Jason Calacanis says about Google AdSense:
... people look at them like content and they don’t even mind them. In fact, I see them as value added. As such, it’s a revolution in advertising—for the first time since the Superbowl people want the ads!!!
That’s right. We are all consumers of products and services, and information about the options available is indeed valuable, especially if it respects our time and needs, so it doesn’t force us to watch irrelevant ads. And this is exactly where digital media win over broadcast.
And it’s essentially a solved problem now. From here on out, it is just a matter of tuning and perfecting the technology and the ecosystem, so they become even more valuable, and advertising can again pay for publishing, including journalism, like it always has—don’t forget that the subscription you pay for a dead-trees paper typically doesn’t even cover print and distribution costs, the rest is paid for by ads.
As I’m doing the Dvorak thing, I’m finding that certain key combos on my mac ignore the Dvorak setting. One example is the highly addictive Dictionary lookup, which used to be at Cmd-Ctrl-D, but now is at Cmd-Ctrl-E, which happens to be the same physical key as D on the normal layout. The same with hitting Q and M while mousing over applications in Cmd-TAB mode, here you also have to remember where the key is on the normal keyboard layout. When you switch to the application and then want to quit or minimize, then you use the Dvorak Q or M. Quite odd.
I’ve been doing
Dvorak for four days straight now, after seeing the link to that site somewhere, I forget where. This is the third time I’ve tried Dvorak, but the most committed one. I think I shall succeed, although it is mentally tiring in a way that I am not used to. Phew :)
The Dvorak Zine, however also reminded me of an old dream of mine, namely to do some basic computer science and web teaching materials as a series of cartoons. I find that most of this stuff isn’t all that difficult for reasonably smart, abstractly thinking people to understand, once they get the right mental picture. Something the McCloud-style cartoon is great at.
Det er grimt, men den er god nok: Det står i retskrivningsordbogen. (Fra dagens Politiken 1. sektion side 3)
In 1989 I was insightful enough to make backups of the source code to the major pieces of software I had developed by then. The only problem is I made them on 5 1/4” floppies, and now I no longer own a drive that reads those. Do any of you have access to such a drive so I could get it out? We are talking 18 floppies of less than 360 kB each, so a maximum of 6 MB.
From iCon:
The definition of visionary is ‘someone with an inner vision not supported by external facts.’
(p23)
I don’t particularly like replicating what’s elsewhere on the net, but this quote has been with me the whole day, and, you know, I’m the maximizer, so here it is again:
You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Thanks, Dan!
I don’t particularly like replicating what’s elsewhere on the net, but this quote has been with me the whole day, and, you know, I’m the maximizer, so here it is again, from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech last weekend:
You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Thanks, Dan!
UPDATE: Added the Jobs name, which I originally forgot in the hurry.
There’s been a
settlement over the iPod batteries. I don’t see a link on their
Danish home page—does anybody know if this settlement is only valid for US customers? ‘cause our iPods are broken, too, you know …
UPDATE: Simon read the notice more carefully than I: This only applies to US residents.
I have a
DELL PowerEdge 1600 server box, same form factor as the
1800 line, so no small beast. It’s currently turned off, which is a pity, but it’s too noisy for me to have at home.
Do you have or know of a place where it can get shelter, power and IP, cheaply? In or around Copenhagen, so I can get to it when I need to. It doesn’t have to be a “professional hosting” place, as long as it’s reasonably reliable.
Now that reboot7 is over, it’s time to take a moment to celebrate Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the person to make it all happen. It was so well done that David Weinberger even suggests it has given the much bigger and better financed US conferences a run for their money. Truly something to be proud of. When will we see O’Reilly hiring Thomas to organize a conference for them?
Jeff Jarvis: “They also need to waste less effort, talent, and money on commodity news [and instead] concentrate on a newsroom’s real value, reporting”
Wire news come for free these days, either online, through RSS, or in the free ad-supported papers that get pushed in the streets and the subway in the morning traffic. News organizations should take the cost savings and celebrate.
But the focus doesn’t end there. A Danish news organization should, as a rule of thumb, not waste their money on international coverage—we all know how to read English, and would rather get that from outlets like The New York Times or The Economist.
And a local paper like Fyns Stiftstidende should drop even the national coverage, and just focus on the local. They will never regain authority on national or international reporting, so take the cost savings, celebrate, and concentrate on the areas where you can make a difference.
UPDATE: Hilarious addition from Jarvis: 2,200 journalists awaiting the Jackson verdict—go home, make yourselves useful to us!
What a bummer … I missed the live video chat with Doug Engelbart last night at reboot7. Thomas says it’s been recorded, and will be posted at
reboot.dk later. He said it was “near-religious”.
UPDATE: Ross Mayfield writes about it, and also spells him Englebart … Wikipedia and Google says Engelbart … which is it?
After reading both
Lessig and
Lakoff and then putting them together, it struck me that part of what we’re up against here is a framing tactic used by the copyright cartel: By consistently using the term “property” in connection with copyright and patents, they’re reinforcing the notion that stealing music is like stealing a can of coke. They’re subtly but effectively making people think this is a moral issue and not a utilitarian one.
And this is the key: I find that once I convincingly make the case that copyright and patents are something we as citizens in a society have decided to put in place to serve our own needs, namely to spur more creation and innovation, and that the design of copyright and patent laws should be judged empirically on how much creation and innovation they generate versus how much they inhibit, the game is won. People agree that it would be beneficial to limit copyrights and they become skeptical of patents.
But this argument is made at the intellectual level, and the copyright cartel is playing on people’s emotional understanding of ownership, of “my car” and “their music”. The word “property” invokes the moral frame. We need a word that invokes the utilitarian frame.
I asked Cory Doctorow about this yesterday at reboot7, and he said they were aware of the problem, that they are consciously using the words copyright, patents, trademarks, etc., instead of the blanket IP word—with the added advantage of letting you highlight the differences between those. That surely helps, but can’t we do more? I would love to hear George Lakoff’s thoughts on this problem and what we can do to fight it. Maybe Cory or Doc Searls could run this by him?
DVD-Jon is in the house. Yay!
At
Reboot7, people are doing
collaborative note-taking using SubEthaEdit. It’s mind-blowing! It also means I can follow the 2-3 rooms I’m
not in at any given time.
UPDATE: Trail-blazers here.
UPDATE: People are also using this to suggest and collaborate on questions for the presenter … in this case asking Skype why they don’t open up their IM network for interop with AOL/Yahoo/MSN.
Listening to
Ben Cerveny at
reboot7 reminds me that for me to understand, examples are really helpful.
Communicating a theory is a good thing. But theories are designed to explain facts in the real world. So when you leave out concrete, practical examples of these facts, then your audience have to think them up for themselves, and it’s hard to know if you got the right ones, and really understand it. You don’t get “Aha!” you get “Aha … I think …”
So please, practice, then theory, then practice, then theory, then … let it be a dance back and forth. That way we can follow you.
It’s reboot time again, and it just occurred to me how last time, at reboot6, I didn’t have an acceptance speech when I received the “Startup of the Year” award, the excuse being that I had been too busy writing my wedding speech for the day after.
And this year, we’re expecting in just 6 weeks.
Going straight by the book :)
Jeff Jarvis discovers a hamburger blog A Hamburger Today and passes it on. I love burgers, though that Hamdog looks pretty scary.
Best burger in New York: Old Town Bar just north of Union Square. Get it rare, and with Muenster cheese.
And now for some [local]: Does anybody know the best burger in Copenhagen? Or Denmark?
I still miss the late Karl’s Burger in Aarhus, right next to Blitz nightclub, when that existed. That’s still the best burger I’ve had in this country, and it’s been many years since they closed now. It was like the sandwich roll you get at Elm Street today, with a really good patty, bacon, cheese, and with a ketchup-mayo sauce that had that little something special. Please, can we have that back?
If whoever made those burgers ever read this, please leave a comment and tell us that you’re going to open up shop in Copenhagen, or how to make it at home :)
It’s great to see that delicious has been picking up some of my ideas for how to improve on user interfaces for tagging ;) Seriously, though, it’ll be interesting to see how it works out in practice. Note, that you have to use the “experimental post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet from this page. I’ve switched my bookmarklet - I want to get some experience with this.
When you’re a
maximizer, second best is not good enough. Good enough isn’t good enough.
It’s not a materialistic thing at all. And it’s not snobbish. It’s a question of aesthetics and value. Why waste this precious life surrounding us with anything less? It’s greatly motivating and uplifting to surround yourself with the best there is, and help make it even better.
I think it’s the same reason some people dive into the arts—poetry, paintings, music. On Friday, I saw Majbritte Ulrikkeholm on TV talk about her need to read William Blake at the end of her day. That’s exactly the feeling I’m talking about.
Me, I find that same kind of satisfaction in a really well thought out business model, in well performed music, in a slick software user interface, in a superbly written article about Ketchup in the New Yorker, in a perfect piece of Parmigiano, a well-executed business move, in an outstanding show by Eddie Izzard, in a beautiful piece of clothing, in a uber-functional perambulator, or in the Californian coast line (yeah, this isn’t man-made like the others, but whoever did it did a pretty impressive job. Kudos!).
It’s not the thing in itself that excites me. It’s what it says about the people who did it. And what that, in turn, says about the world we live in. I’m moved that they care; that they make an effort to do whatever it is that they do, to do it as perfect as is humanly posible. It helps me feel connected, that others care, too, and it helps me believe that there is a something higher, something to strive for in this world.
The “Save” command in desktop software is a consequence of hardware design. Because primary storage (RAM) is fast, but expensive and volatile, and secondary storage (hard disk) is slow, but cheap and permanent, there is a trade-off between the choice of primary vs. secondary storage. Hence the “Save” command, which instructs the computer to move your data from primary to secondary storage.
But as Cooper argues, this is idiocy. Why should you as a user be bothered with this? When you enter stuff into a computer, it’s usually because you want the computer to keep it for you, not because you want it to turn around and throw it away.
Thankfully, lots of modern software doesn’t in fact bother you with this. There’s no save command, the software automatically saves your work for you. But this bargain only works if you can be reasonably certain that it will in fact save it for you.
Most software sans Save will only transfer from primary to secondary storage on exit, which means if the software crashes, either because it has a bug, or because some other software has a bug and brings this software down with it, you’re out of luck. You might lose hours and hours worth of work. This is even worse than the Save command, because this forces users to routinely quit and relaunch theirs apps, just to safeguard our data—a Save button, while still idiotic, is certainly less so.
So here’s what I want to ask of software makers: Save our stuff on a regular basis, not just on exit.
Transfer it from primary to secondary storage every minute or so, when there are changes to data, in the background. It should be fairly trivial and computationally cheap to have a dirty flag, so you don’t need to do this when there are no changes, and to check that dirty flag every minute, to write the latest version to disk, so you’re secure in the case of a sudden crash. In the trade-offs involved in software design, keeping your user’s data safe should always take priority. If people lose their data, your app is useless.
We had Jonathan over to clean our windows today, and what a remarkable difference it has made. Seriously, if cleaning your windows is one of those things that you just never seem to get done, get him. He’s fast, thorough, cheap, and he seems like a pretty nice chap, too.
We just finished watching five episodes of the West Wing in a row. The bastards had kidnapped the president’s daughter Zoey, and with our baby daughter due in just 7 weeks, we had no choice but to keep watching. Damn those screen writers :)
When you’re a
maximizer, second best is not good enough. Good enough isn’t good enough.
It’s not a materialistic thing at all. And it’s not snobbish. It’s a question of aesthetics and value. Why waste this precious life surrounding us with anything less? It’s greatly motivating and uplifting to surround yourself with the best there is, and help make it even better.
I think it’s the same reason some people dive into the arts—poetry, paintings, music. On Friday, I saw Majbritte Ulrikkeholm on TV talk about her need to read William Blake at the end of her day. That’s exactly the feeling I’m talking about.
Me, I find that same kind of satisfaction in a really well thought out business model, in well performed music, in a slick software user interface, in a superbly written article about Ketchup in the New Yorker, in a perfect piece of Parmigiano, a well-executed business move, in an outstanding show by Eddie Izzard, in a beautiful piece of clothing, in a uber-functional perambulator, or in the Californian coast line (yeah, this isn’t man-made like the others, but whoever did it did a pretty impressive job. Kudos!).
It’s not the thing in itself that excites me. It’s what it says about the people who did it. And what that, in turn, says about the world we live in. I’m moved that they care; that they make an effort to do whatever it is that they do, to do it as perfect as is humanly posible. It helps me feel connected, that others care, too, and it helps me believe that there is a something higher, something to strive for in this world.
For the past two weeks, my Dashboard’s weather forecast for Copenhagen has consistently been of low temperatures and showers today and tomorrow, then it gets better. Except the next day, it’s just moved one more day out. It’s driving me nuts!
(Maybe I should stop comparing to the San Francisco forecast.)
A fan of biofeedback, I’m currently in the market for a heart rate monitor, and Polar seems to be the leading brand, at least in this part of the world.
But I am frustrated by the process of picking a model.
They sell no less than 41 different models, with very few differences between them, and the product comparison feature on their site is broken.
Also, these devices seem quite overpriced. After all, they’re just fairly trivial computers, with simple I/O devices, so I don’t get why they make quite so many different models. The main difference between many models seems to be in the software, not the hardware. And since the software is a fixed cost, the reason for having this many models can only be to maximize profits through segmentation. Which fits the pattern of very clear steps on the price ladder, and my sense that these things are quite overpriced.
After several hours, I’ve narrowed the selection to three models, the M61, the S210, and the new RS100, I forget why exactly. I’m leaning towards M61, but then I’m turned off by the fact that the model is more than two years old, and it’s really just a computer, and I wouldn’t want to buy a two year old computer at full price.
Something seems wrong about this market.
Any recommendations for what to get? Are they worth the time and money?
