A few days ago word got out that Warner Music will remove all of its content from Youtube. There is a WSJ article here . It's likely that Warner wanted more money from Youtube and tried to renegotiate. Youtube, in the meantime, got tired of losing money on the content, so it refused the new terms. Minor loss for Youtube. Big mistake for Warner.

Now, Warner Music is a pretty big deal. They have some of the most popular and mainstream labels in existance. Their videos were no doubt among the most popular on Youtube. They were making a lot of money from these videos (upwards of 100 million dollars). But it wasn't enough.

Instead of making money on this, Warner will go back to spending money fighting piracy. And haven't the past 8 years shown how effective the record industry is in fighting piracy?

The fact is that all of these videos will simply reappear on Youtube. No matter how aggressive Warner is in it's copyright claims, no matter how many people they hire to send notices, the videos will come back. Users will be pissed off that their favorite bands aren't on the site, and will upload the videos. People will have to scroll a little deeper in the search results to find them, but in the mean time, Google won't be paying any money to Warner for these illegal views.

Also, for many people, Youtube is the new MTV. It can be a very effective tool for the music industry. Not only mindshare, but Warner could have leveraged Youtube to sell more albums with intelligent linking.

Instead, it's competitors will continue to reap the benefits of Youtube. I wonder how long it will be until Warner realizes its mistake and puts the content back up.

If you find yourself in the situation where you're developing in Windows and using msysgit, and your repo has a conflict, merging can be a painful experience. The best thing you can do is to do it manually. There are plenty of nice tools for merging in windows, but none of them (at this point) seem to work with msysgit. Just read the documentation on merging, and do it by hand. This is explained nicely in the docs:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-merge.html

I upgraded the design of this site to a more professional elegant distinguished look. Now it's running a modified version of the wordpress theme unsleepable. It's odd using a wordpress theme for a non-wordpress site, but I don't mind, some wordpress themes are astounding, and the theme ecosystem around wordpress great.

The new site has a couple new 'features' - each post has tags, and I got rid of the Friendfeed widget. It's also running on the bleeding-edge pylons and couchdb.

If you're considering stealing a wordpress theme for a non-WP site, a quick word of advice: don't bother using the theme source (the php files) as a starting point, unless you want to reimplement the wordpress API. It's much easier to use the page source of an existing site as the starting point.

It was six weeks ago when my home page launched , and it only now appears in Google as the top search result for my name. It wasn't a gradual climb either - all of a sudden it jumped from result 15 to 1. Why the sudden jump? I have no idea -- the content wasn't updated recently, and Google's Webmaster tools didn’t say anything. It could be a number of small changes I made in the past weeks that were finally analyzed, or it could be some obscure temporal feature in Google’s ranking algorithm. Perhaps each time Google crawled the site, it had a little more content, and a better link structure. But honestly, I have no idea.

This might explain why SEO is such an anecdotal process. Without being able to immediately see the effects of your optimizations, it’s impossible to tell exactly how you came about your ranking. The best you can do is read the disparate advice about SEO and try some of the tactics. And then wait several weeks.

For people that depend on Google's organic traffic, this could be a dilemma. If a subtle change you made weeks ago cause a dramatic shift in your search ranking, how exactly do you pinpoint the issue?

Either way, being the first entry for my name has a couple of nice benefits:

• When people search for my name, they'll click on something I control.
• II'll be spending much less time worrying about SEO, and more time on the content

So you've been inspired by guys like Andrew Chen who move to SF on a whim, and now you're thinking about it yourself. SF is an exciting place to live, and the tech community is probably the best in the world. But for those who actually do it, I'd like to offer my sincere advice for the first step: finding housing can be a real pain in the ass. It's the hardest during the summer months, when the hiring machines inside companies are running full steam, and there's tons of immigration to California. This can be a real tough obstacle - so if you want to have an easier time moving, try the winter or spring.

If you are intent on moving in the summer be prepared to spend several weeks looking for a place. You might get get lucky and find it in a few days, or get unlucky and spend months looking. Having some kind of reliable short-term housing is critical.

The usual route is to use craigslist. In most cities, Craigslist usually takes a few days. But in SF during the summer, you're competing with hundreds of other people for apartments. Some of the more popular CL listings get hundreds of e-mails from prospective roommates. With numbers this high, you have a near-zero chance of being selected. It's especially bad if you're male. Landlords prefer females. Females prefer females. If you're a female, you're lucky. Otherwise, you have to suck it up and look harder.

The best thing you can do is avoid craigslist altogether. Contact your friends who are in the area. Use facebook or twitter status messages. Let people know you're coming and someone might have a room available. This should be your first step - it's not a time to be shy or passive.

If you do have to resort to Craigslist, you have to be persistent. From my experience, around 10-20% of the listings you e-mail will respond. If you can arrange a showing, you have a much better chance of getting a place. You should be able to find something after sending e-mail to ~50 listings. If you're picky, it might take over hundreds.

The first step is to create a spam message template. This is the message you'll be sending to every listing. It should be personal, well-written, and you should customize it a little for each post. The goal is to get as few people to ignore it. Tricks like including their name in the subject line help. There's technology that can make browsing listings easier, like custom Craigslist search RSS feeds, or mashups like HousingMaps . Keeping the e-mails organized helps a lot.

By far the most important thing is to be persistent. It's a huge schlep, but you'll get it eventually. Having been through this process, I understand the how painful it can be. Send me an e-mail and I'll try to help you out.

"Ben is struggling. Ben changes his usual routine and starts doing X. Fast forward a few years, and now Ben is successful."

Therefore, authors conclude, doing X will also make you successful.

That seems like a good formula self-help book. It reminds me a little of how medicine was performed up until the 20th century. People were given a treatment, and if it seemed to have a positive effect, it was given to everyone. But the problem was that lots of medicines were placebos. This changed thanks to better statistics and hypothesis testing.

I'd love to read a self-help book that does real hypothesis testing about their treatments, instead of presenting anecdotal evidence. It would be a great book no matter what.

We need more metrics in politics

"[Sarah Palin] already has more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined"

- Rudy Giuliani, RNC 2008

What does this mean? Does Giuliani actually believe it is true? In some sense it doesn't matter, because it resonated with Republican voters everywhere, and received thundering applause from the convention audience. It seems that people actually believe this, and don't bother to question it. But in reality it is a shallow statement, devoid of any real facts. And most political speeches, it seems, are full of these types of remarks.

The terms 'experience' and 'executive experience' have been thrown around since the beginning of the campaign season. Obama has been bashed, time and time again, for his lack of 'experience', and McCain's main platform is his many years in the Senate. Yet by Giuliani's metric, the mayor of Oswego, New York has more executive experience than Mccain, and all the legislative branches combined.

That's why we need metrics for certain things in Politics. But not everything can be measured. When Giuliani says crap like "Change is not a destination and hope is not a strategy", nothing in that statement can be counted. But things like experience, to some degree, is quanititive. It can be a simple weighted sum. Weights are different for certain levels of service, and multiply then by time in office. Time wouldn't be measured linearly, because the difference between 12 years and 18 years in the Senate, in my opinion, is negligable. The weights would increase for each level of office, and the population of the state or district would also play a large role (I'd wager any day that becoming a Senator in California is more difficult than becoming a Senator in Kansas).

A similar metric could be created for 'executive experience'. It would take into account time spent in an executive office. Maybe with metrics like these in place, it would be harder for politicians to spend their whole speeches talking about the lack of experience of candidates. The most they could do is cite the number. And they could save rhetoric for actual issues, which I think is more reasonable.

Another thing that I'd like to measure: is McCain really a maverick? How many times did he actually vote in opposition to his party? That would be fun to measure. Anyone know any good political databases?

At first sight, Atlassian's software lineup doesn't seem too remarkable. A bug-tracker, a wiki, and a few other developer tools. Most of this stuff isn't revolutionary, and they have some a-list blogger competitors . But when you dig a little deeper, it's one of the few 'enterprise' companies to successfully use ideas from web 2.0 and open source in their product.

If you use the Adobe bug-tracking and development forums for Flash/Flex product lines, you'll hardly notice that it's running Atlassian. But when you submit a bug to their tracker, you start to notice that the process is almost unique for a large company. Most of the time, within a couple hours of submitting a bug, an Adobe test manager will triage the report. If there's actually something wrong, they'll assign it to an engineer. A lot of the time, bugs are punted or deferred - but they are never ignored, and the submitter is directly involved with the engineering team. It's a similar process in the forums - when you post a question, chances are that it'll be answered by real Adobe engineers.

There's still lots of process involved, and probably even more behind the scenes, but I don't know of too many other companies that take the community into account. It probably makes Adobe engineers and testers feel more accountable for their bugs because everything is public. If you're not fixing the bug, bloggers can easily rant about it. The community can vote on the important issues. There's just lots more transparency.

Of course, this process isn't perfect, but it's much better than other large companies. Microsoft, for instance, still relies primarily on Usenet for collaboration with their customers (to their credit, they have also taken up blogging ).

Adobe seems to be one of the only companies to really embrace open-source methodologies for product development. Ant it seems to be working for them. Flex is being embraced by developers, partly because there's a lot more sense of involvement and transparency. Many of the features for Flex 4 (the next version) have already been implemented by the community -- holy crap!

Software like Atlassian is changing the game - it's giving companies many advantages of open source, and it's doing this in a simple way - just by making some of the development process open to the public.

I found a great video about SEO techniques from Tony Wright . It's not just about SEO, though, it's about all aspects of website marketing -- including advertising, viral mechanisms, and lots of other topics. SEO is a pretty tricky game, and I don't claim to be an expert by any means. Tony, on the other hand, seems to have a background doing this kind of stuff, so a lot of what he says comes from experience. One of the takeaways is that SEO is "a gift that keeps on giving" -- once you get great search placement, the incoming traffic is free. It's not rocket science, but it requires a certain mindset and awareness.

The reason I've been more interested in SEO lately because I've been having problems getting this domain to the top of the Google results. One problem I had was duplicate title and meta-description tags. These things are hardly an issue when you run software like Wordpress, which includes SEO out of the box.

After watching the video, I've been fixing up this site to be more search engine friendly. Mostly common sense stuff, like making sure that urls and titles contain keywords, and there are some quality outbound links. Small things. Eventually I might pull data from friendfeed or disqus server-side, and render it on each request.

In the mean time, check out the video:

I've always been impressed with writers who can blog every day, especially those who can consistently pump out quality posts. People like Scoble, and Techcrunch -- they're everywhere, which (at least partially) explains why they're so popular.

Some do try blogging every day, but it seems that their posts lose focus. I think Raymond chan is an example of this. His early posts provided a unique view into early Microsoft Culture. These days, while many of his posts are still technical, lots of his posts are about things he reads on the internet. It's not his fault -- but he's trying to maintain one post a day, and there's only so much about Windows you can say.

I've read somewhere that 'blog' is a term old media uses to describe any form of online media. I don't think Techcrunch or Gawker or fasttcompany.tv qualify as a blogs -- they each have several web sites, and some even employ a pretty large staff. At some point 'blog' will be dropped, and they'll just be media companies.

I can't imagine writing something good every day. If I was out in the field, I might be able to write summary posts about things I did. I actually tried that for a while about a year ago here, but quickly realized that it was only amounting to garbage. When your 'field' is sitting in front of a laptop coding, there really isn't much to write about. Sure you can post about code snippets, but it isn't something I want to do every day.

So my goal is to only publish things after editing them for at least three to four days. It's to write stuff that doesn't seem like garbage when I read it a few months down the line. Maybe one day I'll get the hang of it.

I was checking out some videos online when I came across Mike Arrington's talk from Startup School '08.

One of his main points was that entrepreneurs should have a blog or website. It's the best way to interact with the press and media, and it lets you respond to any type of product review -- positive or negative.

This actually gave me the initiative to create a blog. But after checking out the existing platforms (wordpress, typepad, blogger), I couldn't find anything that was worth the effort. They all seem broken in different ways, but the common one is lack of personalization: when I create a blog, it looks too generic. Of course, if you don't like the default look, you can try a better-looking template with more CSS hacks, but then making modifications is more painful. Struggling with a wordpress theme is not my idea of time well spent.

The theming engines in these platforms generally involve editing the server-side PHP/SQL/CSS code. Blogger is a little better about this, they actually have a theme XML language, but who really wants to learn the custom blogger schema? All this explains why there's a market for professional blog designers (search for that in Google). But customizing a blog should be as easy as editing a word document, or creating a mockup.

Many people, it seems, are happy with the default themes. They really only care about transcribing their thoughts, and any blog platform solves that. But like Arrington says, if your blog is the center-point of your interaction with the community, shouldn't you be able to add a greater level or personalization?

I think so, which is why I decided to roll own. Creating a blog from scratch is a great way to exercise your favorite language, web framework, database, whatever. You only add the features you want.

And it was remarkably easy, because most web frameworks are built for this type of project. Plus, adding Disqus and FriendFeed widgets help with all the heavy lifting. The only thing you need to is store and edit the content, which is pretty trivial.

So the next time you're trying to decide between Typepad or Wordpress, choose neither. Roll your own.