A rising issue as the media gets personalized. There are a lot of problems, but not that many solutions. It will take a lot of experimentation and design thinking to “imitate” the opinion clashes in traditional media sources.

We Need A Social News Reader That Highlights Opposing Views | paidContent.

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I am trying to understand why we have so different discovery abilities (and disabilities) for the 3 major media content types that seem not-so-different from a discoverability point of view. I find it amusing that we have pandora et al for music and not for movies. Many mags cover music and movies but it is almost impossible to find something on books.

How we reconcile these differences is likely my next food for thought.

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I love PES from Konami. So do a few million gamers. Last week, the new iteration was out (PES 2012). Once more, Konami (and it’s rival EA Sports with the FIFA series) made the games more realistic, more graphically intensive and more intuitive. And Once more they failed to include features like:

Share your goal replays in YouTube
Participate in Facebook champions league
Tweet your win over your friends
And such

I am having a hard time understanding why boxed game companies are so stubborn in embracing the beauty of engagement between social media and core gaming experience.

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Back in Feb, I had a paradigm shift after reading Chris Dixon's post on Selling Pickaxes During a Gold Rush. Lately, I have been seeing very interesting companies looking at the super hot tech markets from a "pickaxe seller" view. I am sure I am missing many, but here are a few that I find promising:

• Badgeville: Easily build badge economy into your product
• Visual.ly: Create infographics
• LaunchRock: Create "launching soon, sign up now" pages
• App.net: Simple landing pages for apps
• Memsql: Ultra-fast database
• ColourLovers: Color palette and pattern creation website
• Basecamp: Project management
• AppAnnie: Reporting on app store rankings

I will continue to add pickaxe startups to their dedicated page here.

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In Reuters article, Google is reported to have bid weird price points for Nortel patents:

At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

While Reuters is puzzled about the reasoning behind this weird behavior, I am not. Put simply, you win or lose regardless of whether you bid in multiples of $100MM or Pi. Why waste the opportunity to create PR buzz out of an otherwise very boring process like patent auction?

I find this act almost equally amusing compared to Google's mysterious billboard ad in 2004 that should have enticed many eggheads.

It is, at the end of the day, a very clever way to signal the right traits (blend technical skills with arrogance) to new hires that Google is having a hard time attracting in the wake of Facebook, Twitter, Zynga et al.

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