Month: March 2006

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times – Times Online Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Ob-La-gimme 75 million cause your name is Apple too!

Ok, so normally I’m not that much of an Appleheaded fanboy, but this is ridiculous. The Beatles want to sue Apple Computer for getting into the music business? What kind of a crazy world do we live in and what was that thing that Shakespeare once said about all the lawyers?

From the Times Online: “Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs, still owns the licensing rights to Beatles’ products. It is claiming that the introduction of iTunes broke a $26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to steer clear of the music business, for which the Beatles’ company retains the famous trademark. It is the latest clash in one of Britain’s longest-running corporate legal battles.”

Nobody is ever going to confuse iTunes or an iPod with those vinyl records that the Beatles sold a ways back.

This seems to me yet another example of some company looking to profit off of someone else’s success just because some barrister out there needs a new pair of shoes. The next thing you know The Beatles are going to be after Apple Computer because, well, they’re here, there and everywhere, and, well, didn’t we once write a song like that?

Market Street was shut down today at The Federal Reserve Building here in San Francisco as police responded to a bomb scare with a suitcase that had been left on the corner next to the Federal Building. In the end it all turned out ok and it appears some hapless tourist most likely accidently left his luggage on the corner next to a federal building.

Memo to self: The next time I set my luggage down on the corner, don’t walk away from it.

I think they are Xraying the luggage or something here to determine if there’s anything dangerous inside. How would you like to be the guy who gets the call that his luggage had been found?

You can see the entire set of photos here.

The New Wisdom of the Web – Next Frontiers – MSNBC.com The blogosphere is a buzzin’ this morning with the latest MSP (that’s mainstream press) foray into the quirky and mysterious realm called Web 2.0. This time Newsweek is on the case in an article entitled The New Wisdom of the Web featuring campy polaroids of none other than our own beloved Flickr Founders Steven Butterfield and Cathy Fake (hat tip to George!).

The article is surprisingly mostly accurate and right on and is a reasonably well written introduction to Web 2.0 for the masses. Interestingly articulated was the statement that Tom Sawyer was an “early adopter.”

“When Mark Twain’s creation connived his buddies into painting the fence for him, he didn’t call it “user-generated content.” It took the Living Web to figure that one out.” hmm.

A few thoughts on the article.

1. Flickr now has 2.5 million users. This is the first time I’ve seen that number in print. Back on November 14th Business 2.0 said that they had 1.5 million users. A million more users in four months. Impressive. MySpace of course is too massive to even talk about.

2. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has the most relevant quote in the article: “”Everybody thinks we’re building operating systems, PCs and browsers. They clearly don’t get it,” he says. So where does Google want to go? “Look at MySpace,” he says cryptically. “Very interesting.”” Cryptically being the operative word.

There is a big reason why Schmidt is interested all of a sudden in social networking. There is an even bigger reason why Yahoo! has been assembling the equivalent of the Web 2.0 dreamteam. Along with Flickr, Delicious (I hate writing all those periods so I’m going to stop from here on out), Upcoming.org, WebJay, etc. The reason is that it doesn’t take much more than a freshman course in statistics to get that very small samples can produce very strong relevancy.

More than anything else, social networking is about search. The case for the superiority of the human filter for search has already been established with Flickr’s interestingness algorithm. I will not beat a dead horse here as I’ve written on this plenty in the past, but searching photos ranked by interestingness largely produces superior results to Yahoo! Google, Ask and everyone elses computer generated image search algorithm.

Small armies of individuals rating, ranking, tagging, organizing everything is where the power of 2.0 is going.

3. Flickr has succeeded in large part because they continuously delight their users again and again and again. They treat them respectfully and empower them and frequently try and find new ways to impress them. Do I mind that I’m down there painting Tom Sawyer’s fence in Sunnyvale? Hell no. Because I’m having way too much fun doing it. By keeping advertising minimally invasive and working on the dual powers of system stability (all that pesky growth) and new feature introductions Flickr has a winning program.

4. Newsweek also gets it right in listing Digg at the top of their list of “Who’s Building the Next Web.” I’ve suggested that Yahoo! should buy Digg in the past and still think that they would make an attractive contribution to the Yahoo! dream team. Delicious (web search), Flickr (image search), WebJay (music search), upcoming.org (event search), Digg (new search). Do we see a patern here?

Of course the Yahoo!/Digg thing’s already been chatted up to death when Kevin Burton got us all worked up over nothing a few months back. Still, if not Digg, some type of news based social networking thing would seem to be a good play for Yahoo! Unless I’m missing something (which is often the case).

Fraser Kelton also pulls out a good quote over at his Yahoo’s Science Experiment post: “The following paragraph made the story worth the read:

But that’s not why Yahoo bought it for an estimated $35 million. “With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing,” says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz.”

Good to see Steven and Cathy get such fine MSP and good to see Flickr so prominently featured in a national magazine.

Zatz Not Funny — TiVo Series 2 Hardware Refresh Dave Zatz blogged about a new TiVo he’s found online and it would appear to be the first dual tuner TiVo. Don’t get too excited though, it’s not the new dual tuner CableCARD high def monster Series 3. It woudl appear instead to be an intermediate offering between single tuner Series 2 TiVos out today and the upcoming dual tuner Series 3.

I guess this model would be meant to appeal to the more bargain conscious DVRer who didn’t really care about picture quality or high def but wanted to record two things at once.

The basics from Amazon:

” * Record shows from two basic cable channels, or one basic cable and one digital cable channel, at once.
* Up to 180 hours recording capacity
* Includes Ethernet and USB ports, so connecting to your home network is a snap
* Only TiVo offers exclusive features like WishList searches, Season Pass recordings, TiVoToGo transfers, plus new online services like music, photos, and more!
“

USATODAY.com – Cablevision tests ‘remote storage’ DVR use From USA Today: “In a move that could ignite a major debate about consumer “fair use” of TV programming, Cablevision Systems will unveil plans to test a service that gives cable subscribers the ability to record and time-shift shows using existing digital set-top boxes.

Although it works just like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) — consumers choose in advance which shows to capture and can fast-forward through ads — the recording itself will be stored at the cable system, not on a hard drive in the consumer’s home.”

It look like the thin client is about to get a whole lot thinner.

Will there be a day when you truly can have 5 terabytes of TV stored without having to buy 10 external hard drives? An interesting move on the part of Cablevision. Although I wonder about the economics of the experiment. You have to wonder if streaming TV back from a large remote server would be more cost effective than just building hard drives into the boxes. Then again, if more than one person could share the same show under a rights management package thing from the server, well… you never know. I mean, we don’t really need *all* of us to each have our own copy of The Sopranos in high def now do we?

The fact that the Oakland Museum of California lets you shoot in their galleries is really fantastic. So many art museums (San Francisco’s MOMA for instance) are proprietary with their collections and will not let you shoot their stuff.

A museum should be about sharing as broadly as possible with the general public the works in their collection. Photographers are an army of archivists. And great photographers can remix art and find new ways to show, share and present it.

The Oakland Museum deserves a great deal of credit for allowing photographers to shoot their collection and thereby maintaining true to the idea of what a public museum should be about.

I haven’t been to the MOMA in three years because of their no photography policy. It’s backwards, I know, and I need to get over that, but I have such a distaste for the policy of the place that it may be years before I find my way back in there — despite the fact that locked up inside and hidden away are some of the great artistic treasures of our time.

On the other hand, at the Flickrmeetup at the Oakland Museum on Saturday I purchased a membership to the museum (even tax deductable they say on their website). I will be back there many, many times and would encourage anyone I know, and especially photographers to visit as well. There are so many amazing things to see and shoot there.

The Strokes are the quintesential American Rock and Roll band. I was fortunate enough to be able to catch their show last night at the Design Center in San Francisco. Although the Design Center doesn’t have the world’s greatest acoustics, the sold out show was pretty cool nonetheless.

The Strokes have three albums out to date and have for the last few years typified a certain kind of hard rocking American Rock and Roll sound. With influences like The Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones and The Ramones, The Strokes tonight played a surefire set of hard rocking catchy tunes that rocked the house.

I took a bunch of photos of the band and have a set up of 50 photos of tonight’s show on Flickr.