the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Hmm, look who stopped by today:
nat120.classmates.com – – [07/Dec/2007:14:21:46 -0800] “GET /wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/12/06/froth/ HTTP/1.1” 200 9596 “http://paulbeard.org/wordpress/index.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11” Not that I mind, of course, but RSS works just as well.
Hmm, look who stopped by today:
nat120.classmates.com - - [07/Dec/2007:14:21:46 -0800] "GET /wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/12/06/froth/ HTTP/1.1" 200 9596 "http://paulbeard.org/wordpress/index.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11"
Not that I mind, of course, but RSS works just as well.
when you get invited to the annual Lenin Lighting event .
Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include [atheists and freethinkers]? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists.
Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include [atheists and freethinkers]? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.
My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. [From Peggy Noonan Admits GOP Is Controlled By Fundies, “Idiots”]
“I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”
…”The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”
In a nutshell, these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this:
- “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”
- “I get to determine what my own powers are.”
- “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”
[From Emptywheel – >> Whitehouse Reveals Smoking Gun of White House Claiming Not to Be Bound by Any Law ]
Can you say impeachment? Read the whole speech. It flows with the passion of a sermon, but grounded in a purely human context.
On a thread about another instance of ” blame the victims ” (why weren’t those folks at the mall in Omaha carrying guns to defend themselves?), this ad appeared.
On a thread about another instance of “blame the victims” (why weren’t those folks at the mall in Omaha carrying guns to defend themselves?), this ad appeared.
If I was to take on this idea , and it started to look like it wasn’t going to cover costs, sponsorships or well-targeted ads (you would know a lot about your audience in a situation like this and could probably arrange some useful stuff for your members) would probably work. 2.7 million times the $20 I tossed out as an idea is a little over $5 million, but if all you’re paying for is rack space, bandwidth, and a skeleton crew of staff (some machine-minding expertise, unless you get a good co-lo plan), some software expertise (would you need a staff person or could you just contract with someone to build and enhance as you went along?), and a customer-facing staff.
I may have to make a classmates.com category.
The mild contretemps with someone at Classmates.com got me to thinking about it a bit more. It seems that they were planning to take it public at some point:
NEW YORK (AFP) – The pioneering online social networking firm that operates Classmates.com has sought approval from US regulators to launch an initial public offering (IPO) of stock valued from 120 to 144 million dollars. [From Classmates.com plans US stock market debut – Yahoo! News]
That was back in August: seems like if it was going to happen, it would have by now. This fellow says the parent company hopes to raise $120 million from the sale for market cap of around $700 million. Ah, a link there points to the IPO pricing to take place next week. We’ll see.
It all sounds a little bubblicious. 50 million members seems like a lot. But as noted here free registrations don’t translate into revenue. And when you read stuff like this (sorry, it’s hard to make out, but it’s yet another member who found out that the chief privilege of membership is to shell out money) and the links there, you’d be hard-pressed to find a less appealing investment opportunity.
According to this, they have 2.7 million paid members out of those 50 million (5.4%) and lost $250,000 on revenue of $42.4 million for the quarter 3/30/07. They showed a small profit on $152MM in 2006 but their filing admits to low conversion numbers. Not sure how it cost $150MM to host some content that is either scraped from directories or user-contributed.
Check out how many classmates.com-related search queries I see in a day:
Deleting your Facebook is the new Facebook. [From A yet-to-be-released Facebook magazine/book hybrid “will be bought by Facebook…
Deleting your Facebook is the new Facebook. [From A yet-to-be-released Facebook magazine/book hybrid “will be bought by Facebook…]
[via HOLY CRAP (AND I MEAN THAT IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE)…
…Will all free-thinkers, atheists, and non-conformists please form an orderly line at your nearest border crossing or airport?
From Willard Romney’s speech on religion in American political life:
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. [via HOLY CRAP (AND I MEAN THAT IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE)…]
Will all free-thinkers, atheists, and non-conformists please form an orderly line at your nearest border crossing or airport? Thanks.
