I've been hearing a lot about this "Web 2.0" thing lately (and for the past few years). Maybe I'm missing something.

Allowing your users to create their own content on your site might 'wow' some investors and pick up buzz around the tech community, but it isn't compelling in and of itself.

To me, sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter are just different arrangements of input boxes on boring pages. I use them, but they haven't made me smarter, more productive, or substantially happier. Users can only update their "About Me" bio field and refresh their friends' status updates so many times before they wander off to somewhere else on the Web. Goofy games or videos and poorly constructed blogging functionality don't really help.

All of these "fill in this text box and hit submit" sites have two huge problems - lack of moderation and lack of focus. Poor moderation frequently causes the content of a site to devolve to the level of YouTube comments. The "scorched earth" policy of the Millennials on the web (I'll refrain from the awful term 'tweens' here), is enough to leave many a site in ashes.

Lack of focus (or a purpose, or a mission) means that anything goes. Providing collaborative functionality on a site with no real purpose results in an emtpy site, or a site full of garbage. Providing collaboritive functionality on a site with a specific purpose, however, can change the world. Take Wikipedia for example. Wikipedia works because it has a specific purpose: creating, expanding, and maintaining a web encyclopedia. Its well-thought-out set guidelines and policies are known by enough users to keep the site relatively graffiti-free and up to a certain standard of quality. Though the deletionist vs. inclusionist wars will probably always rage on, most issues and disputes are eventually resolved. Collaborative functionality, plus moderation, plus (worthwhile) focus = something pretty amazing.

All this being said, users of Jabbik will have a few different text boxes they can type in! This is a little scary to think about. I'm less worried than I might be, though, because our collaborative functionality will be coupled with moderation and a clear purpose.

Check back soon for additional mumbo jumbo.


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I recall from my days as a student that there were clear trends between the topic of a course, the amount of books required for the course, and the amount of notes taken on the text. For example, a writing course might require 5 or 6 books but I wouldn't end up with too many index cards tucked in the pages or notes jotted in the margins (In other words, it was just straightforward reading. It required no substantial notes). On the other hand, a philosophy or science course might require only one book that would be full of highlighter marks by the end of the semester, along with piles of index cards and scads of fully used notebooks relating to the assigned text.

But it's been a while since I've taken a class. So I ask you: as a college student (past or present), which sorts of classes seem(ed) to require the most books? The most notes? Which sorts of books would be bright yellow when you were done with them, preventing you from selling them back to the bookstore for a paltry 10% of their original value?

I'm curious about where the most books are being assigned, and which ones you're really marking up or writing about. Do any genres, categories or authors stand out to you? Have you devised any innovative methods for organizing your notes or thoughts relating to assigned subject matter? What's your favorite way of keeping your notes in order? Mine was always sheets of scrap paper stuck between pages - I was never too organized. Either that, or one impossible 3-ring binder dedicated to every class. What do you do?

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The factors most likely to influence the decision of a prospective new team member to join a startup are their belief (or lack thereof) in your chances of success and your mission, and their belief (or lack thereof) that they'll have fun in the process of pursuing success with you.


We can't afford (due to a lack of spare cash and dignity) to install slides or ball pits in our office (when we get one - presently, our apartment is Jabbik World Headquarters), and we think that bragging about free caffeinated beverages is a lame way to entice prospective team members. We also think that quality gear with plentiful screen real estate, and comfortable furniture are requirements, not perks. What are some benefits that a startup can offer that'll make its team happier, and help convince prospective team members that it is a great place to work?



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We've come a long, long way, in these short months since Neil and I dropped just about everything to pursue the dream of founding Jabbik. One of the lessons I've (re)learned is to lean on talented people and domain experts, rather than attempting to do everything myself. My CPA friend reviews financial models, Neil tweaks search algorithms in our prototype, and I stay as far away as possible from graphic design. One thing I'll never do again is attempt to design a logo. Here is an early draft I created of a logo for the company (I still think it holds promise, but I'm willing to be overruled by people with talent and domain expertise.):



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At the risk of linking to Seth Godin too much, I think his recent entry on the Kindle is too important to not talk about here. Matt and I have touched on a few of the same points about the state of books in general that Seth makes about Amazon's e-book reader. Namely, that nothing about books has changed since the 1400s.

Electronic ink technology has been around for a long time. It was something Popular Science talked about a lot 10 years ago.  It's also the first counter-argument when I start off a pitch with the claim that book technology has been relatively static for 600 years- "What about the Kindle!", people shout, as if I'm unaware that such a device exists.

It's a neat device, but considering all its hype and how long the technology has been around, it's surprising that it has failed to significantly change anything about books or the way people use them. Sure, it's portable, and it has a novel delivery mechanism (pun unintentional), but what is new about it? In a sense, using a Kindle (or Project Gutenberg, or any existing e-book technology) gives you less than you could get with a physical book. Seth and Jabbik share a lot of the same ideas about how to improve e-books, but we're looking to increase the functionality of and resolve limitations of books, rather than than simply replicate the existing paper model using computers and electronics, as Amazon has done with the Kindle. Reaching the entire web with these ideas is what we're hoping to do.

As far as we're concerned, any new way to read books on computer screens is a step backwards if it doesn't work at least as well as a hard copy would. When you compare the benefits of a hard copy of a piece of text against what you can do with it on a screen, it's clear which one is better to have at your disposal. There's no reason that in the 21st century, that computerized books shouldn't be substantially more useful than their dead tree predecessors.

I added a playlist to the sidebar of our blog. Just click the song, and it'll play. As you can see, even though Jabbik is innovative, we haven't lost our ability to kick it old school from time to time. RIP ODB.
 
We also switched our commenting system to Discus on a trial basis. Have you signed up for our RSS feed yet?


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