View all entries in the 'Life-Culture-Play' Category

The return of the Warp Records catalogue to Yahoo! Music Unlimited

by eleanor on 16 Jan 2006 @ 11:32 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

I dogfood good and plenty, but only where stuff can be made to integrate with my world. My world, as it happens, tends to include asynchronous whirrs and chips — often supplied by Warp Records, of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Plaid fame.

One day they disappeared from the Yahoo! Music Unlimited catalogue - a rather abrupt reminder of all that’s entailed in a subscription music service. “A friend in the music business” said there was an issue of some sort. Meanwhile, despite owning more Warp tracks than is good for me, I had gotten hooked on sipping the newer releases from Boards of Canada and Autechre from YME, access to which was provided through my unlimited subscription. But man, once they pulled Warp, it was a little dismal for us connoisseurs of IDM, ambient, and electro.

Now they’re back. Yay!

So it’s time for me to support both Warp and YME and make my first purchase :-) - Campfire Headphase from Boards of Canada, though the review from Y! Music is a little off the mark. Who knew Yahoo! had music reviewers? Sign me up.

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Hello world: Return from the silent majority

by eleanor on @ 7:09 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

OK, all the signs are pointing to me needing to spend more time with WordPress. Among PhotoMatt’s 22nd, the fanfare around the launch of WordPress 2.0, and the fact that my VP is leaving to go work with Matt - all conjoining with a long weekend, time had clearly come to upgrade and finally port my whole bloggy world over to a vibe more manageable from my Yahoo! busyness.

So I’m down to 73 feeds, with a few more hanging on the edge of (in|ex)clusion. I’m proud - I used to find 200 almost indispensible daily reading.

Hello world, many happy returns, etc.

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Finally, the Amazon Darknet review

by eleanor on 23 Jun 2005 @ 3:04 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

While at Supernova, my (disclosure) buddy JD Lasica and I did a video talking about JD’s book, Darknet, on the conflicts between remix culture, Hollywood and Washington. My first citizen journalism experience - what a dilletante.

I thought JD’s book was great, a really solid treatment of the subject. He used one of my favorite approaches to understand a space — a combination of a big picture survey with deep dives to profile specific instances. In this case, it was profiling people and how they were using technology (almost all of the illegal under the DMCA, poor folks) to do new things with media.

And that spurred me to finally do the Amazon review that JD asked me to do weeks ago (only after I said it was a good book!) - so I’ll post it here. Perhaps I should reread the T&C of the Amazon page to see what I signed away, but microcontent is microcontent (is microformats) and it’s all mine. And thus I will repost for you to remix.

In what is essentially a PR war of hysteria (on both sides), JD presents the middle ground, shifting the focus off the corporations and file-sharing teenagers. We learn about real people who, having become accustomed to technology in their lives, adopt it to create a richer media experience. These hobbyists have the tools and ambition to express themselves, except now the law has intervened. Before, fair use was an acceptable compromise because it was hard to make a perfect copy. Now with perfect duplicates, all fair use is suspect, since the tools used to digitally record a few seconds of a song or movie for a remix piece are the same that pirates would use to steal music or, worse, to profitably bootleg. Those tools illegally circumvent copy protection and the act is a crime no matter the intent.

This is the tension JD describes is his book - a world where an absolute law applies to a range of activities, many of which seem perfect resonable and socially beneficial.

JD presents no real answers because as a society we haven’t come up with them yet. Darknet triggers important questions: is fair-use an intrinsic “right”? should it be? what can people repurpose for their own use in a non-commerical setting? how can that be defined/controlled? where are the mechanisms to license use of this content?

JD points us to the root of the conflict: otherwise normal people become criminals in pursuit of creating their own art and entertainment - works as “trivial” as they are culturally important.

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Viral marketing movie preview for bloggers tonight “Yes”

by eleanor on 12 Jun 2005 @ 3:38 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So, I’m pre-posting on this so in case there’s anyone out there that’s interested and doesn’t already know.

Mark Pincus, Marc Canter and Tom Luddy are trying their hands at viralizing an independent movie with Joan Allen (what an interesting forehead she has!) and Sam Neill called Yes in SF by SBC park at 6pm tonight.

An interesting marketing challenge, since the film’s name, Yes, is such an ubiquitous part of speech. That makes it a hard word to viralize, not quite as easy to pickup on as, say, Sideways is when it’s being debated at the next table. Let’s hope that the text based aggregation of getting bloggers and other cool kids to write about it will help.

I am signed up, but am probably not headed back up to SF since we were there all day yesterday for the KRON blogger meet up. I’ve got a bunch of posts to get up, and have the hankering to play with my WordPress install.

So if you’re in SF tonight, jot your name down on the evite, join the crew, watch the film, drink the kool-aid and then faithfully blog.

It’s curious to note that despite signing up and somewhat committing to attend, it’s only now, while searching for a link for you faithful readers, that I bother to get more info about the plot of the movie. Mark’s posts and the Evite just mention Joan and Sally Potter, no Sam Neill: I wonder who the customers of this project are ultimately? Are reputation effects of Sally and Joan enough to carry the film with no further info, or do bloggers just like a party and special sneak preview treatment?

It’s probably a great opportunity: I missed seeing Primer at both Gnomedex and Defcon last year, and haven’t caught up with it since. And that’s been my loss.
Tags - “Yes” film

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Fun with the thinking man’s drinkers

by eleanor on 5 Jun 2005 @ 4:08 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So last night Mike and I had a rocking soirée with 60 or so folks who I can only describe as the thinking man’s drinkers. Geeks and nongeeks, boys and girls - all very cool people.

Despite my best efforts to astonish with tasty snacks, the highlight of the evening was absinthe brought by Robert Rich and his wife Dixie. Side note, Robert injured his right hand horrifically a couple months ago and is blogging about the recovery process. Last week, Dave McClure blogged about heroism the other day, and this is my nomination for heroism in our time.

Many thanks to all who came - we might have something else next weekend, we have a TON of leftover beer. I thought this picture of the 23 different kinds of beer we have left would speak volumes. Yeah, I was playing with my camera a couple weeks ago and left it with the datestamp setting on. Oh well.

I didn’t blog about this because I wanted to make sure I knew the people who showed up. And we do, after all, just have an apartment. If you missed the evite, email me and I’ll make sure to add you to my contacts for next time. :-)

So thank you to everyone who came - we had a ton of fun and you were great guests. Our kitchen still is a bit of a mess, but the rest of the place is almost as clean as it was when started.

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The importance of a peer group

by eleanor on 24 May 2005 @ 11:51 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mike and I saw the new Star Wars movie last night. While not as bad as the first two, the whole prequel series drives home a powerful lesson:

No matter how smart, gifted, driven, visionary, or well-financed you are, you will not think of everything and involving a group of people as spectacular as you are will make your thing better.

Everyone has blind spots, personal biases, and momentary lapses that keep them from achieving perfection. Peer review — even a simple chat among friends — exposes the weak spots, the obvious inconsistencies, the non-sequiturs, and the critical flaws in your venture. Reality checks can save your business.

As our operations/lives/business/jobs/industries become more complex and entwined, maintaining close connections and involvement with a group of your peers becomes even more important. And that’s part of the beauty and value of the blogosphere. It’s a huge distributed peer review system, as well as a tool for filtering news and attention. You can get a lot more of everything (news, analysis, criticism) that you want, but the insights can be tremendous.

But for some people virtual, distributed “mentoring” doesn’t work. And indeed, we all need real life relationships. A colleague, Blair Koch, with who I worked on a Product Management peer group happened to call this morning and tell me about how she was getting involved in The Alternative Board. Check it out - if you’re struggling on your own with these issues maybe you can find a valuable safety net, a trusty community of peers in this group.

It’s true it takes work. The smarter you are, the rarer you are. But that’s not an excuse. Keep looking and you will find them. Find mentors: good mentors collect people like you and can help you assemble peer groups.

It’s even harder here in the Bay area, surrounded by this culture of innovation where we lionize the coder or entrepreneur working independently. Of course we can do it “on our own”. Reading Darknet last night, I hit chapter 12, Architects of Darknet, where JD Lasica writes about Shawn Fanning (Napster), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Justin Frankel (WinAmp, later Gnutella) and Ian Clarke (Freenet) as lone warriors (notice these guys are… all guys - PubSub’s Bob Wyman told me women need get out and start more companies; which is undoubtedly true). These are guys waging an epic struggle, pursuing their vision, all on their own. But it’s “just” code. Important code, but scaffolding.

Vision is good. All strategy books say you need vision. But there’s a difference between a collective vision and a personal vision — especially when it comes to crossing from revolutionary to greatness. If you’re a guy with a revolutionary tool - if you’re brilliant and hardworking enough, you can do it. That same mindset doesn’t apply to building a company (or great films).

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Music fun

by eleanor on 20 May 2005 @ 9:16 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So I’m in a good mood apparently and not overly professional feeling. My feed reorg seems to be working: I caught a tag music game going on (I should set up searches on my name, but honestly I’m chicken). Jonas tagged me and I will participate.

Last cd’s bought: Winterkälte’s Disturbance and Casino Vs Japan early stuff. A bit epicurian for even my tastes, but CvJ’s Whole Numbers Play the Basics is one of my top 10 albums ever. The CvJ site gives a great sample of their sound. Soothing.

Disc volume: Server says 15.6 files in the main jukebox, but I’ve not burned everything and there are cds of mp3s offline too.

Current song: None. Last song played: (before I started this exercise - FoxyTunes displayed it in browser all day): Psychedelic Furs - Sister Europe.

My list is songs that have been stuck in my head over the last few days:

1. Converter’s “Dron(ritual)” off the very good Exit Ritual (note that “very good” in the category of power noise is a relative thing)
2. Death in June’s “Fall Apart” - neo-folk from Serbia. I have a couple versions, but Something is Coming is a good mix of acoustic and studio work. Warning, he occassionally uses Nazi imagery, but I think I would too if I was in Serbia thru the wars. Jonas?
3. Coil’s “Slur-Babylero-Ostia” (different parts of all three songs) off Horse Rotorvator
4. The Cure’s “A Strange Day” off the dark Pornography
5. Radiohead’s “Sit Down, Stand Up” from Hail to the Thief - this and Paranoid Android are about as mainstream as I get
6. Lastly, and quite enduringly, the “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” song from HHGTG

I really can’t recommend most of that. I do have singular taste - love music with chirps instead lyrics, strange distinct beats and distortion. I find it tremendously focusing. But I do recommend:

1. Haujobb Vertical Theory - the kind of Industrial I favor besides noise.
2. Balligomingo Beneath the Surface - folks from Nettwerk back in the day (Delerium, FLA). Should I find it weird that Avril Lavigne is on Nettwerk now?
3. Autechre’s Amber or EP7 - excellent working music.
4. Anything Robyn Hitchcock - he’s an amazing songwriter and bard (even has a song with Eleanor in it!). If you can find his cover of The Furs’ “Ghost In You”, do it.
5. And on the rare, odd side - Coil/Elph’s Time Machines project - it all sounds like ciccadas. Here’s a review and I use the disc in the same way as the reviewer. It’s epic hot summer afternoon music!

Since I hate chain letters, but generally follow norms, I’ll tag Niall, MJ, Mike, and Russ. Ignore as you may.

And I’ll confess - between reading Darknet and meditating on all the file sharing I don’t do, I’m thinking of Yahoo’s music service. $5 is just about right. I even might be Russ’s sucker, but only if his Zen isn’t some girly color :-). A nice lime green is preferred.

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Webzine 2005 is back

by eleanor on 19 May 2005 @ 10:42 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Well, not that I was at the first ones, but I heard they rocked. Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and crew are putting on another Webzine. It’s a conf, party, subversive get together, geek-out and art thing all at once. In September. And we don’t even have to head out to the playa.

Yes, the rumours are true! After FOUR long years, Webzine will return later this year to San Francisco. We don’t know how we could have gone so long with a Webzine event either. What is Webzine you ask? Webzine is your momma’s cookies, a cup of warm tea, a masturbating monkey, Carl Sagan in the shower, orgasmic, educational, a party, a couple days at the beach, living chinchilla earmuffs, a Habitrail, a snort, 10 hours of sleep, a magical sword, a French kiss, a conference, an expo and celebration of independent publishing on the Internet. It’s an excuse to bring some of the most amazingly brilliant online content creators together under one roof, exposing their secrets so YOU, dear reader, are inspired to create your own. That’s what this is all about. Creativity, ideas and the tools to take you there. Listen, learn and leave inspired.

Webzine’s in SF the weekend of 23-24 September. And it’s going to be cheap as hell.

I’m definitely going and volunteering to help out in any way I can. Check it out.

I like conference sites that are run on blog software. Anyone else noticing that blogs are just a cheap, quick and easy way to get stuff in a web-based database?

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Darknet - the “now” in book format

by eleanor on 18 May 2005 @ 2:01 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Perhaps it’s that I’m used to holding out to read books a bit after the hype has died down, but JD Lasica’s Darknet is downright freaky in how current events it still feels. I’m only about halfway through now, but it’s been very good. And weird. It’s like not having to zip around and hunt and read blogposts to get the back story. JD said he finished it last summer, but it was clearly edited to include events up to late 2004 (and I can’t find it now, but I thought I even saw a 2005 date).

But it’s so current it’s freaky. Like in yesterday’s massive news trawling I ran across this bit about Macrovision and what you can and can’t do and why. And TiVo’s email newsletter is promoting Record, Burn, Go, a $400 combo DVDR-PVR device.

We’re so much in the midst of this now, I wonder how it will standup once we get further out - or if it will be like Smart Mobs, which I read quite a bit after it came out (it think it described the Euro-Asian mobile zeitgeist much more successfully than here in the US).

I’ll write more later, but wanted to throw out how relevant the book is immediately. The stories about people (a bunch of whom I know) are much crisper than either Howard Rheingold or Neil Gershenfeld manage - somehow the interviewees speak more for themselves without extraneous description. Usually I take personal stories as just color and dialogue, but JD does a good job here weaving them into the larger narrative. This is just an off-the-cuff observation, but I’ll have to ask JD how he managed all this info. There were some direct quotes in here from a long time ago.

Things like quotes and sources are an odd thing for me to pick up on in a book (other than as bibliographic inputs to further research!). Jayson Blair was just ridiculous, but the story of Michelle Delio hits a lot closer to home since I can recall reading (and like Techdirt, scratching my head at) some of her pieces.

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Being bookish: events tonight

by eleanor on 11 May 2005 @ 5:22 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Tonight there are two book events for more scholarly pursuits (not everything is food & drink):

• Steve Johnson has a book signing for Everything Bad is Good for You at Books Inc. in Mountain View at 7:30PM.
• Scott Berkun takes time out from talking to big corps with a chill meet up during his book tour of the Bay area. He’s out promoting his new project management book, The Art of Project Management. This one is, yes you knew it was coming, at Faultline Brewing Co., a bar in Sunnyvale starting around 7.

Niall and I (currently listening to Tim Draper of DFJ at Stanford) are headed to the 2nd event, though I am still eager to read Johnson’s book too.

Update: the ETL event yesterday at Stanford was not to be missed. Tim broke into song, which Niall captured here.

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Coastal

by eleanor on 9 May 2005 @ 9:15 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

And now I’m off down the coast with my dad! See ya tomorrow night.

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Wine and geeks and gondolas: girls and boys together having fun

by eleanor on 8 May 2005 @ 11:56 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Courtesy of Jonas (and Courtney for the bus!) we had a geek out in vino-ville yesterday. A herd of 24 (or 26 depending on your math and the time of day) descended on Napa. We picnicked at VS Sattui, where a few of us tasted (the one free tasting of the day - hit Sonoma for the free tastings!) while the others teetotaled. Jonas and Stephanie found a most snacky dessert - chocolate pretzels (think chocolate teddigrams) and this sublime dipping sauce with an improbably perfect combination of pear and cinnamon with caramel. Like a psycho apple butter. I had to snatch some for my own pantry as shown below. Yeah, it remains unopened (I hoard; it’s restraint that gives me the warm feeling all over). Hey Mike, you better hurry home.

Then we did nature tourism0-trekking. From the petrified forest (did you know St. Helena was a volcano??) — I especially liked this shot –

and the geyser, you could hear just the most inappropriate comments - it was clear none of us left our real lives too far behind. Then we went to Sterling, which was pricey but tasty (as long as you kept on keepin’ on with the tastings). On the trip down the hill (Sterling has a fancy gondola ride), we had a little incident. Mischievous, sauced geeks vs gondola and gravity. Bounce bounce. We didn’t fall, but we probably coulda, and got some pretty nasty looks from the crew as they (off in the distance) scrambled to restart the gondola. They eventually sent a truck from which descended a guy who pressed a button to get us moving again (kind of anticlimatic). And yeah, when you’re already pushing Treo-photography to the limits, it’s best not to take pictures while howling with laughter.

I don’t even think he gave us a dirty look when we (docilely) floated by, but I can’t be sure ’cause I was laughin’ too hard. Probably not, I bet they rock the gondola during the off hours. Oh yes indeedy.

As the Treo shots show, I didn’t have a real camera then, being the non-camera born in Rochester never-worked-for-Kodak iconoclast I tend to pose as. But I actually have been suffering camera envy all week, and got one this AM (in time for the food pR0n up above). Not sure I’m gonna keep it, but you’ll start seeing better pictures soon. In case you’re interested in what the rest of the pro-quality camera toting crew captured, the flickr tag for yesterday is (teehee) Rockin Gondola.

The group was great - some people I knew pretty decently, others I’d seen and barely talked with before, and still others completely new. Because we were not geeking, we didn’t start a company, invent a new AJAX type thing, or a new programming language, but we did talk about having a “geek prom” (spurred by the fact that all of the East Bay seemed to be on prom night), outings to Winchester and other places and also a more oenophile wine outing.

But in my book the exceptional factor of the group (beyond that I liked them all) was that it was almost 50% women. And if a pugnacious warrior like Jonas can build around him a group of really competent, interesting women, why can’t other guys?

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Advance notice this time: Onion/Craigslist party after JD’s media stuff

by eleanor on 5 May 2005 @ 6:38 pm in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’m trying to get on top of happenings again, and will post this sooner rather than later. Especially since I’m gettin’ outta town for both wine country and and crashy coastline adventures in the next few days. What a lucky girl. We can’t all go to Finland, but this sure beats U.S. Customs!

As Mike and JD blogged, there’s going to be a Grassroots Media/Booklaunch for JD’s new book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation next Friday May 13 early on from 6-9 pm at CNet’s offices in SF.

Congrats to JD on getting another one out there!

Well, what could be more grassroots than caustic humor?

Afterwards, we can keep on keepin’ on with the guys from the Onion who’ll be spinning and partying at 12 Galaxies (2565 Mission Street) from 10 til 2am. Craigslist and INFORUM (the hipster scion of Commonwealth Club) are playing host, and the event is free. I got this from a pr buddy, and will post a link to Craigslist when they have it up. Here’s a link from INFORUM.

Ah, the Onion. I recall after college when I went into office life that it struck me that Onion distribution had to be one of the web’s killer apps… While occassionally hit-or-miss for me now (I’ve grown so humorless), I found this particularly choice specimen. It’s nigh headache inducing, but is probably profound.

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www.blogher.org goes live, conference ‘05 logistics announced

by eleanor on 13 Apr 2005 @ 10:43 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

So the blogher project is up with the detail on the conference announced…. not the full agenda, but the most critical details:

• Dates: Saturday 30 July - all day, with pre-dinner Friday night
• Location: Techmart, Santa Clara, CA. Note on Gmaps that the little J should be across the street. It’s a good venue (a tad sterile, but we’ll girl it up somehow) in the heart of Silicon Valley. To give folks the flavor I tried A9’s neighborhood maps, since it came off so well at last night’s great BayCHI search session. But there was no data here for this ‘hood. Too bad. (Incidentally do see Mike’s notes on last night’s session.)
• Cost: $99, with scholarships available for those who commit to live blog. Nearby hotels and a girl network for more communistic, sleep-over style accomodations.

Blogher.org will be the core community site, so keep an eye there for the group blogs and other community building resources as they roll out.

The final agenda for the conf should be out 1 May.

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Ah, connectivity….

by eleanor on 5 Apr 2005 @ 10:33 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

We got back yesterday from New Orleans (vacation + Mike’s cousin’s wedding) to find total connectivity loss - phones dead, dsl down. What a pain. SBC crept in while we were at MoMo and fixed voice though it took the usual modem rebooting dance to get online this am. Things continue to flicker, something about Sunday’s downpour and a cut wire.

New Orleans was great - my first time there. I could live there - it’s nice to have US city I could say that about again. The vibe was excellent, decaying south meets the industrial north. And, yes, as someone asked - humidity is ok with me, I’m a native New Yorker (upstate).

Multimedia moblogging was not in line with the escape I needed, but I did take lots of pictures with my Treo. Flickr’s email interface made me laugh - I can’t believe so many people use it and love it if that’s what you have to do!! These devices are fun, but it’s so hard to get them to play well together. Even this am, my Treo was in infinite loop reboot after a synch when the stupid settings moved back the old photos I deleted off the Treo (which I didn’t have enough memory for which is why they got deleted). I will have to explore to see if I can set up an asynchronous synch for media to just push Treo pictures to the desktop. A devastating hard reboot only adds to my morning’s misery as I must redo all my customization again. But at least you get N’Awlins pictures.

We ate, we drank, but the town itself was the best part. I found myself proto-househunting in the French Quarter. Dumaine Street had particular charms, as you can see one entryway below.

Outside of the immediate tourist areas, the people were varied and interesting, like the architecture. It compared well to San Francisco - there was no begging, and, yet like SF, I got the sense that it was a city people lived in.

On the industrial side - there was such great decreptitude everywhere. I find that somehow inspiring. Where I live, in Menlo Park, is simply gorgeous - polished and rustic in the charming wooded cottage way. Here you had the sense of real life - like Oakland with ferns taking root in the cracks in the wall. I'm not sure which I liked best - the French Quarter, the Warehouse District (below), or the decrepit once-grand houses off the beaten track in the Garden District.

The city was at its best during our “adult night” - on our own during the rehersal dinner we hit some great places. First we hit Rasputin’s, a vodka bar - where they had a great ambience, good Canadian vodka (Pearl was our favorite), and spectacularly gourmet zakuskas (the small bites Russians have as chasers with their vodka, but this was caviar and not simple cut veggies) — though they didn’t have the wonderful herbal vodka, Tverskaya, from the Russian town in which I lived ten odd years ago. Next we hit the boutique hotel International House (think of an alternative W), which was playing a favorite Boards of Canada tune (Happy Cycling) when we walked in, and continued to play great alternative dub style music. It’s my choice for our stay next time, even more since our bartender’s recommendation for dinner turned out so well. We went out to Frenchman’s St - the local’s Bourbon St - to Marisol, which was fabulous and emminently reasonable. I pine for their chilled cucumber and buttermilk soup - and the chef’s amuse-bouche charcuterie and final samplers of homemade candies made it epicurian like few meals I’ve had. Yum. And definitely check out the jazz clubs on Frenchman’s.

So fun was had by all, and as long as connectivity persists (issues remain), I’ll be here back to work. And the headclearing vacation worked - I’m ready to do real work now and land my next thing(s). And that will in the area of information exchange - tools, services, and products to help move our stuff (tags, posts, photos, calendars, data, music, etc) so that it’s available at the point of need. Things to collect and repurpose information - mining and extracting in some cases, and in others simply provisioning - so that we can make all these fun and useful applications work better across our insane, info-overloaded, mobile lives.

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Free media - Orb now free

by eleanor on 28 Mar 2005 @ 4:17 pm in Mobility | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’ve been playing with apps and javascript, and trying to tool up to commit to more immediacy and pertinence in blogging (and not go insane in the endeavor) . One find (thanks Tony Gentile) — SharpReader — has brought tangible progress already, in popping up to report that Ted Shelton just blogged that Orb is Now Free. Ted says:

Yes, there will be advertising in the future — but we know that this must be done the google way — advertising that is unobtrusive and adds value without inhibiting the core use of the service. And more importantly there will be content subscriptions coming soon — all kinds of new content that you can purchase through Orb…

But even if you never click on an advertisement and never purchase content, our core philosophy will guarantee you free access to your own TV, your own videos, your own audio, and your own photos… anytime, anyplace, any device.

This is a great move from Ted and the guys at Orb Networks, and should help drive adoption of mobile content - opening up new usecases and user communities. With my lagging-adopter experiments with Yahoo!’s Lauch music videos a couple weeks ago, I found that short advertisements did not mar the experience.

I’d love to use Orb to access my content (my Treo 650’s 1GB SD gives me an adequate daily soundtrack), but I still believe the killer hookup is between Orb and OurMedia (which launched last week to fanfare from all but me - belated congrats to JD and Marc!). Orb would make a fabulous engine to access OurMedia pieces - where the serendipity of boredom will drive user exploration of OurMedia’s quirky contents.

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Howard Rheingold at SDForum

by eleanor on 19 Mar 2005 @ 4:02 pm in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Howard Rheingold spoke on Thursday night at PARC as part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. They’ll make the audio available on ITConversations, probably in a couple weeks. I was especially eager to hear this talk because I’ve been tracking Howard’s work at Stanford Humanities Lab, especially Towards a Literacy of Coorperation, the course he just completed. I wasn’t able to prioritize attending because it competed with the more work-relevant Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program (more online video!). But that’s why we document these things.

Howard’s course just concluded a couple weeks ago, so this was among the first public presentations of what they’ve been working on. They’re working on editing down video from the class, but for the time being there are some video and audio files on their site. I took notes primarily on things I wasn’t as familiar with, so if this is new to you I recommend tuning in directly (I recall the Peter Kollack session discussing more of the fundmentals of cooperation research).

Howard’s talk took us from the dawn of time til now, ending up at the question of whether our new tools can give us additional means to create even more robust cooperation. My background is in International Relations and Policial Economy, so I’ve spent a lot time on the theories underlying Howard’s work. He mentioned Robert Axelrod’s seminal quick-read, The Evolution of Cooperation which is great for anyone interested a more robust exploration the commonly cited maxim “tit for tat works”.

Howard discussed a new-to-me game called Ultimatum. It’s a single play game, where participant A is told they will be given $100 to divide between them and another player, who is faced with the choice of accepting the payout or ending the game with both players receiving $0. In developed countries, with higher standards of living, studies showed that there was a strong sense of fairness. Player A seemed to know that Player B would not accept a division that benefitted Player A too much more than Player B. Howard said the split happened below about 25%, and that by far most outcomes were between 50-50 and 75-25. Splits less fair than 75-25 were rejected as being unacceptable, despite the net-economic-gain that Player B would receive. Strikingly, this ratio did not extend to the devloping world: where subsistence was less certain, any gain was viewed as desirable, regardless of the equality of the division. (for my thinking, this is the mechanism at work in the bloghercon debates.)

This may sound of trivial interest, but for us econ fiends, this sort of outcome blows the central tenet of REMs (rational economomizing maximizers) out of the water - with tremendous implications in economic and social theory. See this paper by Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, for a thorough, though academic, overview. This line of research adds to findings of behavioral economists that there are strong social and personal motivations for actions beyond just the cash-value calculation, and is opening a new frontier of academic research which folks like Howard are mining. As a staunch libertarian, I see nothing but good coming from a more subtle understanding of what humans seek from economic activity.

Continuing this theme, Howard went on to discuss research on altruistic punishment (see here and here) , which is a tantalizing topic I read about several months ago, and then lost track of. The question of enforcement has long puzzled researchers: why do some people waste their time, money, personal capital etc in taking action to prevent negative behavior (free-riding, rules enforcement, cheating, inequality)? From a survival perspective, why aren’t they just concerned with their own welfare? Why are they going out on a limb, or patrolling the range at night when they could be in bed, or even wasting the breath to speak out? All of this begs the question of why we aren’t the savages that economic theory presumes.

This line of research looks at general human behavior to say why the general person seems to be biased toward cooperation, beyond the generally 20-30% who chronically pursue their own gain. Howard didn’t mention this research, but in the fall, I recall reading on PET-scan based research showing that, on an individual level, some people receive stimulation in an area of the brain associated with pleasure when they take actions enforcing actions “retribution”. This is satisfaction received from “doing the right thing” as they perceive it. And thus the mystery is solved: these people are getting a chemical benefit from their otherwise calorie- or capital-expending effort - even outside of just the “we need to keep this place from going insane” sense of collective action. I was keenly interested in this when I first ran across it (via the serendipity engine that is Google News), because I am unhesitatingly one of those people. Underdogs? Defended. Injustice? Pointed out. Hypocrisy? Mocked. Puffery? Deflated. Well-poisioning? Countered. It’s curious to see some basis for why I still like to defend the dork that gets beaten up in the schoolyard.

Howard cited further studies (that I haven’t yet found) show people will take action to punish those who fail to punish; that there is an additional layer of enforcement around regimes of cooperation. A system of nudging, rib-poking and hazing so we all hew to same behavior.

Back to the talk, Howard wrapped it up by stating his belief (hope?) that these “new forms of communication will create new forms of wealth”. This was an echo to how he started the talk, when he discussed how eons ago banding together to hunt large game created a new form of protein-wealth that both expanded communities (the weaker could be more easily supported from the excess as it was not an economic loss to share the new abundance) and stregthened their bonds (the best place to store food is in your neighbor’s stomach — not cannibalism — but the foundation of a system of reciprocity!!). A new form of wealth changes the game, and can hopefully take us another step up from savagery.

My final note from the evening might have come from Howard’s response to a question, but contains perhaps the most profound statement on the logic of the “corporate altruism” that I know had the folks at NEC baffled (and me lacking a coherent explanation). Howard said something along the lines of “corporate support of Linux is seeking to turn Prisoner’s Dilemma into Assurance/Stag Hunt” . Which means it’s moving the zero-sum game of platform-committted devlopment to a more open application environment. And it is a very elegant way of saying “Growing the Pie”.

Perhaps anticipating Howard’s talk, Christopher Allen blogged about altrusitic punishment on Thursday morning, connecting these otherwise-game-theoretic concerns to the blogosphere, with his continued focus on the fundmental characteristics of group interaction. From my view Dunbar’s number is an observation that’s tied to the current-state of cooperation - both our collective skill at cooperating and the state of our tools, rather than a core observation on human nature itself.

For another take on this, check out Elisa’s view on Howard’s talk…. her overview is different than mine (funny how she slacked on writing this until today as well).
There’s certainly a fertile discussion gaining mometum around these important concepts.

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New use-case for IE: Yahoo! Launch videos?

by eleanor on @ 3:20 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

In crusing past a catch-all email account, I found a note from a CTO I met on Caltrain last week (Navient Corp. offers hiring mgmt sw to help companies nail down what they need and then screens applicants to fit those needs; mostly in the call center space). He mentioned an Eleanor song (my name is more prominent in music than real life), by an indie-sounding band called Low Millions (indie -> just about anything featuring guitars).

Wanting to check it out (yet eschewing his iTunes recommendation), I googled and found Yahoo!’s Launch toy, which offered a video. Intrigued, I dug out my IE (it’s true - I had apparently removed all shortcuts to IE) to check it out.

The band was cool, but more interesting was that instead of just playing the one song, the system took me to another song directly - one I liked (Jem’s They). So it’s not only free, and on-demand, but it’s deterministic enough to have lead me to other appealing music.

In order to really use the tool, I had to login to my Yahoo! account. The system glitched on letting me rate Jem immediately, as the server transition from guest to ekrusew failed to handoff my viewing history. So as an apparent new user, I searched and played Jem and rated it highly. The system then played some more appealing stuff - including (new?) Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan - alternative artists I’ve liked through the years. A good experience, content I’m interested in, as I got to see what Sarah looks like now in her latest video. I’m even ok with the commercials that have been interspersed.

Mike, who pays way more attention to this stuff than I do, says this app isn’t new-new, that it’s among the things Anita Wilhelm (mobilegirl) worked on when she was at Yahoo! last year. He’s not sure how much traction it’s gotten out in the world. I certainly never saw it before now.

It’s been a good experience so far - better than tuning into an mp3 channel. It sounds roughly like music I’ve liked in the past (in discovery, variations on a theme is what I want). The video is, strangely enough for bare-bones me, a definite experience enhancer. Though the window remains in the background I’ll bring it forward to take a peek and learn more about a song I like. Then I learn the artist’s name within the context of sampling imagery the band’s provided - like extended cover art. The video is useful in understanding the band, as an extra channel of information. Nice, and worthwhile for even just the couple seconds I view the video.

My recommendation, as always, is that Yahoo! needs to make the investment in porting this to Moz. It’s a nice app, but if during working today I hit a patch of system drag, IE’s first in line for shutdown to free memory. And since I never use IE, IE becomes a de facto Yahoo!’s music videos app - which is exactly the tethering that web-based applications was supposed to eliminate.

And this one is for Russ, who will no doubt be happy that I’m plugging his team: what about mobilizing this for Yahoo!? In the world of MobiTV and Orb, you’ve got the content, the logic and the infrastructure already. Streaming to my Treo would be neat. I’ve got RealPlayer, with no apparent video capabilites, but with a gig of SD, I can stand to add an app. Arguably, I could stand to replace my gig of music files with (a subscription?) music service.

I’ve been slow to feel the need for mobile video, but in this “impression” context I could see it being useful.

Heh, just now it came up with a song by Coldplay “Yellow” that I’ve liked but (counter-culture isolated me) never knew name/artist. Good job Yahoo!.

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Satellite satellite - where are you?

by eleanor on 24 Feb 2005 @ 12:41 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mass customization has given way to extreme personalization as content streams are now sliced thin enough to allow individual subscriptions. Blogging, podcasting, Tivo, OnDemand, iPodding, mobile entertainment and satellite radio all gyrate around the commercial opportunity that is giving people the content they want when they want it.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard Orb and MobiTV (Idetic), spoke with the folks who make Sling Media and Slim Devices, makers of the SqueezeBox. The message is like a drumbeat: consumer-content-consumer-content.

Put on top of that the increased feed-reading capacity brought by my new Treo650+GPRS. I see that Doc’s shopping for a new car radio and Fred Wilson has a business take on the Tivo problem, riffing off Om’s do-an-Apple post which kicked off so much chatter that I sipped at in my other feeds. Further evidence of the march can be seen on if you hit Fred’s Tivo post directly - I bet your adsense will be as appropriate as mine was: I see an adsense serve for DirectTVvia RapidSatellite and his house ad for an HDRadio.

The same theme is everywhere - not surprising with 3GSM and Demo just having taken place. I like Jonathan’s take on 3GSM and SAPVenture’s Jeff Nolan’s take on Demo (along with the Blogging Demo blog).

I’m still reading though the Fast Company piece on Sirius v. XM that was pointed out by at least one of my feeds. It’s so hard to keep track of what’s interesting when perusing via mobile. Blazer and Bloglines are great together - but I wish the Bloglines interface as seen by mobiles had a checkbox to save posts rather than a per-post link so that you could submit several at a time. I also should see if there is a way to make Blazer have tabs so I could open other pages.

That’s (the hype and flutter, I mean) normally just par for the course, and not a big deal, but it’s funnier when I turn to today’s Wall St. Journal ($reg req’d) and see that some of this impact has begun to chew through to the profits of the big boys:

Viacom executives predicted that this year will be one of transition as the company reworks its mix of assets. It “will be remembered as the year of the reinvention of Viacom,” Mr. Redstone told Wall Street analysts on a conference call.

That reinvention includes shedding assets, including at least 40 under-performing radio stations and its Canadian movie-theater chain Famous Players. The company is also considering selling its theme parks.

Viacom now owns 185 stations. It plans to sell stations outside smaller markets so it can concentrate on its outlets in big cities. In the quarter, radio absorbed a $10.9 billion noncash impairment charge, leading to an operating loss of $10.7 billion, compared with operating income of $252 million a year earlier. Even without the charge, the radio unit’s operating income fell 9% to $231 million in the quarter. Radio revenue for the quarter was $550 million, compared with $551 million.

Game, match, and set. This is what happens when 20 minutes out of 60 are commercials and all the programs are pre-recorded. How can anyone be surprised?

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Kids aren’t writing?

by eleanor on 8 Feb 2005 @ 2:07 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Now, for something lighter, we have a piece in today’s The Wall St. Journal (paid content - reg/$ reqd) today talks about parents fighting against some schools with tough pre-graduation requirements, chiefly around lengthy papers. The first case profiled is of a high school senior who was almost denied graduation because he didn’t complete an 8 page paper.

High-achieving students complain these projects eat up time that could be better spent applying to colleges. Many average seniors, bound straight for the workplace after graduation, can’t understand the need for such added rigor. Meanwhile, just the mention of a research paper can send out shock waves these days. Even three-page papers have become a rarity in English classes and 75% of all seniors say they get no writing assignments at all in history or social studies, according to a 2003 national commission on student writing.

I blush to admit the good student I was, but I probably had to do about 5 ten page papers by the end of high school. I marvel at how this could be true now - especially with how important writing is as a form of communication.

This quote especially sounded awful, for these are just the critical thinking skills that most kids aren’t going to get even in most colleges:

Because Cedarcrest students had little experience writing long, annotated papers that defended a point of view, failure on first drafts was common, even among honors students.

Now, if this really is true, this may be the solution to our blogging info overload. Or maybe they’ll find it’s worth the time and effort to try their hand blogging….

But it’s prob far more likely that they will become podcasters or videobloggers. :-)

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