Category: Internet

Here’s a hypothetical. You are one of two firms in a duopoly for a critical service. You are accused of abusing your position to give your firm a competitive advantage by making it selectively harder for competing products to work across the Internet. You are given an opportunity to explain yourself in a public forum. Do you:

1. Show up and explain your case, and let the chips fall where they may.
2. Pack the deck by putting butts in the seats who are paid to cheer for your position. And keep people out who might question it.

Guess which one Comcast did? If you guessed #2, you’re right. I was getting ready to give Comcast credit for even showing up in this forum, and starting to shed a little light into the black box that is Comcast’s network management. But this admission of their astroturfing practices have completely erased that benefit.

Yes, LinkedIn has released an iPhone optimized UI, about six months after Facebook did. Anyone else think that LinkedIn could have used those six months to come up with an iPhone UI that looked more innovative and less like a direct clone of what Facebook did in a weekend?

Still, it’s nice to be that much closer to someone’s profile wherever you go.

I’m probably the last person in the world to hop onto del.icio.us, and now I’m wondering how I avoided it all this time. Especially now that my time is too scarce to blog every interesting link I find—it’s much faster just to post it to del.icio.us, then come back later and skim the cream of the links for a more in-depth post. (A cursory glance at my bookmarks will reveal that I’ve been doing just that for the past few weeks.)

You can subscribe to my bookmark feed, if you’re so inclined, or to one of the topic feeds. I particularly recommend the productmanagement feed if you’ve found the things I’ve written on that topic interesting, though I can’t guarantee frequent updates. I’ll be taking advantage of some of the platform features to do a little more integration with my site, so beware: a little breakage may be ahead.

The Tin Man’s voice is in the New York Times. I mean, they have an actual sound clip of him being interviewed about the Democratic presidential candidates. How cool is that? It gives “voice of the blogger” a whole new meaning.

And I’ve been meaning to post about JP’s other career for a bit as well. He’s the only animator, and UVA alum, and friend, I have who writes for MAKE Magazine. I really dig the Lego Recharging Station.

Finally, I suppose I would be remiss to not point out Dave’s extended post on philosophy in sports, which says a lot of the things that I wanted to say yesterday. Particularly this paragraph:

Losing teaches you that there’s more to life than winning, and that’s the best lesson possible and it’s the one lesson you keep needing to learn over and over until you lose everything, which like it or not is what we all do in the end.

A former co-worker of mine, Jeff Richards, has surfaced at Sonian Networks, which is offering a new on-demand email archiving service. What’s unique about Sonian Archive SA2 is its architecture. It’s built almost entirely using Amazon Web Services, and is architected in such a way that each customer gets their own “virtual stack.” As additional customers are added, the service scales transparently, according to the Amazon Web Services Blog.

It’s a pretty cool play, and the price sounds right, at $3 per mailbox per month.

There were two spectacularly wonderful things that I found online yesterday:

• Guardian: Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock. This isn’t a new story, but the acquittal of the members of the Untergunther on trespassing charges is. And the concept of people breaking in to fix broken things is one of those delightful moments that makes you glad that the Internet exists. It actually out-xkcds xkcd.
• And then there’s this spectacular Mac vs. Vista ad on Cnet’s Vista page, which may be the reason that Internet ads were created. (YouTube cache of the ad; New York Times article on the ad).

Thanks to Pete Cashmore from Mashable, who alerts me to the “launch” of NBC’s “download” “service.” The “service” will “allow” “you” to “download” and “watch” NBC’s “content.”

Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s expand a few of the quotes:

• Launch: Don’t call it a launch if you only serve customers with an out of date browser (Internet Explorer), require the download of the .NET Framework, won’t run on Firefox, and can’t operate with a Mac.
• Download: Why bother calling it a download? Once I’ve gone through all the hoops, I can’t copy the file to a portable player, including (especially) an iPod.
• Service: A big BROWSER NOT COMPATIBLE banner is not service-oriented.
• Allow: How very gracious of NBC to put up download content with so much barbed wire around it. How can they possibly imagine that this will draw a larger audience than iTunes did?
• You: Who is the target customer for this? Even if my mother-in-law used a PC (she’s on a Mac), I don’t think she’d be cool with downloading a 170+ MB OS component to watch content that she can see in reruns later anyway.
• Watch: Watch while you can. The downloads are timebombed and can only be viewed for seven days.
• Content: Where is the killer show that will compel me to put up with all this nonsense? And why if you’re going to timebomb the content do you bother embedding unskippable ads?

Wake me up when NBC decides to stop hating on its customers.

That didn’t take long. TechCrunch is reporting about a FaceBook application called FriendCSV, which allows dumping selected pieces of data about your contacts to a comma-separated format. TechCrunch has the right angle about this; it’s fundamentally about getting your data back out of FaceBook and not being locked in their trunk.

Some of the folks in the comment thread are getting a little spun up about this. I think they miss the point. As one user says, there is nothing in the data set that cannot be viewed by going to the person’s profile page, and you aren’t pulling any data from anyone who isn’t your friend.

At the end of last week, I missed the announcement about the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes. Particular favorites for me include the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Glenda Browne for her study “The Definite Article: Acknowledging ‘The’ in Index Entries”; the Linguistics prize for a study showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards; and the Chemistry prize, which went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan for pioneering work on the extraction of vanillin (vanilla flavoring) from cow dung.

As Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up.

Best part: a special public tasting of a new Toscanini’s ice cream flavor, “Yum-a-moto Vanilla Twist.” Asking what the twist is is probably like asking what the “surprise” is in Whizzo’s Spring Surprise.

Mike Lee, toughest programmer alive, came up with an insanely competent idea for a comments system: Lemur CATTA, which uses reading comprehension to quiz you on the contents of a blog post before you are allowed to comment on it.

Yeah, I know. Seems like some gradeschool teacher—or Kaplan temp—would have come up with this idea before now, doesn’t it?

BTW, careful with Mike’s blog—his content is SFW, but the site title isn’t.

Coming on the heels of the shuttering of Michael Robertson’s CD Anywhere and the collapse of Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital, now would not seem an auspicious time to launch an online music download store. But that’s what Amazon is doing today. The big difference is that they aren’t trying a subscription play, and they aren’t using DRM; they’re selling MP3s.

This factor proves that Amazon has been paying attention. Customers don’t want to be shackled to DRM? We’ll sell music without DRM.

That doesn’t mean that Amazon’s service, named Amazon MP3, will be a hit right out of the park. A music store is more than just listing inventory and collecting money; it’s providing the ability to find the music. On that score, you need content, user interactivity (playlists, etc.), and inventory. Amazon has content on their physical-CD store, but bizarrely, none of it carries over to the digital download side—no reviews, nothing. Site navigation is lacking, too: you can bring up a list of all 194 songs in inventory by Radiohead (or on tribute albums), but there’s no ability to sort the resulting list by album or artist.

That leaves inventory, and here Amazon would seem to have some advantages over iTunes, such as participation by Universal and inclusion of some hard-to-get artists like Radiohead. However, this is no knock-out blow against iTunes. For one thing, Radiohead were in the iTunes store at launch until the band and their agents found out, and iTunes was forced to pull their music when their label realized that they didn’t have digital distribution rights. Will the same thing happen again?

And it’s rude to bring it up, but I wonder about capacity. In the past, Amazon had problems keeping up with traffic volumes around holidays, and that was just with HTML pages. I wonder what they’ve done to scale up to serving 100 MB worth of download for each album purchased?

At this point, I think the party with the most to lose here is eMusic. Amazon made a point in their press release of calling out indie labels (Righteous Babe, Rounder, and Trojan among them) who are selling DRM-free MP3s for the first time; normally these would be eMusic’s bread and butter. I don’t think satisfied customers of eMusic like myself will cancel their subscriptions, but this might impair their ability to grow.

But Amazon, finally, represents real competition to the iTunes store, which is actually kind of exciting. Maybe they’ll turn up the pressure to sign hold-out artists and labels.

In their haste to try to break Apple’s well-earned stronghold on the content download market, NBC is starting its own download service. Rather than charge for the downloads, the downloads will contain unskippable commercials, and according to the Times the downloads will “degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable.” Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Television Group, calls this “kind of like Mission Impossible.”

I agree, but not with the equating of destruction of downloaded content with MI. The real “mission impossible” will be to get customers to accept a download that doesn’t allow skipping commercials and won’t play on a Mac or an iPod. Oh yes: the article says that “the programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.” Like: as soon as they convince their erstwhile business partners in Redmond to add Mac and iPod compatibility to the appropriate version of Windows Media, I would guess.

I think NBC will also have an impossible mission convincing advertisers that they ought to pay for their ad exposure in this way. The informed advertiser should ask who the target audience for the show is, ask how many of the users who download the file will be able to take it on a mobile device, nod at the answer, then discount NBC’s estimate of the audience size by about 90%.

Put a fork in NBC, folks. They are failing to understand even the basic advertising model on which they thrive, which is: go where the eyeballs are. The fifteen people around the country who enjoy downloading crippled content onto their PCs and not being able to skip commercials and watch on their iPods are not a sufficient audience to build a successful download service on (and if you don’t believe me, ask Amazon). And by putting all their eggs in this basket, they are opening back up the enormous gray market of Bittorrent, which would lose much of its attractiveness for normal users if the content were available for purchase on their own terms.

Don’t trust these guys. They speak out of both sides of their mouths, claiming that music piracy is “facilitated by iTunes”—an iTunes that includes significant DRM features for purchased music. And they claim to understand that “the customer is going to be in control” without understanding that the customer will take control here as well.

Update: See Fake Steve Jobs’s take on the service.

Today’s quick random surf turned up some really horrifying things and some really funny ones, so here’s the best of each:

Horrifying: The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time at the Museum of Hoaxes (via). While it starts out whimsically enough with elephants on acid, the whimsy is cut short when you find out that the elephant DIED. About a third to two-thirds of the subsequent experiments are pretty sick, though the one about gender attitudes toward casual sex is pretty good.

Funny: Fight For Kisses, the new ad campaign from shaving equipment maker Wilkinson. The ad is subtitled in English and French, but the actual promotional site is all French. Nevertheless, the concept of babies going all Neo when they find out that their daddies are going to take Mommy’s precious attention away is kind of … disturbing. But funny. (via)

For a project I’m working on, a list of XSLT resources:

• Microsoft’s XML Downloads page, including a pointer to msxsl.exe, the command line transformation utility
• NXSLT – open source .NET based XSLT command line utility
• XML.com’s What Is XSLT – beginner tutorial
• XML and XSLT Resource List from the National Library of Medicine
• Skew.org’s XML and XSLT links page
• An old links page at Berkeley lists some resources for debugging and tracing XSLT
• Mark McLaren’s XSLT resources for beginners
• And of course the W3C pages on XSL

An interesting point is that all of these pages are old, some dating back to 2001—yet they are in the top of the Google results. Is XSLT a dead technology?

This is a wonderful find, and a fabulous metaphor, on the first week of school. Er, shcool.

It’s also a good argument for a serious focus on improving public literacy.