Not My Foleo

Tom Krazit over at CNET has a piece that pretty well summarizes some of the problems that I have with Palm's new Foleo--which is essentially a svelte network computer in a laptop form factor. Although the new not-yet-shipping device has its supporters, the overall chatter has been pretty negative. I hate to pile on, and probably wouldn't, but I'm such a natural customer for this and yet I'm not rally all that interested.

Why am I a natural customer? Well, first of all, I have a Treo 700p, a smartphone that is the intended companion to the Foleo. Second, I am a big fan of Foleo attributes such as small and light. Instant-on too. I used a Jornada 820 for several years for notetaking when I traveled. I only abandoned it when I got a more compact laptop (a Fujitsu P5020) and the lack of wireless networking (and even limited wired networking because of outdated software) became just too limiting. So I get the tradeoffs associated with having something compact and portable; I've consistently tilted in that direction when I've made my device choices.

So why is my initial reaction to the Foleo negative?

Because it's neither fish nor fowl. The Treo is a step function form factor reduction from a laptop (which, of course, brings with it some usability limits). I can pull it out of my pocket to check and respond to email without opening up a "computer." I don't need to carry a bag to transport it. And it gets a full day of battery life or better. In short, it's fundamentally different from a laptop.

This isn’t. It doesn’t have the pocketability of my Treo. At the same time, it’s only incrementally smaller/lighter/faster-to-start than my laptop—while not being able to do lots of things I can do with a laptop. Perhaps if I used a big, high-end “desktop replacement” style of notebook, I’d see this as a more useful intermediate point but as things stand, I really don’t.

A Blast From the Past

The 100 oldest dot-com domains. Many are no longer with us. The three oldest are, perhaps unsurprisingly, out of Cambridge Mass with Symbolics obtaining its domain about a month prior to BB&N (the builders of the first Internet routers) who one might reasonably have expected to hold the earliest.com. And, assuming that MCC.COM is Masscomp Computer Corporation, the top five are all out of Massachusetts. Going down the list, one sees the names of most of the computer companies that existed in the mid-1980s in addition to (mostly) other tech companies of one sort or another. Data General (DG.COM), who I used to work for, is about midway down the list.

 

Via Simon Phipps.

One Thing Netflix Doesn't Do Well

In general, I'm a big fan of Netflix. I'm usually pretty flexible about which movie I watch on a given evening and am happy to choose between what I have checked out from Netflix and what I've purchased and not yet watched. It's certainly not a case of saving money relative to other options. Rather, it's the convenience of sitting down at my computer, listing out what I want to see, and having the rest happen automagically. Over the past few years, I've become of great fan of using the Internet, auto-pay systems, etc. to relegate as many tasks as possible to the "don't have to think about" bin. But back to Netflix.

Another nice thing about Netflix is that if I run across an interesting-looking film on a Website or a Very Short List daily email (very recommended by the way), I can just pop it onto my (long) Netflix queue, for future consideration if nothing else. I was in just such a mode as I was reading an interesting article over on Filmwad called Theatrical Cuts vs Director's Cuts when I was reminded of something that has annoyed me a bit about Netflix in the past. Namely, it often offers just one version of a movie.

To take an example from the article, Alexander Revisited - The Final Cut (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) isn't available from Netflix; only an earlier, apparently out of print version is. There are counterexamples; Netflix offers both cuts of Superman II. However, in my experience, Netflix tends to have just one version of a given film.

I speculate that this decision has more to do with keeping things simple than anything else. After all, Netflix is one of the ultimate "long tail" companies; a few more copies of films popular enough to even merit new, alternative versions would, I assume, be barely a blip in Netflix' DVD inventory. Rather, my guess is that they don't want to risk confusing the average user of their site with film fan minutiae about different director cuts or alternative endings. So, for the most part, they just stock a single version. (As far as I know, Netflix also just stocks the Widescreen version even when a Fullscreen version is also available.)

Does Photojournalism Matter?

In his recent post Elegy for the Photojournalist, Nick Carr writes:

I would agree with Gillmor that this trend [citizen photojournalism] seems inevitable, but I'm not so sanguine about its effects. It's not that I have anything against amateur photographers (being one myself); it's that I think we'll find - are finding already, in fact - that while amateur work may be an adequate economic substitute for professional work, there are things that pros can accomplish that amateurs cannot. We see in the decline of professional photojournalism how the Internet's "abundance" can end up constricting our choices as well as expanding them.

My initial reaction was that Nick had overstated the case. His familiar "Does IT Matter?" has always struck me as a similarly (and, I suspect, somewhat deliberately) overstated argument. The underlying trends are quite real. But the logical extrapolations are a fair bit exaggerated.

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired, has an extensive and thought-provoking comment in which he makes at least a partial counterargument. Among other things, he notes that:

However, while much of what pro photographers once did can be done as well by the greater collective of amateurs, not everything can. Very specific assignments -- a portrait of a famous singer, or the inside of a new designer's home, or a story on elephant trackers -- simply are not going to show up on Flickr. It takes too much coordination, money, and expertise to pull these off.

But the implications of "crowdsourcing" and the changing nature of the news business on photojournalism are, at a minimum, complicated. Kevin goes on to note, among other things, that Flickr (and presumably iStockphoto and the like as well) will become more common for most uses. To a large degree, it will increasingly only be situations where access is controlled for some reason or another (you can't give everyone a photo pass to the Superbowl)--or where a very specific set of images is needed--you need to hire someone, which is to say you need a pro photographer. And, of course, some photographers will through talent or whatever be able to create images consistently recognized as superior--even if the "masses" have similar access to a scene.

Kevin also notes that "The truth is that there were never very many professional make-their-living photographers." In a sense, we've been having this argument for a long time. Life Magazine died recently. But it died before in 1972, prior to which it had essentially defined the category of photojournalism. The competition that time wasn't crowdsourcing. Rather it was the more immediate impact of television news taking the place of a weekly magazine of photographic journalism.

At the end of the day, I'm not (yet) convinced of Nick's argument. There always has been and always will be a tendency for for-profit businesses (especially if those profits are being squeezed) to substitute free, even if it brings the quality down just a bit. And both businesses and individuals have long had to compete with all sorts of free content and with people whose hobby skirts very close to another's profession.

IRIS for Flickr

Bob Brewin's keynote here at JavaOne is San Francisco yesterday was packed with loads of cool demos. For example, a geospatial browser based on NASA's World Wind (using the Java OpenGL API) deservedly received lots of applause. From a personal perspective though, the one that really stood out for me was IRIS, a "rich client" app that uses Java applets to browse and edit photos stored on the Flickr online photo service. There seems to be some roughness around the edges with the login process (try just browsing a user's photos if you have trouble actually logging in) and Sun's servers hosting the project got hammered by the load after the demo. However, the application is just an amazing advance over Flickr's own fairly crude tools such as Flickr Uploader. It uses Java graphics capabilities to full effect to both edit and show the photos in a Flickr album. What's more, the user doesn't have to explicitly download anything.

Congrats to Ken Russell and his co-workers for putting together this very impressive demo.

Best of Science Fiction Film and TV

Many moons ago, I put together a list of my favorite science fiction books. It's a bit long in the tooth at this point; I'll have to update it one of these days. I'm not as hardcore a science fiction fan as I used to be but I still enjoy the genre when the work is quality which, of course, is far less frequently than otherwise.

I mention this because the other day I ran across a pointer to a best-25 of the last 25 years science fiction projects (LA-speak for TV series and films). I don't find most of these things particularly worthy of comment or even the time to read. They're typically either grindingly conventional or just weird. This one (from Entertainment Weekly of all the bizarre places) however was really quite good. It had a few unconventional choices (such as Galaxy Quest) that I might not have thought to put on such a list, but I actually pretty much agree with them. In addition, one of the nice things about the 25-year cutoff for the list was that it excluded various films and TV shows that were inarguably influential but that are perhaps best enjoyed with a degree of "historical perspective."

So, no real disagreements. Just a few quibbles.

On the film side, I'm not a huge fan of E.T. but I appreciate that it was a hugely popular film. And, on the absolutely opposite pole of filmic character, I didn't really buy into the unremitting darkness of last year's Children of Men. But it's clearly a well-made film. I would probably be inclined to include other films instead however. Possibilities that come to mind are Jurassic Park, Minority Report, eXistenZ, The Abyss, and perhaps a superhero double feature of Batman Begins and Spiderman II. (Superman II misses the 25-year cutoff.)

I have even less disagreement on the TV side. I would be inclined to list Star Trek: Deep Space 9--a darker, deeper, and more serialized series in many ways--along with Star Trek: The Next Generation. (A number of the entries group related projects.) And I'd like to find a spot for Babylon 5. The series has its problems. Some of the acting is pretty stiff and the computer graphics are obviously computer graphics. Uncertainties associated with its renewal at various spots also made the final season feel a bit tacked on. But the strong writing, well-developed story arc, and complex backstory made this series worth watching. It does take some work to get into and, at the end of the day, isn't up to the standards that a newer series such as Battlestar Galactica has set so caveat emptor.

In any case, pretty much everything on the list is worth watching. If you're a science fiction fan, check it out.

THE NUMBER and the law

I normally stay away from commenting, linking to, or otherwise getting involved when tsunami-class memes envelop the Internet. I'm talking, of course, about the AACS decryption key and the subsequent takedown notices associated with it. However, I did want to take the time to point to a post that deserves to be at the top of the pile.

09 f9: A Legal Primer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is succinct, readable, and provides a nice overview of the legal landscape associated with this firestorm. It's important because probably 90 percent of what's been posted about this assumes that the takedown notices are about copyright. However, as the EFF explains:

Is the key copyrightable? It doesn't matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.

The EFF also notes that:

The AACS-LA presumably would argue that the key is a "component" or "part" of a "technology" that circumvents AACS. Moreover, AACS-LA would likely argue that the key was "primarily ... produced" to circumvent AACS, that is has no other commercially significant purpose, and that it is being "marketed" for use in a circumvention technology. The takedown letters seem to take the position that both the poster and the hosting provider are engaged in "trafficking."

The AACS-LA will also doubtless point to the DMCA cases brought against 2600 magazine for posting the DeCSS code back in 2000 (EFF was counsel to the defendant). In that case, both the district court and court of appeals concluded that posting DeCSS to a website violated the DMCA.

In other words, you may disagree with the current state of US copyright law as embodied in the DMCA. You may think the the DeCSS (the encryption code for non-high def DVDs)case was wrongly decided. You may think that much of what the content producers do in attempts to protect their intellectual property is stupid and counter-productive. I'd agree with more than a little of that. However, as the EFF explains, the legal effort to quash the publication of this number may be vain but, as a matter of current law, it's probably on reasonable ground.

Which isn't to say that it should be.

Links for 04-17-2007

Sorry for slightly wacky formatting. My script that pulls things off of delicio.us won't seem to pull today's posts for some reason.

• James Governor’s Monkchips » Bloggerzombies: A dream of a security nightmare foretold

Interesting take on Blogger "zombies" by James Governor: "you really don’t want to be in a position in the five to ten year time-frame where everyone blames you for every network security breach, even if its nothing to do with you. Just ask Microsoft."

• Leader's Perspective - Strumpette (PC Mag Considers Edelman Boycott)

The problem with overdoing the transparency.

• O'Reilly Radar > Live Blogging the Expo Day 2 Keynote (Part 2) - Google announcing Power Point feature

Interesting stats here: Japanese is the largest language in the blogosphere with 37% of posts in Japanese. Only .16% of visits to YouTube, .2% of visits to Flickr and 4.59% of visits to Wikipedia are "participation visits". (That actually seems pretty good participation rate for Wikipedia.)

• Web 2.0 Expo: Data on Participatory Web

Now that's Internet time: YouTube went from zero to dominant market leader in just 6 weeks

Links for 04-16-2007

• The Fishbowl: Product Activation Sucks
  I've had a similar complaint about Surfulater, a product I otherwise really like. Neville's always been quick to let me reactivate--no complaints there--but it's still an inconvenience and a concern for long-term support.
  [tags: software]
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Reflections on Complex Systems
  Discussions from the Almaden Institute
  [tags: ibm]
• TinkerX » The Box: Part 2, The Frame
  Interesting follow-up blog on The Washington Post's Joshua Bell story.
  [tags: music,social]
• me + alex quit google. (dodgeball forever!!!!) on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  This probably isn't a first but I haven't seen it before; announcing that you've quit a job on flickr.
  [tags: flickr,google]

Links for 04-13-2007

• The Long Tailpipe - Shai Agassi's Blog: What is ERP
  {You pay for best of breed by moving away from buying software and into building systems.}
  [tags: software]
• Core77 Design Blog
  Harassing the dog with multi-touch.
  [tags: input,humor]
• StorageMojo » Flash’s First Victim?
  Another indication that flash memory is taking over low-end disk drive roles.
  [tags: storage]
• tecosystems » GrandCentral: The Voice One, Not The Web Services One
  Good description of the GrandCentral phone service by Stephen. My concern is that establishing a phone number (or email address) is a fairly serious, long-term commitment.
  [tags: telephony]

Kodak - Winds of Change

According to the person who posted this:

This is a commercial that was produced for internal use. But it has become so popular, especially with employees, that Kodak has released it for external viewing. It demonstrates that Kodak not only understands it's changing business but also has a sense of humor.

It's quite good. The cynic might be inclined to agree with this YouTube comment by luckyblank though:

Kodak's back indeed... abandoning market share, making knee-jerk marketing decisions, and so on, and so on... but they do know how to produce a funny, self-deprecating commercial when the chips are down and money's no object!

via James.

Strings

Om Malik writes in 5 lessons of the Photobucket fiasco: "Free is a tactic, not a business model, and has strings attached to it." (I'm not going to recapitulate the whole bruhaha here, but basically MySpace blocked Photobucket videos that had embedded ads.)

This is just another aspect of the "free API problem" that I wrote about last week and discussed in more detail in the context of January's Mashup Camp at MIT. Reliance on the good will of for-profit corporations is a dangerous page in anyone's business plan. If you're an arts program or a local theatre, perhaps the realities of the market are that you have to depend on the generosity of civic-minded business sponsors. But I sure wouldn't want to sell a business plan to a VC that rested on the hope that Rupert Murdoch's minions might not notice me.

Om Malik's other "rules":

Don’t depend too much on one partner, especially one you don’t have a formal relationship with. Or as one smart commentator writes, “One line of code from that 3rd party literally puts these guys out of business.”

1. If you are going to depend on one partner, don’t make waves. Stay under the radar. I am sure bragging in Fortune didn’t help Photobucket’s case.
2. Don’t lose sight of your own mantra. Photobucket said all along it was just a service provider, and didn’t care about page views on its own site. How it was going to scale and build its revenues, based on that model, is a tough question Photobucket didn’t ask itself in the early days.
3. Pay to play and ensure longevity. Remember, even Google had to pay MySpace, and you the start-up are not that special.
4. Free is a tactic, not a business model, and has strings attached to it.

[UPDATE: The facts in this particular case seem to be "fluid," but that doesn't matter for any of the basic principles involved.]

The Perils of Free APIs

HipMojo.com has an interesting post that discusses the perils of depending on a lot of the free APIs out there from the likes of Amazon.

What Alexaholic, Fraxlk, Crappo and Deflinger have proven is that only a delusional sucker would build an application on a publicly traded corporation’s API and expect to reap commercial success.  In other words, if and when you wish to use a company’s API, understand that it’s a short-lived, double-edged solution.  It’s a hobby.  If you don’t see that from Day 1, get out of the business landscape because you will regret the time and energy you spent on your project.

This is exactly the sort of thing that a bunch of us were discussing back in January at Mashup Camp as I discussed in this post of mine at the time.

if you’re serious about building a business on a mapping mashup, “free” services may not be the way to go. At the least, you should have contingency plans in place to transition to a for-fee service either within the API provider or elsewhere. Providing quality of service guarantees likely requires having backup API providers where possible in any case.

Free is nice to play around with. But if you're going to build a business (or even invest a substantial amount of time to develop), it's pretty darn risky to depend on the goodwill of a commercial entity who probably hasn't even published any definitive terms of service around their APIs.

The Format Wars c. 2007

I confess to finding it really hard to understand the thought processes that allowed us to reach the current state of affairs in high-def DVD. Yes, I know a lot of the history and all that but the current impasse is just so destructive to everyone involved. I don't really buy the thought that the format will be made irrelevant by movie downloads (too complicated, too relatively pricey). However, I have no doubts that very little is happening on the high-def front because consumers don't want to invest in a format that could end up the loser. I suspect, at the end of the day, it will take dual-format readers/writers to make the issue largely irrelevant as with DVD+ and DVD-.
But forget the anecdotal take on the situation. Here's real data from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings from the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: How important is renting HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, the two new high-definition disc formats, for Netflix?
Hastings: Tragically small. We have all the titles on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They're running neck-and-neck, but the total volume is less than 1% of our volume. Consumers want high-def, but the perception of a format war is freezing consumers out. Until that perception stops, very few consumers will try the new high-def discs.

via Hacking NetFlix.

Lasting Appeals

Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune brings us some unexpected statistics from Netflix that show less-watched and less-awarded films now beating out better-known ones for renters and buyers.

“Box office success doesn’t mean it’s going to have a lasting critical appeal, and even an Academy Award is no guarantee,” said Patricia King Hanson, executive editor of the American Film Institute’s Catalog of Feature Films. “Some of the films that are going to be very high on the all-time greatest lists are likely to never have won an Academy Award.”

As both the article and some of the commenters on Hacking Netflix note, there are a number of possible explanations for this data. More people may have seen the blockbusters in the theatres and now are catching up on the "smaller" movies via rental. Or they tend to buy the DVDs of big-name popular films down at Best Buy. Some popular movies, e.g. The Sixth Sense, don't lend themselves as well to repeat viewing as others.
I think there's probably some validity to those explanations. I'm a Netflix subscriber but I picked up The Departed at loss-leader pricing when it came out. So there's one data point (i.e. anecdote) in favor of the counter-explanations.
On the other hand, there are more than a few cases where Oscar winners have proven to be ephemeral favorites compared to some of the also-rans. This piece from The Guardian entitled "Oscar's Greatest Crimes" recaps some of the worst offenses. My all-time vote goes to Apocalypse Now's loss to Kramer vs. Kramer. Whatever the former's flaws it remains a well-admired film whereas Kramer vs. Kramer set a high-water mark for ordinariness (which only lasted a year before the aptly-named Ordinary People eclipsed it.)

Getting Power Right

One wouldn't think at this point in history that getting power outlets right would be such an all-defeating challenge for hotels. Especially, brand-spanking new hotels on the Boston waterfront right next door to the almost equally new convention center. One wouldn't think.
They tried, mind you. There are a couple of sockets thoughtfully provided in the desk lamp so that the usual exercise of crawling around under the desk is avoided. So a "B," at any rate for effort. However, as I've written before, it's execution that's today's thing. The concept by itself doesn't cut it.
And, you see, someone then thought it would be smart to plug said light into a switched outlet which, in the way of such things, means that the power to the sockets is turned off along with the light when one goes to sleep for the night. Leaving no small number of analysts staying at said hotel powerless laptops in the morning. Might want to rethink that. And the clam chowder had to be heated up at their high concept restaurant too.

The Single

This is one of the best summaries that I've read about the current situation in the music business from James Robertson's Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants:

The music industry reaction to this is that digital sales are both salvation and damnation. They would like to translate the business model that's been in use for CD's and LP's onto the new world, but what's actually happening is a return to the 50's and 60's - the single is back.

This bothers both executives and artists. Artists have become used to the idea of producing an entire album as an artistic "statement", and executives have gotten used to the revenue stream produced by full album sales. iTunes threw a gear into that set of wheels, and they are still in denial over it. In a very real sense, the DRM fight is a symptom of the larger problem - the unwillingness to accept the change in business conditions.

Links for 03-15-07

• Michelle Dennedy's Weblog : Weblog
  {Secrecy is not realistic nor particularly desirable-- never was except for rare breeds of hermetic cultures, but privacy-- the ability to maintain and control value for various persona elements-- is. Context & balance are king here.}
  [tags: security]
• DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
  Eye-opening article about chaos and conflicts over at Gentoo. Via Stephen.
  [tags: linux]
• Google Operating System: The Creator of the First Web Search Engine Works at Google
  {in June 1993 there were 130 web sites}
  [tags: search]
• GigaOM » Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model
  {That’s the key to having a business: getting paid, not whether you offer free samples in the morning newspaper to convince people your shampoo smells really great.}
  [tags: web2.0,business]
• An Unlimited Limit
  {It's become completely clear that Comcast doesn't actually offer unlimited bandwidth - and that fact isn't really the problem. The problem is that they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth.}
  [tags: networks]
• A VC: My Blackberry's Atwitter
  I don't get twitter either.
  [tags: social]

Links for 03-12-07

• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Discovering Your Own Productivity Profile «
  I likewise get a bit tired of the endless breathlessness around GTD (even if some of the individual concepts I find useful).
  [tags: organization]
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Beyond the Ivory Tower
  Interesting reflection by Irving about an article from The Economist about the evolution of corporate R&D.
  [tags: science,ibm]
• Presentation Zen: Signal-to-Noise ratio and the elimination of the nonessential
  {The Google website is often mentioned when talking about sites that have cut everything visually except that which is essential. Yet there is emotion there too; the logo is large, colorful, and even "playfully seasonal."}
  [tags: design]
• O'Reilly Radar > Different Approaches to the Semantic Web
  {The semantic web is definitely coming. But it's coming through different mechanisms, I think, than the Semantic Web pioneers imagined.} Note the small "s".
  [tags: web2.0,metadata]

DMD Cameras

As I've complained about previously, there's a dearth of a certain class of digital camera. When I bought my Canon G5 a couple of years back it seemed like a step in the right direction:

the Gx is essentially the high-end of Canon's more-or-less pocketable digital camera. A large pocket to be sure. It also has a fair degree of manual control, a moderately fast lens, and a usable (if not exactly great) viewfinder. It also supports RAW mode, a camera-specific storage format that preserves the maximum amount of image data for later processing in the PC. It's ubiquitous is digital SLRs and the like but far less common in lower-end models. I think of my G5 as occupying a tier between true "point and shoots" and SLRs--albeit without fully allowing a traditional "rangefinder" level of control. Which is one of the things I like about it and, frankly, is a category of camera that largely disappeared in latter film days.

However, the G7 represented a step backwards in some ways (e.g. removing RAW support and the G5's sometimes handily-pivoting LCD display) and didn't make any real advance in any of the areas where it was still lacking from my perspective--shutter lag, slow focus, narrow f-stop range (albeit with a relatively fast lens), so-so optical viewfinder (at least it has one). Instead, the G7's advances were the ones that look good on spec sheets to the unsophisticated--especially the overexposed megapixels.

Just to be clear, I'm not looking for a Leica here. I'm looking for a moderately-priced, modern analog to film camera like the Olympus XA, Canon QL-17, or Yashica T4. (One can argue about the exact specs, but that's the general category. Reasonable levels of manual control, pocketable at at least some level, and not overly complicated.) I own a couple Olympus XA's and a Canon--although I haven't used them in a while and their light meters aren't too accurate any longer. These would typically be second cameras for folks who are serious about photography--probably SLR users for the most part.

I'd been meaning to write about this for a while, but I got stimulated by this post by Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer in which he lists 8 "Digital Cameras We Need." I confess to not seeing anything on the list that I'd rush out immediately and buy until he hits the top slot:

1. The DMD. I've ranted about this before, so enuff said. I'm amazed—really, honestly amazed—that we still don't have this. It's so obvious, so crucial for street photography and some kinds of art photography, and it would require absolutely zero in the way of new technical development. It could easily be put together with existing technology. Whoever does it first will instantly create a new digital camera category. I hereby offer my services, free, to any camera company that wants me to spec out what it ought to be. Just because it hasn't existed heretofore doesn't mean it shouldn't—to paraphrase Al Gore, all that's needed is the will to do it, and that's a renewable resource.

Mike points over a longer article on the subject that he wrote over at the Luminous Landscape. I might argue some of the specifics--e.g. the lack of a zoom lens--depending upon the tradeoffs involved. (Likewise, on camera flash is pretty useless as the main light source, but can be handy for fill.) And might wonder if we couldn't even have an option to focus manually. (Retro is in, you know.) But I fully endorse his bottom line which he summarizes as: "Bazillion digital point-and-shoots currently inundating market: tiny sensor, slow zoom. DMD: large sensor, fast prime."

Read the whole thing.

Links for 03-06-07

• John Nack on Adobe: DNG notes: Compatibility, Color, Hasselblad
  The camera makers aren't big on it, but I have to believe DNG will take off some day. Adobe's John Nack has some deeper details on the format here.
  [tags: photo]
• Machine Shop » The Only Reason to Use Real Rhapsody
  I've been meaning to post about Yottamusic for a while but haven't gotten around to it. There's a good description and shots here. via Stephen.
  [tags: music]
• O'Reilly Radar > Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam
  "Every Internet application that demonstrates the value of collective intelligence is eventually met with sophisticated attempts to dump garbage. Will any sufficiently open social network be met by ever more anti-social behavior until it eventually collap
  [tags: social,email]
• GigaOM » Why RIAA is Silent on XM-Sirius
  Good rundown on payment issues around reproduction and performance rights. “On the Internet, there is no difference between a stream and a download – the only difference is whether the bucket is emptied after the play occurs,”
  [tags: music,legal]

Links for 03-05-07

• James Duncan Davidson: Photoshop Umbrella Branding Continues
  "Placing the Photoshop brand onto Lightroom is like calling lemon cookies something like "Coke Crunchies". And putting the Photoshop brand onto a web-based too like like calling a pizza something like "Coke Cheesy"." Agreed.
  [tags: adobe]
• On Black
  Great photo sequence of lunar eclipse by Jonas Thomen. (Unfortunately, it was cloudy on the East coast.) via John Nack.
  [tags: photography,science]
• Couchville.com
  Looks to be about the nicest job out there of an Ajax-y TV guide grid. From Snapstream, which has about the nicest PC DVR software out there.
  [tags: video]
• Many Eyes
  Social visualization from IBM. Not sure what I'd use it for, but interesting. (This is similar to Swivel.)
  [tags: design,charting,IBM,visualization]
• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Will Digital Revenues Really Ever be Incremental?
  "No self-respecting media executive will want to forego any part of the $75B TV advertising market for the potential of online video advertising. It’s a ludicrous assertion to think that 'all media is digital and it will be multi-platform overnight.'"
  [tags: video]
• tecosystems » What is Open Source? The Q&A
  A good pragmatic (which is to say useful) discussion of what Open Source means by my "old" (sorry, inside joke) colleague Stephen O'Grady.
  [tags: opensource]
• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Adobe Adapting to the Times
  "... for a company that is worth $20B to come out and offer free services for a one-time core, money-making application, it sends a message that it sees a major loss of pricing power and needs to react."
  
  
  [tags: adobe]
• 5 Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data
  Rundown of services to simplify mashup creation. FWIW, I looked at the screen scraping services for a recent project and couldn't get the results I needed so I wrote my own PHP code.
  [tags: web2.0]

Outside Magazine Podcast on Mt. Hood Climbers

I normally stick close to topics at least peripherally connected to IT here. This one probably couldn't be more far afield. However, as I do some mountaineering, this topic is of interest to me and this seemed a particularly good take on the media frenzy around the climbers lost on Mt. Hood last December.

The bottom line is that this event clearly had a very sad outcome but:

• Climbing in winter is not some whacked-out activity
• These climbers were very experienced but (presumably) something unexpected happened
• Accidents happen
• Oregon Search and Rescue deals with more mushroom pickers than climbers

I don't see the text of Outside Magazine Senior editor Dennis Lewon's column online but there is a podcast. Well worth listening to.

Customized Content Presentation and fishWrap

One of the little Web 2.0 mini-trends going on is the rise of the customized portal. It's not new, of course; you've long been able to customize your My Yahoo! page for example. But there's been a fair explosion of AJAX-y and Flash-y (i.e. highly interactive) sites such as Netvibes and Pageflakes. (There are many others as well.)

But my interest here isn't in discussing these myriad sites per se. Rather, it's to ponder a bit the question of how content gets presented and how much control we exert (and want to exert) over that presentation. I mention these new portals because they very clearly combine layout with content. They're not just a customized choice of information source. They're also a customized presentation of that information. Contrast this, for example, with the typical RSS reader which deliberately extracts the content from its design context.

All this was brought to mind by a recent discussion with Pascal Chenais over at his fishWrap blog. The name of the blog comes from an early MIT Media Lab project in personalized news delivery. As Pascal describes it:

When fishWrap was created it was meant to help incoming MIT freshmen transition into their new community. MIT has a residence orientation period in which the freshmen acquaint themselves to the campus and pick where they will live. In the early 90s this involved non-stop activities in which the dorms and independent living groups would put their best face forward. MIT kept track of where the freshmen traveled through a system called Clearing House. For the freshmen this is a particularly intense and confusing period. To help them with this process a group of freshmen in my Newspapers of the Future seminar proposed using the Media Lab’s personalized news systems to prepare a personalized editions for each of the incoming freshman. Each edition would reflect the things they had experienced on campus the previous day using data from Clearing House and news from their home town. Moreover, the system could include news about majors they were interested and current events. These personalized hardcopy editions were to be delivered to the freshmen each morning to their temporary residence.

Apropos the subject at hand, fishWrap included some very innovative work around optimizing layouts. Pascal notes that the intended use of fishWrap pretty much demanded a physical implementation. After all, there weren't a whole lot of WiFi hotspots in 1993! In addition, as he notes in this follow-up post, even leaving aside that practical detail, the early Web just wasn't a very design-oriented place. Especially before the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (which made it easier to create a consistent look to pair with HTML content), many designers were less than fond of presenting work through the lens of HTML--preferring technologies such as PDF that gave them, the content creator, control over the ultimate output.

It's unclear to me that, for the most part, we will ever be nearly as focused on layout and presentation for our daily, hourly, and minutely information streams as a print newspaper--much less a stylish magazine such as Wired. However, as the tools improve, it does seem more than conceivable that we'll improve on raw data feeds--if only to better our mental filtering, comprehension, retention, and organization.

Which is what good design is supposed to do anyway.

Links for 03-02-07

• ColorJack: Sphere
  Very nice tool for selecting a gamut of complementary colors. via Lifehacker
  [tags: design]
• Chocolate Lounge - Taza Chocolate
  Central Square certainly has changed.
  [tags: food,cambridge]
• Graphics.com: The shared resource for creative design
  Good overview of color theory if you need a refresher.
  [tags: photography]
• How Photoshop Started - Video Interview With John Knoll | The Photoshop Blog | PhotoshopSupport.com
  Video interview with one of the creators of Adobe Photoshop.
  [tags: photoshop,adobe]
• The war over your start page « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
  Some of these new entrants are genuinely interesting, but they have a lot of sheer inertia on the part of users to overcome.
  [tags: portal]
• Inside Lightroom
  Another good source for Adobe Lightroom information, including presets.
  [tags: lightroom]