Tuesday, April 8, 2003

A very twisted love story A very interesting read! The short version: Guy falls in love with girl. Guy posts about girl on weblog. Whistle-blower emails guy about girl and shady past. Guy confirms whistle-blower. Guy confronts girl, who claims to have proven unprovable theorems. Guy dumps girl. But wait, there's more... 3:42:34 PM

Downward Facing Blog Bikram Choudhury, "creator" of a popular type of yoga, is now claiming a copyright in the style and demanding royalties. No word yet whether the estates of the authors of the Upanishads -- or for that matter, the entire subcontinent -- will counter-sue. See a lively and amusing discussion on Metafilter. [Creative Commons: weblog] Good golly! Even yoga can't cleanse you of your litigious thoughts. This probably marks the peak of the yoga craze. 3:39:50 PM

RIAA to Student: You Owe Us $97.8 Million Heather Newman at the Detroit Free Press reports that the damages sought by the RIAA in just one of the four lawsuits they filed on April 3 against college students total the unbelievable sum of $97.8 million (incorrectly stated as trillion in the article). This calculation results from multiplying the maximum damages per copyright violation ($150,000) times the over 625,000 songs the RIAA contends were pirated. The RIAA has certainly chosen an attention grabbing strategy in a campaign that will probably not be limited to actions against college students alone. See also this article on Princeton student Dan Peng '05 who was sued by RIAA. [beSpacific] Of course you know this means war. Predictions that the RIAA would eventually sue their own customers have been pondered since the beginning, and it is so sad to see it come to fruition. So which will it be, a marketplace for music dominated by the RIAA, or the demise of the RIAA with a completely new market model spearheaded by musicians and listeners directly? 3:37:55 PM

SharpReader vs Syndirella Reasons I like Syndirella better than SharpReader: The icon in the system try changes color if there is new items to be read. Syndirella detects when the content of a given item changes. Not a very long list. Of course, many of the Radio vs Syndirella items apply to SharpReader too. [Sam Ruby] Oof. Interesting how quickly SharpReader has developed a positive reputation against competing products. 3:35:30 PM

Dmitry Jemerov to quit Syndirella? Dmitry Jemerov writes: I'm really, really tempted to give up Syndirella development. And this is one of the reasons why. SharpReader today has just about everything that I wanted to implement in Syndirella in the next 2-3 months. So, instead of spending time creating Yet Another implementation, I'd rather continue the development of Structorian or a C++/SDL client for DungeonLab. Ok, this is definately not what I wanted to achieve with SharpReader's release. Syndirella has a loyal following and still has a number of features that SharpReader does not (yet?) have. It would be a shame to see further development abandoned. Of course since Syndirella is open-source, I guess others can pick up where Dmitry left off... [SharpReader category of Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream] Well, it is sad, but I'm not that surprised. What I am surprised at is how many desktop news aggregator projects there are already. For SharpReader to hit the blogosphere so quickly is a testament to his marketing mix (whether he knows this or not). Still, my mom ain't gonna install any of these... 3:34:11 PM

There's a Series 2 in my Future I love my TiVo. I do. I do. I do. But I think there's an upgrade in the near future. Between being able to schedule programs remotely and listening to iTunes with my stereo system (not to mention displaying pics from iPhoto), I think that it's about time to start planning the upgrade. Posted: Monday 2003/04/07 11:03 PDT [James Duncan Davidson] Have you noticed that there are two kinds of people in the world? Those who've heard of TiVo, and those who swear by them? I'm one of those who swears by my TiVo, it has completely changed the way we consume television content. And with this home link system, TiVo has definitely hit the sweet spot in terms of leveraging an already invaluable service on my computer (iTunes and iPhoto). Droool! 3:32:08 PM

Let RSS Power Your Email Marketing With the proliferation of government web portals and pages, it is becoming ever more necessary for agencies to reach their customers by email. You can no longer even expect your most devoted readers to visit your web sites on a regular basis. One of my web hosters made a major service change several months ago but never notified their customers by email. The notice was only on their website, and then in a place only accessible by password. When I suggested yesterday to their sales rep that email notices were preferable and that the company could provide them at no additional cost, she was incredulous. Even when governments and businesses do market news and services by email, they're usually using mailing lists and e-newsletters. I subscribe, for example, to newsletters about Utah travel and events, and I get email news of newly posted court opinions and administrative rules. I bet that in every state there are hundreds of these kinds of lists. The problem is that the public cannot easily learn of their existence and they are relatively time intensive for us to prepare and distribute. Using RSS, customers can more easily find and subscribe to our syndicated news, and we can eliminate all the extra processes needed to prepare information or repackage it for email delivery. As one who has managed 30 simultaneous mailing lists, I know. In a few days from now, I'd like to begin sharing with you some methods of using RSS technologies to automate the process of email news publishing. If you have a method that works for you, please write me, Ray Matthews, and let's share it. [RSS in Government] This is simply awesome! Linking RSS into an existing email newsletter system is exactly the right thing to do, and over time, I bet email deliveries drop to a fraction of their current levels. Take back the inbox! 3:29:40 PM

Sean Alexander, program manager for Microsoft on... Sean Alexander, program manager for Microsoft on the Windows Media team, says they have a new blogging plugin coming for Windows Media 9. Hmmm. [The Scobleizer Weblog] Uh, yeah, I'm skeptical too! 3:27:32 PM

SharpReader. Brad '.Net Guy' Wilson: Oh, and isn't it interesting that the first wave of .NET rich client apps that we've seen have all been blazingly fast and look appropriate for the environment... that definitely has never been true of Java, even today 8 years after release. Microsoft has a real advantage here that they need to leverage, by encouraging people to get away from awful web UIs and get back to rich client/server UIs. Ouch! Brad is talking about SharpReader, a new .Net based three-paned RSS aggregator. I'm downloading it now. The related posts feature looks really cool. Update: OK, I'm sold. SharpReader is awesome. It has really leap-frogged Synderella. Update: it does not seem to detect updated posts like Synderella and Aggie do. [Blogging Roller] You can see here that other engineers are looking at .Net the way Macr wants people to look at RIAs and Flash. Also, I've looked at SharpReader, and it feels snappy. 3:26:42 PM

GM ads smear public transit -- again General Motors, a company that gutted many of America's great cities by pressuring local governments to eliminate public transit in the 20th century, is running ads in a local Vancouver paper that calls transit riders "CREEPS & WEIRDOS." Another ad complains about the odor of the subway. Between Los Angeles's smog, Aussie brushfires and Middle East wars, I think we can say with confidence that GM's last kick at the public transit can incurred a debt to the human race the company could never repay. Hard to believe they've got the chutzpah to go at it again. Guess they've got nothing to lose. Link Discuss (Thanks, Heidi!) [Boing Boing] Outragious! 3:22:14 PM

Defining Rich Interfaces I would like to start up a discussion on Rich Interfaces. We at Macromedia have been promotion them for quite some months now, and we see new RIA's popping up every day, which is great. However, there is one thing that I think we all should try to promote a littlebit more; Fluent Interfaces. Explanation: Almost all the RIAs that I see on the web have static designs, they have a fixed with or scale on larger screens. Instead of that, I prefer to have more content! (I did not buy a big monitor to not use 50% of it ;-)) Honestly said, the RIAs Macromedia has developed so far are not fluent as well, and I think we should improve that to show our users how to do it. Before I end up writing a huge post on this, I would like to have your feedback. What do you think about fluent versus fixed interfaces, are there reasons why to go for fixed instead of fluent, and are there things that are missing now to make you able to build better fluent interfaces, do you have tips for developers to create fluent interfaces, how can Macromedia help to achieve all this? Let me know what you think, I hope the end result is that we will all create fluent RIAs soon! [Waldo Smeets Weblog - Macromedia MX Sales Engineer Benelux] Well, thankfully I see a future for myself in RIAs, having more than a dozen years developing consumer-focused desktop software products. As I've said before, when I consider my options for building desktop applications, I look to ubiquity in platform deployment, and to simplicity in API design and usage. Apple offers Cocoa, MS offers .Net, Sun offers Java Swing, each with varying degrees of deployment and simplicity. I'm very much interested in seeing the details on how to build RIAs the Macromedia way. How will it stack up to these competitors? 3:21:16 PM

What Is Banned By The Assassination Ban? (LazyBlawg) Grant Henninger has a question about war, law and assassination: "If we kill Saddam in the first strike is it an illegal assassination or is it a legitimate action as part of the war?" On this subject, the Guardian today writes, "By declaring war, Mr Bush legitimised the apparent assassination attempt against President Saddam. In a state of war, the congressional prohibition on the assassination of leaders is lifted." Related reading: Professor Jeffrey Addicott'sJURIST Forum piece last November, entitled The Yemen Attack: Illegal Assassination or Lawful Killing, and a Los Angeles Times analysis, U.S. Enters a Legal Gray Zone, reproduced at Global Policy Forum. [Update] From a press briefing earlier today by Ari Fleischer: Q: Ari, if the United States is at war, and if you assert that the United States has the right to target the Iraqi leader and his inner circle as part of command and control, does that make the President and the White House a legitimate target for Iraqis? MR. FLEISCHER: Somebody — a reporter asked me that question a few weeks ago and my answer this [sic] is my answer now; you can tell anybody who wants to know the answer to that to get their own international lawyer, I won't do it for them. Mr. Fleischer apparently was referring to his February 26, 2003 briefing: "I have no intention of becoming Saddam Hussein's international lawyer." [Update] On September 22, 2001, Glenn Reynolds pointed to Jacob Sullum's discussion of the development and interpretation of the assassination ban ("License to Kill"), and wondered about "Assassination as Policy:" "[I]t doesn't involve killing lots of innocents, as war inevitably does, and it has a tit-for-tat quality that seems fair. [¶]What I've never seen mentioned, though, is the corrosive political effect it might have...." [Bag and Baggage] This item is several weeks old now, and I'm fascinated by it because we've now seen two explicit attempts to kill Saddam and no one has said "boo" about the legalities in the mainstream media. 3:14:19 PM

Why It's Time To Take A Risk This isn't the first time I've said that now is a great time to be building a company. Everything is cheap - except for capital and customers. However, if you can figure out a way around those two hurdles, it's a great time to build a strong company foundation without as much pressure as during the boom years. And, it's not just startups. Every company should think about ways they can take a risk these days. It's not necessarily frivolous risks - but calculated ones that make sense these days. One of the signs of a strong business is that it looks at the driving forces of the world it lives in, and figures out how to best play off of them. In the boom years, when there was plenty of money floating around, it made sense to get the cash (it was cheap after all), though not necessarily to then go out and spend it on million dollar parties. Nowadays, when everybody is cutting back, a smart business will realize that there are many cheap things out there (office space, people, equipment), and figure out how to use that to their advancement. The companies that use this time only to cut back, won't be in a position to do much of everything when things turn up again. [Techdirt] I've been wondering about this myself, specifically with all the commercial space available in the SF area. Is there an opportunity to change some of these spaces from commercial to residential properties? I'm sure it wouldn't be easy, but is it possible? 3:12:32 PM

Amazon.com As The Web Services Trailblazer For a while there was all this talk about web services, but very few examples of anyone doing anything with them. That's beginning to change. Both Amazon.com and Google are actively experimenting with web services that let others have access to their databases, and, in the case of Amazon, it's proving to be a success. There are a large number of sites out there selling products, all through Amazon's back end using web services. It makes complete sense for Amazon - who has expanded their strategy to running stores for other companies (like Target and Toys R Us). With web services plenty of smaller stores can use Amazon for their backend as well - without Amazon having to do any work. [Techdirt] So, is Amazon competing not only with major retailers, but also vendors of shopping cart systems and transaction processing? As a potential client myself, the opportunity to tap into the rich customer base inside Amazon is hard to resist! 3:04:22 PM

Marketing Translation Blunders REDUX The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty has taken my previous blog entty to task: But I read it on the internet! When Coca-Cola first shipped to China, they named the product something that when pronounced sounded like "Coca-Cola." The only problem was that the characters used meant "Bite the wax tadpole." They later changed to a set of characters that mean "Happiness in the mouth." Uhm... No. Coca-Cola did not run a campaign for "Bite the wax tadpole" in China. They did the research up front. Chinese shopkeepers however, would frequently spell the name phonetically, without regard for translation. When Gerber first started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as here in the USA - with the cute baby on the label. Later they found out that in Africa companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside since most people can't read. Gerber baby food horrified Africans? No. Chicken magnate Frank Perdue's line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," sounds much more interesting in Spanish: "It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate." Frank Perdue? 100 people survey, top 4 answers on the board... Still looking. (sorry, my Spanish language experts are in bed at the moment.) The moral of this story? Do your research, and start at Snopes[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] I stand corrected. To be fair, I read it in a University of Phoenix online classroom discussion. I'll forward on these comments to the class. This is the second time in as many days that I've discovered course materials that are simply wrong. The textbook says that Victoria Secrets ran a Superbowl ad for their Internet fashion show without telling the webmasters. I'm getting kinda bummed out... this coursework costs a lot of money! 2:45:17 PM