Earlier today I came across a Chartreuse editorial that likens Paris Hilton’s fame to that of YouTube and Digg. Ironically, several hours later, I found a Forbes.com article describing a deal between Warner Music Group and YouTube that manifests the comparison. Read the rest of this entry »
When perusing Microsoft’s Coding4Fun community site I came across a blog entry from the VS Express Lead Project Manager describing the Made in [SQL Server] Express contest: “like American Idol, *you* get to choose who wins the Community Award! See below for more information on these fun, cool, and useful applications!”. Pop culture references? Contests? Get your XXTreme flair today, dude! Microsoft is clearly making an all-fronts Web2.0-enabled marketing push. Even the Word Team just started a blog! Read the rest of this entry »
Traditional media tends to offer package deals. Television networks, magazines, albums, … — each of them aggregates content in wholesale manner that, when done successfully, offers the consumer more than they want. But why should consumers pay for the excess bundled content that they don’t want? Read the rest of this entry »
Gas prices have almost doubled at the pump over the past three years, from an average of $1.60/gallon in April 2003 to $2.74 in April 2006. What would cause such a dramatic increase? Opinions range from vast oil conspiracies to classic supply and demand. However, these perspectives are not mutually exclusive — oil demand is largely inelastic, while oil companies have a significant influence on the supply, and therefore their own profits. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft’s new image format is poised to compete with JPEG. Windows Media Photo was announced yesterday at WinHEC 2006, along with a comparison that favored WMP over JPEG and JPEG 2000 at 24:1 compression. With any luck, WMP will succeed where JPEG 2000 failed. WM Photo support will be included in Windows Vista, and as an upgrade to Windows XP. Read the rest of this entry »
Warner Bros. announced yesterday that it will sell movies and TV shows online, and distribute them using BitTorrent. In the same vein as my editorial Pirates are customers too, Warner Bros. realises “If we can convert, 5, 10 or 15 percent of the illegal downloaders into consumers of our product, that is significant.” Read the rest of this entry »
Media companies are reluctant to embrace electronic distribution of music, movies, and television. The entertainment industry tends to view the Internet as a threat to traditional sales rather than as a new way to reach customers. The RIAA and MPAA have been addressing the “problem” by suing P2P users into submission, and these efforts have left a wake of diminished privacy, innocent victims, and reduced freedoms. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had a Gmail account since September 2004, when invitations were fewer and farther between, but I never saw much benefit to an additional web mail service. Hotmail was sufficient (predominantly via hotwayd). I was also skeptical about Gmail’s copious storage space and it’s marketing implications. But today, as I consider a new ISP and primary email address, I see Gmail’s advantages vs. Hotmail. Read the rest of this entry »
Apple’s marketing has effectively garnered mindshare for over twenty years. GUIdebook posted an early Macintosh ad campaign from a 1984 Newsweek wherein Apple bought all 39 pages of the advertising space. Here’s an Apple to Apple comparison to today’s ad campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Video games have long been a hobby of mine. Asteroids at the local laundromat, Super Mario Bros on the NES, and several generations of increasing bits later — I’m still a casual console gamer. I recently happened upon my friend Nuch Vader’s “favorite games” discussion of Wonder Boy, and I decided to write a simpler top-10 list. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve long felt that the vast technical disparities between societies are rooted in commensurate historical resource gaps between the haves and the have-nots. This exact theory is articulated in Guns, Germs, and Steel, a PBS-aired TV adaptation of Jared Diamond’s 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name (wikipedia). Although the subject matter lay outside of my expertise, I find the premise of the documentary to be logical enough. Read the rest of this entry »
Once I resolved some minor rewrite problems, Christine Davis’ brilliant plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior allowed me to add a tag cloud to my humble blog. I extended HJL’s workaround to fix problems I encountered with both tag feeds and traditional feeds. Read the rest of this entry »
VH1 recently aired I Love Toys, top-100 list of toys using the same format as the other “I love…” shows. Inspired by Matthew’s post on Hard Blog Life, I annotated the VH-1 list as well. Read the rest of this entry »
A:\File\by\Any\Other\Name would smell as sweet… Symbolic links have been a *NIX staple since the earliest iterations. Windows finally began supporting the concept with NTFS5, introduced in Windows NT4SP4 and included with Windows 2000. Unfortunately Windows built-in toolset is somewhat lacking, and there are a few gotchas. Read the rest of this entry »
Back-links are the backbone of the blogosphere, allowing bidirectional linking that creates a web of conversation. Several standards exist, so how do they stack up? Read the rest of this entry »