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Decaffeinated Water, Please

It turns out that the presence of caffeine in water systems is now used as an indicator of a leak in waste water treatment systems, since they remove 99% of the caffeine that we cycle through.

Charles Isherwood

[from The New York Times, 30 November 2007]

At the theater, after all, we can feel most powerfully a sense of communion in life's solitude. It is the place to go to feel alone together.

Internet Evolution's “Wisdom of Clouds”

Stephen Saunders is linkbaiting. He has debuted a pretty ho-hum interface called "Wisdom of Clouds", riffing on the Surowiecki book, The Wisdom Of Crowds. But then, he just goes stupid:

[from Internet Evolution unveils “Wisdom of the Clouds” interface | 901am]

We’re calling our new interface ‘The Wisdom of Clouds’ as an ironic homage to James Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds,’ which we happen to think is complete nonsense. And we’re referring to it as a ‘Web 3.0′ interface because we know it will really annoy all the alleged experts who talk pretentious twaddle about the Internet and its various iterations.

Man. I am glad I stopped writing there. I buy into the 'twaddle' about the wisdom of crowds, and I am an alleged expert, too. I am not angry about the Web 3.0 meme, because much better efforts have been mounted to make sense of that term.

The interface is pretty lame. Why not use a memetracker? That could be cool.

links for 2007-11-30

• The Twitter Toolset: 50+ Guides, Hacks, and Scripts
  Christina Laun attempts to pull together a mazillion Twitter resources, and still manages to leave out Snitter and Tweetr.
  (tags: twitter christina+laun)
• Anne Truitt Zelenka » On Covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM
  Anne is a real person, no matter what Fred Wilson says.
  (tags: anne+zelenka fre)
• Competing for the creative class « Jon Udell
  "Is it elitist to focus on the needs of the creative class? I don’t think so. Every citizen cares about housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement. If cities do better in those areas in order to attract the creative class, everybody win
  (tags: jonudell)
• Failure Rates In Early Stage Venture Deals | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
  Fred Wilson runs the numbers on his own deals: surprise! He's smarter than the average VC.
  (tags: fred+wilson union+square+ventures vc)

Yelp: Leading The Way In The New Rudeness

I find this new model of having parties reprehensible. I guess it works like this: you invite 200 people expecting 150 to say yes. If 200 say, "Cool," you send emails out to 50 of them saying sorry: the party was oversubscribed. Maybe better luck next year.

Newest example is the Yelp SF party:

SF Party to undisclosed-recipients, date Nov 29, 2007 7:57 PM subject Update on Yelp Holiday Party mailed-by yelp.com hide details 7:57 PM (55 minutes ago) Reply Hi there,

Thanks for RSVPing for the Yelp Holiday Party and we apologize for the delay in getting back to you.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached capacity and therefore cannot add you to the final guest list. As you can imagine, we would have loved to have accommodated everyone that took the time to RSVP, but unfortunately due to space limitations and an overwhelming response, we filled up very quickly.

That said, we hope to see you in 2008, of course on Yelp, but perhaps even as a future member of our Yelp Elite Squad for whom we’ll have plenty of exclusive and more intimate events over the new year.

Happy Holidays,

Jessica T. and the rest of the Yelp team.

Aw! Blow me. Don't "invite me" if it's not really an invite, dickheads.