Toys for men

When I first tried Gillette's new Fusion blade, I loved it so much that I felt an urge to tell someone about it. And then I forgot :)

But when I saw this question on Yedda, I knew I have to answer it:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion

I'm considering changing from Mach3 to Fusion.

Has anyone tried it yet? Is it really better than Mach3 ?

Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3

Asked by ekuiro on February 12, 2007

View the entire discussion on Yedda

And here is my answer:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion

Well, having "upgraded" in the past from Gillette Sensor to the Sensor Excel, and then to the Mach 3, and being very happy with the Mach 3, I promised myself that this time I will not give in to Gillette's marketing blitz and will refrain from moving to the Fusion.

Surprisingly enough, I failed, and found myself grabbing it just before approaching the checkout at the drugstore. Oh well. A man gotta have his gadgets.

Having used it for a few days now though, I am glad I did this! The Fusion is actually very good. The blades are excellent and result in a smoother shave, the plastics around them feel much better, and the vibration thingie is significantly stronger then before.

The coolest thing though is the extra blade at the back, which lets you explore facial angles where no blade has been before :

Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3

Answered by Yaniv on February 13, 2007

View the entire discussion on Yedda

Technorati Tags: Yedda Gillette Fusion Gillette+Fusion

"28% of Net users tag" ?

David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (and one of my favorite RSS feeds) points on Joho the Blog to a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report, by Lee Rainie, and summarizes it with the title "28% of Net users tag".

Back when we started Yedda, the choice to go with free form tagging was a non-trivial one. Tagging was not yet mainstream, and the concept often met objections from early testers.

Still, we chose to go with free form tagging because we strongly believed that this is the only approach that can support the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of human interests & knowledge.

However, we quickly noticed that the word "tag" often resulted in a "huh?" blank stare, so one compromise that we did make is renaming it from "Tags" to "Topics" – surprisingly enough (or not), this choice had an immediate positive impact on people's acceptance of this approach.

"28% of Net users tag" sounds great. It sounds very mainstream, and it makes me feel good about our choice. But further reading reveals that the actual question that was asked is:

Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post

Well, categorization is very different from tagging. In fact, the word is often used to describe a process that, while having the same objective, is quite the opposite of free form tagging. (Well, in Wikipedia-speak, the term categorization applies to both activities. But you get my drift. I assume that the people who answered this question did not consult with Wikipedia first).

So, while the fact that %28 of Net users actually make the effort to add that meta-data to their content and to other people content (be it in the form of categories or of free-form tags) is great, I don't think it can be summarized with "28% of Net users tag".

It'd be interesting to see a similar report focusing on free form tagging. Pew?

Technorati Tags: Tagging David+Weinberger Yedda

Even more answers on Answers.com

User Generated Flame

Answers.com, the encyclodictionalmancapdia, announced on Monday a new partnership with Yahoo! Answers (also on Mashable).

(Disclosure: Yedda, where I work is a competitor to Yahoo! Answers)

This actually makes perfect sense to me… if done right, it would provide Answers.com with an effective method to keep their users happy even if they don't find what they're looking for right away.

The way YA is integrated into Yahoo! Search is a good example of providing searchers with an end to end scenario, converting a potentially-unhappy search user into a YA user, and eliminating one more reason for the user to leave the Yahoo Walled Garden.

This kind of scenario is not yet surfaced on the Answers.com integration, but the potential is there. In fact, without this scenario the value of the integration is somewhat limited given the questionable value of some of the Yahoo Answers content (e.g. "who here loves dogs like I do" ).

One thing that surprised me though – the Q&A on Answers.com is surfaced with absolutely no attribution to the people who created this content – the users on Yahoo Answers.

Hence, the users who asked the question, and - even more important - the users who have taken the time to answer this question - lose all credit and reputation related to the content they've created. Establishing your online reputation is one of the major reasons people share their knowledge on Q&A services like YA, QnA, Yedda, etc.

Though probably perfectly legal and covered by the YA terms of use, it still is a surprising move, coming from the same folks who've been so active in pushing Creative Commons forward by integrating it directly into their advanced search functionality and weaving it so nicely into Flickr.

Perhaps Brad Garlinghouse was right, and a cohesive vision – in this case, with regards to user generated content (oops!), crowdsourcing and users rights – need to be put in place over at YHQ.

But what if I'm offline?

Sitting in the Office 2.0 conference, after several days on the road, hopping from state to state, from one airport to the next one, from one flaky wireless connection to the next attempt to get connected, the following question posted to Yedda by one of the Office 2.0 attendees stroke a chord:

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you ...

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you don't have access to broadband (airplane, cottage, network goes down, etc)

Topics: web 2.0, office 2.0, office20con

Asked by jakerton on October 11, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

The same issue came up in the morning keynote interview, where Dan Farber interviewed Esther Dyson, who confessed she's posting to her blog mainly through email since she's so often traveling and offline and email works so much better in this scenario.

Karen Leavitt pointed out later, in the "Office 2.0, Where Are We" panel, that in the future, there'd be no offline or online, only choosing if I want to be offline or online. Most likely true, but I hate waiting.

We could put together different solutions for different applications - post to a blog through email, keep the Flickr Uploadr window open with new pictures, use an offline bookmarks manager that knows how to sync with delicious, etc. But this doesn't scale. It's not simple enough. It feels like a hack.

Creating a offline client client for each different applications would theoretically work, but is not very practical - it's expensive to build, and I feel that most of us are kinda tired of downloading (and trusting) so many different desktop clients.

Can we do it in a different way?

It'd be great if browsers would be smarter about offline vs. online, allowing the same bookmark to present an offline version when I'm not connected. So, the Yedda Ask page bookmark would still work when I'm offline, but would have reduced capabilities (for example, topics would not be automatically suggested), and would do something slightly different when the Post button is clicked.

It would be great to have the form posted data go into a "offline queue", and be posted to the online URL next time I go online.

But waiting for browsers to support new functionality is not a good idea, since at the current release rate, it means that we'll need to wait a year or two at best before we have this stuff up and running. And I hate waiting.

Can we hack this functionality today? Ideas anyone?

Technorati : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda
Del.icio.us : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda

More Yedda coverage

Following the TechCrunch post on Yedda on Aug 14th, we've been covered some great folks around the globe. I wanted to list here some of the Israeli bloggers who covered Yedda (in Hebrew):

• Ilana Tamir wrote a wonderful, thorough review on Yedda and its approach to knowledge sharing on Nana


• the.co.ils, who covered Yedda back in May, announced the public launch and pointed out very accurately the upcoming challenges


• "The Marker", one of the leading business magazines published an article on Yedda on August 16th


• my-paradox reported that she's addicted to Yedda! Should we start a support group?


• Tzafrir wrote a heart-warming review on his Yedda experience on Starter, plus some really interesting ideas...

And while at it, don't miss the older post from Ami Ben Basat on his blog, which also appeared as an article in the Globes (hmm, that would be the other leading business magazine in Israel :))

BTW, the $10,000 (play money) I invested in Yedda on Alexadex about a month ago are now worth $56,942 (hmm... play money too...). Now how cool is that.

And now, after all this wonderful excitement, back to the drawing (key)board - we have so much more work to do in order to make Yedda live up to all these expectations!

Technorati : Alexadex, Nana, Starter, TechCrunch, TheMarker, Tzafrir, my-paradox, thecoils, yedda

My profile on Yedda

Check it out:

My profile on Yedda

Questions I asked on Yedda

Questions I answered on Yedda

In case you're wondering, this one was just a test question! I am not sure I understand why it became so popular, but the truth is that she's not spending any time with me because she's so addicted to answering questions on Yedda. Go figure...

Technorati : me, yedda
Del.icio.us : me, yedda

It's been 128 days

Here is the sad truth from Technorati:

Yup... it's true. 128 days since my last post to this blog.

I do have good excuses though. I've been busy coding, designing, specing, supporting, promoting, and not sleeping enough.

Initially I thought it's just a busy week, no biggie, I will post next week. It's not like the world is holding its breath waiting for my posts. But then the busy week became a busy month, and another, and... 128 days.

Creating Yedda.com is exciting. There is so much to do, and every day brings new challenges, making me wish there was away around that 24 hours/day limitation. Only 24 hours a day... this is so Web 1.0, don't you think so?

It's good to be writing code again. I almost forgot how satisfying it is, to write-compile-run-upload - and see how it changes the way people interact with each other. There is magic about it.

In any case. This post is meant to break the silence. I'm back :)

Technorati : yedda
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It's been a long week

I got back yesterday from KinnerNet 2006, a long-weekend-long unconference camp organized by Yossi Vardi. Long days, short nights, lots and lots of fascinating people, and tons of intellectual stimulation. Some physical stimulation too, as I was trying to avoid being hit by a water gun, misguided missile or a hostile robot.

I attended so many fascinating discussions during this weekend, both during the sessions and one-on-one. Topics ranged from blogging to online advertising, business models, MMO, culture jamming, standards, SEO, digital photography, swarms, economics, robotics... cool.

The Marker's COM.VENTION conference started immediately following KinnerNet, with many of the KinnerNet participants attending this one as well. I attended only a small part of it (someone gotta code around here!), and was pleasantly surprised to hear that Yedda, the startup I'm involved in, was selected as one of the 10 most promising startups in Israel in 2006!

And now, that we've been selected as "promising", all we need to do is deliver the promise :)

Technorati : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda

Web 2.0, kicking even harder

The local Web 2.0 scene is heating up. Following the Gemini Internet event on January, the informal lunch with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington two weeks ago was another trigger in getting us Israeli web entrepreneurs talking to each other, and trying to form local "support groups". The lunch event was covered in a TechCrunch post (see also Valleywag's slightly different interpretation :), and later by the local Ilana Tamir on the Nana portal (Hebrew. I was interviewed for this one).

Another nice development is the introduction of the.co.ils (Hebrew), by Yaron Orenstein and Yemi Glick, both internet veterans. ("co.il" is Israeli commercial domain name, equivalent to .com). the.co.ils is an independent blog aiming to cover the local 'net-related initiatives - existing and new. It's young (3 days old...) and fresh and looking good!

Plus, Google is opening its first Middle East R&D center in Haifa, Israel. Yes, things are heating up.

By the way, "Valley" in Hebrew is emek, and "Silicon" is tzoran. This knowledge may be useful one day :)

Technorati : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0
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TechLunch

We had lunch yesterday with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and edgeio in Tel Aviv. It was great meeting the person behind TechCrunch, the blog that in the few months it exists has become one of the central discussion hubs for the recent wave of innovations.

Several other interesting folks were there too - Ouriel Ohayon who (in addition to his other activities) is running TechCrunch.fr, Netanel Jacobsson from Make-The-Illuminati-Seem-Like-Exhibitionists Maxthon, Frank Smadja from RawSugar and some additional folks, including Daniel Cohen from Gemini who stopped by.

Both Michael and Frank, who had early exposure to Yedda, had their fun teasing us about Yedda's public launch date. Yup, we had to push it forward a bit - we received so much important feedback on the user experience from the early testers, some of it we would like to incorporate into the build before the next round of testing, and some of it got pushed further down the road into later builds. We did feel somewhat better when Michael shared that he originally thought that edgeio would be out on October '05. I guess that while the Web's revision number was increased, some basic software developments truths still hold even in Web 2.0 :)

Technorati : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda
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Web 1.0 logos

Stabilo Boss (?) posted to Flickr an image incorporating the logos on most of the Web 2.0 companies out there (yes, Yedda is there too! with the old logo though, instead of the cool new one).

Complexify responded with a link to his collection of "Web 1.0" logos, straight out of '99.

A quick look at these two images was enough to reach a clear conclusion - at the very least, from a graphic design point of view, Web 2.0 is a lot nicer :)

Technorati : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0
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Yedda - People. Sharing. Knowledge.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted a short piece on Yedda yesterday.

And the reason I mention it is that I've spent the last few months hard at work on Yedda, the company I co-founded with Avichay Nissenbaum and the amazing Yedda team.

Yedda is about people sharing knowledge. It's going to be a great place for people to ask questions, and for people to provide answers. Note the emphasize on people :-)

At this point it's still Yedda.org, but as soon as those DNS servers around the world are done synchronizing their bits, Yedda.com should also be up and running. But, to tell the truth, Yedda is very much an .org thing… Go ahead, visit it, register for the beta if you're interested, or check out the Yedda team blog.

Can you tell I'm pretty excited? :-)

Technorati : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda
Del.icio.us : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda