Dancing About Architecture

Dear Comedy Central,

I have an idea for you. Something that would expand your reach, raise your audience in a desirable demographic, and, well, let's be honest: really improve my life. Here's the idea: make every evening's The Daily Show available online, distributed via a "video podcast". If that doesn't make sense, maybe some explanation is in order.

There's a mini-phenomenon happening right now on the web called "podcasting". People essentially record their own little radio shows on whatever topic interests them and then "publish" them through something called a "feed" or an "RSS feed". Then, some collection of people way bigger than you'd ever expect "subscribe" to this feed with a program that sits on their computer. The program, sometimes called a "podcatcher", does a really cool thing: overnight, while you're sleeping, it sees these radio shows packaged as digital audio files, downloads them to your computer, and then syncs them right up with your iPod or other MP3 player. So you wake up, grab your iPod, and you have all these little radio shows that you are interested in available to listen to for your commute.

At first, I thought podcasting was going to be a flash-in-the-pan fad, but after a few months of seeing the growth and actually listening to some of these podcasts, I have to tell you that I think it's for real and represents the beginning of something big. On-demand, automated delivery for even the most obscure, niche content is going to work just because there are so many doggone people out there: some people refer to this as The Long Tail.

Okay, now what exactly does this have to do with Comedy Central? Well, a natural evolution of podcasting is that you're going to see other types of media distributed over this content delivery mechanism. It doesn't take a brain surgeon or even a marketing exec to figure out that the next thing to travel down the wires is going to be video. Content publisher puts the video in the feed, subscribers use their clients to download the video overnight to their notebook computers or portable media players, and wham – now people can watch the video that they are truly interested in on the train ride into work.

As you're probably aware, there are ways that people can kind of do this now. TiVo has recently released their TiVoToGo service, which does most of what I'm talking about, but unfortunately doesn't work for me – and please don't forget: this is all about me. You see, I have a TiVo (well, okay: three TiVos) that I love dearly, and I have a Season Pass to The Daily Show. But I'm a satellite subscriber, and the brainiacs at DirecTV have decided that I'm not worthy of any of the new TiVo features that have been developed in the past couple of years. So, NoTivoToGo for me.

"Hold on", you say. "If you already record every night's show on your TiVo, then why do you need it on your computer?" Well, the sad, sad truth is that I just don't have a 30 minute block of time past 10:00pm that I can use to watch a television program. The perfect time for me to watch The Daily Show is during my half-hour train ride commute into work each morning. If I had this show available on my notebook computer every morning, I'd watch it four times a week. As it is right now, I'm happy if I find time to watch it once a week.

"Just release our content onto the Internet? Are you crazy?" I can certainly sympathize with your plight of figuring out how to continue to realize a return on all of your investment in programming in the new world order, but stick with me a second. The Daily Show is perfect for this delivery mechanism: it's a topical, current show that quickly becomes stale. As opposed to a program like South Park, I seriously doubt you're going to be able to package up The Daily Show reruns onto DVDs ("The Daily Show: Volume XII February 9 – February 26, 2004") and have any success selling them through any channel. So go ahead and leave the commercials in and make the most recent show available for download every night at midnight. Yeah, people will be able to fast forward through the commercials if they want to, but that's no different than what anybody watching via a DVR or even a VCR can do. Being able to get the content from a trusted source instead of relying on file sharing peer-to-peer networks is huge: you retain control of the content and packaging because you've lowered the barriers for users to access your programming.

The other reason that I think you should get behind this is a little more "viral". Have you seen all of the portable media players with 5-in LCD screens that are being released on the market from companies like Creative and iRiver? These guys are screaming for appropriate content to be put on these devices: all they can really offer now is "copy your DVD onto this device to watch it on-the-go". If you made something like The Daily Show available as a video podcast, I bet you that these companies will start to package it as a "preset" for the software that is responsible for managing the content on these devices. Bam! A fantastic tool for expanding your reach over time and you get cited over and over again as a media company that "gets it".

If you're at all interested in this, I'd be happy to help point you in the right direction, but it all really boils down to this:

1. Package up an episode of The Daily Show in some digital format: the Windows Media format or the QuickTime format will get you the most reach. Skip anything to do with RealMedia: nobody likes them.
2. With some content management system that knows how to generate "RSS feeds", add an entry that represents the day's show (just a short description like what appears in programming guides is sufficient) and includes a link to the video file. There's a little mumbo-jumbo that you have to be concerned about when generating this feed, but there are lots of people that can assist you at this point.
3. That's pretty much it. Computers everywhere will "poll" this feed every hour or so, and when they notice that there's a new item, they'll go ahead and download this video file in the background and it will be available for viewing in the morning.

I hope you have an open mind enough to consider this suggestion. It's radical and scary, true. But the opportunity is immense. Speaking just for me, I would be exposed to your advertisers' messages four times a week instead of once a week because you would have given me an additional context in which to view your programming that I didn't have before. But mostly, I just want to watch more Jon Stewart, and this would let me do that.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions. Thank you for your time.

Eric Lunt
//www.burningdoor.com/eric

Posted by Eric at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Those people at Woot! know funny. Today's deal is "Random Crap!". Since there's no permanent URL I can link to, I've copied their very funny description here.

Update: It's already sold out! Lotta people love random crap for a buck!

From Woot! on 2005-01-28:

Tired of clicking all over the web looking for the lowest price on the finest merchandise with the best features from the most reliable retailers? Give your inner Consumers’ Reporter a break by indulging in a purchase that no one would mistake for a good deal: another one of Woot’s famous Bags o’ Crap.

Hey, when this crap arrives at your house, grouse ye not that ye’ve been had. We’re admonishing you in all caps that what we’ve got here is crap. Look:

CAVEAT EMPTOR, SUCKERS!

THIS ITEM CONSISTS OF ONE BAG WITH —OH, LET’S SAY ABOUT THREE PIECES OF CRAP INSIDE.

IF YOU ORDER FEWER THAN THREE CRAPS FOR YOUR BAG, IT IS REALLY NOT COST-EFFECTIVE.

BUT DON’T LET US TELL YOU HOW TO WASTE YOUR MONEY. AFTER ALL, YOU’RE THE ONE WHO BUYS THIS CRAP.

“How,” you ask yourself, “am I supposed to derive happiness from crap?” Well, allow us to suggest some guidelines—think of them as Chicken Soup for the Crap-Encumbered Soul :

01. Disappointment is the result of unmet expectations. You can’t control what kind of crap you get in this bag, but you can certainly decline to expect GOOD crap. Hope is the enemy of satisfaction. Suppress it.

02. The crap that some other people get in their bags will almost certainly be less crappy than the crap you get in yours. That’s just the way it goes. Before you get too kvetchy about it, evaluate the grievance: It’s not like you’re being detained without trial in Guantanamo; you’re just unhappy with a discretionary purchase that was clearly labeled “crap.” In the hierarchy of injustices, this is not a biggie.

03. Consider whether you really want to throw your wages at crap. If this amount of money matters even a little to you, maybe it’s best to close your browser and Woot another day. Try this exercise: In your mind’s eye, picture your hard-”earned” money on a balance, weighed against our crappy crap, as if by some kind of online shopaholic’s Anubis.

04. We strongly recommend you not buy fewer than the maximum three craps for your bag. It’s crap, after all, so if you order less of it, you get into diminishing returns on the cost of shipping. Don’t even try ordering just one piece of crap and then blaming it on our server!

05. Finally: don’t obsess about the crap so much that you forget the bag. “That’s a sweet bag!” you should say to yourself. “That’s totally worth the price all by itself.” Then, when you open your new bag, you can regard its contents with the disdain they deserve. Who put this crap in your sweet new bag? You don’t want this crap. Why would you? It’s crappy.

Posted by Eric at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest draft version (05) of the Atom format specification is out, and it has really shown an amazing amount of improvement since the 03 version. The document itself is very well organized, with the welcome addition of Relax NG fragments throughout the document. Makes it much more readable.

We're staying on top of this at FeedBurner, so hopefully we can support the revised spec right after it is approved.

Source: The Atom Syndication Format

Posted by Eric at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oooh, I can't wait to see this movie. I thought the book was excellent.

Source: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Reviewed at Sundance 2005. - BloggingSundance.com - sundance.weblogsinc.com

Posted by Eric at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful in the world of content syndication. We've seen a new feed format proposal from a group of frustrated users called RSS 1.1, and we have a new round of edits on the latest Atom format proposal. All of these efforts are well-intentioned, and even attractive from an engineering perspective, but it goes to show you that this space just isn't getting any simpler.

And that's just the feed formats. What's really going to be interesting are the namespace extensions. You think Microsoft will adopt the Apple ITMS namespace (hmmm ... can't get to this right now -- did Apple take this down?) in its feeds? Or Amazon.com will start using Six Apart's book namespace? Of course, a major part of FeedBurner's mandate is to sit in the middle and help negotiate these formats and namespaces between the publishers and clients, but it's going to be fascinating to see how clients will grow and adapt to take advantage of the additional metadata that will start flowing through these feeds.

The other interesting "debate" that has flared up again recently is the "auto-subscription" issue: if you click on a little XML chicklet, what should happen? How does that end up communicating to your aggregator-of-choice that you'd like to subscribe to that feed? People have generally fallen into two camps: the "feed:" group ("Register a protocol handler on your machine!") and the MIME-type group ("Just send down the right MIME type and configure your browser to use the right application!"). The MIME-type approach has found a recent champion in Randy Charles Morin, with his Universal Subscription Mechanism proposal. Both solutions have interesting technical challenges, yet neither approach helps a brand new user that doesn't yet have a client ... nor is it possible to really handle multiple clients ("I want most feeds to go to NewsGator, but my podcasts I want to go to iPodder ... oh, and Azureus should handle my television feeds"). That's fine: we have to start somewhere. I like our Browser-Friendly approach (look at my feed in a browser, for example), but I think we could do a better job helping people to subscribe to the feed by offering both feed:// and a USM approaches, as well as a wider varienty of online aggregators, so we can leverage the work that's going on to solve this problem. I think we'll work on that as soon as we get the time.

All of this is to say that the world of syndication is very active and exciting right now. Another indicator of the activity is the number of clients out there. As Dick mentioned in the recent Burning Questions posting entitled "RSS Market Share":

RSS Client market is not yet consolidating, it's expanding. There were 409 different clients polling the top 800 FeedBurner feeds in September and now there are 719 different clients. FeedBurner actively catalogs the behavior and specifications for hundreds of these user-agents.

Posted by Eric at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
by H. G. Bissinger

This book was a great way to experience a land I have never visited: West Texas. The author spent a year in Odessa, Texas to examine the town's crazed focus on the high school football program. The picture he paints is not pretty ... quite bleak, actually. My wife really enjoyed this book as well; it's more than a male-oriented sports book, but rather an interesting study on how an environment influences one's values and worldview.

And yes, I'd like to see the movie.

Posted by Eric at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An entertaining meme that's spreading around right now: what's your earliest USENET post? Well, I found this one, but I seem to remember many more posts before it. Ah well, still brings back the memories!

How do you draw a continuous tube?
Jun 2 1992, 8:28 pm
Newsgroups: comp.graphics,comp.graphics.visualization
From: ericl...@stokes.Princeton.EDU (Eric Matthew Lunt)
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1992 23:42:25 GMT
Local: Tues, Jun 2 1992 4:42 pm
Subject: How do you draw a continuous tube?

Hello there. I've got a graphics problem that isn't getting any
easier the more I think about it. I am programming on a Silicon
Graphics machine using the SGI GL.

I am currently drawing a continuous line in 3D that is made up of
short, smoothly varying segements (i.e. no sharp corners). These
represent 3D streamlines in my program. Now what I want to do is
instead make a "tube" by defining a series of cylinders with a
variable radius at each vertex. What I am having problems with is
connecting each cylinder to the previous one at each vertex so it
appears continuous.

The only solution that I have thought of is to manually calculate the
points on the plane that bisects the two normal planes to the vectors
that define each segment. I'd much rather use the SGI coordinate
transformation commands on a unit cylinder, but I can't see how to.

I'd appreciate any suggestions/war stories that you all might have.

/***********************************************************/
/* Eric Lunt ericl...@acm.princeton.edu */
/* ericl...@phoenix.princeton.edu */
/***********************************************************/

For what it's worth, I never really found the answer.

Posted by Eric at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I had higher hopes for this movie. Yes, it's funny, with a bunch of great improvised lines, but it was just too uneven. Sometimes, it was a long time between laughs. Steve Carell deserves special mention as the mentally challenged weatherman, and Fred Willard, as always, delivers.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (**1/2)

Posted by Eric at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Classic American cinema: three broken men and a broken horse find acceptance and redemption in each other, then prove to the world all you need to succeed in this life is a lot of grit and determination. Rah rah! A great tale, with an awesome performance by Chris Cooper.

Seabiscuit (***)

Posted by Eric at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are a number of blog search engines out there, and most of them allow you to create a "watch list", which is an RSS feed specifically for your search terms. This is very useful for things like egosurfing and competitive intelligence.

I've started noticing that the results feed of one search service are starting to show up as a source in another: so I'm beginning to see PubSub results in my Blogdigger feed, and Technorati results in my Feedster feed. This might be a tough problem to solve, as some of the services actually transform the feed as it flows through their system, so a search engine can't do a simple item compare to detect duplicates.

Ah, one of the interesting challenges of a loosely coupled environment.

Posted by Eric at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John talks about burning missed TV shows to DVD. I've had an almost identical experience, where the DirecTV signal went out and my TiVo missed a show or two, so I found the torrent and wanted to burn it to DVD.

My hard drive is littered with expired trial software for "easy DVD burning", and a whole bunch of free tools that each do one specific thing. All the trial software sucked, and I always forgot how to string all the free tools together to go from a divx-encoded avi all the way to a mastered DVD.

Then I tried the trial for NeroVision Express 3, part of the (deep breath) Nero 6 Ultra Edition Major Update Version 6.6. And it was amazing. Just pick the movies you want on the DVD, a reasonable template, and go. It handles all the re-encoding, menu building, and burning. Perfect for all the times when you don't really care about creating the perfect navigation scheme and just want to get something reasonable on DVD in a minimum amount of time.

It's so good, I (gasp!) actually bought it. Well, not exactly -- good enough that it went on my Amazon wish list and someone bought it for me (thanks Christian!). But this is the first tool for making DVDs (other than Premiere Pro) actually worth paying for, imho.

Source: a little ludwig goes a long way: Kudos to Bittorrent, raspberries to all DVD burning software

Posted by Eric at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)