Tuesday, January 28, 2003

Finnish recording industry demands royalties for kindergarten singing I called it!!! The Finnish recording industry is demanding that kindergartens pay 20 Euros per month in royalties for songs sung by the children. LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing] 8:58:40 PM

He Said 'New-Quoo-Ler' Thirteen Times How can the President of the United States display such abominable pronounciation skills without blushing?!?! Plastic::Politics::Politics:Dubya: You just dropped in to see what state your union was in? You're in luck. [Plastic] 8:57:50 PM

George W. Bush, January 28, 2003 Nice soundbyte. "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is G-d's gift to humanity."... [Democracy for the Middle East] 8:53:11 PM

AOL Uses Chat Bot Interesting. Steve and I played with ActiveBuddy for a while, and I was sorry to see it go. ChatBots feel like command-line versions of Sherlock: I want instant access to specific info: weather, stocks, sports, traffic, travel. While Sherlock shows this info on my desktop, ChatBots can show it on my wrist or PDA... I'm not sure there's much life to text-based ChatBots for marketing, but there may be some novelty to them in the short run scenario. CNET: AOL tries out new IM chat bot AOL has lauched an interactive chat bot that will answer AOL and AIM user's questions about weather and stocks. Some advertisers including eBay, Keebler, Warner Brothers and Dr. pepper has also used this technology for online promotions as well. What will be very interesting about this technology is when it is actually smart enough to add some serious value in the way of brand and customer service dialog that does not seem auto bot fake. 5:24:15 PM

FeedExpress updated FeedExpress is another desktop newsagg for Windows. This one has search built in. It seems all the desktop newsaggs must use .Net in order to get XML parsing for free. I wonder what impact that has on the installation process, and if average users can figure that out. I've updated FeedExpress to build 242. If you haven't kept up with progress, here's a little of the things that have changed since the first releases: Much faster refreshing of feeds (doesn't use .net's ThreadPool anymore since it's slow and buggy) You can search feeds Can load the CSS from the Feed homepage, so you can see the actual feeds in the style that the author intended You can see unread and total count of feeds for each subscription Status tray integration with visual indication of new feeds Import of FeedReader and FeedExpress subscription lists/files (you can better share subscriptions between work and home this way) Various UI improvements other features: Supports reading RSS 0.91, 0.92, 2.0 (I believe some call this version 1), RDF and RadioLands version 2.0. RSS Reader support is plugable, so if FeedExpress doesn't support a given format, it will be quite easy to create your own reader. The basic reading, refreshing, etc. features that you would expect of a feed reader Support for adding additional information about a subscription. This information will be shown in the windows titlebar when the subcription is selected. Support for Proxy servers Optional sounds to indicate new feeds Automatic refresh of Feeds /Jeppe [Aspects of Software Development] 4:32:16 PM

Movable Type to support CC licenses Very cool. One-click creative commons licensing, both on the web pages and in the RSS feeds. We are delighted to see that the popular weblog application, Movable Type, is adding support for choosing Creative Commons licenses in its upcoming version. [Creative Commons: weblog] 4:14:23 PM

www.opensourcecms.com For Steve... The problem with lots of open source software is getting an idea of what it can do, then attempting to wade through the documentation to set it up (if your webhost even supports the things you need). A great idea whose time has come is OpenSourceCMS.com. They already have pretty much every open source CMS installed and ready for demo, including full access to the administration areas. Some of the blog tools (that are also described in this site's resources area) include b2, nucleus, and pMachine. Test drive a new blog engine (or community site, or bulletin board, or project management app) today. [via kungfugrippe] [Blogroots] 1:38:42 PM

Living in a Black Hole? Trippy! One of the more interesting ideas in Cosmos is that we might live inside a black hole. It's one way to grapple with the finiteness of the universe. "Where does the universe end?" asks the student. "Is there a wall, and if so, what's on the other side?" Well, if you lived inside a black hole you might ask the same questions. Exactly the same questions. [Scripting News] Of course, this leads to the question, what's on the other side? 12:29:52 PM

Uber-Browser Take #2: Sherfari Thankfully, David Hyatt as come to his senses. Web browsers are different from news aggregators, are different from web services, are different from email. Consuming news feeds and producing weblogs is a very specific task that needs its own app environment. I just read Jason Kottke's article suggesting that Sherlock and Safari merge. Yes, I know, the rest of you probably read it two weeks ago, but, hey, do you want me spending all my time reading blogs or should I fix some Safari bugs every now and then? ;) Anyway, I also read John Gruber's rebuttal on Daring Fireball. After thinking about the RSS issue in previous blogs it seems that applications like Watson and Sherlock provide a similar service for the Web that RSS does. Again, just like NetNewsWire, they present information to you in a more streamlined fashion, and again, you only fall into the browser when your interest is piqued (or in the case of some of the services, when it's time to buy). Moreover in the case of some of these streamlined services, unlike news/blog feeds, some of these actually do feel "geekier" to me than the corresponding user interface you might have been presented with had you just gone to the Web site directly. I wouldn't mind discussing how to tightly integrate applications like NetNewsWire and Sherlock with browsers, but at this point I think both should remain separate applications. [Surfin' Safari] 12:06:06 PM

Advergaming Misunderstood My Consumer Behavior class discussed the potential of advergames and their effects on consumers. Definitely a hot topic among online marketers, bit I think this guy is right... while guys go online to play games, they aren't playing flash-pong. Also, I like the term "flashturbation", it is so appropriate! :-) Biz Report: Advertisers Use Online Games to Entice Customers On the surface this is a very good article, however I think that it is also very misleading. The numbers spouted in it are either inaccurate, or the examples used are exceptions. One thing is for certain, the idea that advergaming is some sort of marketing panacea is totally false. Let me explain why. Whilst it is true that "59 percent of boys ages 13 to 17, and 62 percent of young men 18 to 24 go online to play games" they do not go online to play cheap crappy dime a dozen advergames. To suggest that they do is wrong. As much to the point, the type of games that people are playing online are generally quest games, or multiplayer games, rather than the kind of games churned out by advertisers. Now I'm not suggesting that it is impossible to gain a good return from an ad game, what I am telling you is that few have done so. If you are considering investing money in this area be very very careful. Design teams will happily spend your cash on a flashturbation spree, but few will deliver results worthy of the name. Remember viral marketing is not about the vehicle, or pretty designs, it is about meeting objectives. The article finishes by discussing the future, talking about ad placements, or incentivised placements, within major game networks such as Sims Online. Now that kind of marketing I can buy into, however that is not viral advergaming, it is product placement advertising. Posted by Robert Loch at 07:52 AM Comments: (post your comment) [marketingfix] 11:46:51 AM

Online Educational Material Can Help Grow Business Nice to see a concrete example of a web presence influencing the growth of a business. Law.com: Web Sites Can Net Attorneys More Clients Communications and client services director Michael Sacks [at "lemon law" firm Kimmel & Silverman] said that since its launch in 2000, the firm's Web site has helped grow the business 25 percent. In fact, Sacks said that according to Web site data, more than 2,000 new clients each year find the firm on the Internet. And since Kimmel & Silverman handles 5,000 to 6,000 cases a year, that's about 40 percent specifically mentioning the Web site when they e-mail or call. Interestingly, Sacks said the goal of the site was to educate visitors, since the main obstacle the firm faced was consumers unaware of their rights. Accordingly, the site includes lemon law rights; answers to frequently asked questions; a newsroom providing up-to-the-minute information; and links sections, among others. Visitors can also take interactive worksheets with them on car-buying expeditions. And the site permits consumers to contact the firm via e-mail or an electronic form. Posted by Olivier Travers at 09:33 AM Comments: (post your comment) [marketingfix] 11:28:14 AM

Surrealist art and torture in the Spanish Civil War Steve sent this to me yesterday. Of course, he should have put it in his weblog, so that he could one-up the infamous BoingBoing :-) The Spanish paper el Pais published a story yesterday on the discovery by a Spanish art historian of the use of modern art in political torture during the Spanish Civil war. Bauhaus artists Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, and surrealist filmmakers Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, were said have inspired the creation of a series of secret cells and "psychotechnic" torture centers. Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial. The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat. Guardian UKLink, Discuss (Thanks, Simon !) [Boing Boing] 10:06:50 AM

Lego Stanley Cup nabbed in Vegas Is nothing sacred? A 6,000-brick replica of the Stanley Cup was reportedly swiped during a sports equipment convention in Las Vegas last week. The stolen hockey trophy copy is only one of two that exist, and was created to promote Lego's new NHL hockey kits. WorldnetdailyLink, Discuss (Thanks, Michael!) [Boing Boing] Oh the humanity! 10:04:39 AM