Photo: New Orleans, LA, October 2000

State of the Blogging Union

January 31, 2003 | Science

It's all the rage today: Guardian Unlimited's New biz on the blog article pretty much sums up where we are in the world of blogs.

A good week

January 30, 2003 | Life

A very successful week. We pushed a new release of our powerful and pragmatic CMS out the door Monday. (The product is better than the marketing, at this point.) Relased a new revision of a client website, long stewing in the committee. And had a full day on-site at another client today. Tomorrow, a day off for R&R.

Dick's Pick

January 29, 2003 | Arts & Culture

An "Interview From the Vault" with David Lemieux, official Grateful Dead archivist, from August 2001.

Printing organs

January 24, 2003 | Science

I worked as an engineer at Spectra from 1988 through 1990 developing ink-jet printing technology for high-end color office printers. Now, New Scientist reports on experiments to "print" living tissue using ink-jet technology. That's some pretty advanced technology.

Persuasive websites

January 23, 2003 | Business & Commerce

GUUUI - Business-centred design - Designing web sites that sell

George Orwell: Notes on Nationalism

January 14, 2003 | Governance

May 1945: George Orwell: "Notes on Nationalism".

Imagination personified

January 14, 2003 | Life

I'm not sure why this article about Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson is so interesting, but it is. Here's a great interview in MP3 format. (via Scripting News).

SMBmeta and spatial web searching

January 12, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Dave Winer points to Trellix's introduction of the SMBmeta file format. From their introduction: One of the major drivers of the US economy are small and medium businesses (which we'll call "SMBs"). [....] This document describes a data file format and associated services designed to help those businesses in their use of the Internet. The file format is also available.

Comments from David Weinberger, Paolo Valdemarin and JY.

I've thought about the business issues surrounding spatial searching and how the web could help small, local buinesses for a long time. In addition, I've worked with a couple of skilled engineers who are deeply experienced with developing spatial searching within relational databases, and have discussed this idea with several other engineers who have worked on related services. It turns out that up here near Dartmouth College, Hanover and Lebanon, NH are something of a hotbed in geo-spatial data, with Geographic Data Technology (Polk), Vicinity (Microsoft), Etak (TeleAtlas) and others all located here.

At the base level, you want to be able to go to Google and say, Drycleaners near me, or, Resturants open for lunch. This is a handy way for the locals to learn about new businesses, as well as relocated people to get oriented. Obviously business travellers are always trying to find out about products and services when they are on the road (because you can only eat at so many TGIFriday's before you want to jump off a bridge).

At the second level, what if you want to find a new car mechanic? First, a listing of, Mechanics within 20 miles might be nice. But then it would also be handy to have an ePinions-like service to get local customer reviews: These guys are great, Those guys are slow, That one mechanic they have really knows how to debug funky engine noises.

Finally, after all that is in place, we can have the infrastructure for consumers to post their desired-service lists -- a file that would help marketers target people who actually might be interested in what they're selling. This file would say, Talk to me about what you offer in X area, and I'll listen. This is a bit of an improvement over the existing carpet-bombing techniques of the direct marketing community.

The Yellow Pages are a very profitable business, and this scheme could virtually replace it, with many value-added network-effect features unavailable in print. I'd be interested in working on this if the opportunity arose.

Good trick, once

January 11, 2003 | Life

Lately we've received a number of telephone answering machine recordings that say, "Hello? Hello? ... Hello?" Then a hangup. It sounded as if we had called _her_ when this person had called us. We wondered if it was a wrong number, or some weird network switch confusion.

Well Occam's razor needs application: It's a new telemarketing technique to get past call screening. Okay, they got us once, but we'll never pick up on that one again. Bye bye.

Snow, and more snow

January 9, 2003 | Nature & Environment

Since we're getting even more snow today, and every day this week, it seems appropriate to point to this list of Inuit words for snow. Thanks Halley!

Apple keynote at MacWorld

January 7, 2003 | Science

Lots of news from MacWorld today:

Also, FireWire 800, integrated Bluetooth on the new portables, automatic backlit keyboard with ambient light sensors (!), Airport Extreme with 802.11g and 54Mbps (backward compatible with all existing Airport and 803.11b gear).

This is all much more than I expected. The PowerBooks look great. Safari will be great after some v1.0 shakedown. Not sure about Keynote (at $99), but there's not much to love about PPT, so could be good.

Five senses of shopping

January 6, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Douglas Ruskoff wrote a well-researched riff on shopping mall design for CBS Sunday Morning in December. "The science of retail design ñ what the industry calls ëatmosphericsí ñ was born by accident in 1956, with the very first shopping mall, ìthe southdale centerî in Minnesota. This realization of an ìindoor main streetî provided laboratory conditions for the study and influence of shopping behavior."

Origami pinhole camera

January 6, 2003 | Arts & Culture

Amazing: "To simplify these cameras as much as possible I made them out of the 11x14 inch photo-paper itself. There is no film in the camera because the camera is the film. Like a salad bowl made of lettuce leaf, and consumed with the meal, the camera doesn't exist after its utility is fulfilled. There is no machine. It is more of an arrangement than a thing."

If price != transparent, then

January 6, 2003 | Business & Commerce

So, my online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is up for renewal. I don't visit their site much, getting most of my commodity news elsewhere, and getting OpEd news via blogs and NetNewsWire. The renewal price was $79, and I decided that it wasn't worth it to me. Maybe if they had RSS feeds, but I'm rarely surfing their site.

It turns out that you can't cancel online, you can only renew online. So I called customer service and when asked "Why?" I said, Not really worth it at $79. The rep immediately said, "Well, okay, what if I renew you at last year's rate?" And what was that rate? "$59." Oh.

I said, I guess it's worth more like $40 to me. (The print subscriber's online rate is $39.) He said, "Well, how about if I extend you two months free, so you can think about it? I don't want you to have to make any quick decisions, and if you decide to extend we'll do it at last year's rate." Okay, thanks.

They're going for a 34% price increase in this challenging economy, on something so cheap to distribute that they're willing to give me 17% of the year free to decide. And unless I was a very dilligent customer, I wouldn't have noticed the major price increase.

Spread the word.

Phish cracks the online music code

January 6, 2003 | Arts & Culture

Phish has the right idea for online music downloads.

  1. Concerts available within 48 hours of their performance. Plus a continuously expanding archive of earlier recordings.
  2. Reasonably-priced MP3 (~$10) and high-quality SHN (~$13) files. Price varies by length of show.
  3. Clear, easy ordering system and reliable downloads. Reports are upwards of 145K/sec on cable modems. Compare this to the usual Internet music download: I spent two weeks grabbing bits and pieces of a 1GB Other Ones concert from Furthernet. Further.net is a great distributed service network, but it's not a paid service, so users will never have the incentive to try to make the service more reliable than it already is.
  4. No artificial platform restrictions, i.e. Mac OS and Mac OS X work fine, as does Linux, or whatever.
  5. As they say in the FAQ, "shackle-free unencrypted files". Combined with a sensible concert taping policy you have the formula for financial success. Connect with the fans directly and use the recording company contract for distribution, not promotion.

If only the Grateful Dead would take this approach. Yes, I'd still buy the Dick's Picks CD releases, but I want much more availability, like shows I've seen that are unlikely to make it to mainstream distribution. They should have started this years ago. And, while I'm carping about the Dead, time for a new website design guys!

Department of useful government

January 5, 2003 | Governance

Mitch Ratcliffe posted a pointer to a fantastically deep report on demographic trends produced by the US Census Department. Lots of good data and analysis in there.

Beck - Sea Change

January 4, 2003 | Arts & Culture

May I just say, again, how marvelous the new Beck album is? I can't get over it. Beautiful acoustic guitar, symphonic string arrangements, weird electronic noises, perfect moody songwriting. I just play it over and over. And when it's not on the stereo, I sing it to myself.

I hadn't noticed this before, but he has an official limited edition iPod available.

The future of music playback

January 3, 2003 | Science

Reports from The Well are that this Ethernet MP3 player is a great thing. I don't doubt it - looks fantastic. Listen to your digital music collection (real-time, random-access) on your stereo (good sound quality, comfy chairs), with a typical IR remote or browser-based control. Works with iTunes and the usual Windows stuff. No Ethernet jack at your stereo? Add a tiny $100 Ethernet to WiFi bridge and keep your music server in the basement.

What if I saved _all_ my stubs?

January 2, 2003 | Arts & Culture

Very cool: "Ticket stubs are everywhere, one of the many receipts in our daily lives - but we all save some from time to time. The Ticketstub project is a place where you can upload scanned images of your saved stubs, and tell a story about that night, that concert, that movie, what happened on that date; basically, ask youself why you saved the stub as a reminder."