Seattle Post-Times

My friend helped find Wired's vanished writer

My friend Jeff Reifman, a Web developer and activist freelance journalist, has been busy. His crusade calling attention to Microsoft's Washington state tax dodge has gained some traction, leading to an interview on public KUOW-FM [25 MB MP3] in Seattle.

Jeff's also featured in the new issue of Wired — though not for getting Bill Gates and company to pay their taxes. Jeff is a key figure in the fascinating tale of how Wired readers tracked down writer Evan Ratliff, who in August decided to see if he could vanish from the grid. It's a fun read. Ratliff sets it up:

The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?

Enter Jeff:

On August 24, a former Microsoft group program manager in Seattle named Jeff Reifman read about the hunt in Wired. Reifman, self-employed these days, had recently launched a series of grant-funded Facebook applications to study the engagement of young people with the news. From a technical standpoint, the contest seemed intriguing.

On August 27, working on a desktop in his living room, he created Vanish Team, a Facebook app dedicated to information and discussion about Ratliff. He announced it on Twitter, and people began clicking over to check it out.

Gen Y doesn't use e-mail, except when it does

Image via Wikipedia

At the after-party of GonzoCamp last Friday, I was talking to a 32-year-old Drupal developer about that content-management platform and where it is headed, and for some reason we got talking about e-mail. I think I was saying that an effective news outlet needed to have easy and flexible e-mail tools — that, even in the Twitter age, e-mailed newsletters and alerts drive a lot of traffic to news Web sites. I get alerted to a lot of news that way — it's intrusive in a good way, ensuring I don't miss stories I don't want to miss.

This guy had seemed to know what he was talking about, so I was a little startled when he said, "Nobody uses e-mail anymore." He clarified that by saying that nobody his age or younger (Generation Y) uses e-mail much, and especially not to get news. Twitter is where most people his age find out about things that are happening. E-mail, he said, is dead. "It's an old lady in the hospital on life support."

Parched, then soaked

This morning I woke up to this ...

... so I went to have a look at this ...

 

It's November in Seattle, but still. This month's precip at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport through Nov. 12 is 3.27 inches. The normal for November over those same 12 days is 2.17 inches.

This unusually wet month has now made the calendar year total wetter than normal. So after running a precipitation deficit through most of the calendar year, we're now wetter than usual. Weird.

Dear applicant: We might be idiots

Image via CrunchBase

I've hooked up with a Seattle programmer named John DeRosa, and we're in the early stages of developing a Web product. We aren't sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but we think the concept is strong and we decided to apply for a start-up incubator-like program in Mountain View, Calif., called Y Combinator.

This was a total long shot. They get more than 1,000 applications twice a year, choosing 50 or so fledgling projects for three months of guidance in launching a business. Most of their applicants are hackers young enough to be our children, some of them still in school. I think our idea has huge potential, but it is somewhat unlike what Y Combinator has backed in the past, so we were a little out of place from the start. The application process was not difficult, however, so we thought what the hell.

Well, we didn't make the cut, but the rejection was more than thoughtful — it was downright insecure!

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

Having been in a position myself to deliver bad news via mass e-mailing, I was curious to know how well I've handled similar rejection messages. Thanks to the fact I have an archive of all my personal and professional e-mail dating back to 2002, I was able to find out.

Content factory: race to the bottom

Image by marissaorton via Flickr

Wired has a fascinating look at a growing business — the outsourcing of content creation. That's a fancy phrase for a system of buying stuff from freelance writers, you might think. But what we're really talking about here is nothing like the freelance-writing profession on which national magazines have long relied.

No, we're talking about a lean, mean text machine. We're talking about Demand Media, whose Demand Studios doles out freelance assignments to thousands of writers everywhere — really poor-paying freelance assignments.

In "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," Daniel Roth walks us through a 21st century process by which high-priced search terms define the assignment and creation of content — and whose few human intervenors are paid inversely. This system requires limited human involvement:

How I surf the Web

I now use several browsers to surf the Web on my MacBook Pro:

• Apple's Safari is my default browser. It's the browser that is launched by links in e-mail, and it's what I use for general surfing of news, shopping, and other stuff. For me, Safari is faster than other free browsers, although it is often the last to be supported, or is unsupported, by third-party plug-ins. I also like the fact I can effortlessly sync my Safari bookmarks via MobileMe with my iPhone, on which Safari is my only browser option.