Jukebox, Annotated

You know the drill. Open up your jukebox of choice, point the shuffle feature to your entire library of songs and list, without exception, the first 10 or so songs that play. I like to add a little commentary about some of the artists, songs, albums, etc.

The Heart of Saturday Night – Tom Waits (The Heart of Saturday Night) (1)

Everything’s Gone – The Mertons (Girandole) (2)

Hunting High and Low – A-Ha (Hunting High and Low) (3)

Green Apple Quick Step – The Byrds (Byrdmaniax) (4)

Honky Tonk Baby – Highway 101 (Bing Bang Boom) (5)

I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water – Johnnie Taylor (Who’s Making Love) (6)

It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World – James Brown (Star Time) (7)

Southern Loving – Jim Ed Brown (The Essential) (8)

Old Joe – Guess Who (Canned Wheat) (9)

Sweet Thing – David Bowie (Diamond Dogs) (10)

(1) My pal G-Man and I went through a phase where we listed to nothing but Tom Waits. This is a great song from a great record.

(2) This record has come up before. Great driving alternative country. A must-buy for alt. country fans.

(3) People sometimes sell the 80’s short musically, and that’s a mistake. The alternative rock, particularly coming out of the UK, back then was pretty amazing. Beautiful song.

(4) An often overlooked Byrds record from 1971. This is a good an instrumental romp as you’re going to find.

(5) This is the lesser version of the once great band, after the wonderful Paulette Carlson left. Good workman like country music, but not a good as the prior records.

(6) A fine song from a great record by the seond best soul singer ever. Yes, ever.

(7) A fine song from a box set by the best soul singer ever. Yes, ever. I make my kids listen to The Godfather at least once a month. They have to appreciate.

(8) Normally I just play Pop a Top over and over, but this is another good song by a country legend.

(9) The Guess Who made some fantastic records, including this gem from 1969. You’ve heard their hits, but their records have a ton of great songs you’ve never heard. One of my favorite all-time bands.

(10) By far the best David Bowie record. I love this song and I love this record. It’s a masterpiece. Haunting. Rent 1984, put it on the DVD and mute it, put this record on.

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jukebox annotated, music reviews

There are No Mulligans When Your House is on Fire

In one of the 2006 trend prediction threads, I mentioned that I was not sold on VOIP because of the uncertainty that 911 calls will work.

I argued that while internet phone calls may be a trend, before VOIP will be a meaningful alternative to traditional land or mobile lines, someone will have to convince millions of people like me that if we dial 911 on VOIP, someone will answer who can help and knows where we’re calling from. There are often no mulligans when it comes to a 911 call, so creating certainty in the minds of the masses will be critical to the trend-ablility of internet phone service. Otherwise it will be a utility for a few and a toy for many.

Sadly, a man in Minnesota found out the hard way that, in fact, there are no mulligans. He called 911 over his Vonage VOIP line when a fire started in his house and, get this, was put on hold by Vonage while his house turned into a 5 alarm blaze.

This is why VOIP is a gadget, not a utility.

Frankly, I can’t believe companies who bungle such an important part of phone service are allowed to do business.

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 19

It’s time for Round 19 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 19:

Yelp
Smarkets
Inform
Filangy
Magnolia
43things
ShoZu
Technorati
Wrickr
Feedmarker

Yelp is a review aggregator with a local flavor. It catagorizes reviews by city.

Smarkets is a “stock market for products” game based on products sold at Amazon. You can buy or short. One of the most insufficient FAQs I’ve ever seen.

Inform is a new aggregation site. Users can create custom channels for topics of interest. It collects and connects the content, as opposed to relying solely on RSS feeds (they say that makes it better).

Filangy says is is “an exciting new concept in search that caters to the user’s specific searching needs and provides results that are needed.” OK, but that doesn’t really tell me anything. Needs more meat on the About page.

Magnolia is a beautifully designed social bookmarking and content management service.

43things is a goal setting and sharing service. Good mindshare, but I don’t really get it. Maybe I need to think up some goals.

ShoZu is a mobile phone service that helps you to save photos and videos from your camera-phone to your preferred online sharing site. it works with Flickr and a bunch of others.

Technorati is a blog search and tagging service. Huge mindshare, and I’ve called it the backbone of the blogosphere.

Wrickr has no meaningful information on its web page. Another example of a company tossing a web site up before there’s anything to see.

Feedmarker is a bookmarking service, that includes a feed reader and tagging. And it’s open source (good marks for that).

Before Today I’d Heard of:

3 out of 10.

And the Winner of Round 19 is:

Technorati in a photo finish with Magnolia.

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CyberSalon: It’s Not the Writing that Matters

It’s the control over the distribution of the writing.

Scott Rosenberg, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads, has more today on the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

The audio from the meetup can be heard via Andrew Keen’s AfterTV podcast (thanks to Sabine for the heads up via a Comment). It is a little over an hour’s worth of mostly interesting conversation, and if you doubt that Steve Gillmor has the best handle on the blogosphere, one listen will erase any doubt. He is one smart, to the point dude. My Gillmor Gang envy keeps on growing.

Anyway, Scott is responding to a post by long-time blogger Rebecca Blood in response to Scott’s initial report from the Berkeley meetup.

Rebecca’s Take

Rebecca’s point is that traditional publishing is about printing books and articles they can sell, which has little to do with finding the most well written material:

When publishers evaluate a book proposal, they don’t ask if the work is true or original or insightful or well-written. First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don’t think they can, they pass. If they believe there is a market and that they can effectively market the work, they buy it.

Scott’s Take

Scott mostly agrees with Rebecca, but draws a distinction between the business side of publishing and the editorial side:

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want.

My Take

First of all, as someone who has written a ton of newspaper and trade journal articles, my experience has been that most editors are looking for something interesting to publish, period. Perhaps this isn’t the case at the New York Times and its ilk, but most publications are hungry for stuff to publish. Whether they will admit that or not is another story, but it’s true.

Initially, there is a process that is at least somewhat designed to locate (a) something well written that (b) fits the focus of the publication.

Veteran writers know the focus of the publications they write for and can generally hit the nail on the head focus-wise on the first try. If you’re an unknown, the bar is higher and the writing must be more compelling to pass muster. If you are a recognized name or authority, the bar gets lowered a little. Perhaps a little ironic, perhaps not. But true.

I’m no John Markoff (and far, far from it), but when I write an article, I have little to no doubt I can get it published by one publication or another. More times than not, it’s the first one I offer it to.

The first couple of articles are sort of tough, but after you’ve been doing it a while, you realize it’s just not that hard to get publications to use your stuff.

Granted, I am not writing to make a living (it’s more of a marketing thing for me), but I have been doing it for a long time and I have to believe my experience mirrors that of many others.

But It’s Not About the Writing

My bottom line on all of this, however, is that everyone has it a little wrong. We’ve been talking about the right things, but not from the correct angle.

Old media is not in crisis because we are writing our blogs. Old media is in crisis because of a two step process is taking away its stranglehold on the distribution of writing. The easy analogy is the record labels and the way they grasp at the catless bag in the face of new distribution channels for music that bypass the labels. Like traditional newspapers, the record labels are in the twilight of their relevance.

So back to the newspapers.

First eBay and Craigslist take away a chunk of the beloved classified ads and that long-standing revenue stream.

Now bloggers (which include not only morons like us, but also geniuses like Andrew Keen) are chipping away at the content distribution model. There is a lessening of the need for a middleman to direct content to us. We can produce, publish, find, read and reply to it ourselves.

And this trend is in its infancy. It will continue and, if the traditional newspapers don’t adapt, it will make them economically infeasible. That’s part of the basis of my 8 Steps to Save the Merc post.

So it’s not about the writing, and it’s not about the quality of the writing. It’s about the loss of control of the distribution of the writing.

Plaxo to Throttle Back the Emails

According to Techdirt, the email loving folks at Plaxo may finally be bending to the collective will and reassessing their email policies.

I regularly get emails via Plaxo telling me that people I know and sometimes people I don’t are updating their address book and encouraging me to update my information via Plaxo. It’s an example of an idea that sounds good in theory (let’s enable users to easily obtain current contact information and add it to their Outlook contacts list) that goes horribly wrong when put into action.

It goes wrong simply because the updating process is based on unsolicited emails to contacts asking them to update their information via Plaxo. I think it’s great if someone wants to add my information to their address book, but not if I have to get emails I don’t want and/or sign up or give information to some service.

After apparently waiting to enact any changes until enough people signed up for their service, Plaxo has indicated that it will throttle back the emails. Here’s a quote from one of Plaxo’s founders that tells you a lot about Plaxo’s commitment to being a good net citizen:

[W]e’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we’re finally getting to that end.

Anyone who takes even a second to think about that statement will realize that it’s like a litterbug who just dumped all his trash on the side of the road saying that littering is bad. Or the guy who just made a ton of money selling email addresses deciding to become an anti-spam advocate.

It’s easy to diet when you’re full and it’s easy to act right after you’ve gotten the spoils of acting wrong.

According to some of the Comments to the Techdirt post, Plaxo is now bundled with AOL Instant Messenger. There’s nothing that will get a program deleted from my computer any faster than trying to stuff a bunch of unwanted programs onto my hard drive.

I find product bundling to be just as distasteful as spam. That’s just my opinion and perhaps others disagree.

But while less Plaxo email is a welcome thing, let’s not start handing out citizenship awards to Plaxo just yet.

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 18

It’s time for Round 18 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 18:

Lexxe
Lookster
PXN8
Measuremap
Facebook
Netvibes
Goowy
MyVideoKaraoke
Gmail
Backpack
Platial

Lexxe is a search engine. One thing I like about it is that web searches and blog searches are combined.

Lookster is not yet live and has no information at all on its web page.

PXN8 is an online photo editing application. You can also buy a copy and install it on your computer.

Measuremap, recently bought by Google is a stats tracking application.

Facebook is a social networking site limited to college students.

Netvibes is an Ajax-based personal portal page. It probably has the greatest mindshare of the new portal players.

Goowy is a very nice looking personal portal page, that adds some extra features like online file storage.

MyVideoKaraoke is a site where users can upload videos of people singing karaoke songs. There aren’t all that many songs up yet, but this is a really interesting idea.

Gmail is Google free, web based mail. I wrote about it here.

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

Platial is a collaborative atlas. You can add tags for locations of places that you are others may be interested in. Neat idea.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

7 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 18 is:

Backpack, in a hotly contested heat. Backpack has a lot of potential as a one-stop shop for online storage and information organization.

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newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

In Defense of Blogging

OmegaMom posts the best defense I have read yet to Andrew Keen’s continuing tirade against our scribblings.

Among her many good points is the following:

Nobody is claiming that all those blogs out there are, de facto, gems of literature that will gleam forever. What is claimed is that the froth will generate some value, that some people whose eloquent or expert or funny voices would never have been heard before will gain some well-earned followings. Even people who start out with the attitude that “blogs are stupid” can discover, to their amazement, that there are folks out there with voices that appeal to them, and experiences that resonate with them.

I’ll put that writing up against any self-aggrandizing drivel spouted off by Andrew’s “elite talent” any day.

Great stuff.

10 Applications I Can’t Live Without (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of my 10 applications post. Part 1 is here.

Here are applications 6-10

6) Ulead Video Studio

I’ve made movies with all sorts of hardware and software and Ulead Video Studio is the best bang for the buck I have found. I use it all the time and while no application is perfect, this one comes pretty close.

7) Behind Asterisks

I forget my passwords fairly often and this little decryption utility has saved me more times than I can count.

8) Atlas Find and Replace

I posted a glowing endorsement of this excellent find and replace utility last year, after it helped me change hundreds of web pages in less than 2 hours. This is a must have application for anyone who develops any sort of internet content.

9) FinePrint

I print all of my documents via FinePrint, which allows you to print multiple pages on a single sheet, to print double sided, to add watermarks, headers and footers and much more.

10) Microsoft Photo Story

The older I get, the more I find that the movies I enjoy making the most are just photos set to music. There are a lot of programs to do this, but the best one is both easy to use and free. All of the photo-videos I have posted on Newsome.Org were made with Photo Story 3.

These are some of my most valued applications. Tell me about yours in the Comments.

Tags: software review, personal productivity

Google Finance: Stumbling Out of the Gate

I didn’t have a chance earlier today to test the newly released Google Finance service. Om, whose judgment I trust (even if I do have to beg him for the link love smallicon-793225 ), says it’s disappointing.

First a word about the finance sites I currently use and then let’s dive into Google Finance.

A Little Background

I am not really an active stock trader these days, but I was back in the mid to late nineties. I told the quick version of my story in an excerpt from my podcast the other day. The bottom line is that I have made a lot of money and lost a lot of money in the stock market. Along the way, I have tried a lot of different financial sites. Some were free, some were made available to me by media companies I provided content for and some I paid for.

Presently, I use two and only two (not counting the brokerage sites where I do my trading, but which I use only lightly for research). My Yahoo, where I track the market and my stocks in my left column, and Morningstar, where I do a lot of my research (Disclosure: I have owned Morningstar stock since the IPO).

So lets take a look, in real time, at Google Finance.

Initial Impressions

The front page looks desolate. What is appealing about Google’s search page doesn’t work here. I see a link to add stocks to your portfolio, but unless it’s well hidden I see no way to add stocks other than one at a time.

Some sort of import feature is a must in future releases.

I added a few stocks, all but one (Google) of which I actually own. The Ajaxy entry screen is fast, but there needs to be a way to import portfolios. Once more- there has to be an easier way to add your portfolio.

Oddly enough, your portfolio doesn’t show up on the front page. There is a list of recent quotes you have looked up, but I see no way to personalize the front page. Surely I’m missing something?

What About the Quotes?

OK, so let’s look up a quote. I own AT&T and have been thinking about selling it for a while.

Here’s where Google Finance gets a little more impressive.

The quote info and chart are pretty neat. I love the way the times of the news stories are reflected on the chart. The news story links are logically placed and easy to access. I like the blog post links at the bottom, but I don’t read blogs for stock buying ideas.

Message Board into Chaos

There are message boards (called discussions) that you can join or start, and I can imagine a horde of pumpers and dumpers lining up outside the walls. There do seem to be some safeguards in place and one of the current pump and dump favorites did not have a link to join or create a discussion.

But I can tell you from vast experience that these message boards will rapidly descend into chaos and will become useless in short order. I predict they’ll kill them all off within a year.

At first I didn’t see links to major holders, insider sales and SEC filings, all of which are available at Yahoo, but there they are at the bottom left of the screen. I wish there was a Morningstar link down there.

Conclusions

My initial conclusion is that Google Finance is underwhelming as far as customization goes, but that the data returned when you lookup a quote is reasonably impressive.

Om’s right, however, when he says “[I]t will be a long time, and I mean long time in Internet years that is, before Google Finance really catches up to Yahoo Finance, which in fact is the gold standard.”

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 17

It’s time for Round 17 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 17:

Truveo
NewsVine
egoSurf
Clipfire
Mozy
Quimble
Basecamp
Pegasus News
Remember The Milk
Squidoo
PictureCloud

Truveo is a video search engine. It seems pretty fast.

NewsVine is a social bookmarking site that combines features of a number of other services, such as Digg and Google News. I talked about it here.

egoSurf is a program that searches your name and web site and tells you where you stack up on the web. I got a 9346. I hope that’s good. I think this is a cool idea.

Clipfire is is a shopping search engine and community. I want to buy a Dell 1900FP monitor, but when I searched for it I got links to all sorts of Dell stuff. Same result for Thinkpad X41. Unless I’m missing something, there results are not focused enough.

Mozy is a free remote backup service. You get 1G of space (2 if you fill out a survey) in return for accepting some ads via email.

Quimble lets you create and share polls. I’ve noticed some nice looking Quimble polls on various blogs.

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.

Pegasus News is a “local media venture” (whatever that might be) to be launched in Dallas, Texas in “early 2006.” OK.

Remember The Milk is an online method to manage to-do lists. Nobody tell my wife about this site, please. Cool looking site.

Squidoo is a site where people post content on topics they care about. They say it’s a combination of Friendster and Wikipedia.

PictureCloud is a service that lets you create 360 degree photo representations of stuff. Unfortuntately all the samples were cut in half when I viewed them via Firefox. Not good. They worked in Internet Explorer.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

4 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 17 is:

Basecamp nudges out Remember the Milk, just because it has a business plan that doesn’t rely solely on ads.

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newsome.org web wars, web 2.0