Ross Mayfield's Weblog

March Happiness

Normally the practice of exclusive broadcasting rights for March Madness is enough to drive you to drink.  At a local sports bar, that is.  This time, in the year of internet video, CBS is doing what the NBC Olympics should have done -- offer all games over the net.  During the game they even set up Game Logs, or glogs, for an amateurish play-by-play.

Sports is tribal, the natives grow restless and this is one token of appeasement. Even though, laughably,  Employers will lose $237 million in wages for every 13.5 minutes workers spend on the Internet tracking games, according to an estimate by outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

And if you haven't heard about Victoria yet:

Security morals? First, this is the cleverest social engineering attack I've read about in a long time. Second, authentication is hard in little text windows -- but it's no less important. (Although even if this were a real co-ed recruited for the ruse, authentication wouldn't have helped.) And third, you can hoodwink college basketball players if you get them thinking with their hormones.

BTW, UCLA advanced.

Social Valley

I only got to pop in and out of TagCamp twice this weekend.  But it's been great following the notes on the wiki.  Ingy and Casey West did a Kwiki microformat plugin for hCard, a simple way to generate a ContactList wiki style with Ajax goodness.  Go play with it.

Someone told me I should blog about how happenings made the Valley social again, at least in code.  Funny how we used to stay at work too long to be with our families, and now we have ad hoc events instead.  The smart ones at least encourage kids to participate.  Lately I've been thinking about holding KidCamp.  That's right, camp, for kids, a novel idea.

As an aside, yesterday was sports day.  Got to coach my daughter's soccer game and stopped by TagCamp with her for a bit.  Walked over to the UCLA-Stanford football game witness one of greatest comebacks ever. When Stanford led 24-3 with 7:03 remaining, I left a game early for the first time I can remember to drownd sorrows.  From a tailgate (I didn't hold one this year) I listened to roars and the radio as UCLA came back to send it into overtime.  Ran back in the stadium to witness the momentum that shouldn't have resulted a 30-27 victory.  What a 4th quarter team.  Even the Trojans are concerned with this undefeated dark horse.  There's a reason for the colors of this blog.

The other Football game had LA on top.  The San Jose Earthquakes had the best season record, and got ousted from the MLS finals by archrival LA Galaxy (.500 record, almost a wildcard, played for a tie).  Hard to be an MLS fan, but today I'm just nursing a hangover.

This week the whole team is in town for an on-site retreat.  Many will meet F2F for the first time, and you can at Wiki Wednesday.