- Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss — transcript of a thoughtful music industry insider considering the effect of the net on the business. The other problem? I’ve been expecting for years now to see aggregate revenue flowing to artist increase. Disintermediation promised us this. It hasn’t happened. Everywhere I look artists seem to be working more for less money. And every time I come across aggregate data that is positive it turns out to have a black cloud inside. Example: Touring revenues up since 1999. Because more bands are touring, staying on the road longer and playing for fewer people. Surely you all can see Malthusian trajectory?
- Kottke on Quarterly — I eyed TED’s book club and thought “hmm, interesting business model: you like my taste, sign up and I’ll send you things”. Quarterly is a “my taste as a service” service. (via Sacha Judd)
- Pipe Viewer — clever little command-line utility to show progress of pipes.
- Sheryl Sandberg’s HBS Class Day Speech — two things stood out, beyond the honesty of the talk: If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat (that’s her quoting Eric Schmidt) and [careers] are not a ladder; they’re a jungle gym (her quoting Facebook’s head of HR). (via Sacha Judd)
"media" entries
NBC #Fail
Choking the Olympic spirit for profit.
I’m violating my first rule. I’m writing angry. But…
I love the olympics. I love sport. And the olympics, still, despite it all, seem to me an incredible distillation of sport’s dedication, intensity, joy, humanity, and drama. Whether it’s the higher order game theory playing out in the biking peloton, the slowly evolving drama of the marathon, the sheer primal athleticism of weighlifting, or the H2O-immersed VO2max test that is the 400m individual medley, I just can’t get enough of it.
But NBC insists on forcibly reminding me at every turn that the Games are also something else. Like college football players, the athletes are mere “content” in a much bigger game. In this case what amounts to a two week utopian experiment in Nationalist Corporatism. A frenzy of metal counts, extractive economics and mind numbing cultural absurdity – where countries are reduced during their introduction to an association with their biggest historical monster.
But you had to wait to hear it because Costa’s idiotic commentary was held on tape until NBC’s $1B worth of sponsors were ready for you to see it: PrimeMonetizationTime. So, a giant fence surrounds the proceedings, put there by the IOC, NBC, and Akamai, where even tweets are controlled and the biggest event on the planet is dribbled out in a maddening temporal shift. But even then we had to endure systematic editing to make sure no one in the Kingdom of TeaMerica might be offended by anything, or bored. It doesn’t have to be this way. This was such a lost opportunity to make it great.
I still haven’t seen the opening ceremony from Beijing (same reasons, same perp), and I missed the one last night too. Well, I didn’t miss it exactly. When my tweet stream started lighting up late yesterday afternoon with visions of giant babies and Voldemort and flying bicycles and all the other British trippiness I ran to my TV. Work can wait, I want to see this! But I was blocked at every turn. Like an Iranian dissident I finally managed via a secret proxy to get a glimpse. But it lasted only a moment before some well-compensated gatekeeper sussed it out and blocked my subversive stream. I couldn’t deal with the asymmetry of the commentary without the thing, so I just shut down Twitter.
Four short links: 25 May 2012
Music Industry, Subscribe to Me, Pipe Progress, and Modern Careers
Visualization of the Week: Avengers Assemble
Jer Thorp visualizes the history of "The Avengers."
In this week's visualization, The New York Times' data artist Jer Thorp visualizes the appearances of "The Avengers" in the comic book series.
A brief history of data journalism
Key milestones in data journalism's development.
In this excerpt from "The Data Journalism Handbook," Liliana Bounegru connects the dots between the earliest forms of data journalism, the rise of computer-assisted reporting, and today's data-driven media efforts.
Top Stories: March 19-23, 2012
Google Maps alternatives, inside Dart, and the upside of offline.
This week on O'Reilly: StreetEasy's Sebastian Delmont explained why his team left Google Maps behind, we looked at the ins and outs of the Dart programming platform, and Jim Stogdill considered the alternatives to always-on living.
My Paleo Media Diet
Turning off, opting out, and disconnecting to save my brain for the things I really want to use it for.
Jim Stogdill is tired of running on the info treadmill, so he's changing his media habits. His new approach: "Where I can, adapt to my surroundings, where I can't, adapt my surroundings to me."
Piracy is not a pricing signal
Lost sales from illegal downloads are lost because of convenience, not price.
The inconvenience of current downloads and streams are not a technology problem, they're a business problem. And rights holders perpetuate the piracy "problem" by not giving consumers the convenience that piracy does.
Four short links: 8 March 2012
Compete on Convenience, Minimal Viable Operating System, Awesome Font, Collaboration Integration
- Add Torrent Links to IMDB (Userscripts) — a glimpse at what the Internet could look like: from the site you research movies on, with one click you could then launch the download. If only the company that ran the movie research site had rights to the OneClick patent and the ability to offer movies for download. Oh wait, those aren’t the barriers. If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!
- JeOS — I hadn’t heard this term before: Just Enough Operating System. Take a standard distro, and strip it down to the bare essentials that you actually need.
- Font Awesome — a font with a zillion pictograms and icons. “An iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap”.
- Collabograte — a collection of integration recipes for collaboration tools so you aren’t broken on the “how do I get this thing set up with LDAP auth?” wheel which others have reinvented with their nose to the mixed metaphor grindstone. (via Kartik Subbarao)
Four short links: 22 February 2012
Hashbangs URLs Must Go, Cheap DNA Sequencing, Content Detection Fail, and Ubuntu on Android
- Hashbangs (Dan Webb) — why those terrible #! URLs are a bad idea. Looks like they’re going away with pushState coming to browsers. As Dan says, “URLs are forever”. Let’s get them right. I’m fascinated by how URLs are changing meaning and use over time.
- DNA Sequencing on a USB Stick — this has been going the rounds, but I think there’s a time coming when scientific data generation can be crowdsourced. I care about a particular type of fish, but it hasn’t been sequenced. Can I catch one, sequence it, upload the sequence, and get insight into the animal by automated detection of similar genes from other animals? Let those who care do the boring work, let scientists work on the analysis.
- The US Recording Industry is Stealing From Me (Bruce Simpson) — automated content detection at YouTube has created an industry of parasites who claim copyright infringement and then receive royalties from the ads shown on the allegedly infringing videos.
- Ubuntu on Android — carry a desktop in your pocket? Tempting. It’s for manufacturers, not something you install on existing handsets, which I’m sure will create tension with the open source world at Ubuntu’s heart. Then again, creating tension with the open source world at Ubuntu’s heart does seem to be Canonical’s core competency ….
Four short links: 21 February 2012
jQuery Performance, George Dyson, VLC 2.0, and Power Laws
- Stop Paying Your jQuery Tax (Sam Saffron) — performance advice for front-end developers. The faster your site responds, the more customers will use it.
- George Dyson Interviewed (Wired) — a different perspective on computing, worth reading.
- VLC 2.0.0 — VLC lets you bypass manufacturers’ designed-in brokenness so your computer can play media. Glad to see it still being actively developed.
- Critical Truth About Power Laws (Science Magazine) — Although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law behavior to be scientifically useful (see the figure). Indeed, even most statistically “successful” calculations of power laws offer little more than anecdotal value. (no PDF available unless you pay, because that’s how great science works)