May 04, 2008
McGuinn Twittering
There's something surreal about seeing a superstar like Roger McGuinn twittering away.How many other people out there can answer this way to Twitter's question, "what are you doing?":
- "Had the greatest time today with astronauts! Went on the ramp to the shuttle."
- "Trying to put a photo on my Wikipedia page is extremely difficult! I put it up they delete it and say 'You aren't Roger McGuinn himself'"
- "Bruce Springsteen invited me on stage last night"
- "Watching "Forrest Gump" on AMC ... the movie that paid off my house in the 90s :-) Byrds "Turn Turn Turn" in it."
Reading Roger is the antidote to reading so many boring digerati wannabes.
April 21, 2008
Charlie Rose on Charlie Rose
I love Charlie Rose, and this is a great, absurd, clip of Charlie interviewing himself on all things Internet:
April 15, 2008
Blue Jeans vs the Monster
I've never liked Monster Cable products. I always feltl like sucker buying such overpriced, over-packaged goods (ridiculous amounts of hard-to-break retail plastic covering makes it difficult to get to the cables).Then in 2005 I found out about Blue Jeans Cable. Nice people, fair prices, good quality products that just work, no hype, no bs. It's what I use for my home projection TV system.
Today there's a great buzz circulating regarding litigation between Monster and Blue Jeans Cable, regarding Monster's claim of infringement on Blue Jeans' part. Blue Jeans fires back with an excellent letter. I hope Blue Jeans prevails.
April 14, 2008
The Digg Inside Twitter
Every day there are three sites I'm guaranteed to visit. In no particular order, Digg, Reddit, and Twitter. With Twitter I'll visit numerous times, via desktop browser, via iPhone's m.twitter.com version, via RSS.Despite the fact that Twitter is supposed to be about "what are you doing now", what a lot of people are "doing" is discovering stuff on the net and sharing it via Twitter. Hence, URLs. Hence, the proliferation of tinyurl.com URLs in tweets.
How different is this from Digg and Reddit? How much overlap is there in terms of popular URLs disseminated via Digg and Reddit versus Twitter each day? Put another way, how many URLs do I go check out via Twitter versus Digg versus Reddit each day? I'd say 40% reddit, 40% Twitter, and 20% Digg.
What's a shame about Twitter then, is that it doesn't DO anything with all of those valuable URLs. It doesn't track them, it doesn't aggregate them, it doesn't let them automatically rise and fall on "popularity charts" like Digg and Reddit. Since Twitter is more of an ever-moving river of conversation, and if you turn your attention away for a moment, you'll miss something, you wind up missing a lot. Way, way more than Digg or Reddit.
It doesn't have to be this way. Twitter ought to consider aggregating the URLs that users are sharing, and proving a view into those URLs. I wanna see what the most popular URLs are being "twittered about" each day.
Think of it this way, Ev, Biz, et al: you guys do this, and I have lots more reasons to stick with Twitter and fewer reasons to keep visiting Digg and Reddit each day.
Whatcha think?
UPDATE 4/15/2008 Looks like someone's working on this . . . Twittlinks....
UPDATE II - 4/16/2008 -- Well, well, well, this is very interesting and along the lines of what I was looking for ---> alphatwitter.com
April 11, 2008
Finally, Someone's Got Video
One keeps hearing about the alarming, continent-sized "island" of plastic rubbish floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and yet, where's the video? Why hasn't CNN or NBC or BBC or CBS or someone gone out and videotaped the thing in detail?Well, CBS hasn't but some little outfit called VBS has. Worth watching, albeit somewhat annoying and clueless narrators (8-9 hrs to fly from LA to Hawaii? On what, a DC-3?).
Here's the link to Part 1 of the video (it's 12 parts long).
April 07, 2008
Gas in La Jolla
I tell ya, years from now when the historians finally dig out the truth of this administration, we're going to find out what I've suspected since day one: it was just about oil, and money, and gaining as much of it as possible. It'll go down as the biggest heist of all time, exceeding in value all other money crimes combined in the history of the world.
April 02, 2008
The Cord Has Got to Go
Go to Chumby's home page and you'll see some cool pictures of the device. But you'll also notice that there's this line that runs from the side of the Chumby to somewhere off-screen. That's the power cord.
The Chumby is a cool device but in my personal opinion its main detractor continues to be . . . that pesky power cord. This device is crying out to be mobile. The market demographic for this kind of device surely expects a gadget that runs on batteries not power from a wall socket.
The very first time I played with a Chumby my very first reaction was the surprise that a power cord was a requirement. And my second reaction was, why not get rid of the power cord and figure out an innovative way to cause the inevitable and interminable squeezing of the Chumby by its owner to be the generation of power to recharge the batteries?
Heck, it could be a spin on the old "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" ad slogan. Call it "Please Squeeze The Chumby". The more you squeeze the longer the battery lasts.
I still think they oughta give that a try. And hey, it'd prolly be patentable.
March 31, 2008
Bad Conference
Wow, was that bad. To my great regret I spent money and traveled and got a hotel room and attended the "CommunityNext" conference in Hollywood on Saturday. It was so bad that after a couple hours I got up, walked back to my hotel, checked out a day early, and drove home to San Diego.What made it suck?
Noise. The conference was held in a nightclub in a mall in the very heart of Hollywood. Nightclubs are not designed as venues for conferences full of people speaking. Between the incessant overheard ventilation noise (that you would never notice if you showed up here at 8pm one night, with the boom boom boom music blaring) and the rude crowd of chattery web hipsters who would not shut the hell up at the back of the room, it was simply too much effort to try to listen to what was going on at the stage.
Hot Air. Nothing new was being explored or explained here. Just a bunch of web conference-circuit "names" babbling on about web, blogs, "community", "social media", "business models", and whatnot with about as much expertise as an Entertainment Tonight talking head.
Nothing worse than a noisy environment where you're straining to hear what's being said, and when you discover that what is being said is mostly hot air, well, that is not a good thing.
What a waste. Of time, and money.
Situating CommunityNext in Hollywood, which is after all Ground Zero of the American Dream, was telling. This is a conference of, by, and for web marketeers and personalities trying to hit the big time. And having the conference in a nightclub makes sense -- this crowd loves parties, it's all about parties, what better place to party, etc.
Strangest experience of the weekend: after checking out of the hotel and while standing outside the hotel waiting for my car, I see a vision of someone emerging from a large construction site going on across the street. I focus and cannot believe my eyes: it's Superman. Cape, tights, boots, slick black haircut, the complete picture. The spittin' image of Christopher Reeve. I noticed around his belt he had a security badge for gaining access to who knows what. As he walked down the street into the distance, I saw passengers in cars waving at him. He waved back. America is safe, and the Dream is alive. Superman is here to save the day!
Hollywood is a seriously weird place.
March 24, 2008
March 03, 2008
Demand The Presidents of the United States of America come to your town for a concert!
Want the band to play in your town?
February 23, 2008
If This Were Baseball, I'd Be in the Hall of Fame
I've seen 738 out of the "1000 Best Movies Ever Made" list in the New York Times.There are some items in the list I would definitely dispute, and there are some omissions that readily come to mind, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Papillion, Dirty Harry, Run Lola Run, and so on.
How many of the NYT's 1000 Best have you seen?
February 11, 2008
Funny Gadget
And the awards for "Best Gadget Name" and "Best Knob Setting Values" goes to . . . Digital Audio Manifestationz, makers of Ezekiel 25:17, a "stompbox" for generating deep, nasty fuzz tones for your bass guitar.
Notable knob settings: "Overdrive", "Distortion", "Furious Anger", and "Great Vengeance".
