Category: General

What happens when you get popular on YouTube?  People try to jack your content. 

I guess one of the things that comes out of this is the failure of YouTube to have any real lock on the content.  They don’t really do any real “streaming” — the actual flash video files are downloadable (and thus you get things like TubeSock)

If you have a secure streaming player (content is streamed using a password protected protocol), it’s a harder infrastructure to build, but it prevents things like this from happening, and it makes content rights holders happier.

So, I swapped out 1/2 cup of sugar for 1/2 cup flour and added 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder.  The stuff fermented like crazy, so i had to put it in the fridge overnight.   Overall, though, it produced a good product.  I’d make some changes, though.

i’d use more sugar.  i’d also cook at a lower temp, as the bottom burned.  i’d also use more cocoa.

I’ve recently been doing some bread making.  It’s interesting.  I tried a “no knead” recipe which ferments the dough for 18 hours or so, and it worked great.  I also just tried a “no knead” (or little knead) loaf recipe that worked out well, too.

I’m now trying to make the original no knead recipe, but tweaked some.  It’s interesting from a science perspective, because I know what I’m doing will change things.  I dont know how much.  In other words, I know enough to be dangerous.

The original no knead recipe is: 3 cups flour, 1 5/8 cups water, 1/4 tsp yeast, and some salt.  mix, ferment for 18 hours, flatten dough, fold it on itself, rise for 2 hours, then you flip it into a preheated cast iron dutch oven and bake for 45 mins (30 mins with cover, 15 without)

anyway, i’m testing out what happens if i replace some of the flour with sugar, and add cocoa powder.  i’m also trying out swapping flour for milled flax seed.

I know that if you ferment too fast, you’ll get big bubbles.  that’s exacerbated by using sugar, which is gonna give the yeast more kick.  one solution is to put the dough in the fridge while it extended-ferments.  alton brown does this for his pizza crust.  i think it’s interesting, but i think it will end me up with really dense dough.  that might be a good thing, though.  we shall see.  i really should stick to my guns and have a more scientific approach, rather than correcting mid-stream.

however, knowing a little makes me look at something and say, “hey, it’s not going right, let me try to correct it”  that’s the right approach, if you’re trying to get a good result. however, it’s not the right approach if you’re trying to get a repeatable process.

ultimately, i’d like to be able to make a simple bread that’s got some sweetness and some chocolate and/or cherries mixed in.  i’m trying to go for what’s been sold by a local bakery here as “bon bon bread”

technorati tags:bon+bon+bread, bread+making

So, umm, GWAR covers Alice Cooper

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After listening to either an episode of This Week in Tech or Diggnation (not sure, probably both) where Kevin Rose talked about people trying to “game the system” by spamming diggs, I was curious about the motivation behind people trying to do that.  What’s it worth to them?

So, I researched the Digg Effect, and came across lots of articles, but two really good ones stood out.  First, Digg vs. Slashdot (or, traffic vs. influence) on kottke.org and second, The Digg Effect on hrmpf.com.

I wanted to know how much traffic we’re talking about and how much revenue someone could expect to get from making the digg homepage.  Both articles come up with the same conclusion: digg sends traffic, but it doesn’t really gain you readers.  The latter article even says how much he made from being dugg.

So, if being dugg doesn’t gain you long term readers, then the monetization can only be from the initial pop.

The “The Digg Effect” article was in reference to an article that was dugg titled, “Apple invents 1984’s telescreens, 22 years too late- Oh, the irony!” — The digg link is bad, but I found the original article here. It’s from January.  The author later states that he made about $10 dollars from being dugg.  I took a look at digg’s alexa graph, and since January, they’ve roughly doubled their traffic.

So, I say, being dugg is worth $20 dollars.  Do you hear that Kevin?  If you were unscrupulous, you’d mix ads in with the stories, but I don’t think you are, so I’m not worried about that.

Anyway, the initial articles both said that the digg effect was very short term.  The kottke.org article talks about how slashdot traffic created a more sustained readership for him.  The hrmpf.com article, well, I’m not sure if that was ever slashdotted, so take this with a grain of salt — I checked alexa’s daily pageviews for hrmpf.com, and noticed something.  Before he was dugg, he was pretty much at baseline.  After that, his traffic drops off to a small fraction of the digg-effect traffic, but it stays above baseline.

What I’m saying is, maybe he didn’t get 15,000 new readers, but quite possibly, he gained some, and that’s worth infinely more than actually being dugg.

If being dugg is worth $20 directly, well, there’s not much motivation to being dugg.  If being dugg gets you a large number of incoming links and an increased readership, well, you’ve got the makings for some recurring revenue directly from your readers and an increased pagerank for more search traffic, both of which, over time, could be worth much more than $20 bucks.

I view making the homepage of digg as, well, nothing earth shattering, but definitely something that can help a small blog build a readership for the long term.

technorati tags:digg+effect, kevin+rose+digg, digg+homepage

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