Dr. Who isn't up on iplayer yet! Why not? No fair! We've already poured out the beer and everything!

Tags: rant, uninspired

Today was my last bat mitzvah for this academic year.

( mostly successful )

I hope I can find some more pupils for next year, otherwise I'm going to really miss the teaching!

Tags: jewish
Current Location: Synagogue hall, Stockholm, Sweden
Current Mood: exhausted
Now playing: The Weepies: All good things

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/292445430/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/dont-screw-your-partners-over-a-marketing-promotion/

Celebrities are starting to take notice of Seesmic, a “Twitter for video” service that lets people have asynchronous video conversations on the fly (see my disclosure, I am an investor).

First was Deepak Chopra, who made a whole series of videos for this site. And yesterday things got even more exciting, when Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett came on the site and had discussions with other users. Here’s one of the exchanges, between Jemima Kiss and Steven Spielberg.

So that’s all really great, and I’m happy as an investor. But Seesmic made some terrible judgment calls yesterday around this promotion that has resulted in us removing it from our sites (we installed Seesmic video comments on all TechCrunch Network blogs last month).

First, we didn’t know about the promotion until reading about it this morning along with every one else. All we knew is that our sites all simultaneously went down three times yesterday. After the first time we identified the likely problem as Seesmic and contacted the company. They assured us there was no way the plugin could take the site down. When it happened a second time we disabled the Seesmic plugin and the sites went back up. We identified the problem - the plugin was loading an external Javascript file, and when Seesmic’s servers were down, we just sat and waited for it for up to two minutes before timing out.

Seesmic said they’d patch the problem in the next version (which will pull the Javascript call into the footer instead of the header, so TechCrunch can mostly load even if they are down), and said they shouldn’t be going down again in the meantime. We re-enabled the plugin.

Then we went down a third time late last night, and we disabled the plugin for good (until the new version is available).

This morning we heard from Seesmic that the reason for the downtime yesterday was due to multiple server reboots around the Spielberg promotion.

What They Should Have Done

A simple email to us telling us that they would need to be rebooting their servers periodically over the day would have let us prepare for this and disable the plugin as it was happening. That way, Seesmic video comments would have disappeared from the site for periods of time, but TechCrunch would not have gone down. Of course, as Seesmic grows, having properly architected plugins and server redundancy will also help ensure that this problem doesn’t occur again.

I understand that young startups need a little wiggle room to get things right, and I don’t mind testing that raw software on TechCrunch. Even if that means we go down occasionally during their growing pains.

But never withhold information from your partners and tell them that you have no idea what is causing downtime when you know exactly what the problem is. As exciting as getting Steven Spielberg on your site to talk to your users is, it is not worth being dishonest to partners.

I understand that Seesmic may have been hesitant to tell us about the promotion because they wanted to keep it quiet. But all they had to do was tell us before the downtime that it was going to occur, and we would have been happy. And Seesmic would still be an active plugin on TechCrunch.

Some of you may wonder why I’m calling out a company that I’ve invested in so harshly. The reason: I’m calling them out because they deserve it, and the fact that I invested in them means I need to be careful before giving them any kind of break.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Sorry if I mangled your user name!

Hurrah for Christopher Benjamin! ( The Unicorn and the Wasp )

Tags: who

 

We went 5 hours between feeds last night for the first time ever, and that was after 4 and a half hours between feeds in the first part of the night. So, I'm counting last night as the first night we had only one feed over night (Feeds at 10:40, 3:00 and 8:00). I'm not necessarily expecting it to happen again, but it feels like progress, and progress is always good.

We dashed over to the pediatrician's yesterday because we were worried about his umbilical stump (it was oozing. Apparently it's just finally starting to think about falling off). We also discussed the 'fussiness' (as the pediatrican calls it. I call it screaming, but whatever). It seems (oh joy) that babies get increasingly fussy from 2 weeks up to about 6-8 weeks, and then get calmer again. The pediatrican (I love this guy) leaped into a synopsis of the lecture he heard this at where they showed graphs of babies tracked across a whole spectrum of races and cultures showing exactly this pattern - i.e. it's a human trait, not a "white baby in America" thing. But that means more crying to follow, me thinks. However, I'm hoping we'll get better at dealing with it and soothing him as the days go on.

However, coping is something I'm not really doing right now, at least, not consistently. After I started cutting myself seriously for the first time in 8 years Adrian has decided it's time for me to go talk to someone. Sadly I don't actually have the motivation to arrange it. (And personally, I consider cutting to be a coping technique. Other people take hot baths or read a book, I make myself bleed. Weird, and not exactly sane or balanced, but it works. It works very well). I can tell that I really am depressed right now, and not just having 'blue periods' because even when I'm cheerful and relaxed the cutting seems normal. I recall that I had stopped feeling that way. However, I'm finding it hard to be more bothered about this than considering it something of a nuisance. See my previous remark about yes, I really am depressed right now. And I know what that word means and when to use it, trust me.

So, most important news, WE AINT DED. In fact, I type this while comfortably ensconced in the beautiful Baltimore apartment of rahaeli and sarahq. And it really is an awesome apartment. It's a converted factory building (Baltimore does old industrial building conversion really really well - there's a steam-punk Barnes and Noble too) with incredibly high ceilings and loads of books.

( wot I did on my hols, part 1 )

Tags: holiday

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/292419779/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/how-to-structure-a-yahoo-google-search-deal-its-all-about-the-tail-and-the-torso/

Even as Carl Icahn rallies angry shareholders to try to force Yahoo back to the bargaining table with Microsoft, one of the “strategic alternatives” Yahoo may still be trying to work out in the background is a search advertising deal with Google. There is a 60 to 70 percent gap between what Google collects for search ads and what Yahoo collects, so simply handing over a portion of its search advertising inventory to Google would boost its cash flow and profits considerably—perhaps adding as much as $1 billion or more in cash flow.

But how could such a deal pass muster with antitrust authorities, who are already investigating the test run Google and Yahoo did last month with only 3 percent of Yahoo’s search ads?

It would all depend on how a deal is structured.

One line of thinking is that Yahoo and Google could get away with a deal that only hands over 10 to 20 percent of Yahoo’s search advertising inventory. This would need to be on a non-exclusive basis, meaning that if somebody else could come in and beat Google’s revenue-per-search-query Yahoo would be free to hand them the ad inventory instead. The assumption was that this would be the 10 to 20 percent of keywords that bring in the highest revenues for Yahoo. (We discussed this point in our interview with Citi analyst Mark Mahaney last month, for instance).

But there is another way Yahoo could get a lot more bang for its buck in a deal with Google. Instead of handing over the most valuable search terms, it would be better off handing over the ones with the biggest delta in profitability (the difference between what Google makes on those terms and what Yahoo makes). Yahoo does not have any trouble getting decent ad rates for the most desirable search terms. Call those the head keywords that bring in the most revenues. What it has trouble making money on are the keywords in the long tail and torso of its advertising inventory. And that’s exactly where Google excels at squeezing out relevant matches and clickthroughs.

If Yahoo can identify which basket of search terms represents the biggest profitability gap compared to what Google makes, it can maximize what part of its ad inventory to outsource to Google. These terms will likely turn out to be the ones that are currently the least valuable ones to Yahoo. Picking the 10 to 20 percent of keywords where the delta is the greatest between what Yahoo and Google are able to charge would effectively multiply the impact of the deal. After all, there is no point in handing over high-revenue search terms that Yahoo is already matching Google on in terms of profitability.

If the numbers work out and antitrust can be avoided, such a deal would certainly be a way to appease (or at least answer) Yahoo’s increasingly irate shareholders. But if Yahoo is serious about striking a deal with Google, it should do so before the proxy battle with Icahn comes to a head.

(Photo credit:Jack Versloot).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Oxfam is currently doing a drive to collect 9" knit or crochet squares. They are hoping to collect 250,000 by September. This represents the number of women who "did not survive pregnancy or childbirth to be able to care for her baby, because she couldn't access the medical care she needed." The full article, along with links that tell you where to mail the squares to, and some pattern links if you're feeling uncreative, is here.

This is a cause very close to my heart. I'm not saying I would have died outside the hospital, but I think it could have been a lot closer away from medical teams armed with IV fluids and oxygen masks (I was only under the mask for about half an hour I think, but they pumped 3 liters of fluids into me over the next 12 hours, along with various drugs). So medical care good. Medical care very good.

p.s. you might wanna be putting that blank behind a cut before kittydoom makes with the bahleetion

Poll asking the community's opinion of previous poster's default user icon. Voting options include adoration, indifference, fear and forcing PP to change user icon on threat of banishment from community.

Current Mood: devious
Now playing: American Routes on NPR