Tag Archives: New York Times

Full Disclosure

Let’s start with a Wikipedia definition.

Phrase: Full Disclosure

[In] Journalism, full disclosure refers to disclosing the interests of the writer which may bear on the subject being written about, for example, if the writer has worked with an interview subject in the past.

There is nothing that bothers me more than bloggers, journalists and writers who don’t do full disclosures. Even at VentureBeat, disclosures are inserted at the bottom of the article.

That’s why I was pretty excited to see Fred Wilson’s post: “Three Reasons to use Disqus”:


First, I’d like to be perfectly clear that our firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Disqus. So I am clearly biased about what I am about to say. Second, I’d like to point out that the reason we made the investment is largely based on my experience as a Disqus user for the past 10 months and the result it has had on my blog/community. Sometimes seeing is believing and it certainly was in this case.

So, with that disclosure out of the way, here are three reasons I think every blogger, certainly every serious blogger, should consider switching to Disqus.

What’s the point of a full disclosure if its at the end of the article/blog post? The reader will read an entire article not knowing that the writer has any reason NOT to be objective.

Then at the end of the article WHAM!

“This post was actually anything but objective, I have a million reasons to be biased about this, but the main reason is because I am an (investor, advisor, user, lover, etc.).”

I wrote an article for the Collegian on the MacBook Air and Steve Jobs’ Keynote. My editors had me ready to go hours before the announcement, hungrily awaiting the Chief Fanboy’s words. No sooner did the Macbook Air show up on the screen than I got a call from my editor telling me to track down some students and get some responses.

Why?

They were Mac fan(girls) of course.

I felt that the article should have led: “Full Disclosure: I wrote this article not because of the momentous announcement of the MacBook Air (because it wasn’t), but because my editors happen to love Apple — one of them got an iPhone for Christmas and can’t live without it.”

I’m sure I’ve written posts on here that don’t need Full Disclosures.

Why?

Because on a personal blog it’s EXPECTED to be unobjective. It’s inherently subjective to my personal thoughts, opinions, feelings, and sometimes irrational judgments voiced in text.

But for a media outlet, be it print, digital, or TV media, all biased writers should start out with the simple “Full Disclosure” at the beginning of an article where they are unduly biased.

If you love Facebook for example (I dunno, maybe your best friends work there), when you write an article about Facebook, you should write why you’re biased, so that readers know to enjoy your article with a grain of salt, knowing you’d defend Facebook to the death.

If you’re an investor, advisor, competitor, or have any reason to be unduly biased outside the bounds of a normal person, you should probably state that in the beginning. If not, don’t pretend to have objective reporting and writing.

I look at Techcrunch, and would never assume that any of the writing is objective. Most of the writers have very strong feelings about the material they’re covering. That’s fine because it’s the general attitude of the entire publication, but imagine reading an article in the NYT by an Obama supporter who is trashing Clinton, or a Clinton supporter who is writing about Rev. Wright controversy.

Shouldn’t they disclose to the readers that they’re in no way objective (not many are, after all) and that you should know they have strong opinions against John Doe candidate.

(Disclosure: This blog is written by a passionate writer, who is objective about very few subjects posted on here.)

Xobni pimped by the New York Times

(This is a post I originally wrote for IST Building)

It’s not every day a Penn State co-founded start-up is mentioned by Bill Gates. Now, that same company, Xobni (zob-nee) founded by PSU ‘03 Electrical Engineering (and Schreyers) alumnus Matt Brezina, whose email capabilities Gates called “the future of social networking”, is featured in one of the top publications in the United States — the New York Times.

Xobni is featured in today’s New York Times as the service finally opens up to public beta use. With 50,000 users and 140,000 more on the waiting list, it seems plausible that the fledgling company that just turned down Microsoft’s acquisition offer (this wasn’t as high profile as the Yahoo bid, of course) will see some significant traction.

This, a follow-up to fellow Y Combinator alumnus Weebly(self-described as web page creation that ‘doesn’t suck’), which was ranked in Time’s 50 best websites of 2007, and this may be the (good) writing on the wall, forecasting the future direction of Penn State start-ups.

So what is Xobni?

From a previous article:

Xobni’s goal is to not only revolutionize its users inboxes, but also organize personal information, Brezina said.

“Our goal is to organize information around relationships. We want to be the Google of personal information,” he said.

His company’s first product, Xobni Insight, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that extracts information from the emails stored in Outlook. With the information, Xobni’s toolbar automatically creates profiles of each email user, displaying a person’s relationship, attachments sent, a history of emails sent between the two parties, as well as a time graph showing at what time of day the most quantity of emails was sent.

While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. Brezina said it also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks.

Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends.

Venturebeat’s Editor-in-Chief (my boss) Matt Marshall gives a bit more insight on Xobni’s future plans:

Notably, Xobni is also working with third party developers to let them build applications with Xobni. By allowing third party integration for its APIs, Xobni becomes a trojan horse for those third parties to access Outlook integration through a plugin. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t offer a friendly set of APIs for people to plug into Outlook, and so Xobni hopes to become the place developers come to for such access. Salesforce is a good example. If you’re emailing someone, Xobni could show you — through an integration with Salesforce — how many sales calls you’ve made to the person, and how many dollars in computer sales you’ve made to them. Xobni will announce such partnerships over the coming weeks.

VP of engineering Gabor Cselle, such a geek (respectfully I say this) that he wrote his thesis on organizing email, has a much more technical analysis of the email nightmare Xobni seeks to solve:

Experts say that there are two types of email users: Cleaners and Keepers. Cleaners receive only a few emails a day, and they meticulously file each email into a specific folder. Keepers, on the other hand, receive copious amounts of email, and although they may start out with a good organizational system, it is quickly abandoned. We designed Xobni for the Keepers — the everyday people who need a product that will help navigate their flooded inbox.

The average Xobni user deals with a whopping 30,000 stored emails and communicate with some 1,900 people. For many, this means sifting through several hundred messages every day. It’s only going to get worse: the Radicati Group estimates that by 2009, people will spend up to 41% of their workday dealing with emails. We are experiencing bona fide email overload, and the challenge for us “power users” is to find a way to process and organize large volumes of information over a short period of time.

If you’ve read my blog, you’ve probably seen countless post after post hailing Xobni as King — but then again I’m biased. Matt graduated from State High, and I knew his sister years before I knew him or his email-revolutionizing company. That being said, he’s a pretty cool guy to know, regardless of whether or not he ever started Xobni.

Many PSU students don’t even use Outlook, but Xobni has plans to integrate not just with other webmail clients such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, but also services such as Facebook (which has a horrible UI to search/store messages), LinkedIn and Salesforce.

Liz Kisenwhether, Director of the Entrepreneurship Minor here at Penn State, has brought Matt in to speak with various classes and meet with students as part of the Spring 2008 Bishoff Entrepreneur in Residence program. Although I’m not sure when he’ll be back next (as a State College native I’m sure this will be quite frequently), I highly advise any students interested in technology start-ups to speak with Matt as he gives some pretty insightful feedback on everything from refining your vision, to investment pitching.

News like this would be probably pretty standard for a Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT alumnus (which coincidentally, is where Matt’s co-founder Adam Smith graduated from) — so this shows Penn State has a ton of work to become a major player in Technology start-ups, but this University is clearly on the right path. (Although I wonder how many more start-ups could come out of this place if they didn’t horde Intellectual Property like Gollum and the ring)

Congratulations to Matt and co. for the exciting news — it’s currently the 5th most popular technology post on the NYT (unfortunate if it is overshadowed by the Microsoft-Yahoo battle, which (temporarily) ended on Saturday) , certainly in part to the support they get from the Y Combinator community.

The Economist agrees: Lower the drinking age

An interesting post in the economist in regards to the US drinking age:

In the early 1980s more than half the states had drinking ages lower than 21. Some let the boozing start at 18; some allowed 19-year-olds to buy beer and wine. Spurred by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the Reagan administration in 1984 ordered states to raise their drinking age back to 21 or lose 10% of their federal highway funds. The states buckled under this fiscal blackmail but—surprise!—under-age drinking did not disappear. In some ways, the problem got worse.

Besides making criminals of millions of young people, the “21” law encourages the young to binge in secret. And one new and dangerous fad is for young folk to go to a bar on the eve of their 21st birthday and, after midnight, attempt to down 21 drinks before closing time.

This is what I said a month ago:

I believe that lowering the drinking age to 18 — or even 16 — would lower the artificial scarcity of being 21-years-old to purchase and or consume alcohol in the U.S.

And believe me you, it is certainly artificial scarcity.

STudents create fake I.D.s, sneak into bars, go to parties, go to cabins, and any way they can usurp the rules.

Of course, after having spent some time in the military, one can see how ridiculous the 21-year-old age limit to drink alcohol.

“Die for country but can’t even drink a beer legally.”

I mean, there really is no argument against that.

Of course, alcohol abused can endanger the lives of others, needlessly, recklessly, and most definitely foolishly; but will the lowering of the age increase DUIs or DWIs?

I always think to myself — what is the difference between a person with 20 years and 355 days and a person with 21 years and 0 days (in the US)?

Absolutely nothing.

And then there’s the fascinating article published in the New York Times:

He said that the most dangerous day of a young person’s life is the 21st birthday, when legality is celebrated all too fervently. Introducing wine as a part of a meal, he said, was a significant protection against bingeing behavior.

What is the evidence? In 1983, Dr. George E. Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, published “The Natural History of Alcoholism,” a landmark work that drew on a 40-year survey of hundreds of men in Boston and Cambridge.

Dr. Vaillant compared 136 men who were alcoholics with men who were not. Those who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table, but was consumed away from the home, apart from food, were seven times more likely to be alcoholics that those who came from families where wine was served with meals but drunkenness was not tolerated.

If you must no, I rarely, if ever, consume alcohol, and I’ve never been drunk.

I have no personal vested interest in lowering the drinking age (especially since it won’t be lowered before I turn 21) other than that it just makes sense.

Black I Am

If you haven’t seen what I wrote about being black, you should probably read it.

There’s also a great op-ed by K.A. Dilday, a guest contributor to the New York Times, who discusses the merits of being called black vs. African American.

(Are they just jacking my blog? Ha ha)

I’M black again. I was black in Mississippi in the 1970s but sometime in the 1980s I became African-American, with a brief pause at Afro-American. Someone, I think it was Jesse Jackson, in the days when he had that kind of clout, managed to convince America that I preferred being African-American. I don’t.

Now I live in Britain where I’m black again. Blacks in Britain come from all over, although many are from the former colonies. According to the last census, about half of the British people who identify as black say they are black Caribbean, about 40 percent consider themselves black African, and the rest just feel plain old black. Black Brits are further divided by ancestral country of origin, yet they are united under the term black British — often expanded to include British Asians from the Indian subcontinent.

The term African-American was contrived to give black Americans a sense of having a historical link to Africa, since one of slavery’s many unhappy legacies is that most black Americans don’t know particulars about their origins. Black Americans whose ancestors arrived after slavery and who can pinpoint their country of origin are excluded from the definition — which is why, early in his campaign, people said Barack Obama wasn’t really African-American. Yet, since he has one parent from the African continent and one from the American continent, he is explicitly African-American.

Distinguishing between American black people based on their ancestors’ arrival date ignores the continuum of experience that transcends borders and individual genealogies and unites black people all over the world. Yes, scientists have shown that black means nothing as a biological description, but it remains an important signal in social interaction. Everywhere I travel, from North Africa to Europe to Asia, dark-skinned people approach me and, usually gently but sometimes aggressively, establish a bond.

And I’m sure we will see a response from Yale that makes sense

NYT’s has a guest op-ed by Peru’s first Lady in which she takes Yale to task for playing a game of finder’s keepers. (My words not hers)

Besides the fact that one Mr. Howard Bingham was shady about “finding” the “lost city of the incas,” aka Machu Pichu, but even more ridiculous that Yale won’t give up the rights. (Bingham denied he had any help reaching Machu Pichu, instead attributing his find of a life time to “local rumor.” Ha ha, sure.

This too shall pass.

For our memories for now, but this incredulous example for a supposed “higher” institution of educational learner just shows how far an American-supermacist model can take you off the enlightened path.

I would say the good brethren at Yale are having some racial problems too, but since I have a few friends attending, I won’t comment.

Maybe President Bush, an alumnus can step in and give the Peruvians their artifacts back, but it’s highly unlikely from that skull & bone.

When Women Rule … Men Get Scared

Wow — if you care about breaking stereotypes, read this.

So my dad and I had a lengthy discussion about politics yesterday, and I was saying how it bothered me so greatly that people(mostly men) didn’t like Hillary Clinton “just because” — they essentially had no reason other than not liking a woman in power — and while they never came outright and said that, there was no other reasonable explanation for her supposedly rubbing them the wrong way.

I remember reading a quote from the black lady who ran for president in 72, saying how she faced more discrimination for being a woman than for being black.

Nick Kristof, today in the New York Times wrote: In particular, one lesson from this research is that promoting their own successes is a helpful strategy for ambitious men. But experiments have demonstrated that when women highlight their accomplishments, that’s a turn-off. And women seem even more offended by self-promoting females than men are … The broader conundrum is that for women, but not for men, there is a tradeoff in qualities associated with top leadership. A woman can be perceived as competent or as likable, but not both.

Again, we should be afraid of a society that is so strongly against having a woman in office (not because her name is Clinton) just because she’s female.

Although I agree with my dad, that Obama means hope for so many generations to come — black, white, latino, Indian, Chinese, whatever race, whatever gender, whatever nationality — it still greatly disturbs me in this country that we would allow our fear of women to throw this election.

Now I come from an African family where the male has final say (interesting side note that my mother supports Hillary Clinton– because she’s a woman) so I’m used to a patriarchal society. Now don’t get me wrong, my mom has say in family decisions, this is not King and the rest of us our subservient, but everything runs through the male.

So I can understand that many people may have grown up in similar homes where the authority of the male is unquestionable, or even if there is a balance of power, the mother is restricted to menial house managing duties — cleaning, cooking, raising kids, picking up kids, etc. (The stereoytpical soccer mom)

But it bugs me to no end — in fact, I’d almost rather see Hillary Clinton be president just to make all men bow their heads and lose some of that huge ego we all carry.

Clothing and appearance generally matter more for women than for men, research shows. Surprisingly, several studies have found that it’s actually a disadvantage for a woman to be physically attractive when applying for a managerial job. Beautiful applicants received lower ratings, apparently because they were subconsciously pegged as stereotypically female and therefore unsuited for a job as a boss.

How many times have you heard the “dumb blond” stereotypical jokes, whether they emanate from middle - school adolescents, or from their fathers, the jokes certainly exist.

And when you look at an ad like godaddy, or a music video (even when the feature is the female singer her self — like in the case of Christina Aguilera) you have to ask yourself: is this all women are worth?

If you’ve read my blogs on xanga, or even on Facebook, you’ve seen me write about the value of a woman — and in fact, I’ll post one of my old writings tomorrow.

I’ve jokingly made derogatory remarks about a woman’s potential — so I’m calling myself out too on this issue — but it is inexcusable, unjust, and even perfidious if we as a nation reject the rule of a woman simply because she’s female.

I suspect this is the real reason why 47% of the country does not want her to see President.

This is still, sadly, mostly about image.

White man, white woman, and a black man are in the race. And while I’ve spoken extensively about racism, and my own experiences with it in this town, nothing would hurt more than to see a woman knocked out and not given a fair chance by millions of men and women in America because they don’t like to see this powerful woman. It just tells me that people, racist or not, would rather be ruled by a man — be he non-white — than they would by a woman.

And don’t tell me it’s because she’s uncharismatic because I know plenty of men who HATE Oprah and would never, ever, in a million years even consider voting for her, even though she’s as charismatic as they come.

Think about it all you Obama/McCain lovers — whats the deeper issue behind this Hillary-hating?

Only when we as a nation can ask the difficult questions will we ever break out of our naive mindset — and I don’t think we’ll see that anytime soon.

There is no excuse for denying a woman the chance for leadership, there is no reason for this misogyny, and ultimately the question all Americans, male or female should ask themselves is:

‘Would I want my daughter to be treated this same way?”