What's Your Marketing IQ

By Davis Freeberg

This is an interesting survey that asks you 20 true/false questions about marketing and then assigns an IQ score. I was glad to see that I beat the average CEO score of 79, but felt like a 92 was a little on the low side. If you guess a wrong answer then it counts against you, so if you don't know the answer you are best off being honest and saying I don't know.

Editor's note: I scored a 116 IQ -- according to the site I'm an "up-and-coming consultant." Okie dookie. TH

'05 Proving To Be Worst Newspaper Year Since Recession

MediaPost Publications - '05 Proving To Be Worst Newspaper Year Since Recession - 10/31/2005 Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) print newspapers will very shortly be D-E-A-D. I can't remember the last time I read an actual newspaper. I do of course read plenty of newspaper contect (SFGate, NY Times, etc.) but it's all online. If I can't be connected, I print out stories and take them with me.

Apple Sells 1 Million Videos

Apple Sells 1 Million Videos Stock Up $3.05 per Share Simply amazing! Apple sells 1 million videos and the stock is up $3.05 right now.

So let's take a look at the math here. Apple's download service is new. Who knows how many people downloaded videos just to try them out. But aside from this, let's assume that of the $1.99 that Apple charges per download that they get to keep half. I'm not sure what the real number is, but let's assume that it's half.

If you average out the downloads per day, you get roughly 1,578,947 downloads per month. Now lets assume that Apple continues the momentum of their downloads and in fact each month has a 2% increase in videos sold.

By the end of 12 months under this analysis, Apple would have sold a little over 21 million downloads. Now if Apple gets $1 per download (and I have no idea what the number is) they would make about $21 million from selling downloads. Of course there is incidental cost above and beyond the payment to the content provider, but let's say Apple cleared $20 million in earnings on their downloads.

So Apple's stock is up $2.5 BILLION dollars in market cap on what potentially could be $20 million in earnings. This is on top of the fact that the stock today is already at a new 52 week high and trades at almost 40 times earnings with no other major news out on the company today.

Whew! Can somebody say bubble? Forget about what I think about their download technology (it sucks in my opinion -- who wants low res versions of tv shows at $2 a pop). Even if I'm wrong and people turn out to love watching low res downloadable tv shows and music videos, there is simply no way, even with stratospheric growth, that today's run up is justified. Perhaps this is just the beginning and Apple will be making higher quality shows available in the future, etc. etc. And I know they are making decent money off their iTunes and iPod sales, but this is just plain nuts.

It will be interesting to see where these download numbers sit (as well as their stock price) in six months.

Microsoft is Rolling Out XBox 360 In Store Displays

greg hughes - dot - net - WOW!! I just played games on an XBOX 360 Apparently Microsoft is beginning to roll out the instore displays for XBox 360. You'll have to wait in line I'd imagine but get ready to try one out for yourself at a retalier near you shortly. Thanks, Scoble!

Software Converts iTunes Songs... But Is It Legal?

Neowin.net - Software Converts iTunes Songs... But Is It Legal? HotRecorder converts songs from iTunes and Yahoo!'s music service to DRM free mp3s. I've used Total Recorder for a number of years which does the same thing. It's amazing to me that people think that they can control sound and light waves. Do what you will with the files, but as long as in the end they convert to sound and light waves, there will always be a way to copy them.

RSS Support in New Microsoft Windows Vista

RSS Support in New Microsoft Windows Vista RSS is terribly powerful as a tool (as WE all know, I think). Still, in terms of the general population RSS is largely a mystery.

Scoble posts about some of problems with RSS for the non tech literate.

All of this is going to change though. Microsoft is going to popularize and bring RSS to the masses with Vista. You just watch.

World in Need of a Blogging Renaissance

World in Need of a Blogging Renaissance Mitch Keeler says he's tired of the same old top bloggers getting all of the attention from sites like Blogniscient, Memeorandum and Blogebrity. Nick Douglas of Blogebrity takes issue of his being lumped in as an aggregator. I'd have to kind of agree with Nick. I mean, Blogebrity is about the celebrity of bloggers. I'm not sure whether Mitch is being critical of Blogebrity or not, but it seems kind of crazy to suggest that maybe they shouldn't be blogging about A list bloggers -- to me that would be the equivalent of asking People magazine to stop focusing so much effort on A list celebrities -- uhhh, isn't that what People is there for? Do I complain about the fact that PVRblog is writing too much about PVRs and not enough about other things? No, because that's what it's there for.

Now whether or not People is your cup of tea or not, or whether Blogebrity is a site for you is another question. But I wouldn't criticize them for doing what they do. Perhaps Mitch is not criticizing them, but just suggesting a preference for something else these days.

I've just started using Blogniscient, but as far as Memeorandum goes I think they do a damn good job of covering the top stories. I check the site every day and without exception they cover the hot tech news of the day. Although a lot of the same A list bloggers get covered there, they often times provide deeper links and I've found some good new bloggers there actually. But again, my primary reason for going there is to stay on top of the top tech news of the day.

I don't think people should be critical of services like memeorandum or sites like Blogebrity simply because they seem to aggregate much of the content of or post about the top bloggers. That's what they are designed for.

Mitch does raise a good point though. How and where do you find new and original content in the blogosphere. I find that I will find new writers oftentimes because they visit my blog and drop an insightful comment. I also get technorati subscriptions to terms like flickr and mce and tivo and the what not and find other new bloggers blogging about the same subjects that interest me. Still, I wish I could find more new fresh bloggers that are blogging about interesting things in digital media. Digg has a lot of stories with quite a bit of diversity. Where else out there are you finding fresh new voices?

BuzzMachine on Flickr's Interestingness

BuzzMachine on Flickr's Interestingness Jeff Jarvis linked to one of my articles this morning in a post on interestingness. Like me, Jeff has been impressed with interestingness and says that he's been telling anyone who will listen about it. Today Jeff asks two really good questions. First, does interestingness have to be restricted to photos or could it be applied other areas of search as well and 2. Need interestingness be confined to a single site, or as one of his readers KirkH suggests, could interestingness work in a more decentralized way through something like P2P.

I think it's really great that people are examining the concept of interestingness because I think the potential with human filters is huge. Digg is perhaps the next up and coming smart human filter most relevant to search.

Below is the comment I left on Jeff's site in response to the article:

"Where interestingness works for Flickr is that there is a great deal of community interaction that is built around the photos of Flickr. All of this data, favorites, comments, notes, views, etc. represent activity and interest. Especially when people are marking a photograph as a favorite it says that they think it is good. When you have enough unrelated people saying something is good, there is a good chance that it is interesting.

Flickr is like an addiction for many. I’ve got over 11,000 photos marked as favorites (check them out via the link if you have a few seconds -- believe it or not they are all truly amazing). You get sucked in and can spend hours and hours and hours participating in it. So it is this massive amount of free labor that allows a finely tuned human filter to run through the photos of Flickr. There are still some little things that Flickr can do to get the tagging better (a spellchecker for tags, promoting and incentivizing tagging even more, actually hiring college interns or other low cost labor to tag their top photographers with additional tags — especially highly searched tags where appropriate, etc.). But what makes the interestingness algorithm most compelling is that it works really really well. And it works really really well because of the massive amount of human time that goes into reviewing the photographs on Flickr.

Even still, with Flickr today image search still has a long way to go. The biggest problem with image search at Flickr is simply that the library is too small. Image Search at Google and Yahoo! is completely exhaustive. If I want to find a photo of some rare river in Africa, there is a good chance that I can find one. It won’t be a very good one, but it will be there. Flickr on the other hand only has something over 1 million members (I haven’t seen any updates on members since the Flickr blog announced their one millionth member a while back). Although one million sounds like a lot, it’s not. One million people are fantastic at getting you the very best photo possible of the Empire State Building, or of a rose, or of the Golden Gate Bridge, or of “San Diego”, etc. You get the idea. But you won’t find that rare river in Africa on Flickr… yet.

The key to Flickr’s continued dominance in image search will be to continue to recruit the very best photographers. Eventually one of them will make their way to Africa and we’ll actually get that fantastic photo of the rare river that we are looking for. I’ve suggested in the past that Flickr create a very inexpensive rewards type program to incentivize referral activity to the site. Certainly giving top photographers even free Pro accounts, etc. could help. But these are the ones you want essentially shooting your images for your future image searches at Flickr.

Flickr also most likely (and should) assigns rankings to their members. I’m not sure on this for sure as interestingness is “secret sauce” or so they say. But I suspect that Flickr is also looking at how reliable a persons comments are towards superior photography. If I’m a somewhat uninvolved Flickr member but my Aunt Mary posts her wedding photos on Flickr and I fav them all, these should carry less weight than if I’m involved in the community and consistently rank well. Reputation ranking will also be something to watch in the future.

Perhaps the thing that is most important to consider with all search though is how little anything beyond the 2nd page matters. Almost all searches stop after two pages and this is as deep as any human filter needs to go really. The rest of the stuff will be there for the rare times that it’s needed. And a lot of the long tail stuff as well.

So there are two questions really. 1. Why in the blazes has Yahoo! still not integrated Flickr’s interestingness into their own image search where applicable? and 2. How do you translate the superior model of image search that Flickr has achieved to other areas of the internet?

Perhaps the closest thing I’ve seen that may have potential is Digg (who congrats just received more funding). Similar to Flickr the idea behind Digg is that people either dig a story or they don’t. They seem to be building a large community quickly and for the posts of mine that have shown up there ranked highly the traffic has been massive. Mining Digg’s top stories (which are run through their member's human filter) and assigning high search page ranks to highly ranked stories would make sense.

Like Flickr though, Digg will depend on a community. And you need to keep this community happy and incentivized to continue to be your human filter. I think that building online communities will represent great opportunity in the next five years and the ones that catch on will have much more value in the form of the byproduct of smart filters than people realize today. Yahoo! was very smart to pick up Flickr. I suspect that Digg may be the next one scooped up.

Flickr and Digg can never fully replace search as we know it today. They can merely enhance it. Neither is exhaustive enough to cover the breadth needed. But when horses race and the winner by a nose gets all the money any small enhancement in search is magnified.

Thanks for the link Jeff. "

A Call in the Night

Microsoft's Matt Goyer Says Tweak MCE for Rollup 2 on the Way

Matt Goyer's Microsoft Windows Media Center Blog - MCE 2005 "We're very close to getting a new TweakMCE out that will install with MCE 2005 RU2. I know some of you are very anxious for this but please hang in there. The reason for the delay is that we're working very hard on Windows Vista Beta 2 and we haven't had the spare cycles to dedicate to cutting through the red tape to get this out the door. I'm sorry, this is my fault, we should have pushed this out earlier before the beta 2 crunch.

The good news is that we'll launch a new powertoy with TweakMCE that gives power users access to an often requested feature."

I Was Hungry and It Was Your World

Scott Richard

Nightstreetpaintingpic by Scott Richard

As those of you who have seen my photos know, one of my favorite genres is the genre of urban photography -- especially when it's dark and especially when it's wet. There is something about rain, umbrellas, taxis, etc. -- there's nothing quite like them when it's dark and you catch their bright reflections off city streets.

Scott Richard is a Santa Barbara artist and painter who shares a similar appreciation for the urban setting and has been able to translate much of what I feel in many of my photos into paint and canvas. Check out his New York series here.

All I Want to Do Is Spend Some Time With You

TiVoBlog's Alex Raiano on TiVo vs. MCE

TiVo vs. MCE, which is the better value?: Alex Raiano of TiVoBlog is out with a post comparing a top of the line TiVo to a Media Center Computer on value vs. cost and comes up with the following conclusion:

"As you can see, even with a lifetime subscription, the top of the line TiVo box costs a lot less then a middle of the road MCE system. Essentially you could buy 2.159731409100020044097013429545 top of the line TiVo boxes for the cost of one MCE box. If you want to look at the “low” end TiVo you could purchase 3.0962356321839080459770114942529 TiVo’s for the cost of one MCE box. When you break it down like this I think you can see that TiVo with a lifetime subscription is in fact a better deal for a budget minded consumer."

My response to Alex would be, well, yes and no. If all you are doing is comparing a TiVo box vs. a Media Center PC and if all you want is something that will record standard definition television as easily as possible, then I'd agree with you that a TiVo is a better way to go. On the other hand you have to consider the advantages of a Media Center over a TiVo in a lot of other areas and ask yourself if a lot of these advantages are worth paying extra money for.

For starters, you mention yourself that with Media Center you actually get a full fledged PC, again some value here. If all you want is a DVR then maybe not, but for some having a PC is also nice. But let's move beyond the fact that you get a PC with a Media Center DVR.

1. The first thing I'd point out is that with a Media Center PC I can buy a HDTV card and get at least, for now, OTA HDTV on network television (no monthly fee there as well). I can't do this with even the top of the line standalone TiVo. Is it worth paying extra for network programming in HDTV? I think so.

2. Next you have to look at expandability. you mention the 300-hour TiVo box, I believe you are referring to the Humax T2500 there. This unit has a 250 gig drive in it. But it's not 300 hours on high quality recording it's 100 hours. What if I want more space? Can I do that with a TiVo? Well yes, if I want to pay more money and send it to WeaKnees and also void my warranty for hacking into the box. With my Media Center PC on the other hand it's as simple as attaching another USB external hard drive and instantly I have more storage. This is especially helpful if I want to archive television and save shows.

3. I'm a huge music nut. One of the things that I love to do is to record things like Saturday Night Live and Austin City Limits and then strip out the audio from the shows (with a cheap shareware app, Total Recorder) and have live music mp3s. Can I do this with my TiVo, well no, because the box is locked down. With my Media Center PC I can do this. With a Media Center PC you have much more control over the media file and what you can do with it.

4. What about remote viewing. TiVo has TiVo2Go which makes you jump through a few hoops to copy your files to your laptop, with my Media Center PC I don't have any of those hoops to jump through. In fact, if you are going on the road for a two week vacation for instance, just unplug your external 250 gig hard drive (plug a new one in to record shows while your gone) and take it with you. Now I have all my television with me on the road and can view it on my laptop anytime I want. Super easy.

5. Now what about expanding my television in my home? With my Media Center PC I can buy extender units and have my centralized television recorded available in any room in the house. Can I do this with my TiVo? No, I have to buy a new TiVo for each and every room (plus a new lifetime package or monthly fee for each and every TiVo box). I also need to rent additional receivers for the extra rooms from my cable or satellite provider (they charge for these as well). And if I want to be able to watch Law and Order on any of them I have to record it on all of them. With Media Center I can record all my TV centrally and then have it available in any room in the house merely by buying extra extender units. By the way, the XBox 360 will serve as an extender unit AND will be able to stream high def and, oh yeah, it comes with a kick ass game platform or so they say.

6. Now let's talk about one of the biggest standalone TiVo weaknesses of all, the single tuner. With the TiVo box I'm stuck with one tuner. Ugh! What if I have two shows that are on at the same time that I want to record. I'm stuck. With my Media Center PC I can add multiple tuners. This helps for recording conflicts.

7. Now we haven't even gotten into all of the extra things with Media Center "My Music," "My Pictures," "My Videos," "Online Spotlight," "My DVDs," etc. But the Media Center PC has a lot more built in functionality for other media beyond television than the TiVo does at present. It's pretty cool being able to pull up our family vacation videos right from the Media Center menu. One of my favorite things also to do is to have my music playing in the background while great giant full res slide shows run across my 43" plasma in my living room. This is all built into Media Center.

8. Now the other point you make Alex is in comparing a brand new purchase of the two units for comparison. I'd challenge you to think about how people buy computers in a different way.

Most people at some point upgrade their PC anyways. I know I've been through several computers over my life and at some point I'll be ready to upgrade again. Now if the next time I upgrade my computer, I buy one with Media Center (by the way both Dell and Gateway now ship their PCs with Media Center as the default and it costs no more money than regular XP Home) for my home office, then (since I was getting a new computer anyways) my only expense would be buying the TV tuners and an extender unit. Now this would make the proposition cheaper as well.

Secondly, for a little over $100 now you can get a copy of Media Center with a remote on eBay. Assuming an old computer that you are upgrading from has the power, you could buy a TV tuner for it, stick it in there and now you also have a much cheaper Media Center PC. You've only paid for the software and remote and the TV tuner. Much cheaper and it gives you something to do with that old PC that you probably just would have donated to the Salvation Army anyways. Beware of course that trying to go it yourself this way vs. buying a built for MCE machine may perhaps increase the potential problems with incompatible hardware, etc.

Of course both of these options assume that you will upgrade your existing PC at some point (but most people in fact do upgrade from time to time).

Now Alex, I'm not saying that Media Center does not have it's flaws. I actually think that the biggest flaw is that the picture quality on a standalone TiVo is better than the standard definition picture quality on a Media Center. Others disagree with me on that, but that's my sense. In the past I've been told that TiVo has better compression quality, but whatever the case, side by side I think TiVo's standard definition picture is slightly better.

Also, many of the TiVo flaws that I mention above are taken care of by some of the DirecTV TiVo boxes. I, for instance, in addition to my standalone TiVo and Media Center PC, also own a Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HDTV TiVo -- which is in my opinion the best possible DVR on the market at present (although watch out for DirecTV's move to MPEG4). But now we are talking about a different animal and a much more expensive one as well.

Alex, your point about a PC being more complicated is valid. Your father-in-law who is computer illiterate might in fact be better off with a TiVo if all he is looking for is the cheapest basic single tuner DVR. Although I will say that as Media Center has evolved it has gotten more and more stable. With the current version including the rollup that was just released, Media Center is pretty darned stable. Still though, it is a PC and I don't think you will ever see the stability on a PC that you get on a TiVo -- but Media Center has improved significantly from it's initial release and subsequent upgrades.

But also Alex, if your father-in-law is as computer illiterate as you claim, perhaps he's just better off not buying a standalone DVR at all and instead using one the cheapo free rentals from his cable or satellite provider. I know my parents are not computer savvy and that's what they do. Then they don't have to pay for anything at all except a monthly fee. Of course they get a sucky DVR, but at least it's something cheap that they can use.

Personally for my money I'm willing to pay up for the added features that a Media Center PC brings over a standalone TiVo. The real horse race though will come in about a year from now when we have a standalone CableCARD dual tuner TiVo to compare with a CableCARD Vista Media Center machine. I have a feeling that both of these upcoming units will make everything else out today look chump.

Ed Bott by the way did an article a while back that also provided a pretty good comparison between TiVo and Media Center.

Thanks for the blog post on the topic Alex, good work and keep up the conversation!

The Devaluation of Photography

The Devaluation of Photography: Denyerec blogs about the new trend for people to upload their high res images online and sell them through web based stock photography sites for pennies on the dollar. He obviously does not like the idea. "Good images are simply worth more than that. Equipment, time, travel, expenses and gosh-darn, bloody experience. To see people throwing good images that have cost them to produce onto sites like this just makes me sad. Will there come a point in the future where there won’t be any such thing as a professionally produced image, because people have become too accustomed to paying $0.77 for a photo?"

Thanks, Stock Photo Talk!

Young, Foolish and In Love

My Last Post on the Economics of Flickr

Fractals of Change: Bubble 2.0 – Who Owns My Content? I've been writing a lot about the economics of Flickr the past few days and I'm going to stop talking about it after this post. Anil Dash's post on the economics of Flickr has generated quite a bit of interest out in the blogosphere. Fractals of Change is out today with yet another post on the fairness of Flickr using their users' content for ads. Tom Evslin suggests that while community based 2.0 efforts are fine for non profit efforts like wikipedia, that when companies like Flickr make actual money and profit it is somehow less ok.

I thought I'd repost something I added as a comment on Tom's blog today as I think it further clarifies, at least in my case and opinion, the value proposition from Flickr:

As a Flickr user I'm getting ever bit of a fair deal. They pay for the bandwidth of my high resolution bandwidth intensive images. They provide my photographs visibility which might result in outside monetization. You never know, Flickr just MIGHT be creating other ways down the road for their users to monetize their portfolios.

Plus, by offering my photos, I in turn get to view EVERYONE else’s. It's called sharing -- hence photo sharing. At present I've got over 11,000 photos marked favorites at Flickr 9seriously, click on the link, you will see some amazing photography). Some of the most brilliant and creative work I've ever seen done with photography. If I had to pay to see all these photos I never would have. But that's the deal. It's a community of people sharing. I get to post my art and I get to see others great art in return (ad free as a Pro User I might add).

People are getting too worked up about this. It's not the users at Flickr who are complaining but all of the outside people who haven't really felt the richness of a full immersion into the flickr community.

Flickr represents not only an online community, but a way to unite photographers in cities across the U.S. who never would have met each other otherwise. I've gone on photo shoots with these people, gotten tips from them, shared stories with them. You can't put a price on the ability to create this kind of rich beautiful community.

Not only have I been able to view the best photography of my life on Flickr -- rivaling even what I've seen in fine art museums, I have also met so many fantastic artists and friends in person through flickr. Aqui Ali, Sam Bloomberg-Rissman, cate, SFbuckaroo, Rita, Caitlin Burke, John Curley, Deborah Lattimore, the list goes on and on -- and sorry for not mentioning so many other of you who have been equally inspirational for me. I have seen the work of and met brilliant photo artists through Flickr. Without Flickr I never would have met some of these friends and photographers, learned from them, been inspired by them.

And I can assure you that they feel as strongly about Flickr as I do.

Heck I got to spend an evening with none other than Mr. Chalk himself. I don't expect anyone to understand this without the context of the community that it's taken from but it was a great time.

And I've met so many other people just online -- people who are now equally close friends. I'd name them all but I don't think I could get through the entire deleteme uncensored roster and I'd be afraid of leaving someone out. People from all over the U.S. and even internationally -- some great photographers, some just seriously funny people. Participating in deleteme uncensored is truly a fun thing for me and it's also a heck of a lot cheaper than therapy.

Nobody's forcing anyone to put their photos on Flickr. It's voluntary. And even though my photos are used by Flickr, and they may profit, I in the end am enriched much more than they are in a much more meaningful and sustentative way.

For those of you that think that Flickr users don't get something out of it, I'd challenge you to spend a month immersed in the community and see how you feel then.

Will there be an economic model for artists to sell photos through places like Flickr in the future? Probably. But please, dont' tell me I'm getting ripped off. Caterina Fake is right in her response post to Anil. Some things are just so much more important than money.

AllPeers MediaCenter: Beta Testers Wanted

AllPeers Wants Beta Testers AllPeers Media Center is a Web 2.0 effort that would appear to allow you to "manage and share your photos, videos and podcasts inside your browser!" Looks interesting. They are looking for beta testers at present.

More on Flickr, Yahoo! Google, Interestingness and Image Search

Jeff Jarvis on Image Search Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine says that he's been showing everyone who'll listen Flickr's "interestingness." I have been saying for a while that Flickr's interestingness algorithm potentially represents a way for Yahoo! to take back image search from Google and left the following comment on Jeff Jarvis' blog today:

"More than just "interesting," "interestingness" could potentially be a way that Yahoo! reclaims a little piece of search from Google. Today image search at both Google and Yahoo! is largely broken. Do a search for "San Francisco" at both Google and Yahoo! Image Search and you will find a hodge podge of mostly mediocre images.

Now do an image search for "San Francisco" and rank it by interestingness on Flickr and you get a substantially superior line up of photos.

It will only be a matter of time before Yahoo! integrates Flickr's algorithm into their image search and Yahoo! will begin serving up much, much better image search pages than Google, this could potentially cause a buzz and a shift in image search traffic from Google to Yahoo!

The main advantage Flickr has with interestingness is that it is based on human input as opposed to pure computer generated search algorithm. The actual human ranking, rating, tagging, commenting, etc. that helps determine interestingness for Yahoo! will give them a leg up in determining superior images.

On the other hand, working against Yahoo! is 1. They have been slow to integrate Flickr's algorithm into their image search (I have no idea why, it's seems to me like a complete no brainer) and 2. Google image search results are actually improving. Although I doubt Google still has any "human" element to their image search page rank, I do believe that they may be targeting certain photobloggers for instance who consistently produce quality work and enhancing their image rank. Not that my photography is great, but it is probably better than average from an image search result and most recently with the Google reindex a few weeks ago my Google Image Search traffic has tripled. I've also noticed in doing Google Image Searches that since the reindex three weeks ago that their images are in fact better than pre reindex. They still are not as good as Flickr's interestingness ranked searches, but they are better than they were before.

Simultaneously Releasing Movies and DVDs

atmaspheric | endeavors � Blog Archive � Simultaneously Releasing Movies Atmaspheric Endeavers is out with a post this morning regarding comments made by director M. Night Shyamalan on adopting a zero tollerance policy towards films that are released in theaters and DVD simultaneously.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting Shyamalan as saying that "he planned to ask theater owners at ShowEast's Final Night Banquet and Award Ceremony "for zero tolerance on this -- to say, 'If you're gonna release a movie in another medium, then you're not going to get into our theaters.'

According to the article "such chains as Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Theatres, Loews Cineplex and Cinemark USA already have adopted a "zero-tolerance" stance."

Billionaire entrepeneur Mark Cuban has been building a staff, according to Wired magazine, to start a new DVD label to offer films for release simultaneously in theaters, on cable TV, online and on DVD. Cuban's 2929 Entertainment has recently signed a deal with director Stephen Soderbergh to make films for the studio.

Between Cuban and partner Todd Wagner, according to Wired, they own film distribution assets that include Landmark Theaters, HDNet Films, the HDNet Movies channel, Rysher Entertainment, Magnolia Films Distribution, 2929 Entertainment and a piece of Lions Gate Films.

Back in May, Cuban posted on the idea of releasing DVDs simultaneously with theatrical releases. "Movie producers need to maximize revenue in every means possible while a film is top of mind," wrote Cuban. "That means being able to sell DVDs, PPV, Pay TV and however else we can generate revenues under the umbrella of a single advertising push. In other words, after spending tens of millions of dollars to get their attention, why not allow consumers to buy the movie how they want it, when they want it, where they want it? That will give movie producers more revenue visibility and return and that will increase the number of movies they make."

Cuban has also been a proponent of sharing some of the DVD revenue with theater owners.

Foggy Bridge, #2

The Dawn Is Mine, But I Will Share It With Any Bird That Cares to Wear It

Nick Starr's FlickrLicio.us Banned From Flickr

NickStarr.com : Nick Starr dot com � Flickr doesn’t believe in Web 2.0: Wow. I've only heard Nick Starr's version of this story but it would appear that, according to him, Flickr has blocked his site FlickrLicio.us. FlickrLiciou.us was Starr's site (which I'm sure was using a hell of a lot of bandwidth) which focused on presenting women he found on Flickr. Starr would basically hotlink to images of hot women on Flickr and created an aggregated photo album of sorts.

According to Starr, "(FlickrLicio.us) operates on the basis that Flickr “makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.” - Per the Flickr TOS.

The nature of the site is and shouldn’t be the matter at hand. The site operates under full compliance of the Flickr TOS. I have personally emailed with Butterfield and Heather Champ about the site. Heather asked me to remove any posts that contain links back to the pictures hosted on Flickr if the owner of the photo asks me to do so.

I and the current owner, have complied with every single request that has come in to remove a post that someone requests be removed. "

Starr goes on to claim that he is being selectively targeted in having his site banned by Flickr:

"How about sites that do EXACTLY the same thing as FlickrLicio.us? Wouldn’t Flickr want to block them from displaying pictures as well? They aren’t though. WHY FLICKRLICIO.US?

For evidence of this check FlickrBabes, FlickrChicks, and ChicksnBreasts. They all still have photos displayed on their sites. They provide the same service as FlickrLicio.us does, but have not mastered the precision and are not covering a scope as wide as FlickrLicio.us is. "

Further, Starr claims that Flickr management will not reply to his requests for an explanation.

"The owner of the site has sent emails to Stewart and Heather as well as Caterina Fake (VP Marketing & Community at Ludicorp) addressing the concerns it has. There has not been any reply to a single piece of communication."

These are some pretty serious allegations and I find it hard to believe that we have all of the facts at present. I'm going to email this link to some of the folks at Flickr and see if we can get more clarification on the matter at hand.

A couple of thoughts come to mind. 1. Perhaps Flickr is worried that women who show up on Starr's site will sue them (they can't always control who posts photos of who) or 2. Perhaps they (or their corporate owners Yahoo!) just find the objectification of women itself distasteful and choose to be arbitrary in this case. Whatever the case I'd like to hear an explanation for myself on this one.

Update: Stewart Butterfield from Flickr responds:
Hi Nick - I was going to comment on the Flickrlicious site, but I didn't see any way to leave comments there.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with social networking (??) or Web 2.0: it's pretty simple. In two parts:

(1) Flicklicious is a business. Flickr isn't around to serve businesses, but people - we're quite upfront about the "for personal use" thing.

(2) Each Flickrlicious page served ~2-4MB of photos from Flickr. It's also a popular site. That adds up to gigs and gigs and gigs of transfer a month. Good for Flickrlicious since it saves on bandwidth (and hosting) costs. But it's bad for Flickr and is an abuse of a system designed to help people get their photos out onto the rest of the web, and not lock them up in Flickr.

To be perfectly honest, we definitely don't like the T&A or XXX angles and we don't want it associated with the Flickr brand, but that is definitely not the issue. The same thing would happen to an ad-based site serving Flickr photos about horses or sailboats or boogers.

Carry on!

Update #2: It would appear this morning that perhaps Starr is not being selectively targeted here. FlickrBabes is also showing a message this morning saying that they also can no longer hotlink images from Flickr.

Update #3: According to Ben Barren, who has a rather detailed pro Nick Starr post out on the subject at hand, Nick Starr has agreed to pull all advertising off of FlickrLicio.us in order to better classify as a non-business site per Stewart's concerns above.

Nick has also agreed to work with Flickr to better manage the bandwidth problems.

Per Nick Starr: "This is a general announcement for everyone following the current Flickr / FlickrLicio.us issue. As of 1pm EST today, FlickrLicio.us and ALL of its subdomains will be 100% ad free. Flickr inserts ads in their site for non-paying members. They are making money off of YOUR pictures.. The site is and will never be a commercial venture, simply a person blogging content they find on Flickr to be visually appealing. It is just like ANY weblog.. This covers Stewart’s issue 1: Flicklicious is a business. (2) Each Flickrlicious page served ~2-4MB of photos from Flickr. This can be easily solved. Simply tell me specifically how many pictures maximum you want on the main page. Currently there were 32. What is an acceptable number? FlickrLicio.us would even be willing to cache the photos on its own server, using FlickrLicio.us’ bandwidth for hosting of the photos; however there is the issue of copyright that would come into play. If you know of a solution to this the site can COMPLETELY operate free of Flickr bandwidth."

Update #4: ChicksnBreasts seems to have been shut down as well. From the ChicksNBreasts blog: "I'm not sure why none of the pictures are showing up, but I think it has something to do with this. If flickr is really trying to shut down chicksnbreasts, it won't work. This site has been too much fun to just let die. Stay tuned..."

Update #5: It looks like all three, FlickrLicio.us, ChicksNBreasts and Flickrbabes are all back live again.

Update #6: Stewart Butterfield left the following note on Nick Starr's blog: "Glad it worked out and sorry how it happened. One last thing: it’d be nice if you could remove everyone’s email addresses from the first thread — will save years of additional spam crud."

Whew! Who needs soap operas when you've got all this drama!

Vista Inactivity Log Off

It seems the beta I'm running of Vista logs me off after a few minutes of inactivity. I checked the power mangement options and screen saver is set to none. Anyone know where to access the option to turn off log off for inactivity in Vista?

VoodooPC Aria media PC Reviewed

VoodooPC Aria media PC reviewed - Media PCs - mediapcs.engadget.com: Engadget's got a post on a review of the VoodooPC Aria Media PC. Included in the post is this gem: "the Aria’s built-in DVD-ripping function, which lets you archive your DVDs to its hard drive. Sure, as PC Mag says, this may be a DMCA violation. But are you gonna let that — or a $4K price tag — stand in the way of a pure entertainment experience?"

hmmm... interesting. Ed Bott was just talking about DVD ripping in Vista on The Windows Media Center show this morning. This is not Vista though.

The PC does have one of those sexy touch screen displays and comes in a stunning Ferrari type red.