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: Google KNOL doesn’t syndicate

Google Knol made a ridiculously loud fat-man-diving-into-kiddie-pool splash last week. Why? Three reasons:

a) Google is involved, and anything with our Interwebs overlords in charge should be greeted with deference.

b) Wikipedia might get crushed in the process. Nerdy Wikipedia editors are just so annoying, after all.

c) The content, at least for the seed list of topics, is FANTASTIC.

Most of the articles have been licensed under Creative Commons. So why the hell is it so hard to get to the content via XML? Let’s say I want to syndicate Knol Content on my site? Why can’t I do that? There isn’t even an RSS feed that will let me get to the first 1000 characters of the Knol.

That blows. And Google should really fix it.

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.

Welcome to the real world, Starbucks! Free WiFi! What’s next? Cheap coffee?

The yuppie in me LOVES Starbucks. But that other guy - who left home at 15 to be self reliant ever since and has held down a job since seventeen - HATES it.

One of the worst features of Starbucks is the paid WiFi. What were they smoking? 30 dollars a month for WiFi, especially after I just lost an arm and a leg paying for cinnamon crapola latte? Get the f outta here!

I welcome their entry into the real world with “free” WiFi. Well done, guys.

Here is the full story.

Challenge to the Techmeme Blogosphere: One Day without a Twitter Post

Update: As expected, I FAILED. http://gigaom.com/2008/05/30/yet-another-drama-about-twitter/

This retarded crap has to STOP. It makes Silicon Valley and the people who cover it look like a bunch of little girls obsessing over Lauren Conrad. Or Hannah Montana. Or some other floozy, take your pick.

I like Twitter. I do. I use it all the time. But I swear I get ticked off when I can’t plow through a single frigging major tech news blog without some writer bitching about Twitter. Or praising Twitter. Or shedding tears everyt time the goddamn things goes down. Or comes up. Or stays alive for greater than 6.47 hours. Or talking about its business model, perceived and otherwise.

Bloggers, trust me. We’ve heard it all. We don’t care. Twitter doesn’t care. God doesn’t care. You look like idiots with your shameless self-serving pandering. Just because you don’t get charged printing costs is no reason to abuse the “Publish” button.

Just to get this out of way, the fact that I am doing a Twitter post myself is not lost on me. But I’m not a big name blog site, so I don’t count. So there.

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.

Greetings From London!

So my long overdue journey to the motherland is *finally* underway. I am sitting in London’s Heathrow airport, paying a pretty penny for the privilege of blogging for the three of you that read these words. Can you believe Internet access is charge at 5 pounds an hour?! And I thought Comcast was a bunch of slimy crooks!

Here are some fun things that have happened so far:

• I showed up at the gate at SF Airport to find an explosion of pink-blue-blonde highlights on the heads of a bunch of noisy college-age girls. Naturally, I assumed they were part of some lame-ass punk rock band showdown event in London. I struck up a conversation with one of them and discovered that they were part of a Sacramento hair school and were on their way to London for a week-long advanced hairstyling class. Some follow up questions that I don’t have answers to:
  • Obvi: When did hair technology become advanced enough that you had to fly to a different continent to learn about it? Why the hell do you need to go to London to style hair? Is there *anything* about hair that can’t be taught in the United States? And when did the UK surpass Los Angeles and Miami in fashionable hair?
  • Do you (the reader) have any idea what it is like to do a transatlantic jaunt with a bunch of crazed, airheady stylists? It was as if some of these girls had never been on a plane before. As soon as the goddamn thing took off, they were raising their hands and screaming as if they were at Six Flags. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed my ass off but it got old after awhile
• I had heard that Americans are far more prudish than Europeans and I generally assumed this to be a bad thing (again, obvi!). However, my opinion has changed after I saw three grown men - one of them well into the salt-and-pepper-hair whooping and hollering while thumbing through a Playboy. In the airport lounge. With little kids running around. Jeez, Eurotrash. Way to make a brown boy blush.
• This is sort of well-known, but Brits as a whole need to be taken to task for their blatant overuse of the word “brilliant”. Now, I’m all for hyperbole and embellishing the truth, but something about the word “brilliant” and the supreme lack of context just rankles me. A nice pint of beer does not make the frigging bartender brilliant. Same goes for the janitor who simply does his job by cleaning the urinals. Please stop treating this mundane shit like Sir Isaac Newton’s expositions on calculus, you fools.

Another word to the wise - Heathrow has officially turned into a steaming pile of shit. When I stepped off the plane and walked through four different lobbies, the flooring was uneven, carpet was ripped out in places, wires and pipes ran under a fully naked ceiling and the paint was starting to chip off. WTF? Add to this the fun banners tacked along the walls “We are working hard to build a new Heathrow” and I was truly amazed. Hell, I’ve seen podunk American airports that are run better than this dump.

Saumil’s Guide to CorporateSpeak: Circle Back

This is the second edition of Saumil’s guide to corporatespeak.

Today’s phrase is “circle back”. This is just a lame, soft, ridiculous way of saying, “In order to make sure that all you lazy bastards got the shit done that you were supposed to get done instead of playing ping pong, foosball, nerf wars or drinking Odwallas, let’s all sit in a stupid conference room tomorrow so I can make damn sure that you got shit done”.

In other words, you know how the annoying milkman keeps following up coz you’re too cheap to pay his 10 dollar bill? Well, he is circling back. Go figure.