other words, I don’t know much and am a carefree yuppie freak.

But I’m just amazed that Google even paid for daycare in the first place. I’ve seen and heard of companies where the cashews in the kitchen are counted as perks. And that’s in Silicon Valley! As a 19 year old, I worked in the marketing research department of a Midwestern utility company (this was pre-Enron and trading utilities was actually kind of hot. Ewww).

You know what the kitchen contained? Black coffee. If you wanted half and half, you had to carry your happy ass down to Starbucks. Failing that, you could use the little creamer packets and be happy you had a job in 2001.

I know its Silicon Valley and we’re all special, but get a grip, people. While Google clearly fux0red this BIG TIME, cheap daycare is not common. Let’s be real.

Saumil’s Guide to Stupid ValleySpeak: Touch Base

N00bs to this blog, check out the rest of the valleyspeak series here: http://bitbubble.wordpress.com/category/corporatespeak/

This one isn’t Valley specific, but oh well. I’ve spent several years walking around office hallways and cubos and overhearing people saying, “Let’s jump into a conference room and touch base”, or “My crack dealer and I are touching base at the street corner tonight, want to join?” and it has been getting to me.

As far as I understand it, touch base == call or meet someone irrelevant about something immaterial. No one or nothing is being touched (at least I hope not). And whose base is this anyways? Why is there a base involved in the first place? Is anyone climbing a mountain?

So why the hell do we keep using it?? “Touch base” is yet another example of corporate America’s slow but continuous emasculation and withering of plain, simple, understandable English.

I only wish Hemingway were alive so he could get into a cagefight with anyone who’d dare to use the phrase in his presence. Now that’s a fight I would pay to watch on HBO.

Saumil’s Guide to stupid ValleySpeak: Cycles

Why do Silicon Valley types find it so necessary to inject ridiculously lame software/hardware terminology into everyday conversation? Is it not enough to obsess over algorithms during our morning showers? Does it leave a void if we can’t accost a poor sap to discuss the joys of being a chirp-chirp status update robot?

When ordinary, unpretentious people in Indiana need to get shit done by their employees, the conversation is very simple.

Boss: “Employee #x, I need this shit done. Now. Drop everything else”. [Employee doesn't even respond, gets on it].

But that would way too normal for the Valley. What’s the point if you can’t talk about clock cycles? We’ve got to pull bullshit like, “Hi Karen, what do your cycles look like for the next month?”. Fellas! Remember, when you ask a lady about her monthly cycles in a hallway conversation, she may slap you. With good reason.

Same goes for begging for “bandwidth” when a project is important. People’s time is not a dumb pipe. This shit has got to stop.

On Craigslist dating and web developers

Okay, I don’t really keep up with all the sneaky shit that people do on Craigslist Wild Encounters, etc. but this one is a doozy.

So I’m out having beers at Eddie Rickenbacker’s with my fellow Stanford alum MJR. After we’ve exhausted our supply of stupid tech gossip and other industry happenings, talk turns to my friend’s personal life. I ask him where he met his girlfriend and he replies like a real straight shooter, “Craigslist!! Worked like a charm the first time itself!“.

I start to laugh my ass off in disbelief when MJR, a true web geek takes it one step farther.

“I really wanted to a/b test which picture would work the best.”

Pause.

If you know what a/b tests are, you are likely busting your guts. If you don’t, skip this post.

So basically, here are the steps for you Craigslist daters:

• Host the image on your own server when you post the ad. I didn’t even think you could do <img src/> on Craigslist with src pointing to a third party site. Live and learn.
• Rotate through the images on your server
• Measure response rates. Could be via a post-fact questionnaire but I wouldn’t mind more details from MJR on how to do this. Is there a way to connect a click on the “send email” link with a particular img file? Since the click event can’t be logged by third party server apart from Craigslist, how do you do this?

All in all, hilarious, though.

Saumil’s Guide to stupid ValleySpeak: Rock Star Developers

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I hate stupid corporate terms that I come across in the Valley. Here is my previous coverage: http://bitbubble.wordpress.com/category/corporatespeak/

Today’s phrase is “Rock Star Developers”.

Everytime you hear a startup founder or a hiring dev manager, its the same goddamn grind: “We’re looking for rock star developers”. I’ve even had some morons come to me and say, “Do you know any rock stars?”. I am simply supposed to know that they’re talking about programmers, not The Chili Peppers. Oh how juvenile of me for questioning your assumptions.

Okay, let me set the record straight: COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS ARE NOT ROCK STARS. THEY ARE NOT ROCK STARS. THEY ARE NOT ROCK STARS. I get it - you’re referring to their competence level, but please. The comparisons are ridiculous. Ask me for von Neumann clones, then, not for people with a drug problem.

Just because a guy smells like a Linux box or hasn’t seen the inside of a gym in 3 years does NOT MAKE HIM A ROCK STAR.

Developers are fine with being developers. They like - nay, love - to build scalable systems. They love to push pixels around until every single one aligns perfectly to their command. Good ones obsess over the efficiency of their algorithms. They fix bugs and document their code (okay, scratch that last one).

No developer I’ve met in my nine years learning and working with computer scientists has said to me, “Boy, I wish a groupie would do lines on the back of this ThinkPad”. Does that really surprise you???

So quit your bogus rockstar developer fantasy. And just deal with the fact that you work in the kingdom of geeks WHO ARE NOT ROCK STARS.

Update: The stupidity never stops. Was hauling tail down 101 this morning and saw a large billboard in San Mateo by obsessed-with-pink Zecco that screamed the following three words: “Rockstar Developers Wanted”. Sigh.

Is it me, or is MyWire.com doomed?

I recently came across MyWire.com, a Redwood Shores based company that “connects” people to trustworthy information and allows them to create “channels” based upon their interests. You can view the property in action right here: http://www.mywire.com

Did I miss something? I’m clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, but here is what it sounds like these guys do:

• Buy up a bunch of content sources (Associated Press, etc.) that are newsy/topical.
• Show snippets for other content sources like The Huffington Post.
• Allow users to create a profile and comment upon licensed stories.
• Allow users to create a custom set of stories based upon interests.

Clearly, the first 3 bullet points are, well, lame. Why would I ever use this when my problem is not lack of available/trustworthy sources of information but way too many goddamn sources? Its too much noise, not enough signal.

The fourth one is interesting, yes, but is a problem that several folks are attacking in myriad ways. Take Persai, for example, which asks you to specify your interests and picks out relevant stories for you (more complicated than that in reality, but whatever). There is also MeeSlice (http://www.meeslice.com) and I won’t say anything more about them just yet.

So what in the world is MyWire offering me in terms of innovation? Did I miss something?

New Category: Overheard in Silicon Valley

I hear some things that I’d never, ever hear anywhere else in the country. I’ll try to report them as I find them.

I Survived My First Bay Area Earthquake

And I didn’t even get a lousy tshirt.

So frigging lame, I didn’t even feel the damn thing even though it struck at 5.6 10 miles north of San Jose. I was in the gym at that time and the only thing going through my mind was how severely weak I’ve gotten in the past three months.

Narcissistic behavior can make you ignore tremors, too. In addition to turning you into a meathead!

Four years in the Valley and I spent my first real earthquake hanging out with sweaty men. Nice.