Voice-Over Demos

Amazon's Ad-Auction Patent Application

Brin on Google Not Going Public

Nice message to deliver to the employees with all those stock options.

Bumperstickers Galore

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Tim

But just look at the boosterism coming from Cory (who is on the conference committee): "Jesus Christ! We've got some amazing speakers coming this year! I mean mind-bogglingly amazing," says Cory. "I speak at a lot of conferences -- two or three a month, sometimes -- and the tech-bubble-collapse has really flensed away the fat from these shows. Gone are the empty suits with empty promises, leaving only really meaty technology, polkicy and business questions that are being addressed by smart, passionate novel thinkers whose accomplishments speak for themselves."

Whew. It goes on. Here's Cory again:

I speak at a lot of conferences -- great conferences -- but the Emerging Tech conference is the nigh-perfect event. The range of subjects and the quality of the speakers (and the attendees) makes this event into the kind of show that is the equivalent of reading a hundred of the best science fiction novels of the past ten years while getting an MBA from a really good, tech-oriented B-school. In four days.

So who's speaking at the conference? The usuals. Rheingold, Kay, Shirky, Bonabeau, Drexler, Brewster Kahle, Weinberger, Meg Hourihan, and on and on. All very nice folks but you know what? The lineup strikes me as your basic Pundit Circus, next stop Santa Clara. How many of these people are really at the forefront of emerging technologies, getting their hands dirty working on real stuff rather than using these deductible junkets to express their unending stream of opinions on the latest techno sizzle? Hey look! A new toy! And it's shiny! Oh boy!

I'm not convinced this is an essential conference to attend. Oh, I'm sure we'll have lots of blog coverage, perhaps webcasting coverage, perhaps even dueling webcams like at Lessig's recent Stanford Law conference. And we'll no doubt have plenty of coverage of the parties, with lots of photos of the partiers partying like it's still 1999.

The whole thing reminds me of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite off of Sgt. Pepper:

For the benefit of Mr. Tim
Another techfest far from slim! So super-keen!
The Webloggers will all be there
Laptops, Wi-Fi in the air -- what a scene

Internet and nanotech and robots
Open Source and MMORPGs,
Don't forget, the parties go on, all night long!

The celebrated Mr. T.
and all the pundits start their talks at half past eight
The Webloggers will dance and sing
As Shirky goes and does his thing - don't be late

Messrs. T. and D. assure the public
Their production will be second to none
And now look, Brewster's arrived, giving out books!

The blogs will roll at ten to six
Social software's in the mix, with P2P,
And Mr. D. will demonstrate
A wireless multihop router's applicability

Having been some days in preparation
A splendid time is guarateed for all
And tonight Mr. Tim is topping the bill

Have fun, techno-weenies, but I'm gonna skip this one.

TANSTAAFB

Earthlink Complains About Motley Fool Article

Brian,

I thought you'd be interested in the following thread. Earthlink complained because Purchase Circles, it appears, can include customers. Amazon goes by domain names in email, and zip codes, so Earthlink subs in Atlanta (their HQ) may be on the Purchase Circle.

So, I removed Earthlink from our article. You may want to consider it as well, as the purchase data may be in error.

Best,
Jeff

Question is, was Earthlink more ashamed of the list of books that Amazon listed (and continues to list on their site), or the fact that the brianstorms blog had a SELL recommendation? Inquiring minds want to know.

Here's what Amazon told Jeff:

To compile our Purchase Circles bestseller lists, we group the items we send to particular zip and postal codes, and the items ordered from each domain name. Since many domain names are specific to companies or education institutions, this enables us to define which items are selling best in offices and schools as well as in various cities, states, and countries.

We then determine which items are more popular with each specific group than with the general population. No personally identifiable information is used to create Purchase Circle lists. As an additional measure to ensure confidentiality, Amazon.com creates Purchase Circles only when at least 200 Amazon.com customers are associated with a particular group.

Jeff apparently forwarded this to the Earthlink person who made the fuss, saying, "To my eye, it seems to suggest that some of your subscribers in your area MIGHT be included in your purchase circle." With that, he decided to pull the Earthlink section of the big chunk of my blog article that he'd published on Motley Fool.

Jeff suggests I remove Earthlink from my blog entry as well. I think I'll keep it in. It's a humor piece, as I clearly stated up front. I'm glad that people read it and that it raised questions about how exactly Amazon calculates things with their Purchase Circles feature. Oh, by the way, Amazon currently says the top three DVDs purchased in Earthlink's DVD Purchase Circle are: Moonstruck, Vertigo, and ... Caligula. Well, there you have it ladies and gentlemen.

Here's the thing: Purchase Circles came out on August 20, 1999. It was kind of a weird feature back then, and it remains one now. In fact, I challenge anyone to go to Amazon.com's homepage and navigate to the Purchase Circles section of the site, using only links found on Amazon's web pages. Good luck. I gave up. Instead I just went to Google and typed in "Amazon purchase circles" and presto.

Which brings up another thought: using Google to navigate other websites. More and more I hear people say they use Google's home page to go to other sites, rather than type in a URL into their browser's text input box. I find this interesting. I suspect part of it is that it makes at least part of the user experience the same for all websites --- rather than having to go to ten different sites to access ten particular features of those sites, having to wade through each site's distracting, NASCARized, monetized, animated, whizbang upsell messaging each time.

You might say, well, use Bookmarks. Bookmarks are so 90s imho. They don't scale well. I find them long-term storage: I create them all the time to remember places, but I don't use them for rapid access. There are too many. Bookmarks don't scale well.

And so Google becomes the gateway to other site destinations. I find I use it for this purpose quite often these days -- Google's my default browser page, so all new windows simply open to Google. If I want to go to a certain feature of some other website, I will often just type it into Google rather than go to that website and navigate through it to get to that feature. How many other people do this I wonder?

Michael Gruber at the Mysterious Galaxy

See, Gruber has been an invisible man, the ghostwriter behind Robert K. Tanenbaum's series of thrillers for the past sixteen years. This fact had been kept secret from the mainstream public until just a few weeks ago, with the release of Tropic of Night (ToN), his first novel published under his own name.

At a lecture and book signing at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego last night, I found Gruber to be shy about mentioning his illustrious ghostwriting career, at least during his lecture. I sensed he was torn about talking about it: on the one hand, mention of the Tanenbaum connection clearly detracts attention away from ToN and the Gruber brand which he's now out trying to build. On the other hand, Gruber's a natural storyteller, and what a story he has to tell, about himself and Tanenbaum!

Interestingly, Gruber referenced Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, several times during his talk. One of ToN's characters was inspired in part by the hero of Ellison's book. There's a strange parallel between that hero and Gruber's own life story. Unable until this year to be his true self to the public, to speak publicly about his writing life, unable to do book signings as Robert K. Tanenbaum, having to deal with Tanenbaum talking on TV or in lectures or interviews about how he writes "his" books... think about living that kind of life for sixteen years. That's enough to drive anyone crazy.

No wonder Gruber found refuge online on The WELL, where for the past ten or so years he's hung out in the "writers" conference, telling us all about his real-life Ghostwriter v. "Fleshwriter" ordeal, discreetly keeping the Tanenbaum name out of the conversation. Everyone in the writers' conference knew, or found out eventually (it wasn't hard: at times Gruber would post notes announcing not one but two of his ghostwritten novels were on the NYT or Amazon bestseller lists at the same time), but they kept it a secret from the conference postings. Now, after all of these years, he emerges out into the world, kind of like (if you'll pardon the analogy) a grub having lived underground for seventeen years before climbing the tree and turning into a cicada. (Funny, guess what "tanenbaum" means in German.) It's as if the grub desperately wants to tell its own miraculous story of life underground; but nobody seems to care, they're here for the cicada. At the same time the cicada is enjoying its new metamorphosis.

Regulars in The WELL's "writers" conference have been privy to what amounts to nearly a daily blog of Gruber's writing life for the past ten years, the highs and lows, the victories, the defeats (well, mostly victories). There, we learned that the scary-looking dagger featured on the cover of ToN was actually something Gruber found on the Bows of Wood website, where artist and craftsman Vinson Miner makes and sells a line of what one might call organic weapons. The dagger is made of a sharpened obsidian blade with a handle made of the jaw of a lion.

In fact the most recent of the writers' conference's "brag" topics (where for years WELL writers have proudly and openly "bragged" about their accomplishments, followed by the obligatory cheers from other writers), has in a way been co-opted by Gruber over the past year. I don't for a moment think he's done it intentionally, but one of his brags would, shall we say, be enough to put food on the table for a dozen or more other WELL writers for quite a long time. Everyone remains polite and supportive, but there's an unspoken understanding that Gruber is now, compared to everyone else there, a genuine superstar. Each and every posting of his in that topic is like yet another rung up the literary ladder of success. It's been a remarkable journey to witness. It must be extraordinary to finally, after all these years, be able to emerge with your own fame in public. He's earned it.

One of Vinson Miner's knives.

There were some sixteen folding chairs arranged in three rows around a podium in this modest little bookstore. There were perhaps twelve people in the audience, including myself. I couldn't tell how many had read the book already: it was a weird crowd. Thriller/occult geeks, seemed to me, all of them middle aged. Remember the way Garth of Wayne's World 2 said "Unix! Kewl!"? I had no difficulty imagining the Trekkie-like members of this crowd going, "Occult suspense shamanistic ritual horror novel! Kewl!". I could be wrong...

Gruber wore a black jacket, black shirt, and blue jeans. He resembled a mix of Rod Steiger, Jean Reno, an older Bruce Willis, and a bespectacled Colonel Kurtz as played by Marlon Brando. He spoke in an East Coast (perhaps born in New York?) accent.

He dove right in talking about what inspired him to write ToN. Which I thought was an odd thing for him to do, since he hadn't checked who in the audience was already familiar with the book (I haven't read it yet, in fact, I've never read anything under the Tanenbaum name either; in fact, I'd have never heard of Tanenbaum if it hadn't been for the Writers conference on The WELL). Nevertheless, the story of how this novel came about goes way back, appropriately to a time long before he began ghostwriting, all the way back to the early 70s, when Gruber was in Miami pursuing a PhD in Marine Biology. He'd grown up wanting to live the life of Jacques Cousteau: "I wanted to make my living in a bathing suit," he said. While in Bimini in 1972, he was bitten by an octopus. It was that experience that led him to meet a woman that helped inspire ToN. She told him strange tales of shamans, rituals, and sorcery. Interestingly, Gruber felt it necessary to start the novel with a disclaimer, where while he acknowledges the book is fiction, he nevertheless gives credit to "J.H." for the inspiration.

The marine biology career didn't pan out. "I was a crummy scientist," he admitted. So he became a cook, "Dr. Cook," he says they called him. Then he did "government work", eventually leading to the ghostwriting gig.

"What I'm interested in is the deeply weird," Gruber told the small audience last night. Not abducted-by-aliens weird, but the feeling-of-someone-following-you kind of weird. The sense that there's a presence in the room when no-one else is there. "The world is not quite what scientists make of it," he says. "The world of the psyche is just as real as the world of quarks and stars, only science can't quite grab it."

He likes to push people's "ontological buttons." He spoke of beliefs of science versus psyche. From his perspective at the podium, he told how he could see the walls at the back of the bookstore opening up, and there revealed beyond the opening was the skyline of Miami. He noted that no-one in the audience turned around to confirm what Gruber said he saw, because of "an absolute faith that I'm bullshitting you." Everyone laughed.

After the talk, which concluded with a cheery "Thank you! Buy my book!" exhortation from Gruber, he signed copies of his book that everyone had bought. There were only a dozen or so people and no-one seemed to want to form a line, so people simply hovered around, casually taking turns having their books signed. One guy, shown in the photo below, had him sign two copies of ToN, and then two copies of another book, Killer Books: A Readers Guide to Exploring the Popular World of Mystery and Suspense by Jean Swanson and Dean James. The first couple of pages inside the front of these books were literally covered with autographs of, one assumes, famous mystery and suspense writers. When Gruber saw what the book was, he excitedly told the guy, you know what, let me tell you a secret.... Gruber quickly leafed through the table of contents and, not fiding what he was looking for, went to the back of the book and quickly scanned through the index, obviously looking on each page for the beginning of the T section. Nothing. I could swear Gruber was surprised.

Maybe Tanenbaum has finally become the ghost.

Slashdot Effect in Progress

More on Amazon Purchase Circles

Pitch This

Some of the brilliant ideas he's looking for include, and I quote:

• Something to compete with eBay
• Something to compete with Microsoft
• Something to compete with Oracle
• Low cost fusion

As someone once said, "Well, duh."

Glad That's Over With

Throbbing Thursday

Free Dumb Fries
Great new topic in the Words conference on The Well, where folks are listing all the "Freedom" replacement terms for "French", in reaction to the "Freedom Fries" inanities in Congress. Examples: "Freedom Rivera", "Freedom Legion", and my favorite so far, "Pardon My Freedom"...

Wednesday Findings

Imagine if the people who operate such sneaky "restaurants" started using meetup or something like it. You could visit a list of the kinds of foods you like, and see who's gonna be cooking them in your area. When enough people have signed up, the host sets a date and away they go, with a great dinner.

This goes back to the battle-of-the-fans idea I blogged about a while back: using the Net to gauge the demand for goods and services. For example, I would love to see "Lawrence of Arabia" in 70mm restored widescreen glory. I'm willing to pay, oh, $10 or $15 to see it in a really nice theatre, something like The Arclight in L.A. So where can I go on the Net and indicate my level of interest in seeing a theatrical presentation of it, within a certain geographical area and timeframe and ticket price?

MAME Project
Ok, now this is cool. Dave McAnulty, who I used to know at MP3.com, has this amazing project to create a virtual arcade game that theoretically could play everything ever written, using MAME ROMs. Don't miss his VCAR project while you're at it.

Texaco Station Charges $4.29 A Gallon
Local San Diego news organizations are having a field day today with this story of a station in El Cajon that's charging a wee bit more than usual for gas.

Tues Misc

Obsessive Baby Blogs
Imagine, you grow up and find out that the whole world knew the first time you peed, puked, laughed, hit a key on the computer keyboard (spacebar, of course), sat up, used a straw, uttered "BA", grabbed first book on bookshelf (Devil's Dictionary, and "then he puked on it"), ate banana, and walked down the stairs for the first time. It's like the beginning of a real Truman Show. The only thing missing from the historical record of ezekiel: selected diary of obsessive parents are the times, in hours, minutes, and seconds. And where's the video? Most impressive first: first ride in a stretch limo at age 2 months 3 days. Why, it took me about 30 years.

Rehab Diary
Funny, fictional diary entries from celebrities in rehab.

Purchase Circles as Stock Buy/Sell Guide!?

Check out the Brianstorms Portfolio with stock recommendations solely based on what I find in the Purchase Circles!

Busy

The Attack of the Giant Chee-to

Spam and Channels

Channels Gone
I may have been the only person in the world to be a subscriber, but I kinda liked MP3.com's Classical Music Channel. Not the greatest performances, not the greatest selection, not the greatest usability, but still, it was nice to listen to streaming classical music once in a while. Not any more. MP3.com has quietly killed all of the channel stuff on the site, as far as I can tell. In fact, all of my MY.MP3 music, that I had installed using Beam-It (remember THAT?) is gone as well. I can't find any emailed notices from MP3, and so I don't know if they notified customers or just quietly shut things down. Not very nice, but not surprising of Vivendi, one of the companies, remember, that sued MP3 before they acquired MP3.

UPDATE 1613PST: It seems that some of the Classical Music Channel pages still exist, but I suspect this is just because MP3 wasn't thorough in its cleanup efforts. However, none of the streaming seems to work anymore, even though the M3U files get sent to your mp3 player --- the MP3.com servers send out no actual stream, as far as I can tell.

Various for Tuesday

Wash Me!
Seen dirty cars or trucks with "Wash Me" written on them? How about with "www.washme.com" written on them?

Fun With Whitehouse.gov Search Results
An unscientific survey of search result counts at www.whitehouse.gov... Go to www.whitehouse.gov and start typing things in the search box you find at the upper-right-hand corner of the homepage. See what kind of result counts you get. Here are some:

iraq.....................   480
bin Laden................   233
enron....................    56
halliburton..............    12

pollution................   205
crime....................   515
homeland security........  1090

axis of evil.............    38
patriotism...............   109
flag.....................   309
peace....................  1571
freedom..................  1682
economy..................  1683
war......................  2028

brilliant................    50
intelligent..............    39
stupid...................     5
dumb.....................     1
idiot....................     0

evil.....................   524
worship..................   251
prayer...................   358
faith....................   960
religion.................   321
god......................   800

goldfish.................     0
cats.....................    73
dogs.....................   156

terrorist................  1435
unemployment.............   357
   

domestic.................   746
foreign..................  1691

truth....................   347
lie......................   594

global terror............    62
global warming...........     0

environment..............  1045
taxes....................  1510
business.................  1953

republican...............   829
democrat.................   641

liberal..................    42
conservative.............   135

dove.....................     5
hawk.....................    51

woman's right to choose..     0

bribes...................     3
campaign finance reform..     9
kickbacks................    10
quid pro quo.............    13
special interests........    89
gifts....................   395
incentives...............   591
votes....................   856
money....................  1341
   

england..................   133
egypt....................   139
italy....................   165
saudi arabia.............   190
iran.....................   212
germany..................   239
france...................   287
japan....................   302
korea....................   322
canada...................   352
india....................   381
israel...................   392
china....................   507
russia...................   566
mexico...................   636
texas....................  1130

fear.....................   429
worry....................   492

pretzel..................     9
alcohol..................   163
   

baseball.................   152
football.................    87
soccer...................    37
golf.....................    32
basketball...............    32
hockey...................    17

sex......................    44
drugs....................  1060
rock and roll............     2

springsteen..............     0
stereolab................     0
beatles..................     1
madonna..................     2
michael jackson..........     3
britney spears...........    23
yo la tengo..............   152
rolling stones...........   380
who......................  3962
guided by voices.........  9798
   

amazon...................     2
ebay.....................     5
yahoo....................    12
microsoft................    23
apple....................    46
   

blog.....................     0
earthlink................     1
aol......................    21
web......................   417
internet.................   382
the well................. 13185