I think that "disruptive" is one of Michael Arringon's favorite words. Even though we all know he's not using it correctly, everyone just kind of lets it go, as trying to correct it would be more effort than it's worth. It like how your co-worker always says "French benefits", but you just let is slide. Yeah, he's an idiot, but somebody has to deal with the copy machine's toner cartridge.

What's A Structured Data?

If you read TechCrunch regularly, you'll notice that sometimes, when they are talking about a product, any link that you would expect to go to the actual website in question actually goes to another TechCrunch media property, CrunchBase.

CrunchBase is one of those sleazy ways to drive pageviews, like how most Gawker Media sites make you click the "more" link to read an article. I didn't mind it up until now, when Arrington announced his plan for the 'Base: disruption.

CrunchBase allegedly aggregates information about startups, like funding rounds, founders, acquisitions, all that shit that nobody cares about anymore since Facebook got a valuation ($15B) that's almost as high as the Ford Motor Company ($18B). Anywho, Arrington hopes to disrupt companies like Dow Jones, who make people pay for this kind of aggregation.

I Sold GOOG At $516. FAIL.

The problem with Arrington's approach is that it's borderline useless, unless you're good at screenscraping. From the announcement:

We accumulate all this data about startups, but much of it doesn’t make it into actual posts on TechCrunch or the other blogs. And even when it does, it isn’t structured properly. So we thought we’d just put it up in a structured format for people to use when researching these startups.

--Michael Arrington, Local Boob

You know what would be a useful format for this structured data? Anything but HTML. Give me an Excel file, a CSV file, fuck, put it on Zoho's shitty online spreadsheet. Something I don't have to think about to parse. That's something useful to researchers.

I was going to burn a Friday afternoon with a sixer of Sam Adams, feeding this data through some AI machinations to see if it can figure out what makes a startup successful. My theory was that large contiguous blocks of consonants in the company's name was highly correlated with success.

Dow Jones Takes Umbrage At The Sight Of Your Weak, Flaccid Limbs

Why aren't companies going to abandon their costly subscriptions to Dow Jones's market research? Because Dow Jones can provide more information about a company than just "the social media space for gay clowns under 40 is very hot right now". This is where TechCrunch fails miserably. Shit, they couldn't even expose the shoddy programming behind InterviewUp that you guys dug up this week.

I haven't done one of these in a while:

• The electronic word processor: disruptive
• Brown v. Board of Education: disruptive
• Nuclear power: disruptive
• Putting a bunch of information about startups on a single website: not disruptive