Posted on November 27, 2006 @ 9:40 pm
I’m sitting in a hotel in Guadalajara watching Monday night football, Packers vs. Seahawks. Everything is translated into Castellanos (Spanish), even the refs when they announce penalties. I’m surprised how many people here are watching the game…
Posted on November 25, 2006 @ 10:29 am
I’ve been taking a lot of photos since getting my new camera and looked into a bunch of different web-based photo albums. Here are my comments about some of the leading ones:
*Flickr the best overall because of the huge network already using it. I have the basic account which limits how many photos I can upload per month and how many ’sets’ I can create. The reason you take photos is to share them, and Flickr makes it easy to link together w/ friends and to share your photos with large groups of people with similar interests.
* Picasa Web Albums: Really easy to upload directly from iPhoto (with the plug-in), but lacks the community sharing aspect and lacks many of the photo-specific features, like adding notes on the images.
* Zoomr Much like Flickr, but lacks the strong community. Similar features, no unique benefits from what I could tell.
* Gallery This is a self-hosted product that’s actually quite great for archiving your photos on your own website. It allows comments, ratings, and many of the features of Flickr (except community). I installed this on my serverand I like how easy it is to customize. While I’ll continue to use Flickr for sharing w/ friends, I may use Gallery to archive the raw image files (to get them off my hard drive).
There are two photo sites that I didn’t bother trying:
* Snapfish Instead of encouraging me to try new features or giving me a discount on my next order, HP decided to threaten to close my Snapfish account if I don’t buy anything from them in the next 10 days. What an awful idea. If that’s how they treat their users, I’ll try another photo printing service next time.
* Kodak EasyShareThe reason I didn’t try it is because I’ve had too many bad experiences where a friend sends me their photo album in Ofoto or EasyShare, and it won’t let me browse it without registering on the site. This was a huge mistake on their part and is the main reason I won’t bother trying it.
Posted on November 15, 2006 @ 12:43 am
I’ll be spending the next few days in Half Moon Bay — so I’ll be offline for the most of Wednesday -> Friday.
Hopefully I’ll return with some good photos to post.
Posted on November 10, 2006 @ 10:38 pm
I have a small canon sd300 and just started figuring out how to use it in the manual mode. Here are two shots that I took tonight:
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| From Sunset almost… |
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| From Washington Sq… |
I can’t wait to upgrade to a new digital camera with manual controls.
Posted on November 9, 2006 @ 11:18 am
The changing landscape in the content world results in one interesting deal after another. Today it was announced that Microsoft will share a percentage of each Zune sale with record labels, the first deal struck with Universal. Record labels are struggling with falling CD sales, and according to MarketingVox, this deal is intended to compensate record labels when someone purchases a Zune, which can potentially store illegally downloaded music.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case — but I think there are two strongers reasons for such a deal:
# Zune allows you to share music with other Zune owners, transferring songs via WiFi. If you transfer a copyrighted song, it only play on the other device for 3 days or 3 playbacks. It seems that this sharing feature would encourage sales of songs, since a transferred file is only good for a very limited period. However, I could see the record companies wanting compensation for allowing this feature (and allowing sharing of their content).
# In Robert Scoble’s interview with the Zune Product Manager, the PM mentioned that they want you to have a great experience out of the box, and that the Zune will come pre-loaded with some cool content. If MarketingVox is right that Zune is giving a little more than $1 to Universal, it could actually be compensation for pre-loaded content, like an mp3 and a music video.
If I’m wrong and the compensation isn’t for purposes like those above, then it’s a pure strategic move for Microsoft, better aligning themselves with the content owners. Hopefully such a deal opens the door to other new opportunities for the music business…
Posted on @ 12:15 am
I’m particularly interested in how the election results affect things like:
* _Net neutrality_: Sounds like the democrats won’t make a drastic change and sign the net neutrality bill, but Ed Markey as Chairman of the Telecom and Internet Subcommittee may help fend off legislation from telcos.
* _Copyright_: TechDirt has a good post about this. In summary, it basically depends on who is assigned to lead the Congressional IP subcommittee.
* _Gas prices_: I didn’t think it was coincidence that prices fell drastically from August-Nov, leading up to the election. I also don’t find it surprising that oil prices rose today and inventory fell sharply.
* _Housing prices_: A great article on Bloomberg says that democrats may be concerned that the fed is “too focused on inflation, to the detriment of promoting growth”. I’m with them if it doesn’t cause the price of my house to drop! 
Posted on November 3, 2006 @ 4:18 pm
I noticed this article covered in 3 Quarks Daily today — that the North American based McArthur & Co. Publishing to -censor- edit Nancy Huston’s award winning French-language novel “Lignes de faille” before publishing it in English.
Kim McArthur, founder of McArthur & Co. is quoted in Globe and Mail saying that the author “has promised us some slight revisions; it’s very tiny . . . maybe four sentences” to permit Lignes de faille to be published in 2007 in Canada and, possibly, the United States with a new English title, _Birth Marks_.
The controversy is over how Nancy Huston writes about the war in Iraq, George Bush, Jesus, and pornography. Huston says “contemporary America is reproducing the worst traits of Nazi Germany. I believe we are in a pretotalitarian state.”
As an American, this makes me really frustrated, but at the same time it doesn’t surprise me. If the original book were published in English, -Fox News- the right-wing media would likely attack the publisher, the author, and bring back memories of _freedom fries_. This is censorship at it’s worst and demonstrates the influence that the US media has on what is and what isn’t published in America.
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Completely off-topic — it’s interesting to see that _Lignes de faille_ is nominated this year to the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award. The Goncourt winner is selected by the Academie Goncourt jury in the 2nd floor dining room at Restaurant Drouant in Paris. I ate dinner in this same room earlier this year…what a place!
Posted on @ 12:24 pm
On Wednesday I started writing a post about how online revenue for newspaper publishers is growing, but that the news industry is also missing some major opportunities. I haven’t published my article online yet and it’s turning out to be more of an essay than a blog post, so I’m going to table it for the moment. However, one observation in my essay is that most newspapers have started blogs on their websites, usually with their own writers; and that these are often less successful and less interesting than other niche blogs that exist. My main case and point is that TechCrunch is one of the leading technology blogs, and I’m surprised that a company like Dow Jones, News Corp or Gannett hasn’t made a strong effort to acquire it. It’s hugely popular, profitable, and the content would complement their other online properties. AOL clearly saw this opportunity when they bought Weblogs Inc . I think AOL may be more comfortable with decentralized content properties, whereas news publishers for the most part prefer to fold sites under their main brand. I tend to think that the better long term approach is to grow a diverse set of succesful niche properties, and use the content to supplement the main brand. For example, wouldn’t it be powerful for the WSJ or USA Today to supplement the business & technology sections with news & analysis from TechCrunch (while maintaining TechCrunch as a an independant property)?