Links for 02-20-2009

• Marginal Revolution: *Spin* magazine moves from a five star system to ten - Granularity of ratings is an interesting topic. Sometimes you legitimately want more. However, I think it's also true--as the discussion here goes into--that more granularity often just gives an excuse to not make hard and fast distinctions.
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » We are programmed to be interrupted. - This strikes me as mostly true.
• The Angry Drunk » Scoble Just Doesn’t Get It - Hee hee. "Social Networking is not Marketing; but the inability to grasp that fact is the defining characteristic of the New Media Douchebag. To a NMD like Scoble, every interaction; from posting a Twitter update, to talking to a person in a bar, to uploading a picture of their cat is an opportunity to promote the semi-mythical “personal brand” that they’ve built around themselves. This is something that makes the New Media Douchebags almost tragic figures to me; and is the main reason why I don’t bag on them as much as I could."
• Do You Know Who Owns Trader Joe’s? - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com - Interesting trivia.

Links for 02-19-2009

• Technology Cannot Solve All Problems - "We had it simpler: no one was recording our youthful indiscretions." Amen.
• Chuck's Blog: The Coming Architectural Wars - An EMC view of what Cisco is up to.
• Fixing the PC power adapter cluster-muck | Coop's Corner - CNET News - But, as Coop says, now let's standardize notebook power too.
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Universal charger for phones plan - Yeah!
• Local Advertising Isn't Jumping Online - BusinessWeek - The Web hasn't really embraced locality in any big way. This affects a lot of things going forward.
• HipMojo.com » Content vs. Distribution: The Techies Still Don’t Get It - More or less the other side of the question.
• Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight - O'Reilly Radar - Amusing and good piece about the Hulu/Boxee kerfuffle.
• What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com - Freakonomics on micropayments.
• Poynter Online - NewsPay - I'm skeptical about this. (I worked for Cynthia in a long ago life.)

Links for 02-13-2009

• abovetheclouds.pdf (application/pdf Object) - Some interesting data on cloud economies of scale here.
• Music Recommendation and Discovery in the Long Tail « Music Machinery - Some interesting stuff here but it will take me some time to really digest it.
• Old Code and Old Licenses [on Simon Phipps, SunMink] - This gives a sense that there is very little "just" about "just relicensing" old code.
• The Despair Inc. Blog » Two New Shirts! “1 Random Thing” & “Ignore” (Offer Expires 2/14) - This made my morning.
• How does Leostream still exist? - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com
• In Webworld, How Do You Charge Money for a Flight 1549 Story? « ReJurno - Not sure I see a real answer here. Suggestion seems to be somewhat along the lines of stock photo. Which is a different product (with its own set of problems).
• The New York Times needs an online impresario to help it pay its bills - The problem is the math. It's not if you can make revenue but if you can make enough. 10% of website's unique visitors willing to pay $100 per month? Seems off by order of magnitude plus. "The annual bill for the Times daily news report is above $200 million, according to one recent estimate. If just 10 percent of the website's 20 million unique visitors signed up for TimesPlus – at, say, $100 a year – that would pay for a big chunk of the news, which Executive Editor Keller rightly says comes only through "hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work.""
• Twitter / Cory Doctorow: The fact that people want ... - "The fact that people want something, the fact that it's good, does not mean that its commercially viable. #toc"

Links for 02-11-2009

• Hacker News | You Can’t Sell News by the Slice - Comments give me some food for thought.
• National Geographic Adventure Mag.: 100 Greatest Adventure Books (1-19) - Nice list.
• ManyBooks.net - Free eBooks for your PDA, iPhone, or eBook Reader - A free source for books in many formats. Yes, I'm waiting for my new Kindle.
• peterme.com: Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated - Probably unnecessarily argumentative but this piece does poke at some of Shirky's overreaches wrt ontologies and tags.
• HP On The Cloud: 'The World Is Cleaving In Two' -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek - ""Effectively, the world is cleaving in two," he explained. There's the traditional world of the enterprise data center, which will continue to exist, and there is a new external supply of compute power and services accessible over the Internet. " Contrasting position with other vendors that are trying to dress everything in the cloud mantle.
• Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags - Interesting piece. I always struggle with figuring out how to best keep some vague veneer of order on my digital stuff.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Misreading newspapers - Typically good piece by Nick Carr. I think he's right about micropayments not working but I also concur that Clay Shirky probably overstates the case in general.

Links for 02-10-2009

• Newspapers Are Running Out of Time to Solve the Problem of Content Theft | Black Star Rising - "the newspaper industry is basically responsible for the entire boom in blogging — arguably the biggest revolution in the news media in decades. It’s responsible because the vast majority of bloggers (with the exception of those who have professionalized and begun doing original reporting) write their posts based on the coverage of paid news staffs."
• CollegeHumor Graduates :: Tuned In - TIME.com - "In my opinion, this is a part of a greater shift in entertainment from channels/windows to brands. NBC doesn't just run 90 minutes of SNL within a programming block -- it's a legitimate standalone brand." There's a lot of truth in this comment.
• The Kindle and the End of the End of History - O'Reilly Radar - "To cut to the chase, if you read old books you get a sense for how thin the searchable veneer of the web is on our world." I've been doing some historical research lately for a book I'm working on and this point has really struck me as well.
• AMD at Home -- Online video - A nice listing of online video.
• Op-Ed Contributor - You Can’t Sell News by the Slice - NYTimes.com - "Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on."

Links for 02-09-2009

• Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky - "The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong. "
• Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The difference between FREE and 1 cent? - I'm not convinced, as Don seems to suggest, that a micropayments system that is "simple, fast, and universally accepted" is sufficient to overcome the psychological factors.
• Why Your Startup Shouldn't Copy 37signals or Fog Creek - The argument in this piece essentially reprises the main critique of the book "In Search of Excellence" that enjoyed brief vogue in the 1980s. Successful companies can succeed in diametrically opposed ways.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Isaacson’s pitch for micropayments - The micropayments idea is making the rounds again. I'm not sure what has really changed to now make it viable. (Other than failure of alternative monetization mechanisms.) "When you demand money for access, you’re not only invoking the “mental overhead” of a decision on the reader’s part; you’re effectively seceding from the Web, cutting off the online circulatory system of inbound links, and risking a slow, painful slide into irrelevance."
• The Meaning of Sarah Palin - Interesting essay.
• Drip by drip, Starbucks lost what made it shine -- chicagotribune.com - I've wondered myself whether the fact that "Starbucks is now found in hospitals, nearly every airport and countless corporate cafeterias." (where it's often god-awful) isn't selling out their brand.

Links for 02-04-2009

A bit of a gap here as ma.gnolia.com has suffered a serious meltdown so I've moved back to del.icio.us for my bookmarks. Pretty much all my bookmarks from the period during which I used ma.gnolia.com (approximately the last 8 months) have been posted as links to this blog. I'll see how the company does with data recovery before I invest time in repopulating my stored bookmarks from this blog.

• DIY pinhole for dSLR :: Photocritic photography blog - This may be worth trying. I've been meaning to play with pinholes for, oh, 30+ years and have never gotten around to it.
  
• Journalism.co.uk :: 'Democratic legitimation via the web is not enough', says Clay Shirky - "Shirky says he previously made certain assumptions about the result of what he calls 'crowd wisdom' and its positive impact for democracy. Now he believes that public pressure via the internet could be 'just another implementation layer for special interest groups'."
  
• EarthNC - Nautical Data for a Digital World » Blog Archive » Exploring the Sea Floor with Google Ocean - Overlaying chart data with Google Earth.
  
• Heavyweights of the supercomputing world | News | TechRadar UK - Some good HPC history.