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started 6/13/2001; 8:19:58 AM - last post 8/10/2001; 5:04:18 PM
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Doc Searls - 
6/13/2001; 12:19:58 PM (reads: 3978, responses: 7)
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The Olde Turnaround 
| | David Coursey takes back what he said about Linux on the desktop. Sort of. |
Woops! There goes the MP3 standard
| | Thomson is dumbing out loud about plans for monetizing its ownership of MP3. |
But they'll have to change their name to DoubleTag
| | Says here DoubleClick is safe from exclusion by IE6. |
A double short cap, hold the arsenic
| | This morning at Peet's I ordered the usual, but the guy behind the counter shook his head. "Can't do that," he said. "I'm an Arizona fan." I'd forgotten that I was wearing my Duke Blue Devils 2001 National Champions t-shirt, which was a gift from Buzz Bruggeman, who actually went to Duke (I went to the small college b-ball powerhouse that produced Jerry Steele Bob Kauffman, M.L. Carr and World B. Free, among other NBA also-stars). Buzz is an attorney (I think Duke actually requires that a certain percentage of its graduates go on to Law careers) whose true calling is a creative piece of software called ActiveWords. I won't promise he'll give you a t-shirt, but hey: check it out. |
Shaking and moving
| | For the first time in 27 years, our tax dollars are not paying for my sister Jan (retired from the Navy as a Commander several years back, before she went to work for a start-up that no longer employs her but is incongrously still in business) to move. She's a pro: 17 times in 22 years she saw her life packed up and shipped somewhere in the world she'd never been before. By the time her ever-growing inventory of possessions arrived at the new location, she had found a place to live, started a new job, initiated enduring friendships and hacked the local service codes. Her stories of sofas stuck in stairwells in London, locals gathering to advise her allied occupation of a medieval cottage in Wales, or single-malt sendoffs from Scotland are family legend. (We only recently started talking about how her Honda was totaled in Santa Barbara 25 years ago, when she lived in Oxnard and worked out at San Nicolas Island.) |
| | So now we are synchronous siblings in mid-move, once again. She's headed to North Carolina from Arlington, VA while I'm heading back with the family tomorrow to our old place by Yhe Bay to down-pack the contents of a 3700 square foot house with plenty of storage, so it will fit in a house half that size with approximately no storage at all (well, there's the "garage," which was divided by a former owner into an office to something suitable, literally, for half a car). |
| | Anyway, this time — for the first time — she is cost-consciously and packing herself. Her advice for the the latest information on moving is The US Post Office's Movers Net, which includes a section with instructions for packing anything. Ever observant, she also notes that someone at the Post Office has a sense of humor. Go through the list alphabetically and between "China" and "Crystal" and "Kids Stuff" you will find instructions for packing a hippo. |
Sourcebusting
| | Dan points out an effort to bring more credibility to the analyst game. The analysts in question here are actually the most accountable ones, which cover stocks and other securities. The ones I'm most interested in are the quotables in the computer industry: Forrester, Jupiter, Gartner, IDC and so on. Is it any surprise, for example, that estimates of the Linux server "market" range from 9% (for the Microsoft-sponsored Gartner Group) to 39% (for AllNetResearch, which is affliated with internet.com, which owns LinuxToday and pile of other Linux sites)? These are the sources editors go to for "objective" opinions to balance information derived from those involved in stories the editors cover. It would be very interesting, and helpful, to see some kind of accountability/standards effort made here. |
You blog something new every day
| | Marek tells us that Bialystock is a town in Poland. And also something of a perjorative. |
| | And here's the conversational market at work on the Public Bitwave matter. This is very cool. We have to get the public radio industry aligned with their own Reality. The public wants MP3, not Real. And let's face it: if the public knew a little more about Ogg Vorbis, they'd want that too. Hey, it's even available for the Mac. |
| | In fact, I just downloaded MacAmp, played a track from the Ogg Vorbis site, and the whole thing works like a champ (and sounds great) without screwing up anything else on the computer. Compare that to Real, which never met a setting it didn't want to change. |
Tenant farming
| | I realized last night that none of us owns the Web. We rent it. Really. If we don't pay our providers, whatever we "own" disappears. And for those of us getting a free ride (like, y'know, the whole blogging community), the same goes for our kind benefactors. |
| | Anyway, it's just a thought. |
Still making that connection between babes and disease
| | Here's how Panda Security gets ink (or pixels, or at least a few lecherous stares). Thanks for the link goes to Don, who adds that, if you look hard enough, you can find an actually useful press release. |
| | Along those same lines (or curves), I just encountered a record number of cookies at this site, which tells us how Microsoft uses booth babes to hustle the Xbox. |
Justice?
| | The Lemur points us to this piece at The Register, which says DoubleClick may have a problem in the slave new world of IE6: |
| | Indisputably, Doubleclick cookies are toast when IE6 hits, and they're toast because of the way the default privacy settings are implemented, they're third party cookies. But need cookies derived from the Beast of Redmond be deemed third party? WinXP is riddled with MSN and .NET markers, blink for a second and you'll have accidentally agreed to trust all cookies/certificates/dubious new operating systems from Microsoft and... It's scarcely surprising if major site proprietors are already noting which way the wind's blowing. |
| | The Lemur's own take on the matter is good reading too. |
Another way to drive
| | I'm hearing from readers about iCab, the neat little browser from Germany that runs on Macs. This is from She Kisses Wyverns of Technomancy (current title — the technomancy blog: we've been setting fire to cornflakes kinda like your mom): |
| | I browse using iCab (www.icab.de) on the Mac OS. It has a wonderful feature -- well, several wonderful features, but the one I'm specifically thinking of is that you can tell it to run Javascript, but not allow it to open new windows. |
| | iCab also has two other features that make it my default browser: it allows you to filter ads by URL, and it allows you to accept/reject cookies by server. |
| | Plus, it includes an HTML validator. How cool is that? |
| | Very cool. But does it remember passwords, fill out forms, keep an editable history of where I've been, and let me delete individual cookies? If it does, I'm there. |
Take back the bitwaves
| | When I went to the NPR site a few minutes ago, I noticed two things that seemed out of whack. |
| | In the vertical frame on the left is a section titled "Listen Now," underneath which one chan choose to hear Hourly Newscasts or Program Streams. Under the former one chan choose RealAudio or Windows Media. Under the latter one can choose Apple Quicktime, Read Audio or Windows Media. No MP3 player choices. So NPR is broadcasting with three different audio formats: Real's, Microsoft's and Apple's. On the other side of the page is another frame that contains this item: "Vote for NPR in the Webby Awards's People's Voice (Fresh Air in radio and Election 2000 in politics). And tell us what you think about our relaunched Web site." (I added the links.) |
| | If you want to see what The People are really voicing, go to Live365, which features 37,000 audio streams, all in MP3, mostly originating from individuals. Then look at iTunes — the Apple MP3 player that is, as far as I know, the only audio client from a major vendor that isn't an instrument of Supply more than Demand. iTunes has a Radio Tuner with a pile of stations and networks that broadcast in MP3. (For a QuickTime movie of the tuner at work, click here.) The best is KPIG, which I will flog'n'blog shamelessly until the day one of us dies. Right now the Pig is pumping crystalline MP3 stereo at 128kbps through my Cambridge speakers. If you're looking for real-life terrestrial radio station (a commercial one, no less) that is With The People, that has a real relationship with its listeners and with the artists it plays, KPIG is the hog's pajamas. Look no further. |
| | Meanwhile NPR and its outlets are still serving the Supply Side by transmitting Real and Microsoft streams. A few minutes ago I tried to hear Fresh Air from KCLU by way of their RealAudio stream, and I had to endure the usual pop up windows insisting that I download (and pay for) yet another one of Real's annoying and intrusive clients. Then when the stream came through, it sounded like it was phoned from Timbuktu. |
| | So here's my question: What's keeping broadcasters — especially noncommercial ones — from transmitting in MP3? Are servers from Real and Microsoft cheaper? I don't see how, when there doesn't seem to be any shortage of MP3 servers in the world. And even Apple doesn't seem to be hustling QuickTime as an audio format (video, yes; audio, no). |
| | Whatever the answer, it's time for The People to rebel. Whatever else happens, we've got to lose Real. I've had enough. How about you? |
If your dot-com flopped before its IPO but you still cleared a good salary and a BMW, then what you made was Bialystock.
| | I've been listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the world's finest radio interview show. The guest is Mel Brooks, whose Broadway musical, The Producers, just won twelve Emmy awards. Terry opened the show with a clip from the movie version of The Producers, which came out in 1968 and starred Zero Mostel as failure-prone Broadway producer Max Bialystock, and Gene Wilder as Bialystock's inspired accountant. It's been thirty years since I've seen the movie, so the dialogue was fresh for me. It blew my mind, because the story's humorous premise — making money by selling an bad idea for millions to investors willing to take all the risk and lose everything when the idea flopped — became standard operating procedure in dot-com era, which we might end up calling The Bay Nineties. "You could make a lot of money by over-financing turkeys" is one line from the movie. I don't have time to look around for the script, but I'd love to find and quote a little more than the headline above. |
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marek j - Re:
6/13/2001; 2:03:45 PM (reads: 1033, responses: 1)
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Bialystock or rather (Bialystok) is a town in Poland, on the north eastern edge of the border. To be from Bialystock is to be a little slow and not very intelligent (not true but it's a polish joke). Anyway, the joke is that people from Bialystock are swindlers. They are backwater peasants who have learned the ways of the people from the Big City (like Warsaw). They are a Big Time wannabes and they will do anything to sound smart but in the end of course they are just people from Bialystock.
Disclaimer: I don't mean to offend anyone from Bialystock - it's just a folk tale in Poland.
Marek J
soapbox.radioPossibility.com
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Craig Jensen - Re: Take back the bitwaves
6/13/2001; 2:10:56 PM (reads: 1073, responses: 2)
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Doc, I couldn't agree with you more. I have taken your challenge and sent this email to the webmaster of KUT, the public radio station in Austin, TX. ( http://kut.org )
Cecilia,
I like many aspects of the new KUT.org website. Congratulations on your good work.
There is one thing, however, that I don't like. Webcasting with RealAudio seems totally contrary to "Public Radio" culture. The software is buggy and very intrusive to the client browser and worse, the sound is horrible. Doc Searls, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto has this to say: http://doc-weblogs.com/2001/06/13#takeBackTheBitwaves . What he is suggesting is more in line with what I would expect from KUT.
By-the-way, I put my money where my mouth is. I have been a member of KUT since the early 1980's.
Could you please look into this and let me know what you think?
If I hear back from the webmaster, I'll let you know what the response is.
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Craig Jensen - Re: Take back the bitwaves
6/13/2001; 2:50:38 PM (reads: 1177, responses: 1)
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I got a response already! That's worth something right?
This is what Cecelia says:
Hello, Craig:
Thank you for the kind words and constructive criticism. I will pass along your comments, as well as those of Doc Searls, to our program director. We are currently in the process of evaluating new streaming partner, so it is always good to know what the people -- who actually use the service -- think about it.
I appreciate that you took time to share your thoughts with us.
Best,
Cecilia Nasti
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Doc Searls - Re: Bialystock
6/13/2001; 3:20:48 PM (reads: 782, responses: 0)
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That's cool! I had no idea.
I just assumed Mel Brooks was mooshing "bialy" and "stock" into one name. A bialy is a bagel variant.
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Doc Searls - Re: Take back the bitwaves
6/13/2001; 3:44:27 PM (reads: 972, responses: 0)
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That's great! And I just noted it on the blog as well.
Now I just got this from the auto-responder at NPR:
=================================
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 15:13:16 -0400
From: "webmaster " <webmaster@npr.org>
Reply-To: <webmaster@npr.org>
Sender: <webmaster@npr.org>
To: <doc@searls.com>
Subject: [Webmaster Mail]
[Webmaster Mail]
[:::::::::::::::::::::::THIS IS AN AUTOMATED REPLY:::::::::::::::::::::::::]
Thank you for writing.
Due to the overwhelming amount of mail we receive, we cannot personally
respond to each email, but we DO read each message.
However, we hope that you'll find the answer to your question below. Included are: searching for a story, ordering a tape or transcript, contacting your favorite program, information about an e-mail petition about NPR funding going around the Internet.(it's not true), or find your local station.
[lots of contact poop follows]
=================================
Well, about what I expected. That's okay. Their customers are the affiliate stations who buy their programs, and we are those stations' customers -- a real market relationship we don't have with commercial broadcasters.
So I'm not surprised that you got a real response from KUT (a great station, I agree... having listened to it once all afternoon, thanks to freak atmospherics, at the beach in North Carolina), while I got the e-boot from NPR's webmaster.
Doc
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Awesome to see SOMEBODY talking aout this... we really need an MP3 centered list to keep them all moving in the right direction...
I have sent several emails now to stations and programs alike...This American Life, Prarie Home Companion (who USED to be QuickTime ONLY!!!!) and all complain about cost.
I sent $$ and messages to PublicRadioFan a website that is the BEST central site I have seen to get them to list the formats and advocate more MP3 use...
Why is Apple so silent on all this?
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Doc Searls - Re: Tke back the airwaves
8/10/2001; 9:04:18 PM (reads: 822, responses: 0)
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Apple can't cope with the fact that Quicktime is getting deeply niched in the marketplace, to put it kindly. They should open source it. Now's the time.
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