Delaney in Flight

I’m really digging my new camera.

Blind and Desperate

Am I the only one who thinks all of these “me too” services being thrown up by AOL lately are tokens of desperation and a lack of vision?

TechCrunch reports that AOL is about to release a “YouTube clone.” This is on the heels of AOL’s recent launch of a MySpace competitor.

It looks to me like AOL is thrashing around in search of something to grab hold of as the walls around its closed system crumble and fall.

I don’t know if AOL can save itself or not, but I don’t think trying to become a Web 2.0 company is the most promising way to try.

Steve Gillmor is the New Dave Winer

I used to be amazed at the degree to which Dave Winer would go out of his way to fight with people. As it turns, out Dave is minor league when it comes to fighting. The King of RSS has lost his blog-fighting title to the ZDNet Zinger.

After first deciding that links are no good and then writing some of the most indecipherable words ever put together, Steve Gillmor carps at Richard Querin and gets irritated at his pal Mike Arrington on the latest Gillmor Gang podcast. I got frustrated with Steve’s pissy demeanor after part 1, so I missed all the barbs I expect he flung around in the rest of the podcast.

Steve also managed to make Nick Carr sound like a down to earth, logical and reasonably friendly guy in the process. In fact, I got the impression that more than one of the other gang members were put off by Steve’s demeanor.

Thank goodness Doc Searls is still in the gang to provide a voice of reason to the podcasts.

I think what was initially a fun and interesting free-for-all debate has devolved into a soapbox for Steve to pick fights and act superior, and I find that boring. The spirited debate is what attracted me to that podcast, but lately, as old what’s his name points out, Steve just sounds angry at everybody.

I’m too bored with Steve’s act to even get into the merits of his argument, but I will say that if you make outlandish statements like this whole non-linking business and then get irritated when people react negatively, you are going to be mad a lot.

For Music Lovers

twangville

I continue to think that Twangville is the best music site on the internet. If you don’t know this site, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

102 Films

Jason Kottke posts a list by film critic Jim Emerson of 102 movies someone ought to have seen to be considered movie literate. I suspect my list and that of just about everyone else would be different, since we all like and dislike different things, but here’s the list.

An asterisk means I have seen it.

* 2001: A Space Odyssey (overrated)
* The 400 Blows (pretty good)
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien (defines the modern alien genre)
* All About Eve (good)
* Annie Hall (other than Tiger Lilly, I find Woody Allen’s movies boring)
* Apocalypse Now (great movie)
* Bambi (I liked it and my kids do too)
The Battleship Potemkin
* The Best Years of Our Lives (great movie)
* The Big Red One (pretty good)
The Bicycle Thief
* The Big Sleep (OK, not great)
* Blade Runner (one of my all time faves)
Blowup (never seen it, but would like to)
* Blue Velvet (great movie)
* Bonnie and Clyde (OK, not great)
* Breathless (nah)
Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie (good scary movie)
* Casablanca (as good as its reputation_
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown (pretty good)
* Citizen Kane (great film)
* A Clockwork Orange (famous for being weird, but still pretty good)
* The Crying Game (great ending)
* The Day the Earth Stood Still (great sci-fi)
* Days of Heaven (fantastic movie; a must see)
* Dirty Harry (great Clint)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing (good movie)
La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity (one of my favorite of the film noir genre)
* Dr. Strangelove (great film)
* Duck Soup (I actually get the Marx brothers)
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial (great at the time)
* Easy Rider (good, but Wild Angels was better)
* The Empire Strikes Back (masterpiece)
* The Exorcist (great horror film)
* Fargo (great, but Raising Arizona is better)
* Fight Club (OK, not great)
* Frankenstein (masterpiece, if he’s talking about the 1931 one)
The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II (should have added III too)
* Gone With the Wind (I liked it the first few times I saw it)
* GoodFellas (great film)
* The Graduate (great film)
* Halloween (maybe the best modern horror film)
* A Hard Day’s Night (good because it’s the Beatles)
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life (my favorite holiday film ever)
* Jaws (how in the world has Jason not seen this!)
* The Lady Eve (good, but not great)
* Lawrence of Arabia (great epic film)
M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior (great post apocalypse films)
* The Maltese Falcon (great Bogart)
* The Manchurian Candidate (OK, not great)
* Metropolis (never understood the big deal about this one)
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the funniest movie ever)
* Nashville (good, not great)
* The Night of the Hunter (great Mitchum)
* Night of the Living Dead (one of my all time faves)
* North by Northwest (my favorite Hitchcock)
Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront (Brando when he wasn’t a cartoon character)
Once Upon a Time in the West
* Out of the Past (Another of my favorite film noir movies)
Persona
* Pink Flamingos (great, but I like Hairspray better)
* Psycho (good)
* Pulp Fiction (one of my all-time faves)
Rashomon
* Rear Window (good)
* Rebel Without a Cause (OK, but not as good as its reputation)
* Red River (great movie- there should be more westerns on this list)
* Repulsion (weird, but with Catherine Deneuve)
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface (pretty good, but Casino’s better)
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List (masterpiece
* The Searchers (another great western)
The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain (a rare musical I like)
* Some Like It Hot (OK, not great)
* A Star Is Born (the original is bearable; I hated the remake)
* A Streetcar Named Desire (great movie)
* Sunset Boulevard (another great film noir movie)
* Taxi Driver (great movie)
* The Third Man (great Orson Welles)
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil (definitely in my top 5 all time)
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (great movie)
Trouble in Paradise
* Vertigo (more great Hitchcock)
* West Side Story (didn’t like it)
* The Wild Bunch (great western)
* The Wizard of Oz (speaks for itself)

I’ve seen 78 out of 102.

All in all, a fairly good list. I would certainly add The Birds, Suddenly Last Summer, Summer of 42, The Last Picture Show, and A Place in the Sun. I would seriously consider adding Full Metal Jacket, the remake of The Thing, Belly of an Architect and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Bubble 2.0 Watch: He Said Thought Leaders

web20 Om Malik says that the thought leaders (a new “pre-owned car” word for my dictionary of needlessly fancy terms), along with investors and pundits, have lately begun to wonder about the whole Web 2.0 business.

Proving that thought leaders have been reading blogs for months, a “well known angel investor,” which I believe is a nice word for a rich guy who swoops down like an angel from heaven and tosses some cash at whatever science project turned business grabs his fancy in exchange for the possibility to get even richer by later selling said project to either Yahoo or some poor smuck in an IPO, wrote, according to Om, “that many of the Web 2.0 companies that were cropping up were targeting a niche audience. He found that many were me-too or forgettable permutations of some of the more established players such as Flickr, You Tube or Digg.”

Ya think? I and a bunch of other average Joes must be thought leaders too, since we have been saying that for months.

Om, who is generally on the money about things technological, goes on to talk about scalability and Web 2.0, arguing that eventually some of the advances that are being made in the Web 2.0 arena will find their way into the enterprise applications that run big business, sort of the way NASA’s velcro found its way onto my 4 year old’s tennis shoes.

Maybe. Eventually. But most big business is running enterprise applications that are 2 or 3 versions old, so Om and I will be retired before the benefitted versions find their way onto most corporate desktops. By then my grandkids will be hoping to get links from Om’s grandkids.

I continue to think that too many people are trying to stuff business, hobbies, old media and blogs into the same bag. I don’t know if it’s a mass scam in the making or if people who are used to writing about business and old media are just writing about what they know.

What I do know is that to judge success you have to start with perspective.

As Dave Winer points out, TechCrunch’s 53,000 or so subscribers is huge in blogosphere terms. 53,000 viewers would be a gigantic bomb if it were a TV show, which is measured in old media terms. Similarly, a Web 2.0 application that has a million users at $0 a month makes a lot less profit than my blog, which makes very little, but costs almost nothing to operate.

You can’t measure success in raw numbers. And you can’t judge a blog by old media standards.

Blogs are not businesses, no matter how many people try to pretend they are. A part of a business, yes. The business, no.

Similarly, most of these Web 2.0 applications are not businesses. A part of a business, yes (thus the sell to Yahoo business plan). But still not the business.

I think there are a lot of people trying to stuff a lot of square pegs in the old and familiar round holes.

As soon as they realize that won’t work, we’ll step back, get some perspective and see where we are.

Web 2.0 Wars: Quarter-Finals Round Four

The Web 2.0 Wars season has come to an end. The list of winners and playoff brackets were posted the other day.

Here’s how the playoffs will work. After taking a look at my prior commentary about each application, I’ll revisit each application and see what, if anything, is new. I’ll add an update for each contestant and pick the winner.

We are now in the quarter-finals and have already had Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3. It’s time for the fourth and final round of the quarter-finals.

Here are the contestants for the fourth quarter-final round:

Digg
Basecamp
Backpack
Technorati
Mercora

Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but as I’ve said many times I don’t like the news by contest process. There is also the potential for gaming which stories get top billing.

Basecamp is a web-based tool that lets you manage and track projects. Prices range from free to expensive. I like the fact that I haven’t seen a million of these and they actually charge for the service, thereby at least giving a nod to a legitimate business plan.

Backpack is an online information collection and storage application. Sort of like a turbo-charged on-line Onfolio or One Note.

Technorati is a blog search and tagging service. It has huge mindshare, and I’ve called it the backbone of the blogosphere- when it works. Unfortunately, it has regularly occurring hiccups.

Mercora is a music search service that stumbled across the finish line first in a weak heat. I got flamed for not picking StumbleUpon.

And the Winner of the fourth quarter-final round is:

This is also a hard round. I have been a devoted user and defender of Technorati, and I still like it, but my link numbers go up and down in a random fashion and I know for a fact (via trackbacks, etc.) that a lot of blogs are not being tracked correctly. Digg is a technological juggernaut, but I just don’t like news by contest. Basecamp has a business plan, but plays to a niche market. Backpack is cool, but in a crowded field.

Most people would give it to Digg in a landslide. But I’m going with a fading Technorati.

Technorati joins YouTube, Memeorandum (now called Techmeme) and Myspace in the Final Four.

Look for the semi-finals shortly.

If I’m to Be Your Camera

If I’m to be your camera,
then who will be your face?
-REM

After researching cameras for a while and considering the various alternatives, I bought a new digital camera. I wanted a digital SLR that would allow me to take photos semi-automatically, like my trusty Sony DSC-V3, and do a lot more manual stuff as I climb up the learning curve.

30D-775836 I settled on a Canon EOS 30D. I also bought a Canon Speedlite flash to use with it. My impressions so far are (a) it is a great camera that can do everything I want it to and more, and (b) I have a lot to learn about photography. I am going to take a camera class later this month, but so far it has been a process of trial and error. I happened across Darren Rowse’s excellent Digital Photography School blog. If anyone has any other sites I should bookmark, please let me know. My initial objectives are to learn the proper settings to take shots of the kids playing their sports and colorful shots in lower light settings and to learn how to manipulate depth of field.

Through reading the manual several times and trial and error, I have already flower-723925 learned a lot more than I knew before about the various camera setting. I am still confused by the practical interplay between aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I know what each term means, but I don’t yet know how to set each for a particular shot or which one to set first.

I took a hundred or so photos today, first of a birthday party and then of the kids and their friends swimming.

jumping-771950 The kids love to jump off the walls behind the swimming pool. Previously, getting a decent photo of them in flight was a hit and miss proposition, with at best one face sort of in focus and the rest of the faces blurry.

This camera will take 5-6 shots of the same jump, with every part of the picture in focus. This camera compared to my old one is more than night and day.

And that’s notwithstanding the fact that I am a mere novice at the digital SLR thing.

It’s going to be fun learning all this stuff, and I certainly welcome any bookmarks or pointers from the experts.

RanchoCast – May 12, 2006 Edition

I did a new podcast tonight. I think it’s another good one, with some great new music by relatively unknown artists you will love.

I played some Deadstring Brothers, Pieta Brown, a two-fer from the Gourds, a song I once described as “perfectly beautiful,” a song by the greatest American rock and roll band working today and much more. 60 minutes of great music.

Not much tech talk tonight, as I am profoundly bored with the blogosphere these days.

MPAA Lets Loose the Dogs of War

snifferdog-701085 Just when I thought we might go a whole week without the MPAA making a greedy fool of itself again comes word that the MPAA is training an army of dogs to sniff out all those pirated DVDs.

Of course so far it is an army of two: Lucky (not to be confused with Lucky Dog, our dog who cares not a whit about DVDs) and Flo.

And of course, Lucky and Flo’s noses, as good as they are, can’t distinguish a pirated DVD from a legal one. So I suppose if you carry a DVD through the airport, you may get the drug dealer treatment unless you can prove to the MPAA that you bought the DVD.

What’s next, a flock of movie sniffing pigeons who will join the MPAA in crapping all over its customers?