Category: Internet

Usable Type: Usable Microformats. An actual real life example of a microformat in action, in a place where it actually makes sense to have one. I might have to hack this into the blog just to check it out.

BuzzMachine: No more AO-Hell. An elegant, well-written elegy… well, not really, what’s the opposite of an elegy?—anyway, Jeff Jarvis kisses AOL goodbye as he kicks it to the curb and in the process writes a really nice summary of the Internet experience pre-Mosaic.

For the record, I was lucky enough to avoid getting hooked into any of the walled gardens, primarily because I went online first through my school and the Unix shell, then through Mosaic at the end of my fourth year. Never looked back.

Congrats to Dave Winer for shipping OPML 1.0, the outlining format that’s also a blogging tool. I’ll be playing with it and posting thoughts in the familiarly named space over here.

We’ve been back in the Boston area just short of a year, so it’s probably time for me to get a cell number with a 781 area code.

Actually, the move is precipitated by increasingly flaky performance from my once-trusty Nokia 3650. The phone has never had great reception at our house, and now it’s not answering some calls and dropping others. Time to move on.

I did my research and decided to make a few changes. First, after looking at the available models, I decided against getting another Nokia right now. I like the Symbian platform, but frankly I’m not using it. The only apps that I run on this phone are available on other platforms too. And Nokia has really fallen behind in terms of phone design.

I realized how far behind Nokia has fallen when I looked at phones from LG, Samsung, and even Sony Ericsson. I had once sworn never to get another Ericsson, but the S710a changed my mind. This is a slick little phone, and despite its association with Star Wars Episode III seems to provide some serious features, including a 1.3 megapixel camera (with a lens cover!) and built in Bluetooth. Plus that screen… and of course the EDGE network stuff. Compared to it, the runner up, the Nokia 6820, just didn’t look good.

Second, I decided to buy the phone, and my new service plan, from Amazon. Over the last few years I’ve grown to realize that there is nothing magical about the activation service that the cell phone dealer provides, and a look at the activation instructions provided for Cingular phones confirms that. So I bought a new plan with the phone and reaped the relatively massive discounts that came with it, and I’ll cancel the old service when the new phone arrives. I don’t know why I thought that would be hard. (Though maybe I should wait until the whole thing is done before making that assessment.)

It will be nice to have a cell phone that is a little smaller, and I won’t miss the circular keypad.

You’re a blogger. You find the AOL listings for Live8. All of Live8. And you post links to them. You don’t rehost the clips, you don’t try to sell them, you just point to them. No problem, right? Um, apparently, wrong. Sonician, as indicated in this Google cache snapshot, is taken down completely. I’m looking forward to working down the links anyway, but damn it: why on earth would you do something so boneheaded, AOL?

Oh right, I forgot, you’re AOL.

If I had a Paypal address for the author of the site, I’d be flowing them some coin, but as it turns out, all I can do is to call AOL and the site’s ISP and bitch. Maybe you should too. Because as the author of the site says, “Since when is linking to another website a crime? Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?”

Boing Boing: White Wolf’s last copyright debacle: DRM disaster. Great list of something like 13 different problems with a product using the simple DRM in Acrobat files, plus a jillion bad PR moves by the firm producing the DRM’d content trying to defend their DRM.

Second most stupid use of DRM ever, after the inexplicable decision to DRM a CD by a new act like Tsar that stands to lose the least and benefit the most from file-sharing.

Looks like Dave is taking his new OPML outliner application on the road. Yesterday New York (with visit from John Sculley), tomorrow Berkman. I hope to be there tomorrow night.

Mostly I’m excited at the prospect of a decent Internet aware Windows outliner.

And yeah, much more excited about the demo than I am about the Boston Macworld going on this week. And will remain in that balance of excitement until Apple starts announcing product at Boston Macworld. (Though it would have been nice to meet Adam Engst, Andy Ihnatko, and the great Rob Griffiths.

New York Times: Consumers, Long the Targets, Become the Shapers of Campaigns. Sigh. You know, I thought Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger worked this out years ago, folks. Consumer = someone who consumes, or as the Cluetrain quotes, “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” If you really want to talk about people participating in your business, then you’re not talking about just a consumer any more, but a customer. Big difference. Do you take consumers seriously? How about customers?

To the point of this article: How would you advertise to a consumer? Buy, buy, buy. How about to a customer? Maybe you don’t advertise at all, maybe you just put out the information about your product and let them decide. Both are forms of marketing—maybe even valid forms of advertising—but only one is enlightened.

To be clear, I’m mostly complaining about Crest’s interactive advertising campaign, which has very little to do with enlightened customer-centric marketing. I see Crest asking me to vote on toothpaste and I think, You don’t respect me and you don’t respect my time. Calling Crest’s campaign, which sends “e-mail message[s] from Crest urging [customers] to vote every day” for their favorite toothpaste flavor, “marketing” is like calling that condescending lecture from your least-favorite aunt who forgets you’re more than five years old a “conversation.” (It also sounds like a good way to drive up Crest’s opt-out and unsubscribe numbers.)

But Staples’ interactive product design contest—encouraging customers to submit new product ideas—is respectful. Their process is much more like a true conversation. Maybe the difference is as much in the nature of the products as it is in the companies. After all, who needs another flavor of toothpaste?

Last point: I’m not sure how the Times can write an article about companies using interactive marketing and not ask the other partner in the equation, the customers, to comment. The only voices in this article are advertising companies and product marketers. You would think they would have asked at least one toothpaste user how he liked being asked to vote. Then maybe they would have found out something.

At the least, can we get the Times to stop writing articles that use the word consumer when they mean you and me?

A few emails in reaction to my Grokster piece, both pointing me to more detailed responses elsewhere. David Goldenberg writes, “Thought you might enjoy this most recent interview with Mark Cuban over at Gelf Magazine…”:

At first glance, it would seem that the Supreme Court has dealt Mark Cuban, who helped fund Grokster’s legal team, a pretty severe blow. But Cuban says the Supreme Court focused on how the technology was marketed, and not the technology itself, and thinks that the ruling will stem any moves by Congress toward passing laws that could potentially be even more restrictive of technology….

Gelf Magazine: Is this a major victory for the entertainment and recording industries?

Mark Cuban: No. It’s a major victory for lawyers everywhere.

And according to Business Week’s interview with Larry Lessig, the famed intellectual property specialist is in agreement:

Q: Why do you think the Supreme Court decided to take on this case rather than letting the issues get decided in Congress?

A: Increasingly, this court is oblivious to the costs of its own decisions. The Reagan Administration pushed the regulatory-impact statements. I think we need an equivalent Ronald Reagan to push the judicial-opinion-impact statement that tries to calculate the efficiency costs of certain legal rules. I continue to be disappointed in Justice Souter’s obtuseness to the costs of the complexity that he adds to the copyright system….

Q: So the problem with the decision is just that the Supreme Court rendered an opinion at all, rather than letting legislators decide?

A: Right. By making it a process that goes through the courts, you’ve just increased the legal uncertainty around innovation substantially and created great opportunities to defeat legitimate competition. You’ve shifted an enormous amount of power to those who oppose new types of competitive technologies. Even if in the end, you as the innovator are right, you still spent your money on lawyers instead of on marketing or a new technology.

In Congress, we might have a lot of argument about what the statute should look like. But that would be a process that would resolve this intensely political issue politically. Instead, Justice Souter engages in common-law lawmaking, which is basically judges making up the law they want to apply to this particular case. And not just Supreme Court judges—what they’ve done is invite a wide range of common-law lawmaking by judges around the country trying to work out the details of what this intent standard really is.

Thanks to Rob Hof, Business Week’s Silicon Valley bureau chief, for the tip about the interview (also see the comments thread on his BW blog post). I kept waiting for Lessig’s comment to appear on his blog, and I’m still waiting; this confirms my suspicions that the so called “inducement test” from the ruling is anything but a bright line.

New York Times: Web Content by and for the Masses. The tone of John Markoff’s article is fairly laudatory toward the efforts by various large corporations toward what I am starting to think of as Our Internet—the part of the Web featuring content that touches our lives or that we generate ourselves. Markoff’s examples include Flickr, the applications that have been layered on top of Google Maps, Yahoo’s My Web, Apple and Microsoft’s embrace of RSS in their browsers, Will Wright’s Spore, Technorati, and the infamous LA Times wikitorial experiment.

So what about the most recent corporate foray into Our Internet: Apple’s new podcasting support? The subscription model is clean, the price is right, you can grab individual episodes or subscribe to a podcast indefinitely, clean model to take the content with you, and clear instructions on how to publish your own feeds (even if the namespace is funky). What’s not to like?

Well, take a look at the Podcasting Directory (iTunes required, or see screenshot). Who creates the content in this directory? How deep do you have to go before you find true user-created content? On first glance, it looks to me like podcasting is about Disney, ABC, ESPN, public and commercial radio, and Adam Curry. if you scroll down there’s “Indie Podcasts,” but that’s a tiny percentage of the directory’s public face that looks like Our Internet. Everything else is business as usual.

The irony is that if you dig into the directory through one of the category links on the lower left, the balance is redressed: there are 816 audioblogs (as of this writing) listed, compared to probably three hundred other listings. But from a promotional standpoint, it’s all about big content (and maybe about ad or sponsorship revenue for Apple; surely the presence of ABC, Disney, and ESPN all above the fold suggests some kind of promotional package with ABC Corporate).

And because podcasts are just audio, there are none of the attention-sharing features (like searchability, tags, or even hyperlinks) that might help provide automated ways of discovering and surfacing new voices. Unless I’m missing something? But it seems like we have a level content publishing model but a very un-level content promotional and discovery market.

I want to let this one go but I can’t; it’s stuck in my head.

I was at Home Depot for the third time in 72 hours or so at lunch. On Friday I picked up the wrong module for the media distribution center, and when I went in this morning to return it and get the correct one, I picked up the right box. But when I got it to the car and was driving to the office, I opened it at a stoplight and realized there was no module inside—just a punch-down tool.

I thought, Great. Not only would I not believe myself if I went back with the opened box and told them there was no module inside when I bought it, but I had used the self-checkout and so there wouldn’t even be a cashier to vouch that they had seen me.

But I went back and stood in the return line, and did a slow burn as I waited, and waited. And when I explained to the return cashier, whose first language was not English, she called over the MOD, and then the head cashier.

I started telling the story to the head cashier, but she cut me off. “You were here this morning, weren’t you? I saw you.” Yeah, I said. “Go ahead and get a correct module. Sorry for the trouble.”

I had set myself up for nothing but trouble: go in first thing in the morning, take the purchase path that involves no human contact, walk out with no proof that I hadn’t just taken the module out of the box. But because someone happened to see me and vouch for me, the system made an exception.

Hugely important, that human ability to make judgments and to decide that there should be exceptions. It doesn’t get implemented in code that way, and we forget about it all the time. But we are more than just ghosts in our machines. Sometimes we’re here to make decisions they can’t, so that people who need help can get it.

Democrats.org, the official site of the DNC, has relaunched, as I hinted this morning. Much more prominent messaging on the party’s agenda, strategy and initiatives.

The code-head thing I hinted about? Well, for one thing, the site is now being served as XHTML 1.0 Transitional (though there are some minor validation weirdnesses). For another, if you view source on the main site pages (i.e. the pages that aren’t part of the Blog Formerly Known As Kicking Ass), you see mt-* URLs, including mt-search.cgi. Word has it that the whole DNC website has been ported to a customized, mostly static version of Movable Type.

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time a blogging platform has taken over an entire web presence for a major American political party. (For all I know, that sentence doesn’t need the qualifier “American,” but I don’t have enough information to go out on that limb.)