Thinkcorps

I waste a lot of time actually trying out technologies like bittorrent, steeping myself in different apps to understand their inner workings and dynamics. Clearly, most journalists (even the tech ones) don’t bother. It’s always bothered me that you have to get to the media fringes to find real experts, but I suppose it’s always been that way. I think experts are naturally drawn to the fringes, where they can more easily pursue their obessions and interests. Mainstream journalists are focused on maintaining the tragectories of their careers, and that’s why they gravitate toward big publishers/media, despite a lack of talent and skill. We all make our choices, after all, and we rarely do it for anyone other than ourselves, let alone some amorphous concept like “media”.

In that sense, the Media is really an afterthought, a result of a lot of low-level individual decisions. It’s not the Eisners that make Media what it is, it’s the beat reporters and editors. My personal experience only allows me to see into the arena of tech journalism, but I have to assume that the problems are the same with all other beats.

What’s funny, is that I just wanted to jot down a simple thought on TV torrents. How did I get onto media? Ahh, the wonders of blogging. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on why TV torrents are or are going to be so popular.

First, (and this is what prompted the above rant) many torrented TV shows are recordings of HDTV —the best quality you can get. Way better than I can record on my Tivo (I have analog cable). The torrent is widescreen and super-sharp. The Divx encoding is excellent, btw. It’s like watching a DVD. Faced with a choice, I’m going to go with the torrent every time. I’ve never read anything that mentions how this P2P market spreads not only many shows, but the best available quality of recordings—and that quality is only getter better.

Second, of course, is the removal of commercials. The improved continuity radically improves the viewing experience, in my opinion. Good TV can be so much more immersive, almost movie-like. Which brings up a very valid point about the shortcomings of the commercial. New episodes are plugged like crazy, and yet we’re forced to swallow commercial repeats—and some extremely unimaginative ones as well. Yet there are many outstanding commercials that make it to watercooler discussions. I suggest that advertisers rethink the way they approach their commercials. More variety, more often, focusing on the spots that actually resonate with audiences. So many commercials are just tired, boring and irrelevant.

It’s really not our fault that TV advertising sucks, is it?

I feel like this post rambles all over the place, and yet, I’m still going to just post it and get this stuff off my mind. Done and done.

Wow. If there’s anything more disruptive (in a good way) than open source, I haven’t seen it. I bought a Linksys Network Storage Link the other day because I was interested in setting up a home NAS, and when I heard that the Storage Link’s Linux OS had been hacked open to allow the installation of other apps, I had to have it. I specifically wanted to set up an iTunes server, to share my sizable music collection on the laptops in the house. It’s totally brilliant, BTW. All hats off to the uNSLUng folks.

I always thought Linux was great, but that it’s primary stumbling block was the user’s learning curve. I think you’re going to have that problem with any computer, BTW. There’s just a lot to learn. On an embedded device however, the limitations make it much easier to handle. The uNSLUng app that handles software installation—ipkg—is very simple to use, even on the command line. It connects to the Net, downloads and installs the SW all by itself. Very slick.

If anyone stumbles on this post while having difficulties, here’s a few suggestions:

1. Follow the instructions to the letter. Be anal, make sure everything works at every step, restart the unit when advised to.
2. Firewalls OFF! This is advice so obvious that no one mentioned it in the posts I read, and so I didn’t think of it. Your firewall is probably causing your Windows networking problems (and your inability to connect to the NSLU2). Turn it off, see if things work, then ratchet up your firewall protection until you find the maximum level that allows you access to the NSLU2. Same goes for virus protection.
3. Logging into uNSLUng as ‘root’: I had trouble logging in to my uNSLUng unit when I reconnected the hard disk. (I think there’s a password stored on the HD that was interfering?) I restarted with the HD disconnected, logged in as root, and then reconnected the hard disk. After the HD initialized, I could then run ipkg and install software.
4. Creating an mp3 folder for mt-daapd: create this folder from a remote PC, not from the command line, since you’re logged in as root there and the permissions you’re advised to set in the installation instructions won’t be sufficient.

So, two posts in the same day. I’m on a roll, dammit!

While I find it admirable that many bloggers are turning their blogs into for-profit ventures, it seems that the first thing to go are the standards once held so dear. Yesterday, RSS was the Holy Grail of information exchange, a platform for a grassroots revolution that promised to hose mass media down to its skivvies. Today, of course, there is money to be made, so f*ck RSS, let’s stick some ads in there!

The reason this bugs me is that there’s only one way to get an ad into an RSS feed, and that’s to surreptitiously embed it into an item’s description tag. This way, I can’t easily remove it and you’re more or less sure I’m going to have to see it (unless I have access to my reader’s code and a rudimentary understanding of regular expressions, of course). With such a simple action, the author creates a combative relationship with the reader. “Hey, jerk-wad, you’re gonna read this ad! You can’t avoid it! It’s all over the place. Bwah-Ha-Ha!”

It’s cruft, pure and simple. Boing Boing, popular champion of all things cyber, has attached little GIF text ads to their feeds. The ads are annoying and largely irrelevant (matching up advertiser and reader is still an inexact science, despite google). Boing Boing also prepended author names to their item descriptions, because, well, I think Joi Ito mentioned his reader didn’t support author tags. Total cruft! There are clear specifications for author tags. So those of us that with readers that can actually parse a feed correctly now have to see author names twice. Great. I can’t help but think that the Boingers enjoy the modicum of extra exposure.

I realize that RSS is especially vulnerable precisely because of its ease of use. But when our supposed champions go out and break it on purpose, for personal gain—well, I don’t see that road going anywhere good (tragedy of the commons, much?).

I got an email this morning from a friend, announcing a 4-part series he wrote that’s appearing on sfgate.com. He’s also started a blog, which unlike the advice you’ll get from thousands of bloggers, isn’t about the ‘conversation’ so much as it is about exercising/exorcising his own skills, ideas, emotions, etc. It’s a writer’s blog, treated writerly.

Now part of what makes blogging such a phenom is that you can do whatever you feel like, post whatever you want. There are no rules, save one, really—make it personal, make it reflect your passion. And yet—writing?! He’s posting actual stories, pieces he’s sat down and thought about, crafted and revised. I even have the evidence in a recent post where he destroyed his laptop after it crashed while in the middle of composing what i can only imagine was a lengthy post.

I suppose that it’s only natural to expect that the expansive population of blogs would reflect our own society, and our own individual contributions. The vast majority are going to jot, and only a select few will take the time to craft. But the Net is awash in information, and a jot adds only one tiny dimension to that original data point such that we need to compile several jots (or opinions) in order to sufficiently contextualize the data. So presently, we jot and jot, flushed with our new power to influence, and others code and code building tools to filter and organize the data and the jots. Once the tools mature, however, the jots will become just another data point—ones we won’t even see until enough of them coalesce into something large enough to be visible.
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Nice graphic here charting out Apple’s supposed move into the mass market. I totally don’t buy it. There’s no reason to think that the Shuffle and Mac mini are going to take the mass market by storm, serving as some kind of tipping point. Besides, I don’t think products make tipping points, people do (read Gladwell’s book again).

These two new products are slick, but extremely stripped down. This makes them weak candidates for newbies, and better candidates for “switching” users (present PC users who want to try out the Mac way). But with limited power and feature sets, I think the biggest market is in present Mac users who want to expand their families. Both products make a lot of sense alongside their more powerful Mac brethren. Especially given their price points.

So mass market hit? I doubt it. But the genius here (not seen in the Cube) is that the appeal and price point of these products should drive their success purely within the confines of Mac users, while still appealing to PC “switchers” and newbies, growing the Mac universe. Lesson: Make money from your core users first, expand your customer base second.

I love the fact that sooner or later, whatever you’ve been mulling over in your head seems to pop up in the blogosphere. There’s just so many conversations going on, whatever sparked your interest probably sparked someone else’s as well. This time, in honor of CES, it’s PC-TV.

Scoble comments on Doc’s comments on efforts to push PC through the TV.

I’ve been (obliquely) poking at this question after experimenting with Tivo, torrents and the Philips DVP642 (hyper-popular DVD player that plays Divx files).

First, whatever UI you want to slap on its face, you want a PC controlling your TV. It’s just too convenient and powerful. Tivo shows that.

Second, if you assume that podcasting will grow along with citizen’s media along with some form of Internet-delivered TV, then video creation will be democratized, and we are going to need to support the widest range of possible formats. Bittorrent demonstrates that there’s a plethora of combinations out there, and a PC is great at sorting through them. While my Philips DVD player is great, it cannot play all formats and often inexplicably stumbles over files it should play. My PC is amazingly flexible, and can be easily updated to play just about anything.

Third, (and this addresses the PC-TV interactivity argument directly) you must take into account the display. HDTV displays completely change the game and I think it’s extremely short-sighted to decide what the American public wants before it’s had a chance to figure it out for itself.

Historically, Americans have had to view PC-TV interactivity through an incredibly low-res display. Analog TV makes the PC totally un-fun (remember the Gateway media PCs on 36” TVs?). You can’t read anything from 2 feet away, let alone the couch. And the peripherals weren’t there either. The wireless keyboards and remotes sucked.

Now, add an HDTV which besides having vastly higher resolution also enjoys a larger physical display size than your average analog TV. Add bluetooth and more options for remote controls. Create a UI that actually works on TV. Now wait a few minutes (years) and let people figure out what it means for themselves.

We didn’t know we’d like/love timeshifting until Tivo gave it to us. Timeshifting is interactivity designed for the couch. What other couch-tuned interactivity could be out there? Don’t assume that interactivity means editing Excel spreadsheets in your livingroom. It doesn’t. There are dozens of totally new ideas waiting to be adopted into this new media PC platform. But you have to give it a chance to develop.

Of course, developing this new platform properly is the rub. The “digital home” is all the rage at this year’s CES, and within the announcements, we can see that many of that ancient “boom time” biz-dev execs have survived. There seems to be an instinctual drive by these execs to bundle up tight packages of hardware, software and (DRM’ed) content. They seem to believe that consumers will not buy devices that don’t come pre-packaged with content, and so they DRM their way into a corner, creating a device or service so crippled that only an idiot would buy it.

Here’s my advice: the media PC is an EMERGING platform. Like the Web, it needs freedom + time in order to grow. Build it so that it’s flexible and allows developers to easily add their own features. Build it so it can easily integrate citizen’s media in all its myriad formats.

Build it so that I can figure out on my own what I want to do with it. I don’t mean a completely empty platform. Just build it like you build PCs. Preinstall a few basic software packages on it, so I can get a taste right out of the box. Then leave me alone. Let me add whatever features I want, and keep that damn DRM out of my way.

You only don’t need a PC in your TV if you’re 100% happy with the Comcast/MPAA/Disney view of the world. Otherwise, there’s got to be a PC in your TV’s future.

I’m reading this article on Slate, when I come across this:

My kids understand that if they walk into a Wal-Mart and pilfer an Usher CD, they’re stealing about $12’s worth of somebody else’s property. My kids have a much harder time grasping the notion that if they download all those same Usher songs, they’re also stealing somebody else’s property?maybe not quite the full $12’s worth since the plastic disk, the liner notes, and packaging all count for something, but certainly most of the $12 since the real value rests not in the plastic but the musical performance digitally embedded in it.

Now, I agree that the “real value” rests in the performance, but the $12 is completely arbitrary, a value set by the record company because it’s convenient for them to do so. Clearly, his kids have put a very different value on the performance in digital form, unencumbered by its plastic packaging.

And maybe this is the real digital music argument stripped bare. The value of the CD is in the control it offers the music publisher. The value of digital files is in the control it offers the music consumer. Nobody cares much about liner notes and packaging in the age of the playlist.

That leaves the value of the musical performance in question. Publishers treat the recorded performance as a marketing event, something to be celebrated en masse, even as they target the announcement of said performance to certain demographic groups.

Consumers, on the other hand, don’t naturally act en masse. More and more, we find that we can function, we can purchase, on a very individual level. We listen, we create playlists, individually. Certainly, we come together in small cliques, but these are insignificant to today’s marketers.

If we want the communal Usher experience, for example, we will go see him in concert (an event with lots of clear fixed costs). Otherwise, we’ll value his album or certain songs on a completely personal scale, weighted by our tastes and the tastes of those immediately around us.

Now we see two “individuals”—the publishing company and the consumer—on different ends of a scale, attempting to value this musical performance. The publisher views the world as a calendar of multimillion-dollar marketing events, theirs and their main competitors. The consumer views the world as their tiny individual life: their work, family, friends, likes, and dislikes.

It’s easy to see that we’re going to have a problem here. For while music has emerged (and only very recently) as a powerful publishing business, historically it has served as a vital record of our shared societal history, something that demanded to be shared because of its emotional impact. You can see this history and the tremendous power of music in the songs of any age or genre that you personally connect with.

So the value of music to the consumer really cannot be separated from that consumer’s ability to share it. And while the Internet has recently radically improved our ability to share things, it doesn’t change the fact that sharing is what music compells, that’s what it has been honed to do over thousands of years. The music connects with me; I memorize it, humming the tune and lyrics over and over. (I think you see what’s coming next.)

Yes, music is a virus. So, good luck trying to bottle it. Once you’ve let it out, it’s going to spread on its own, not because of file-sharing technology or pirates, but because that’s exactly what it has been designed to do. And the better you make that music, the more powerful it is, the more likely that it will spread like wildfire, completely out of your control.

That is precisely why musicians start out to make music. And that’s why we listen and love it. To be honest, the whole “$12” concept just gets in the way.

Slate gets it pretty right. At it’s most simplistic, you could view this election as between “guy from Massachusetts” and “guy from Texas”. And let’s not underestimate Americans’ ability to be simplistic. The Republican’s strategy seems to have boiled down to “confuse ‘em so much they have to go with their gut.” And it worked. Southerners are still uncomfortable with Yankees. It’s engrained in the culture.

Message to Democrats: Massachusetts is dead. It’s a marginal player in today’s society. Until you get yourself a candidate from the heartland, from the South, nothing’s going to change.

OK, I saw this Surowiecki story linked on kottke.org, so I read it. And it’s a typically simplistic/provocative thesis (in this case ironic as well), the kind Wired should have patented by now. I used to be an editor at the magazine in its earlier days, so I’m familiar with the approach. But as is more frequently the case, Wired’s all flash and bang, with little substance after that. In other words, the article rings hollow.

Why is it that every large magazine treats its readers like idiots? Reporting is good, analysis is good. Teach me something, dammit! Advance the argument!

Surowiecki’s story is about the “decline in brands”. I don’t know what this means. He seems to have adopted an earlier definition of the term “brands” – one only a couple generations removed from “cattle marking”. Today’s definition of branding has far surpassed “trademarks.” It encompasses all of a company’s interactions with consumers. Everything counts in the big equation.

Wal-Mart Is the Ultimate Brand
Yes, there are a lot of brands today – there are a lot of companies. This would create pressure on consumer loyalty on its own. But, as Surowiecki fails to mention, we live in a society commanded by Wal-Mart and hypermarts. Today, America shops – wittingly or unwittingly – based on price. It’s the Wal-Mart way. Wal-Mart drives an increasingly harsh bargain with suppliers, demanding ever-increasing discounts. Wal-Mart’s “brand” is based on a foundation of lower prices. And it’s the Wal-Mart “brand” that has grown to eclipse all others.

In addition to price competition, we are enjoying the fruits of a better, faster distribution system. FedEx, UPS, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com – all these companies have played important roles in helping shape how we get products from overseas to store shelves (or our doorsteps). This has helped open US markets to many new companies, here and abroad, and this has in turn increased pressure on price sensitivity.

The biggest explanation is “swelling strength of the consumer”? WTF does that mean? The people that drive Wal-Mart do not spend their days combing the Internet for product reviews. This is a massive myth. The strength of the consumer lies in the price sensitivity that Wal-Mart has driven like a stake into the minds of US consumers. It’s drilled into us every day that lower prices are what matters.

Also—Epinions blows. There’s hundreds of actual review sites available that provide far more valuable information than Epinions. Plus, have you ever been to Amazon? Their reviews are far more numerous and more likely to contain useful information. Epinions has been search-engine optimized so it shows up a lot in Google searches. That doesn’t mean there’s anything useful behind that link. Get a clue.

The “What Have You Done for Me Lately? economy.” (sigh) Why does every idiotic idea at Wired have to be an “economy”. You guys are becoming a parody of yourselves. I blame Surowiecki’s editor for that one.

As for Sony, the company is in trouble because it’s entertainment arm has forced it to develop shitty products that no one wants. Again, it’s the company’s actions that define its brand.

Fashion prices falling? That’s nice. But what’s happened to sales and profits? Private label products can allow a manufacturing plant to stay efficient, by keeping machines running and people employed, while it addresses lower end markets it wouldn’t otherwise touch. Efficiency trumps price, for the simple reason that it lowers costs, allowing a company to compete on a more crowded field. (Again, a function of Wal-Mart’s influence.)

What Does Loyalty Mean, Anyway?
I wholeheartedly agree that consumers will have more power in the future, but not because brand loyalty is dying. A consumer is loyal to a company because there’s a relationship the consumer is interested in maintaining. A company is not your friend. You don’t hang out and BBQ with Nokia. They make stuff, you like the stuff or you don’t. Besides, it’s a friggin’ phone, probably one of the most commoditized electronics on the face of the planet.

It must be pointed out that Apple’s loyalty goes far beyond the iPod. There are legions of devoted Mac users who could care less about what the company does or what kind of iPod it’s releasing. To ignore them is to be disingenous at best.

A pretty sticker on a box does not make a “brand”. Any seasoned marketer will tell you this. A brand is irrevocably tied to its customers, piss them off and yes, they will leave and your brand will suffer.

What insight is there to be had in telling us what we already knew we knew?.

i like the harmony remotes, even though i own a lame-o 745 model, which seems to pale in comparison to their newer offerings. I also say kudos to Logitech for buying the company and getting on the bandwagon. Solid user-centric design is not so easy to come by. I only have one problem—-

Get your friggin’ site working so I can update my g*dd*mn remote. This is the obvious achille’s heel of a Web-based remote. No Web, no remote. (I have to change functionality and add my new Tivo to the mix)

Plus, the stupid site runs on .asp, which is a huge f*cking mistake, IMO. Get linux and apache you dinks! Hell, I’d settle for Apache for Windows. I’m sure it’d work way better. What are they running this server on anyway?

i’m going for a walk.

I watched “The King of Masks” this weekend, and I enjoyed it, even if it was a bit sappy. What was interesting was how overwhelmingly positive the online reviews were. When I thought about it, it became pretty clear that the only audience a film like this could ever attract is one that was explicitly looking for it. Thus, the positive reviews. As long as you weren’t disappointed, you’d be prone to leave a favorable review.

Likewise, negative reviews are usually left by people who have been misdirected into seeing a film, and thus found themselves in the wrong theater. They are the wrong audience, and in reading negative reviews it’s very difficult to see past the initial reaction that “obviously, this person was never meant to see this movie”.

So, my question is: what reviews are worth reading? Which should be weighted high, and which less? Because we’re working with a five star rating system, it seems critical to weed out the useless ratings which are skewing the results. But what algorithm could we use?

Collaborative filtering is going to match up a group of similar moviegoers and weight the reviewers within that group. The problem is, have you enough moviegoing history to get a good filter? If you do, is your group still large enough to give an effective answer? Usually not.

Anyway, no answers—but go check out audioscrobbler. If we could tap into that, link it to amazon and whatnot, we’d at least solve the music problem.

I fixed my Namiki Vanishing Point tonight and I’m very very happy now. I love this pen. I guess I had been futzing with it or something, and I took it apart while the nib was extended (several years ago – duh!). This is bad. Screw it back together and it didn’t work. I thought a spring popped out. What I think happened is that the little trap door that covers the nip opening (when retracted) was in the wrong position. I jiggled it until I got it back into the open position, reassembled it, and everything is wonderful. So, in case you’ve got a curiously busted Namiki lying around, go fiddle some more, it might just come together.

Just got the new Supercar CD, Answer, and I’m very excited. I love this band and I’ve bought all their albums and some singles (since they’re all Japanese CDs, that’s saying something, I think).

So, I open it, and I notice, thankfully, that there’s LabelGate protection on it. LabelGate is assinine protection in which you get keys from a center Sony server, good for one transfer of the digital files (no idea what format) to your PC. Subsequent transfers are like $2/song, and (maybe) available only to people in Japan.

Why would I care? Well, I just had to reinstall XP, so all my old OS tweaks weren’t in place yet. Suffice it to say, Sony spent a lot of money to protect all their CDs, a system I compromised by turning of CD Autoplay.

Everyone should turn off Autoplay. Autoplay is now like messenger (the unused service that hackers use to put popups on your screen)—it is a loophole, used to trick unsuspecting users. I don’t differentiate between the two. They are both insidious.

And BTW —Sony, you suck. A long time ago at Wired, our sage Kevin Kelly asked, “who’s the next Microsoft?” I answered, “Sony.” You had the brand, the expertise, the intelligence. And you’ve blown the whole deal. Your HD music player resoundingly sucks. Your music store sucks. Why? Because you accept that your customers should be treated like thieves and criminals. Man, was I wrong about you guys.

I think it’s funny that your tiny seasian suppliers are now poised to eat your bento box. Korea’s gonna whip your ass (and I bet that hurts), because they are willing to innovate—fast—and create cool new products that customers might actually want.

Well, last week I got screwed.

Several months ago, I presented a project to someone (I’ll call them A*hole), a project I’d sketched out in fair detail over the course of a year or so of evolution. We discussed it in detail, I expressed my wish to get the project up however possible and my need for help toward that end. A*hole was in a position to make introductions. There’s a subsequent big hole of time in the story that I was, of course, not privy to, and then lo and behold, my (albeit modified) project appears with big partner, staff, all apparently orchestrated through A*hole.
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I think the one thing I would take away from this movie—regardless of political caste—is that the emergence of a global economy, globalism if you will, requires a radical readjustment in your perspective. It is difficult to operate effectively on a global scale while simultaneously addressing local/national interests. The two are so vastly different that I don’t see either ever really understanding the other.

The most poignant moment in the movie for me was when the old lady in the (I’m assuming) bingo parlor, said that “those poor people will never be free.” I can only assume that she meant that when you’re sitting on billions of barrels of oil, people will always be knocking on your door and whispering in your ears. And they will.

To deny that Iraq has great strategic value both for its oil reserves and the impact it could have to balance power in the worldwide oil market is to be stupid. Our country runs on oil and has vast global investments that also require oil. Oil is important, and on some level, I think you can create spreadsheets that justify killing for it (I personally disagree morally, etc. with this, but capitalism is not inherently moral, is it?). Taking action to protect those oil reserves is by no means irrational. The Bushes know this, being both oil men and politicians, as Moore points out by illuminating the Bushes’ relationship with Saudi leadership.

The Other Reasons
I don’t buy the “freeing Iraqis” argument. (I heard this last night while watching Scarborough Country for a few moments until I got ill—that guy should be smart enough to know the shit he’s shoveling.) We went into Iraq ostensibly to disable the threat of Saddam’s weapons. Iraqi freedom was a side bonus, or it was supposed to be. If it is really our job to police the world, imposing freedom on all who stand in our way, then where are all the troops in Africa? No one wants to go to Africa because it’s of little strategic value compared to other targets, and it’s a bloody mess to boot.

Moore’s biggest failure, in my opinion, is that he takes things back to a personal/local level, showing the impact that this war has had on regular American families who’ve lost their children, and how the poor are going to have to shoulder the burden of protecting the rich. These are fine and true arguments, and I think that the government should weigh heavily the cost of sending our troops into battle.

Go Global
But the interesting points in the film are made around Carlyle Group. This is globalism defined. They evalute opportunities around the world and have created the necessary relationships to transcend old-style national borders and governments. This is how you do business on a global scale. These are the people you rub shoulders with.

When you build a home (or subdivision), for example, there are many local officials who’s approval is critical to your success. You aren’t operating in a vacuum. Same with politicians, only more so. Our government has many relationships around the world that it maintains to address US interests. Now, if you’re a US business seeking to expand internationally, wouldn’t you go talk to the guys who are tapped into that network?

The biggest problem I have with Bush & Co. is how clear it is that these global business interests (look at Cheney’s resume) are pulling the strings, and our government is currently ill-prepared to police the gray areas the current administration has illuminated. Cheney’s mystery energy meeting is a case in point. I could care less about whether Ken Lay was there—Enron’s a smokescreen anyway. I do however want to know what influence the other oilmen there had on our energy policy, and thus, our foreign policy.

I respect the idea that facilitating business will improve the lives of Americans (mostly the rich, unfortunately), but I also think we have a moral imperative to protect our environment and help those less fortunate. Simply pushing one agenda is not going to work—as I said before, capitalism is not inherently moral. Free markets don’t care much about babies, sickness, clean air, or birds.

How we balance out these competing visions is the real trick. I see how business operates on a global scale, but I’m not sure how other agendas can effectively rise to that level. We need a balance in order to succeed. After all, no matter you’re reasoning (wmds, freedom, or oil), creating balance in the Middle East is what the Iraq war is/was really about.

I just got one of these from Engineered Audio for my gen2 iPod. It pretty much rocks.

My headphone jack broke, like many gen2’s. Half of the internal plastic ring snapped off, so the remote jack won’t seat firmly anymore, and usually works its way out quickly, disabling the remote. Plus, whoever designed the clip for the wired remote put form way ahead of function—not so great for clipping effectiveness. So I was looking for a better solution.

The RemoteRemote works on RF (sweet). The keyfob control is small, and the buttons are maybe a bit too small—sometimes it takes a couple presses to get it to function, but it does work exactly as advertised (unlike the iTrip, which I was spectacularly unimpressed with).

The receiver unit constantly draws power from the iPod battery, which is an issue, if like me, you taped it in place. (I did that to solve my broken jack problem). The battery power issue doesn’t bother me, since I’ve already got a battery life problem as it is. I just keep the Ipod plugged in to my PC most of the time.

So, I can now dump the iPod in my bag, and keep the keyfob out – either in my hand or attached to my bag. I am very happy.

I stayed up late last night, reading Blankets, by Craig Thompson, a graphic novel I’d been meaning to pick up for quite a while. It’s a very personal story about his Christian upbringing and brief first love. It’s a really beautiful story and well told. It reminded me in so many ways of myself and the emotions I struggled with as a teen (probably everyone struggled with). It wasn’t any specific details, though I grew up in Wisconsin, did some church youth group, too. It was simply an intense emotional resonance, basically one of the reasons the world needs writers: they remember the things we don’t. After reading the book, wisps of those recalled emotions clung to me until I finally fell asleep.

This morning I woke up and stepped back into my work routine in front of the computer. Alex demonstrated for me the new address autocomplete feature he just added to his Webmail product, ATPmail. He’s also going to add a filtering mechanism, so that the addresses come up in order of most recently used. With every feature added, ATPmail becomes more of a suite of database tools—your mail, addressbook, etc, is the data.

Which brings me to Gmail. Why a free Web-based email program has become so popular, so desperately wanted, is beyond me, but it’s obviously got a lot to do with the abstract allure of “search”. Alex and I tinker and discuss ATPmail, his Web-based email system, every day, and Gmail is a welcome step forward and innovative competitor (note: we’re tiny, Gmail is, naturally, big). But email is not unstructured text, like a Web page. Email has lots of headers, a subject, a body, and most important, a date. The reality is, there’s a lot of value in “filtering” email, but not so much in full text search on a 1GB archive of old mail.

As email ages, it loses most of its efficacy. Like most things, its context and relevancy fades. Gmail retains the conversation thread, which I suppose allows you to rebuild as much of the context as possible, but that assumes a long and detailed conversation, an epistolary form which I’d argue has been dealt a somewhat permanent blow by email itself. We note things in email, we shout out, we remind, we ask—we don’t often discuss at length. Email is sparse and direct, which further erodes its context over time—there’s just not that much to contextualize in a typical message thread.

But each of us has already invested so much of our lives in email. Most of us have mail archives, from work or a previous email program, deep in a folder somewhere on our computers. We’ll probably never retrieve that old mail—those experiences—whether because of neglect or simple technological incompatibility. That record of our lives is lost. And that’s frightening. So many days and interactions, so many events and stories, all lost in the ether or locked in a bit.

Maybe that’s the great promise of Gmail (and desktop search as well). An accessible archive of experience, transcoded into hard drives across the Internet. We might forget, but Google won’t. I don’t think it matters so much that the context will be indecipherable, that we won’t remember who that person was, or why that line was supposed to be funny. It will all be in there, ready for reminiscence if we ever want it.

I think that’s comforting when your life is lived on a digital plane. Google sees your tracks in the sand, even if few oth-ers do.
—end ramble

Yay! Lakers are falling apart. Even Shaq/Kazaam looks to be feeling a way out. I wanna watch game 5 again, right now. :)

craigslist has rss feeds for searches – woo! link

Apple rocks. This Airport Express device is very cool. It will output either a digital or analog audio stream to the external stereo device. What’s important, however, is that Apple’s separated iTunes audio output from your PC audio output. I have my PC hooked up to my stereo, which works great with iTunes, until I hit a Web page with audio or get an OS error beep which then blares out of my stereo (usually scaring the shit out me). Separating music audio output from other audio output is a huge step forward, IMO.

Good article here: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/archives/000212.php

I lost power last week for 4 days in a 6 day span. My House was completely dark, and consequently, I was completely up sh*t creek. Doing what I do, I kinda rely on power for the PC, phone, DSL, etc. For most of the first day, I thought it was a blackout in my little outage block, but as it turns out, it was just me. Somehow, my meter blew (only my PC was on, as it is every day, I swear), as the PGE guy told me later that afternoon.

Now, replacing your meter is a ridiculously long process, made that way, as someone pointed out to me, because of the many intrepid homeowners who probably had their asses fried while messing with live wires. PGE has to come out to both disconnect and reconnect the power, while an electrician had to bang around outside for two days, setting up the new box. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time with The New Yorker over these days.

What did I learn? Email’s a drug, and you can get hooked on it. The New Yorker is a really good magazine, despite its Conde Nast parent. I really need to move.

Since I had so much time to sit around and read and think, it occurred to me that beyond our general American reliance on Mid-East oil, our electrical power grid is stupid. How is it in an age where the Internet is all-pervasive and a company like Enron can divert thousands of megawatts of power to Vegas just to fuck with people in California, that there is no fault tolerance built into the power grid? I.e., why can’t neighboring power blocks feed power into a broken block? I realize that at some level, if a block fails, it has to be fixed, but there has to be a way to better isolate the problem than taking hundreds of houses offline indefinitely.

Any upgrades this entails won’t probably happen for 20 years at least, since local utlities are monopolies and PGE especially has garnered a deserved reputation in California for, well, let’s say “less than optimal responsiveness”.

It’d be nice though. Maybe with a grid upgrade we could build in capabilities and incentives for more consumer-based, alternative enegry systems to feed power back into the grid. I love this idea, though I wonder what kind of impact it would really have. Probably small given how businesses are so used to wasting power—why don’t those highrises turn off their lights at night anyway?

David Pogue gives the Gmail beta a hummer this morning in the NYT. Given that he’s had this much time to put his story together, and that the wave of online discussion has already crested, I am surprised how wrong he is. Now, I am not a Google-basher, but I’m not a blind fanatic either. Google’s a company, they make tools. And we’re all entering new territory here—where a company owns parts of your personal data stream (in the case of Gmail) in perpetuity. We all thought Worldcom was cool once too, you know.

Those reactions, as it turns out, are a tad overblown. In fact, no human ever looks at the Gmail e-mail. Computers do the scanning – dumbly, robotically and with no understanding the words – just the way your current e-mail provider scans your messages for spam and viruses. The same kind of software also reads every word you type into Google or any other search page, tracks your shopping on Amazon, and so on.

But don’t people create ads that leverage these computer scans? And isn’t that the same thing? I am not actually typing these letters right now, either. I am banging on my keyboard.

Besides, if you’re that kind of private, Gmail is the least of your worries. You’d better make sure that the people at credit-card companies, mail-order outfits and phone companies aren’t sitting in back rooms giggling at your monthly statements. Heck, how do you know that your current e-mail providers – or the administrators of the Internet computers that pass mail along – aren’t taking an occasional peek?

Everybody’s doing it, so it must feel fine.

Still, you feel what you feel. If Gmail creeps you out, just don’t sign up.

This is not the point. The point is that WITHOUT signing up, any email “conversation” you have with a Gmail user is archived without your explicit consent. Didn’t we all go over this a few weeks ago?

That would be a shame, though, because you’d be missing a wonderful thing. Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself.

Blow, baby, blow.

But otherwise, you wouldn’t even peg Gmail as being from the same planet as Yahoo and Hotmail. The most important difference is the amount of storage: one gigabyte. That’s 250 times the amount you get on a free Yahoo account, 500 times the amount on Hotmail.

Gmail only does text email presently. If your average text message is 4 KB, then that’s 250,000 messages. If you get 50 non-spam messages a day, then Gmail will store more than 13 years worth of email. Overkill much? Point: it’s a marketing gimmick, you won’t actually use it.

In fact, Google argues that with so much storage, you should get out of the habit of deleting messages. Why risk throwing away something that you might need again someday? An Archive button moves a message out of the in-box, but it remains searchable. Actually deleting a message involves fussing with a pop-up menu.

Why doesn’t Google want you to delete email? Why? Hmm, let’s think about this for a minute. Hmm. Still thinking here.

Of course, if you’re going to keep all your e-mail around forever, you’d better have some pretty good tools for managing it. Fortunately, if anyone can tame a vast pile of data, it’s Google. Its famous search command works brilliantly on your own e-mail, plucking one message out of 5,000 in a fraction of a second.

Give it to me, baby!

Gmail doesn’t have the usual mail folders. Instead, you can flag messages with labels of your own choosing. The advantage here is that you can apply different labels to a single message, in effect filing it under several categories at once. An extremely easy-to-use filter feature lets you flag incoming messages with certain labels automatically according to who sends them, what’s in their subject line and so on.

I spend a lot of time working with email actually – I help design and improve ATPmail, a friend’s webmail program. I love ATPmail, and Gmail has some of ATPmail’s features. We have spent much time talking about features, search included. Boolean text search is great for unstructured data. Email is very structured, however. You have senders and recipients, time, size, subject, body, attachments. All these can be used to sort and filter. And filtering into multiple categories? How is that not confusing?

[Ads] turn out to be a maximum of three text-only four-line affairs, clearly labeled and way off the to the right, just as on Google itself. In my e-mail, a message about Earth Day contained an ad for a computer-recycling company. A question about music players had two ads for stores selling the Apple iPod. In a press release for a computer show, a Linuxworld link appeared.

Google just announced that’s it’s doing image ads now. So, stop shovelling. Things change, especially in business.

The automatic spam-removal feature is adequate for the moment, but once thousands of people begin to use the Report Spam button, Google plans to harness the cumulative intelligence of its customers to refine its spam filters in innovative ways.

This might work, and it might not. A lowest common denominator approach isn’t the most effective way to deal with spam. As more people report spam, you have to raise the threshold of what constitutes spam, since more false-positives will be reported.

Finally, Google promises that it won’t shut down your account until you go nine months without using it. (Hotmail and Yahoo delete all your mail and recycle your address after only 30 days). Now that’s not being evil.

Google likes data, it needs data. Why would it ever want to decrease its own ability to compete?

The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us. We know a good thing when we see it.

There are lots of reasons why you should be concerned about Gmail. The mantra “don’t be evil” is cute and works well on a press release or a NYT article, but it’s a slippery slope. To whom doesn’t Google want to be evil? What’s the missing object of this phrase? Us users? Or the stockholders?

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Just in case you get a notion.

I just had a filling done and was recounting the experience (good) to my friend Chance. He said, “I’ve got to get some work done, too. One of my teeth has cracked from an old filling.” Surprised, I told him I had the same problem with two old fillings.

“Yeah,” Chance said, “who would have thought metal was harder than teeth?... I would have, actually.”

I laughed. Who came up with metal fillings anyway? And mercury before that? No wonder people hate the dentist. Sadistic little bastards.

I just picked up MVP 2004 (baseball) for ps2, and I was immediately reminded of something that I’d heard in the news awhile back—Barry Bonds handles his own rights, unlike the rest of the league, which does it through the league or the player’s association (maybe both), I forget. The point being, no Bonds (arguably the most popular player in baseball videogaming, since vids are going to naturally place more emphasis on home runs).

Obviously, Bonds’s replacement isn’t hard to find. I quickly found the anonymous (and generically white) Barry Bonds stand-in. He does have awesome stats, but it’s too bad. He doesn’t have any Barry-like qualities, probably on advice from the lawyers.

So my question is, can you be considered one of the greatest players of all time, if you’re not in any of the videogames? Each vid has a short lifespan, but Barry’s holdout could continue indefinitely, meaning he might not ever make it into even the ‘classic’ rosters in future editions. Kids of the future are going to know their baseball not from afternoons skipping school to spend at the park, but from afternoons skipping school to hang in the basement, playing games.

i was listening to some belle and sebastian today, and it occurred to me that a video shot from foot level, showing only feet and anything that happened to get near feet could be interesting. you could even have a plot—foot chase, falling down, etc.

In subscribing to a number of rss feeds while still reading a few major newspapers, I believe I’m starting to see patterns in how news stories bubble up to the big sites/papers. What strikes me is how the internet has been integrated into the news cycle, permanently increasing its velocity. Whether this increase will continue to accelerate, well, time will tell.

It could be that we need information filtering tools (google news, rss aggregators) more than we know. I tend to get overwhelmed switching from the Net to TV (where anchors are rehashing news I’ve already read), and the sheer volume of news stories needed to fill the days of cable news networks, newspapers and internet sites is staggering. They don’t stop talking—ever.

So it may just be that information overload, combined with some good filtering technology, will actually spell the death of broadcast television and the birth of Internet TV.

Simply put, I need more control over what’s jacked into my brain.

One thing I’ve been mulling about in my head this morning is how people really need to pay more attention to their RSS feeds. Most people think they’re cool and all, and yet they don’t bother to customize them—many people just use the default templates provided by MovableType, for example.

This is BAD, people. RSS is going to be great because it will be useful and used. If people are using it, then it’s a front door to your site, and you need to be sure it’s making a good impression.

What I’m saying has surprisingly far-reaching implications. The interesting thing about RSS feeds is that, because RSS readers are designed to present news items in an easily readable text format, when linking to a Web page, the reader tends to like it better if the page is uncluttered and the body is on the left.

For example, while BoingBoing’s RSS feed isn’t quite perfect (I’d like to see the diff authors’ names on their posts), it shows full article text (good) and when you view the Web site in a reader, it shows up well (body column on left).

Many sites will make a conscious decision to only use RSS for headlines—since they want to drive people to the site (for ad views or whatever). That’s fine, but sites that don’t care should provide full article text in their feeds, no question.

The other thing I was thinking about was why RSS should be integrated into an email client. RSS is primarily famous today because of its ties to blogging. Blogging is cool because it’s super simple, but powerful content publishing. Much like a wiki, blogs lower the bar, making it easier to contribute, and RSS feeds make it easier to keep tabs on those contributions.

So, say, in a group or corporate situation, I can see great value in team or project blogs, allowing members to share thoughts or update others on news, and the RSS feeds simply extend that to anyone who wants to keep up on a team/project’s situation/progress. If the blogs are company based, then the RSS feeds are really the ‘news’ of your company, so to speak.

This is a really great way for anyone within the company to keep up on what others are doing, and clearly needs to be integrated into email (assuming you’re of the mind that people only rely on a few key programs, email being one of the most important).

More Proof that God is simply short for Godzilla.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/jjfcc4.html
(it’s a “Sodom” and “Gamora”/Gamera joke, dammit)

just something I thought Bush might like to review in his religious studies as he prepares this latest offensive in the puported defense of ‘marriage’: Matthew 7:12 – read it, live it, love it (you bastards).

It always amazes me how much hatred is loosed upon the world in the name of God.

so, like many people, i have allergies and i’ve had some success taking Claritin. Now, I was very excited when Claritin shifted to non-prescription status, and I immediately go out and pick it up at my local supermarket. I think the initial Claritin brand was going for something like $1/tablet. Then a few months later my supermarket starts selling generic brand Claritin (Loratadine) for about half that: 24 tablets for $12. Then a few months later, they’re selling a 90-count bottle for like $17. Today, my caring mother informs me that Sam’s Club is selling a 180-count bottle of Loratadine for $15.

So my question is, When do I stop feeling like a chump?

1. MPAA wins its stupid suit against 321 Studios, makers of DVD X Copy (specifically tailored for making movie-only DVD backups). This is another reasons the DMCA must be struck down. Regardless, software development is easy these days. The only reason that 321 was taken to court is that they circumvent the CSS copy protection on DVDs—other DVD-backup software doesn’t touch the copy protection, leaving that dirty job to small, simple ripper programs like DVD Decrypter. It makes DVD backups an extra step, but with a huge hard drive, who cares?

The lesson here is: as long as there’s kids in the world, and those kids have computers, Hollywood is screwed.

2. iTunes removed their switch to mini player button from the window interface – those three buttons in the top right corner. It used to be that clicking on the sized/maxmize button (or whatever it’s called) switched between big and mini player views, but now it just switches between a sized large view and a maximized view. This is really freaking stupid. Now, I have to use a key command, Ctl + M, when iTunes is clearly designed for mouse clicks.

I have heard argued that making that button switch to miniplayer breaks with Windows conventions. Well, buddy, screw Windows conventions. Apps never used to have miniplayer views, first of all. And our screens are much bigger these days, obviating the need to maximize anything. If Apple is such a leader and innovator and their shit smells so sweet, then please, please pray that they put that miniplayer view back into the window controls.

That’s all for today. I’m going to APE in SF today and gonna pick up some cool comics and zines.

Google has a location service that you can use to search for things, like wifi hotspots, in your area. It’s cool, but fairly inaccurate when using data from Web pages that aren’t specifically listing wifi hotspots. This is a natural result of the malformedness of Google’s database (the Internet). You simply can’t get great results when your dataset is not consistent.

For example, I see hotspots in Berkeley that don’t exist. When examining the Web pages behind these supposed locations, I see Peninsula area codes (650 area code shares street names with Berkeley) and Buck’s restaurant (in Woodside, also a street in Berkeley).

Obviously, the accuracy, or “quality of service,” sucks. But, maybe that’s OK.

Google has built its reputation on good search results and innovation, and I wonder how much it can rely on the old 80:20 rule for software, in which the last 20% of development takes 80% of your time and resources. Buttoning up a project is very difficult. Google doesn’t worry too much about that. It puts out cool products in “Beta”, and the geek community, which influences the analyst community, eats it all up.

But I wonder how the public, my mom for example, would react to a product that works only this well. If your yellowpages was as accurate as Google location, you’d be pissed.

If the potential for the Internet is as a mass media, and Google is its current 800-pound gorilla, I have to wonder how well Google is going to be at creating products for the general public that work really well.

And that’s exactly when I’m reminded again of that old stalwart Yahoo. The game is far from over, my friend.

“Lay it on a flat surface like a Polaroid picture.”

Update to the list of reasons that HDTV won’t make the promised big splash.
1) FCC mandate says TV signals must be digital, not that they must be HD.
2) Copy protection schemes are already creating unusable products.

And today, number 3: the actors and producers are freaking out about their high-definition “warts”. Yes, dear Benjamin, the future is plastic – plastic surgery. From talk show hosts like Katie Couric to porn stars like Jenna Jameson, everyone’s scrambling to deal with wrinkles, pimples and scars. Oh my!

I predict that this will help push Jessica Simpson into a top news anchor position at ABC, finally shattering the glass ceiling so that TV and American culture can finally realize it ultimate dream: put no one on the air over the age of 25.

(We’re already well on our way toward the mandate that every show give up a little fan service, if you know what I mean. Janet? Beyonce?)

This will also have the side effect of forcing the Department of Education to revise its list of programs approved for closed captioning. Given the revised TV landscape, all approved shows will either have to take place in an arena or contain at least 12.5% horrific automobile crashes. So, NASCAR, arena football, and Judge Wapner’s Animal Court? You’re back on the list.

From WWD.COM
Tuesday February 17, 2004

Memo Pad: Ready For Her Close-Up

READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP: Hemlines, rather than hairlines, are usually the fashion world’s focus, but Katie Couric’s current ’do may be worthy of special scrutiny. The new bangs she’s been sporting on the “Today” show lately aren’t just part of a trend — sources said they’re about to double as camouflage. America’s Pixie is on the verge of going under the knife for a major brow-lift courtesy of Dr. Craig Foster, the plastic surgeon best known for reconstructing the face of the Central Park jogger, according to sources familiar with the situation.

While such a procedure might seem a bit drastic in the age of drive-through Botoxing, Couric and her TV personality peers have a new reason to be afraid about losing their looks — high-definition television. The super-sharp imagery of HDTV is infamously pitiless about its subjects’ looks. “In the last few months, I’ve had three major TV people come in expressing specific high-definition television concerns,” said plastic surgeon Dr. Cap Lesesne.

“HDTV is a nightmare,” said one beauty editor. “I would be surprised if she wasn’t considering surgery.” The “Today” show isn’t currently broadcast in HDTV, but NBC was an early adopter and it will likely happen sooner rather than later.

A spokeswoman for Foster said, “We do not know anything about it,” and a “Today” spokeswoman declined comment.

Last fall, New York magazine named Foster one of “beauty’s best” doctors in the city, and noted that he had started using the Endotine brow-lift treatment that sources said Couric will likely undergo. Endotine patients have small incisions made in the forehead where tiny hooks are inserted that pull the skin of the brow taut. Six to eight weeks after insertion, the skin resettles at the higher elevation, while the hooks — which are biodegradable —gradually melt away six months later. Initially, the change in appearance can be jarring, and during those six weeks the patient’s skin gradually crawls up her face — something “Today” show obsessives might chart if Couric’s new bangs (a common camouflage technique) weren’t in place.

“In her business, and I know her very well,” said Lesesne, “there’s a life span, and there are hundreds of people behind her who want her job. And this is her image she’s protecting.” — Greg Lindsay

dj dangermouse’s the grey album, a remix of the beatles’ white album and jay-z’s the black album is pretty great. i don’t really listen to hiphop much either. you should be able to find it online somewhere – illegal-art.org had it.

i find it humorous that EMI’s cease and desist served little more than PR, creating even more demand for the album. this, you can argue, creates demand for all of jay-z’s albums in turn, since PR is PR. that demand feeds the coffers of the record companies, who pay out the majority of it to their copyright-crazy execs and legions of lawyers (who created the PR firestorm and directly benefit from it through billable hours).

so in a really sick and twisted way, everybody wins.

So, Internet TV is going to be almost-on-demand. And it’s going to be niche programs, almost an exact mirror of the kind of voices we get to see today, thanks to the Internet. This is very good news. It points to an entirely new channel-space: the indie films, public access shows, amateur porn, etc., that never got wide distribution by the big networks or cable operators. And that channel-space is going to need a lot of new navigation and search tools.

I looked at the Akimbo Internet TV press release today, and my first thought was, ‘Wow, the programming on this kinda sucks.’ If you’re expecting Internet TV to be the same as regular TV, you’re going to be disappointed. But why would you? Regular TV sucks, so why not do something different?

Regular TV will go on-demand. The big nets huge investments in their archives, bandwidth and CPU power keep increasing. HDTV’s a beast to transmit and process, but a better encoding format should minimize that. (Besides, for all the hype, there’s going to be very few true HDTV shows in your immediate future.) Once they go on-demand, they can put their entire archives online and create some pretty interesting programming packages or highlights shows (NBC did something like this awhile back on MSNBC).

While that’s a good move, the big nets’ reliance on traditional revenue models and traditional copyright law to protect those revenues, will probably leave little room for real innovation, despite the zero marginal cost involved in distributing programming once it’s digitized. So don’t expect much.

However, we see glimpses today of the mass of content that doesn’t fall under the big nets’ purview. Oscar-nominated short films, foreign animation, foreign TV shows, video clips if every shape and size downloaded off the net. IFilm has built a business off this, as has CinemaNow and others—and let’s face it, the Internet video industry is clearly in its infancy.

The recipe for Internet TV is pretty simple: digital video production and bandwidth are getting easier and cheaper, p2p/swarming download technologies are gaining popularity, RSS/ATOM/XML will allow you to subscribe to feeds that deliver video content, and aggregators/search engines will help you map and navigate these feeds.

I think Internet TV will work best as an extension of regular TV, not a replacement. I hope these companies see that.

Combine Internet/on-demand TV with an integrated broadband wireless network, a big digital TV with HD storage and multiple touchpad LCD screens used for remote control/web surfing/personal video/etc.and you’ve really got something.

Items:
Akimbo Internet TV Set-top Box
Tivo and Strangeberry

David Pogue does an insightful roundup (reg. req.) of 6 hard-drive MP3 players, all still pretenders to the iPod’s throne. I see this, and I ask myself why? For all the hullabaloo, Apple does not have a monopoly on good design.

I think the iPod’s current supremacy presents a very simple challenge for all other manufacturers: dump the DRM. It’s not working, people don’t get it, and it’s keeping you from creating interesting, competitive products.

What’s most interesting about all the hard-drive jukeboxes is that they are ALL implicitly embracing piracy. No one says it, everyone knows it. Jim Griffin, formerly of Geffen’s tech group, said it plainly the other day in the Register:

“It costs $20,000 to fill an iPod from iTunes Music Store. Quite simply, no one looks at a 40 GB iPod and thinks, “it will cost me $20,000 to fill it”. It’s a polite fiction. It’s a looking the other way.”

So according to Apple:
4GB = 1,000 songs (128Kb) = $1,000 in iTunes songs
15GB = 3,700 songs = $3,700
20GB = 5,000 songs = $5,000
40GB =10,000 songs = $10,000

Now, let’s say I’m an above-average US consumer, I am 30 years old and I have a spanking new 20G iPod (you need the dock, remote, etc., so why buy the 15?). What do I do?

The Data
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey 2002, 25-34 year-olds spend $750 on television, radio & sound equipment (in which CDs are counted) on $46,875 in after-tax income. According to the MPAA, the average consumer spent $741 on media in 2002 (est.). These figures jibe pretty well, IMO.

So, using MPAA data, your average consumer spent $5 on music, $10 on home video, and $19 on TV per month in 2002. That’s $60 per year on music. Historically to 1998 (earliest data in the 2002 MPAA report), recorded music expenditures have been pretty flat, between $58-65. Let’s assume $15 average cost of a CD over this same period.

Back to Me
Over the course of 10 years of mature music buying, I have acquired a library of CDs. That’s $600 average, but I’m a fanatic (which is why I’m in the market for an iPod) and I spend 4 times the average consumer ($240/year or 16 CDs). I have $2400 in CDs, say 160 albums.

I am not a perfect consumer, however, and my interest in many of these albums has waned. Also, the advent of digital music has me listening to music on my computer which I sit in front of all day long. Result? I need more new music than in the past. So while I love my CD collection, I have ripped only a portion of it. Half my collection has made it onto my PC, that’s 80 albums and say 880 songs. I am an above-average consumer, and I don’t think 128Kb is sufficient. I like my music in 160Kbps VBR for higher quality. So those 880 songs take up the room of 1100 128Kb songs (I have to buy songs from iTunes Store, 128Kb only).

Ready to Buy
So, the long story short of all this is that I need more music, lots more, and how am I going to get it? My iPod is just over 20% full of old music, and I need more new music than I used to. If I was already buying 4 times average, $2400/16 units per year, and that goes up 25% to 20 units/220 songs (.88 GB), then I’m spending $220/yr at the iTunes Store (again, $60 is the present average).

At the end of the year, my music collection grows from around 4GB to 5GB. I fill my 20GB iPod in just under 18 years. [Given battery life, that’s probably 3 additional iPods I’m going to have to buy.]

If I’m totally average, then my present collection, 100% ripped, is going to be 40 albums/440 songs/1.76GB. If I continue to spend $60/yr on music, that’s 60 songs/240MB. That’s 9 yrs to fill a 4GB mini. [Expect to buy an additional 1 iPod mini.]

Conclusion
Your average consumer probably owns less than 2GB worth of music.
An aficionado probably owns 8GB, but has ripped only 4GB.
Average expenditure is $60/240MB/yr.
A fanatic might spend around 4 times that at $220/880MB/yr.

So, your average consumer plunks down $300-400 for an iPod, and every day they’re staring at several gigs of unused space, while reveling in their ability to listen to their music in more places and ways than before. This I think, shows not only a complicit embrace of piracy by the jukebox manufacturers, but a compelling reason for the advent of all these (not so cheap) 4GB players.

4GB is just not going to beckon for pirated content as strongly as 20GB.

There’s a ton of confusion out there about which DVD formats do what, -R, +R, -RW, +RW, and even -RAM. Pretty much everyone will go on record saying that the whole thing is a ridiculous mess, fueled by greed over license revenues. And they’re all right. The interesting thing however, is that in this format war, everybody wins.

See, when a format war breaks out, it creates a lot of attention and competition. This is good. Then vendors create drives that handle one set of formats, then combo drives that handle all formats for a slightly higher price—and consumers walk away with more choices and perhaps some semblance of a sense of security. What’s bad about that?

The only thing that sucks is that you need to do more research to figure out what to buy. Well, I got that covered.

Pick One
There’s two sets of formats you need to concern yourself with, the – and the +. Forget the RAM, that’s computeronly and essentially comparable to either rewritable format. So, in each -/+ group, there’s an R (recordable) and an RW (rewritable). Do you need a drive that reads both? NO! Pick one or the other, based on your situation.

When you buy a DVD recording drive, buy a few discs to test out on your DVD player and your PC’s DVD-ROM drive. Whatever works is what you need. Any new DVD player is going to play the -/+R discs fine. DVD-R is the most compatible format, with +R a close second.

The RW’s are a different story. Mostly, these will be used as backups, which means they’re usually read on the same drive you burned them on. So, there’s no compatibility issues at all.

My advice? Buy a good quality DVD-R/RW drive (the faster, the better) and some good quality media. Buy the max-speed media your drive can support, for example, 4x, because DVDs take a long time to burn. Super deals on blank discs are usually too good to be true—either the discs suck or they’re 1x speeds. Keep in mind, there’s pirated discs out there labeled faster than they actually are. Burning coasters is so ‘90s.

The multiformat drives? Forget ‘em. If there’s ever any question, a DVD-R will do the job, just like a CD-R.

After reading a NYT story on Cargo and the new crop of men’s shopping magazines, I figured I’d take a gander at their web site. I’m not convinced Cargo is worth it, and apparently, all they could come up with that guys care about is Tech, Style, Cars and Culture. Why not “Couture” and round out the alliteration? You know you want to.

The thing that gets me about this – and maybe it’s just me – is that their mission is about getting you to buy more crap. I don’t need more crap. I have a garage full of shit I don’t use and haven’t gotten around to getting rid of, because well, acquisition is more fun (i admit that). But I just don’t have time to pick out moisturizers. I like to focus on essentially one product category at a time. I do my research, I get obsessive, then I make a bunch of purchases. Afterwards, I have my little recap session, usually over the phone with friends considering the same purchases. I dispell the myths and offer up some hard-won advice. See, it’s about purchasing smartly – gaming the system to at least get back to even footing.

You can’t do that with moisturizers. You buy ‘em, you slather them all over for a week or so, maybe they work, maybe they don’t, and then, if you’re like most every guy in America, you get bored and forget about it. I think most guys’ interest wanes after de-stinkification. There’s no way to beat the odds, to get a great deal, to win.

Since I like electronics, I perused Cargo’s little digicam overview. Summary: it sucked hard. But it is just preview copy, so you can’t really expect much. And that’s why it’s good fodder for sniping. So, without further ado, I present:

My translation of Cargo’s roundup of “The Best 5-Megapixel Digital Cameras.”

The Intro: 3-megapixel cameras are fine, if you don’t mind people thinking you have a small weiner.

#1 (HP Photosmart 935): It’s kinda shitty but it’s cheap, which sorta makes sense. It has a dock, because you’re too clumsy to plug in a cable (also why I own your ass at Street Hoops 2, bitch). Again, it sucks, but you’re a cheap bastard and your imaginary girlfriend knows it.

#2 (Minolta Dimage F300): This one can take pictures straight out of the box, ‘cause you’re a dingleberry and can’t be bothered with reading or charging batteries or even printing out the pictures – (take that all you poindexters). And since your ADD is getting worse, the camera can keep your subject in focus, even when you forget exactly why you’re standing in the bushes outside your neighbor’s house and your pants crotch is strangely cool and damp.

#3 (Sony Cybershot DSC-T1): This camera is so skinny, it’s like really skinny. Seriously, dude, it’s fucking skinny. No skinnier than that … skinnier … skinnier … little more … just … yeah … ehh … yeah, that’s it. See? Told you. It’s got a bitchin’ ass lens, just like the professionals use – ‘cept the pros’ lenses are about 5-6 times as wide, capture tons more light despite the impressive-sounding name, and project onto image sensors that aren’t the size of an eraser head. But it’s like the same, dude. Oh, and there’s no viewfinder.

#4 (Canon Powershot S50): This camera actually looks like a camera. What a dweeb! The pictures are pretty good tho, if you care about that. It does some shit, but who cares? Hey, you want another shooter?

#5 (Contax TVS): Finally, this camera is da bomb. Bling, baby! Why must you own this? One word, son. Titanium. It’s the ultimate jimmy cap for digital crap. It’s super strong and light. No, it’s not gonna protect anything if you drop it. Why? Well, that’s kinda complicated—it’s physics, dude. Inertia and shit. Seriously, don’t worry about it. It’s titanium, it’s bitchin’, that’s all you need to know. It makes your penis look bigger too. Don’t ask how, it just does.

link to quicktime movie.

(via Joi Ito)