Life

Jason Kottke writes on: My business influences

As you may have noticed by reading the site in the past year, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about companies…how they succeed, why they fail, how to approach them from a holistic sense so they make sense on a human scale and not just from a business perspective, that sort of thing. In deciding to start my own little company of one, here are a few things I’ve run across that have influenced how I’m approaching it.

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I don’t have many heroes, but Craig Newmark is definitely one of them. He’s had offers to sell craigslist for millions of dollars, many offers from VCs, he could charge for all listings on the site, or he could fill the site with advertising, but this is what he wants out of craigslist (via Wired): “get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world”. The many articles I’ve read about Craig have really reinforced for me that you need to let your values drive business decisions and not the other way around.

I’ve mentioned this a few times on the site before, but Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, has the one of the best quotes about business I’ve ever read on their about page. It’s an excerpt from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

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Dave Eggers gets a lot of crap, but I like the way he’s trying to run McSweeney’s:

But the way that McSweeney’s is run is, “Can there be a way that what they call mid-list authors, people who don’t sell in the Danielle Steel category, can still have an audience and still make a living?” McSweeney’s has very little overhead, to the degree that we can sell 6,000 copies of somebody’s book, and he can still get a decent amount of money, because he’s getting more per book because of the low overhead. That’s still our goal. I was just sort of going along with the same business model, like, “If we sell 50,000 copies, then everyone will do fine, and life will stay quiet.”

Not trying to take over the world, just doing something in balance with the lives of everyone concerned.

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There are lots more people other there doing wonderful things with their business lives (37signals, the independent Mac developers like Ranchero, Delicious Monster, and Panic, etc.) but that’s enough for now.

Buzz Marketing with Blogs discusses Google’s AdSense programme. Am surprised at this: 

I was all set to tell you about Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York who just publicly posted his exact Google AdSense revenue figures for the year.  He made $500, he says, and he’s got charts to back it up!

This is notable not because for the grand total, but rather because Google’s AdSense Terms of Service prohibit any discussion of click through rates or payments—a stance that has long aggravated many naturally chatty bloggers.

How the hell did he manage to make that much? I have some AdSense adverts over at Palimpsest and have so far managed to make about 20p.

I used to work in the same building as Tony Finch who has a blog on LiveJournal here, though we never met. He is remarkable, I am sure, for many things, but the one tat stands out is his email address, dot@dotat.at.

From The Guardian:

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual – no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands – but they regularly indulge in “attempted rape flights” when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. “Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards,” explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. “I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

“Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his ‘mate’: when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note ‘raeb-raeb’ calls (the ‘conversation-call’ of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling ‘raeb-raeb’ and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer).”

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. “When one died the other one just went for it and didn’t get any negative feedback – well, didn’t get any feedback,” he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest – especially in Britain for some reason – but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Not much happened over the weekend, spent a lot of time helping out with the Elmcroft Associates website.

Other than that, didn’t get near the computer at the weekend. Plenty of stuff to catch up on…