Here’s an underreported story if ever there was one (from the IMDb Studio Briefing):
Theater owners are apparently mounting a fairly united front to black out the Steven Soderbergh-directed Bubble in many cities on Friday. Exhibitors object to the planned simultaneous release of the movie on DVD and on pay-per-view high-definition TV. (The film is actually being released on DVD on Tuesday, the day of the week that virtually all DVDs are released.) The film is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, owned by Mark Cuban, the dot-com entrepreneur who also owns 2929 Entertainment, the film company that backed Bubble, and the art-house theater chain Landmark Theaters. The Baltimore Sun reported today (Thursday) that no theater in that city, the country’s 24th largest market, will screen the film. It quoted Scott Cohen, head of R/C Theater Management, as saying, “At this point we’re not going to play any movie that is under that model.” In Seattle, where the film will open at one theater, Landmark’s Metro, an unnamed exhibitor told the Post-Intelligencer, “It’s not a question of if we will be hurt [by simultaneous release of movies in theaters and on DVD]; it’s a question of how much.” In an article on his website posted on Wednesday, Cuban indicated that some exhibitors have defied the stonewall being erected against his film, but he does not indicated how many have agreed to screen it. He urges patrons of those theaters to “thank the manager … for having the balls to go against the rest of the industry.”
It makes me incredibly angry that theatre owners, instead of working their butts off to compete fairly by offering a great viewing experience, are using anti-competitive tactics to deny consumers choice.
So here’s an idea: let’s boycott any cinema that thinks distorting the market and coercing consumers is the best way to compete. Let them get a taste of their own medicine! I wanted to put a little button in my sidebar that says “Boycott Bubble Blowers”. Something like:
Unfortunately my graphical skills are barely sufficient even for this simple mockup. If someone reading this agrees with me and is capable of making something cool-looking, I promise to put it in my sidebar, link it to a suitably apoplectic rant and encourage others to do so (while giving full credit of course). I cribbed the text for the movie title from the Internet Movie Database.
Update: Thanks to the design skills of Julia I’ve set up a website for my first foray into consumer activism. It includes a cool button, suitable for placement on your own blog or website!
I subscribed to the Digg feed a few weeks ago, and I’d have to agree with Russell Beattie: the wisdom of crowds is rapidly being overwhelmed by foolishness. There’s also an off-putting bias towards Digg-boostering in the frontpage stories. This may play well to the faithful, but non-fanatics like myself aren’t interested in a constant stream of “Digg Rules!” style stories.
So if Yahoo is really buying Digg for $30 million, which I doubt, they’re barking up the wrong tree. They’d do far better to add Digg-like features to del.icio.us, which bases popular picks on the pages people have bookmarked for the own purposes, rather than relying on a hard core of obsessive compulsives to lift choice stories out of obscurity.
Update: Thomas Hawk concludes that the rumored acquisition is a bunch of hot air. I guess I see less value in Digg (at least at present) than Thomas does, since he is still enthusiastic about a potential link up. His long post about improving Yahoo Search by using social software techniques, in which he proposes a Digg acquisition (could this have been the original source of the rumor?) is highly recommended reading, in any case.
On Techcrunch, A-list blogger Michael Arrington posted a seemingly innocuous commentary on Tello, a high-profile foray into the instant messaging/presence space. While praising the underlying idea, he pointed out a few flaws in the way the launch has been orchestrated, including the fact that the Tello homepage trumpeted links from the traditional press but ignored the blogging world.
Nothing particularly controversial, one would think, but this didn’t prevent Michael from being raked over the coals in the comments to his post, with a typical critique reading:
I generally like your blog, but shudder when you stray into pretentious rants like this. Please do criticize on the basis of the product but don’t whine because a company isn’t following your narrow script.
Now maybe there’s some history here that I don’t know about, but there seems to be a surprising amount of pent-up hostility towards bloggers like Michael who have the temerity to believe that what they say actually matters. Another commenter points out that even exceptionally popular bloggers have far less reach than a mainstream mag like Business Week.
True enough, but this totally and utterly misses the point. It’s a well-known fact that successful names from Big Business aren’t always the best entrepreneurs. Seeing as Tello encroaches on the terrain of tech favorites like Skype and Trillian, a very pertinent question to ask is whether they will successfully court the requisite early adopters and opinion leaders. If not, all their money, experience and exposure in the mainstream media may well come to naught. Michael was absolutely right to criticize their apparently blasé attitude towards bloggers, and Tello was absolutely right to respond by adding links to major blogs to their news page. The only ones for whom I can’t find any sympathy are those righteously indignant readers of Techcrunch who live and breathe the Web 2.0 world, but as far as I can tell don’t even get blogging.
I’m a huge Bob Cringely fan. In fact, I own both his classic PBS documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” and the sequel “Nerds 2.0.1” on VHS. Outnerd that, suckahs!
Anyway, Bob’s weekly column is generally entertaining because he’s not afraid to go out on a limb and say something potentially ridiculous. His recent column on Google’s ambitions in the TV advertising space is a case in point:
Google imagines a world where only single people see match.com ads, and people who can’t drive see ads from taxi companies where others see Toyota campaigns. Where fraternities see ads for strip clubs, beer, Cancun weekends and LSAT prep courses, and only seniors (and their adult children) see ads for Alzheimer’s drugs. What would be the value of that increased efficiency, capitalized into present dollars? Ten billion? Fifty billion? I say the value is $100 billion — 25 percent of the total U.S. advertising market and 15 times Google’s current size.
Cringley believes this will come to pass because Google’s edge in advertising is “granularity”. So it stands to reason that the googlization of TV will result in more targeted ads. Or does it? What analyses like this tend to forget is that TV ads are a throwback to an ancient time when broadcast was the only game in town for delivering video, and mass advertising the only plausible way of financing it. The whole point of TV spots is that they’re fairly generic, so they gel nicely with the broadcast model.
What’s actually going to happen is that broadcast is going to suffer a slow and agonizing demise over the next few years. It will be replaced by video on demand, enabling viewers to choose exactly what they want to see and watch it whenever convenient. It’s increasingly clear that people don’t like their shows interrupted incessantly. If ads become so targeted that they start recommending Italian restaurants for us to dine at this evening, as in Cringely’s example, then what possible value is there in delivering them on TV, where they are at their most vacuous and annoying? The real trend will be for internet-style search services to migrate onto the boob tube. After all, the core value of TV ads is in their ability to sell undifferentiated staples like breakfast cereal and laundry detergent to the masses using the same generic shiny happy models, running on a sun-drenched beach. Once I can get real information with a click of my remote, they will be utterly irrelevant.
Update: Apparently even the advertising industry agrees that “Advertising is Obsolete”. I felt very avant-garde when I first started ranting about this, but it’s finally beginning to seep into the mainstream.
My off-the-cuff review of Performancing, the Firefox blog editing extension, was characterized by ambivalence. Since then I’ve made a conscious effort to use it for my blog postings, and there are certainly a lot of attractions. Real WYSIWYG for one thing, so I don’t have to save my work to see how the HTML will look. Being able to edit in a split screen while browsing the web for links and the like is also cool.
Nonetheless, I’ve gone back to the good old WordPress textbox. Performancing still has too many bugs and annoyances, many of which I mentioned in my review. I’ve even managed to lose my work a couple of times, which is hardly endearing. And updates have been few and far between, so I’ve given up on any major improvements in the short term. I’m certainly open to trying again once they’ve had time to iron out the glitches.
In the meantime, WordPress 2.0 has been out for a couple of weeks, and it apparently has WYSIWYG editing and a host of other cool features. I’ll try to give it a test drive next week if I have time.
Chris Lott: Web 2.0, The Whining Whingeing Web
Update: Fixed the missing hyperlink.
A few days ago I posted my musings on the decision to make AllPeers a Firefox extension, rather than a standalone app. I cited a post by Brian of The Dumping Ground as an articulate expose of the sceptic’s position. Brian went on to post a thought-provoking three-part series entitled “What Does ‘Web Paradigm’ Mean, Anyway?” (part one, part two, part three).
I seem to have developed a reputation for never agreeing with anyone, ever. (But in a thoroughly endearing way, right?) Although Brian makes a lot of excellent points, I’m afraid this is no exception.
A fair summary of part one would be that everything interesting about the web browser (hyperlinks, back/forward buttons, content viewers, etc.) has already been integrated into the desktop by Microsoft, and the result is neat but hardly spectacular. And yes, sprinkling a bit of web goodness onto Windows is not particularly revolutionary. (And if I were the type to take cheap shots I might ask why we are using Windows as the epitome of desktop/web integration when Microsoft has rarely — if ever — done anything truly revolutionary). The beauty of the web user interface paradigm is that it’s much simpler and less cluttered than the windows-flying-everywhere desktop paradigm. To benefit from this we need to kill the desktop, not graft on a new appendage.
Part two puts forth two overarching arguments for shunning indiscriminate use of web-inspired user interfaces. Firstly, Brian points out that HTML, even souped up with healthy doses of Javascript, sucks for many types of applications. True, but I’m not proposing a wholesale shift to HTML. Mozilla introduces the concept of a modern, markup-driven user interface language: XUL. Like HTML, XUL is easy to author and to stream across a network link, but it can be used to create great GUIs. In fact, Firefox itself is built using XUL. Microsoft seems to agree, seeing as XAML (its XUL rival) is a key component of Vista.
Secondly, he maintains that expanding the role of browser extensions will require the addition of capabilities to the browser (preemptive scheduling, process isolation, etc.) that are tantamount to creating a new operating system. Here his case is at its strongest. It’s going to be a long time before Firefox offers a viable alternative to a full-blown OS, and in the interim the annoyance of having to put up with its shortcomings may outweigh its advantages for many types of extensions. For example, I hate the fact that when I restart my browser, I have to restart Chatzilla. But if we had adhered to this argument in the past, we’d still be running our GUIs on top of DOS or some similar abomination. Sometimes it’s necessary to make a clean break and reinvent the wheel if we want one that’s smaller, lighter and rolls more smoothly.
In part three, Brian is saying that to take the web to the next level we need to put into place infrastructure that is based on structured data like XML, rather than fragile HTML. Well whaddaya know, I wrote a whole essay that argued exactly the same point. Who says I never agree with anyone?
The Observer has a long article about the upcoming e-book revolution. No one seems anxious to go out on a limb, with forecasts as to when electronic books will rival their paper brethren ranging from ten to fifteen years hence. I believe that this trend could kick in a lot sooner than that, with electronic reading devices becoming a common sight within five years. And I’ve predicted that the first rumblings will be heard this year.
Techdirt cites a survey indicating that only 17% of viewers would be willing to pay for TV in order to avoid seeing ads, calling into question the whole notion of selling shows on an a la carte basis:
[The networks] have far more to make from advertising than from selling individual episodes of shows, and can’t seriously believe that everybody that watches programs now will pay to watch episodes.
Really?
First of all, the survey specifically mentions the $1.99/show figure that has seemingly been plucked out of a hat by the networks. Obviously this price is far too high if pay-per-view is to become a viable replacement for advertising. In fact, I suspect it was purposely made unrealistically expensive to avoid pissing off affiliates who depend on ad revenue. To be fair, the Techdirt blurb makes this point before going on to dismiss as economically inviable the very idea of paying for shows .
But the real issue is that the survey asks the wrong question. We all pay for those “free” shows through higher prices at the department store, supermarket and car dealership. The transaction just isn’t as transparent. The proper question is: would you rather pay $X for shows or view them for free, with ads, and pay 10-20% more every time you purchase something from a company with a big advertising budget?
I have to rebuild the entire Mozilla tree more often than I would like. The build takes around 20-30 minutes, and while it’s running my machine is too busy for me to compile or test AllPeers. So I engage in one of the many other aspects of my job, like writing this blog. The problem is that I launch the build from a console window, and there’s no indication of when it’s finished. So I end up flitting back and forth to check on its status, which does nothing to improve my concentration or productivity.
Having failed to find a satisfactory solution, I bit the bullet and wrote FlashTaskbar. It’s a very simple executable that blinks the console window from which it is run if the window isn’t in the foreground. I use it in combination with a batchfile called makex.bat:
@echo off
make %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
FlashTaskbar
If I run makex instead of the normal make, I can continue to work in another window, and when the taskbar starts to flash, I know that the build has completed.
I figured that others might find this useful, if they’re running long tasks in a console window. As always, I take no responsibility for any problems that you might encounter due to use of this program. If you prefer, build your own version (how’s that for open source?):
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
FLASHWINFO fwf;
fwf.cbSize = sizeof(FLASHWINFO);
fwf.hwnd = GetConsoleWindow();
fwf.dwFlags = FLASHW_TIMERNOFG|FLASHW_ALL;
fwf.uCount = 1;
fwf.dwTimeout = 0;
FlashWindowEx(&fwf);
return 0;
}
A bunch of people have asked us when we’re going to start making AllPeers available to registered beta testers. We’re extremely gratified by the enthusiastic response to our screenshots. But we also understand the importance of making a great first impression. We’re testing AllPeers intensively and working on it to ensure that it meets your high expectations. It’s still too early to give an exact date, but we’re confident that when you see the software, you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.
I was planning to put off any predictions until October or so to increase my chance of getting them right, but in the end I decided to bite the bullet and venture a few now.
- The first real mainstream DRM backlash will take place, as consumers realize that music they have bought on various online stores doesn’t play anymore when they buy an MP3 player from another vendor. Apple will make a gesture towards interoperability but try to hold onto its proprietary advantage as long as possible.
- Portable electronic reading devices will begin to make their presence known, and it will finally dawn on forward-thinking publishers that their current business model (subsidizing their online offering by selling pulped dead trees) is doomed to extinction.
- Google will stumble as it struggles to cope with hypergrowth and move beyond its advertising-dominated business model. Its stock price will be lower at year end 2006 than it was when the year began.
- Firefox will break the 20% barrier in browser market share, in large part due to bundling agreements with PC manufacturers.
- At least one application based on Mozilla’s nascent XULRunner platform will achieve widespread adoption.
That’s all I’ve got, folks. Most of the really cool stuff will have to wait until 2007.
Update: Actually here’s another one: despite competition from Digg and other upstarts, Slashdot will remain the king of geek news sites in 2006. Their community and moderation system are simply too well-developed to be easily duplicated. But if they’re smart (note the hedging) they will start to dip their toe in the murky waters of community-driven story selection, perhaps by setting up a special “readers’ picks” page.
On my desk I keep a laptop and a desktop tower system, both of which I use continually (particularly since you need two machines to test the networking capabilities of AllPeers). I’ve been using a KVM switch to control both machines with a single keyboard and mouse, but I’ve never been particularly happy with it. For some reason, switching over takes a few seconds, which is hardly convenient when you’re flitting back and forth all the time. Also, there’s no good way to transfer data between the two machines, and I find myself saving files onto shared drives, loading them in text editors, etc., all just to get a long registration code, for instance, from my laptop (where my email runs) onto my desktop machine.
The other day, a colleague turned me onto Synergy. Usually when you change software you experience only incremental improvement, but every once in a while you stumble on a something that totally blows away your previous approach. This is certainly the case with Synergy. I got rid of my KVM switch, and now it’s like I have a single computer with two monitors. When I slide the mouse off the left side of my desktop screen, it appears instantly and smoothly on the right side of my laptop screen. The keyboard affects whichever machine is displaying the mouse cursor. The clipboard works across machines, and not just for textual data.
To summarize: it rocks. I don’t doubt that, as usual, I’m the last person on earth to hear about this, but if for some reason you have two machines on your desk and you aren’t using Synergy, run (don’t walk) to their website and grab yourself a copy.
In a comment on the Preoccupations blog, Lloyd Shepherd contends that DRM is a sine qua non of legal digital media downloads, using the example of iTunes. I see statements like this all the time, and they always leave me baffled. Why is DRM essential to iTunes? What would happen if there were no DRM? Is the fear that one person would download a song from iTunes and then share it on P2P networks with the rest of the world? If so, how does this differ from the status quo? I can get any song I want from a P2P network already. It strikes me that people buy songs from iTunes for the convenience and peace of mind, neither of which would change one whit if there weren’t any DRM.
The flip side is that I know many people who don’t buy songs from the iTunes store because of the DRM. There’s certainly a chance that Apple would sell less music without DRM, but this isn’t nearly as obvious to me as it appears to be to some others. Frankly I think they would sell more in this scenario.
Update: Lloyd points out that I should have linked to his original blog post.
Long before user-generated content was a hot buzzword, Slashdot was innovating in this space, and some of its achievements have yet to be matched nine years after the site first went online. While I’d be the first to admit that many of the 100s of comments that adorn the typical frontpage article are embarrassingly childish, the moderation system that is used to separate the wheat from the chaff is impressive from both a technical and a sociological standpoint. In other ways, however, Slashdot is very similar to traditional publications. A small set of handpicked editors choose which stories to run and tidy up their wording to remove spelling and grammatical errors. Well, they choose the stories in any case.
It’s only natural, then, to seek a decentralized solution for actual article selection as well as for moderating comments. The latest contender to gain significant traction is Digg. Alex Bosworth describes the intricate division of labor that enables the community to choose which articles belong on the front page. We’ve been dugg a couple of times over the past few weeks, so I’ve had a chance to experience the process firsthand.
My conclusion: there’s something there, but there’s ample room for improvement. One problem that irks me is the reliance on what Alex calls “hardcore diggers”. My first reaction upon reading his article was that I should hack my blog backend so that every post is automatically submitted to Digg. My second reaction was: what happens if every semi-serious blogger decides to do this? The hardcore diggers, who are crucial to the overall process, would be overwhelmed and the whole edifice would come crashing to the ground. I much prefer the system used by del.icio.us for its popular list; regular people, not fanatics, choose which webpages are of note by bookmarking them, something they do because it provides them with value, not out of unavoidably fragile altruism.
Another major problem is that the lack of editorial oversight leads to rampant duplication of topical stories. It also lets the most appalling spelling and grammatical errors into the system, making the average Slashdot story look like Shakespeare. There needs to be some way for the community to edit submitted articles (maybe they can learn from Wikipedia’s experience in this regard) and to coalesce URLs that refer to the story into a single submission. The fact that next to no one moderates comments is a tribute to the elaborate and delicately balanced ecosystem that Slashdot has managed to foster, something that Digg will have to try much harder to imitate.
Finally, Digg is extremely vulnerable to gaming. It doesn’t take that many “diggs” to get a post onto the frontpage, and the benefits are significant enough that for a PR-hungry company or blogger, it might be worth creating dozens of accounts for this purpose. If the most effective defense available is to rail against the perpetrators’ lack of morals, I fear for the long-term health of the site. Perhaps they hope, with some justification, that if the active community grows large enough, the effort required to lift a story out of obscurity will eventually render gaming unfeasible.
