Obfuscatory marketing

I'm disappointed by Ed Felten's 15 line p2p app.
Ed is a great communicator, and a smart programmer, but in this case he has abdicated explanation for a sound-bite.
He could have written his minimal p2p app clearly and used it to teach, but instead he fell into the Obfuscator's trap of optimising for lines of code, to make a marketing splash.

Peer to Peer communication is a natural part of programming these days; writing code that looks as cryptic as that fails to make the point clearly.

Squared Circle

Flickr's Squared circle tag. It's pretty, but there is this odd feeling that there is a joke here I'm not in on.

charming leakage

When I saw Suw's announcement that she and Chris had met and were in love I was happy for them, but not surprised. Sure, I had seen them talk in chatrooms, but the real clue was some information leakage from iChat AV.
It's presence information shows you when people are online, and when they are available for audio and video chat. So for a couple of weeks beforehand, I would glance at my buddy list and whenever Suw & Chris were online, they'd both have their A/V icons dimmed, as they were together, video-chatting. Congratulations.

Ocean's boiled to order

I was asked last night where the phrase 'Boil the Ocean' came from in Tantek and my presentation on lossless xhtml - Can your website be your API?

I wasn't sure, so I searched a bit, and found this:

Will Rogers’ response to a reporter’s question on how he would deal with the Nazi U-boats:
"Boil the ocean."
"But how would you do that?" the reporter continued.
Without a beat Rogers replied, "I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details."

Value destroyed

Fortune.com:

Harder to fathom is the MSN TV 2 Player's inability to play music that has been downloaded through a PC from MSN's own Music Store. The Player had no problem with PC-created MP3 files and tunes ripped into the Windows Media Audio format from CDs but choked on music bought from MSN itself. An MSN representative said the incompatibility arises from the digital rights management (DRM) copy-protection system employed by the MSN Music Store to fend off pirates.

For the Fallen

For Remembrance Day, I have a special audioblog. This is Laurence Binyon, reading For The Fallen from the British Library's splendid collection The Spoken Word – Poets

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

BBC MP3s

Tom, our man on the inside at the Beeb:

There's this show on Radio 4 called In Our Time that's concerned with the history of ideas. Each week Melvyn Bragg brings together three guests (serious guests at the top of their fields) and they have a discussion around the major themes. It's kind of awesome if you're interested in science or history... Starting from shortly after last week's episode, now you can download and listen to the whole programme in non-DRM'd, easy to understand, iPod (and other media player) -compatible MP3 format!

Finally my campaign is bearing fruit. Get that In Our Time Electricity episode now.

Counting blogged votes

Having talked about vote links for well over a year now, it was about time someone started counting them, especially with tomorrow being election day in the US, and it might as well be me.
Presenting the Technorati Blogger Vote Count.
Instructions on how to add votes to your blog are there. Note that you can vote for or against each candidate individually.

What's wrong with this picture?

David Weinberger says:

When your wifi card doesn't work under XP, after spending three hours futzing with drivers, I suggest you try this:
Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services. Look for Wireless Zero Configuration. Click on it. If it's stopped, start it. If there's no start or stop button, double click on it and change "Startup type" to "Automatic."
Or you could get a Mac which, because it is a closed environment, tends to be easier to live with.

No David, the Mac is easier to live with because it's designers don't assume they control (or should control) all networking. Stuart, who invented Zero Configuration Networking, would say on seeing that Configuration dialog:

Which part of "zero configuration" did they not understand?

Audio recording

Dave says::

This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

Dave, you should have asked, instead of searching. Here's some free code to record audio using QuickTime from any Windows device. The code dates back to 1992, and was working on Windows in 1997.
This is what AOL use to do the Audio/Video chat in the latest AIM releases (that iteroperates with iChat).

Value destroyed is not owned

Tim Oren writes on DRM as a warning sign:

Copy protection DRM always destroys end user value, in both convenience and robustness. When you see DRM in a business plan or analysis, it is always there to benefit someone other than the end user. Find out who, it will indicate where power lies in a content value chain.

The mere presence of DRM indicates a failure to deliver end user value. If the information object were to lose value when extracted from the bundle or service from it was derived, DRM would not be felt necessary. Therefore the presence of DRM suggests a vendor that is behind the curve, failing to find a new value to deliver as their chokepoint disappears in the digital world.

Tim is correct that DRM destroys value, but he is mistaken in his implication that it can just be Customer value that is destroyed. The 0th law of economics is that a trade only happens when both parties see themselves as gaining from it. If the Customers see less value, they pay less for the product, and its value is thereby reduced. This kind of short-sightedness is foolish enough with conventional goods, but is especially stupid with digital media, when you have no measurable marginal cost of goods and can carry over Customers' excitement into other goods.

How about mass video editing?

Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took something like the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which bits of action people as a whole found interesting.

Losing language sales

This weekend we attended the Home School Geography Club, which was about Viet Nam, and enjoyed it immensely. Our friends the Hamiltons hosted it and, among many other fascinating things, taught us as few words in Vietnamese, and fed us Phô .
However when writing out the Vietnamese sheets, Bich was adding the accents by hand on the printout. It turns out that the Vietnamese keyboard inclued with OS X is far too hidden for anyone but experts to find(System Preferences, International, Input Menu Tab, and check the ones you want in a scrolling list).

This reminded me of an idea I had for an Apple ad campaign to highlight OS X's language support.

What I suggest is a poster campaign, showing a localised Mac screen running Mail with large type saying

Macintosh speaks your languages

Except that you do it as a teaser.

Start with the least common (in the US) languages Apple localises to, eg Korean, and work your way up the demographic to English, changing posters once a week or more often

매킨토시는 너의 언어를 말한다
マッキントッシュは言語を話す
Macintosh говорит ваши языки
Macintosh fala suas línguas
Macintosh spricht Ihre Sprachen
Macintosh parle vos langages
Macintosh habla sus lenguajes
Macintosh speaks your languages

Each time you change a poster and add a language, you switch the outer UI (menus etc) to that language. You deliberately place the posters in non-ethnic areas, so they are cryptic to most.
(Obviously, you get native speakers to translate the slogan instead of using Sherlock like I did).

47 million Americans speak a non-English language, according to the 2000 Census. 26 million also speak English well, 21 million are less proficient. Millions more learn a foreign language in school.

Imagine the media buzz these cryptic posters would generate, and the feeling of pride the bilingual people would have when they see an ad in their language, out in public.
In other countries, you do the same thing with a different language order.

Heckling the debate in irc

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it.
I combined the two:

You can call this audioblogging with comments or maybe it is something else.Note that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords like 'flu' or 'bin Laden'.

Direct link: http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

Hackaton at Technorati next Wednesday

As we'll have a huge concentration of web geeks just up the road at Web 2.0 next week, we decided to have a hackathon at Technorati on Wednesday night.

Bring your laptops and brains, and hack on our API and other web code.

RSVP promptly