brummies are funniest

My proud brummy hubby pointed out this one from BBC News: researchers, commissioned by Paramount Comedy Channel, asked 4,000 people to listen to the same joke in 11 UK regional accents to discover which they found most amusing. (yes dear. jasper carrott IS the best.)

But then it went on. Apparently, the funniest accents belong to people - Brummies (Birmingham), Scousers (Liverpool) and Geordies (Newcastle) - who were deemed the least intelligent. (chuckle)

And did you know that the BBC accent (the Queen's English) is refered to as the Recevied Pronounciation? It was considered the least funny of all UK accents in the study. (tee hee)

I suppose it's quite American of me to be taken aback at how seriously Brits take their humor. Or that the funnier you are, the less intelligent you are perceived to be (?) Take a look at the list - fancy a flutter on what this says about class and society hanging on in modern day Britain?

eBay: The OS for E-Commerce?

"I want to bring our infrastructure stack to the entire developer community such that they are no longer limited by having to buy and run their own infrastructure."

Eric Billingley, Senior Director of eBay Research Labs, recently sat down with the Wade Roush of the MIT Technology Review to discuss R&D at eBay and a plug-in architecture for third party developers.

Read the Technology Review article.

"put the record on eBay"

thanks to Ryan, i found out about this ten-second clip from Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, talking about eBay.


Can't you see Turtle driving up with Vince, Drama, and E on Hollywood Boulevard playing this song?

self-governance and the social web

"strive to control what you must, rather than what you can".

people are basically good. but, as Nick Carr points out, until all people are good, self-governing online communities will continue to require assistance with enforcement of consequences for harmful behavior. this is regardless of self-policing mechanisms you put in place (feedback, rankings, algorithms, report this as inappropriate, etc.)

the world is getting trending flatter, while the web remains decidedly unflat. But I disagree with those that say the social web is made up of companies working to perpetuate an illusion of self-governance. I consider it realpolitik for the Internet - interfering when you must, not when you can.

a "woman blogger"?

"The compiler doesn't care if the person who forgot the curly brace is wearing a black lace bra."

i've never wanted to stand up and applaud after reading a blog post before.

it is now my mission to meet Kathy Sierra.

Lin

lin and celeste

linda dyer passed away last week. lin and i worked together at two companies. she was the event chat queen. we were sharing an office when she learned she had breast cancer.

the last time I saw lin was in 2001, after she had finished her first round of chemo, before her second and then her third. i saw her waiting on the corner of 18th and Dolores for a light to change, and gave her a lift home. "cancer makes me cranky sometimes," she shared.

we lost touch. i would occasionally hear word about her through fundraisers, or about her poetry or her november birthday. jeffrey and carole stayed in contact, and lin would sometimes watch celeste. here she is, about 2 weeks before she died. cuddling with c in her hospice bed. (thanks for posting, j)

the importance of shipping in online commerce

Shipping is a BIG DEAL to online buyers and sellers. After the supply & demand for an item has been made efficient (marketplace), and after payment friction has been removed (checkout), getting goods from sellers to buyers quickly and inexpensively increases in importance.

I thought this was a great New York Times piece highlighting the perspective of the US Postal Service, and how business models can adapt over time to turn a competitive threat into an advantage. Rather than going the way of the telegram, snail mail is booming.

My two favorite quotes:

1) “Six years ago, people were pointing at the Internet as the doom and gloom of the Postal Service, and in essence what we’ve found is the Internet has ended up being the channel that drives business for us,” said James Cochrane, manager of package services at the Postal Service.

Hot thought: Sure email, evites and online greeting cards have taken a bite out of USPS revenue, but the Internet has been a boon to USPS package delivery, thanks to online commerce.


2) Mr. Henderson (former postmaster general and current COO of Netflix) is “the only guy on the planet who looks at our volume of mail (1.4 million movies shipped every day) and thinks of it as quite small,” said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif. “It’s a trickle of mail to him, where to anyone else it’s a torrent.”

Hot thought: With shipping is so core to online commerce companies, who better than the postmaster general to give an operation needed perspective, efficiencies and innovative thinking. Now that's thinking outside of the shoebox...