3/8" Wired
Uh oh ... I just received the November 2005 issue of Wired in the mail. It's a full 3/8" thick, much thicker than it has been in a long time. What's next ... a relaunch of The Industry Standard?
« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
October 24, 2005
October 21, 2005
Yahoo! Music Raising Their Prices
You knew a price increase had to be coming. Yes, Yahoo! is raising the price for their Music Unlimited program from $4.99/mo to $9.99/mo if you want to be able to download the music onto your machine or a portable music player. Kind of a strange distinction, but okay -- it will still be worth it to me at that price point.
My question is, does anyone know of a way I can re-up my membership before the price change goes into effect on Nov 1? I've been an annual subscriber since May, but if I could reset my contract from today that would be sweet. Trying to find a way to contact Y! about anything is painful -- they obviously have gone to great lengths to minimize any kind of customer feedback.
October 19, 2005
CMJ NMR #935
Time for another Yahoo! playlist. This time it's from CMJ (College Music Journal), and it's this week's New Music chart.
Playlist: CMJ NMR 935
Contents:
- Sigur Ros, Takk...
- Death Cab For Cutie, Plans
- Wolf Parade, Apologies To The Queen Mary
- Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better
- Nada Surf, The Weight Is a Gift
- Devendra Banhart, Cripple Crow
- Ladytron, Witching Hour
- The Dandy Warhols, Odditorium Or Warlords of Mars
- Super Furry Animals, Love Kraft
- Broadcast, Tender Buttons
- Ok Go, Oh No
- Coheed & Cambria, Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness
- The Go! Team, Thunder, Lightning, Strike
- Her Space Holiday, The Past Presents The Future
- Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine
Load up the playlist, put it on shuffle, and enjoy.
October 18, 2005
Flower 15 Playlist
Flower15 means a ton of great music November 8-13 at the best venue in Chicago. I'm tempted to fake a business trip and get the event pass, but as it is I'm happy to be attending the Friday late show with the Popes.
Anyway, if you use Yahoo Music Engine and you want to gear up for the shows, I've created a Flower15 playlist that includes the following albums:
- Local H, Whatever Happened To P.J. Soles?
- Detachment Kit, They Raging, Quiet Army
- Hopesfall, A Types
- Minus The Bear, They Make Beer Commercials Like This
- Pelcian, some of Australasia and some of The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw
- Criteria, En Garde
- Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Shake The Sheets and Hearts Of Oak (two albums because Ted r0x so hard)
- These Arms Are Snakes, Oxeneers Or The Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home
- The Essex Green, Everything Is Green
- Just A Fire, Light Up
- Jimmy Eat World, Stay On My Side Tonight and Futures
- The American Analog Set, Promise Of Love
- Maritime, Glass Floor
- Smoking Popes, Destination Failure
- The Promise Ring, Very Emergency
- Make Believe, Make Believe
- Tristeza, Spine And Sensory
- Isis, Panopticon
- Evergreen Terrace, Sincerity Is An Easy Disguise In This Business
So download this Flower15 playlist, put your music player on shuffle, and then go help a good cause.
Music!
Some may wonder why a blog with the title "Dancing About Architecture" doesn't have more writing about music. Others may have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. No matter: the point is, I love music and I've always loved music, so let's talk about music.
In the several months since I've started using Yahoo! Music Unlimited, it's become a larger and larger part of my daily music experience. I've ditched the iPod and replaced it with a Creative Zen Micro, which works with Yahoo. There are a hundred things that could be improved with this setup (the service, the client, the player, and the DRM), but the fact remains that this is the best way to consume massive amounts of music.
One of the cool things about the Yahoo! Music Unlimited (which I'm going to shorten to "Yahoo Music Unlimited") is that you can share playlists which are captured as xspf files. So, I'm going to start sharing xspf files.
The first best place you can go to fill up your player is to go to Ian Rogers blog. Of course, it's hosted at Y! 360, so you'll need to submit to a full body cavity search before being allowed to read it. But once you straighten up and get past that, you'll find Ian has done a wonderful thing: he's created xspf playlists for recent issues of Mojo magazine. There's no better way to get exposed to a wide range of new music than to download one of the Mojo playlists and hit "shuffle". There's a lot of great stuff and a lot of crap, but it's all new.
Here's the Sept 2005 Mojo playlist.
I'll follow this entry up with lots more music. And you really owe it to yourself to at least give Yahoo Music Unlimited a try. You may not think you'll like music rental, but you might be surprised.
October 14, 2005
Creative Error Messages II
Here's another one from a Friday afternoon at 1:15pm Central:
"Sorry for the inconvenience. We're making updates to the site. Please check back soon."
At least this error message is somewhat poetic. And not really that disingenuous: I'm sure they are making updates to the site. Frantically!
Quote of the Day
Quote of the day, courtesy Michael Sippey:
I'm a bit worried that once again there are t-shirts commemorating parties. "Hey! Let's tempt fate!" Jesus, people, don't wake the bear, he's resting.
Apple Movie Trailer RSS Feeds: D.O.A.
Apple, what are you thinking? First off, the good: movie trailers are a great idea for the new iPods. They even have a nice page that lists a bunch of trailers: cool.
Check it out -- an RSS feed for this page. Alrighty, they must be podcasting the trailers so you can subscribe to it right in iTunes, complete with the iTunes namespace extensions. Great idea, Apple.
Then I looked at the feed:
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>Apple Movie Trailers</title>
<link>http://www.apple.com/trailers/</link>
<description>Popular movie trailers presented in QuickTime.</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2002, apple.com.</copyright>
<item>
<title>Chicken Little</title>
<link>http://www.apple.com/trailers/</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Trailer 2)</title>
<link>http://www.apple.com/trailers/</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Syriana</title>
<link>http://www.apple.com/trailers/</link>
</item>
...
RSS 0.91? No enclosures? No itunes elements? Everything linking to the same URL? There's not even enough information to run this thing through SmartCast.
Apple movie trailer page people, if you'd like to enable this feed for podcasting, please let me know and I'd be happy to help. As it is now, it's ... well, a little shameful.
October 08, 2005
Serenity
I haven't watched any scifi on television since Farscape went off the air, so I missed out on Firefly (and, yes, Battlestar Galatica -- sorry!) But the trailers for this movie looked good, so we went. Loved it. Great characters, great tone, fantastic sense of humor, and just dark enough. Might have to go back and watch the series now!
October 07, 2005
New Economy? You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.
I have had an article pinned to my bulletin board at home since I cut it out of the Wall Street Journal on March 29, 2001. It's by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (yes, the "Future Shock" Tofflers) and it's entitled "New Economy? You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet." If you think back to March 2001, you'll remember that it wasn't the most optimistic time in recent history. But Alvin and Heidi did a great job of taking the long view, and it has been a source of inspiration to me. Here's the pull quote:
Some say today's woes mean there's no such thing as a "new economy." But a lot of "start-ups" failed during the Industrial Revolution, too.The energy surrounding the Web 2.0 conference made me think of this article again, so I thought I'd share the text of the article with you (without permission -- please don't get mad at me WSJ).
NEW ECONOMY? YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET.
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler.
Mr. and Mrs. Toffler are founders of Toffler Associates, a strategic advisory firm, and co-authors of "Future Shock," "The Third Wave," and other books about the future.
Featured in the Wall Street Journal
March 29, 2001
Faced with a panicky financial plunge, America, it would appear, is awash in I-told-you-sos. I told you these stock prices were too high. I told you what goes up must come down. I told you there was nothing behind all those dot-com IPOs. Now comes Michael Porter's Harvard Business Review article in which he says "Even the phrases 'new economy' and 'old economy' are rapidly losing their relevance, if ever they had any."
In the frenzy of the immediate, we may blind ourselves to the larger, more important reality. Yes, Virginia, there is a new economy, and it's just getting ready to launch its next phase.
Digital Revolution
In recent years, investors and the business community have been split. On one side were traditionalists who have always insisted that the "new economy" was a myth, and that all the old "fundamentals" remained in place. On the other were utopians who saw in the new economy an end to business ups and downs, and who not only justified the insane overvaluation of many dot-coms, but predicted a generation of essentially unstoppable growth and prosperity -- a "long boom."
Both sides in this polarized debate were, and are, wrong. Traditionalists may argue correctly, as Mr. Porter does, that the main purpose of business is still to make a profit. But that begs the question of how profit is defined and how it is achieved. A thousand years ago enterprises pursued profit. But they operated in an agrarian world based on peasant labor. The industrial revolution that began in the 17th century brought a radically new economy (though it had its doubters, too). It did not eliminate the pursuit of profit in one form or another, but it transformed just about everything else from finance to family life, from work to war, from resource use to religion. Today, on an even bigger, faster scale, a new economic and social system is taking form. It, too, will transform just about everything else.
The optimists spoke to us of a digital revolution. But by predicting steady growth and ever-rising stock prices, they forgot that revolutions, by definition, are marked by surprises, reversals, upsets, wildly volatile swings, and a heightened role for chance.
Indeed, during the early stage of the industrial revolution thousands of start-ups failed because, like today, their business models were wrong, their drive and optimism misdirected. No one knew how to operate in the emergent, postagrarian environment. Businesses had to invent everything anew -- factories, distribution chains, labor relations, sales. Markets gyrated, and plenty of investors lost their money, to a chorus of I-told-you-sos.
To imagine that the new economy is over is the equivalent of thinking, in the early 1800s, that the industrial revolution was over because textile manufacturers were going broke in Manchester.
Today's stock-market agonies hardly prove the new economy's non-existence. If stock prices plunge 50% on a given day, does that mean the actual underlying economic activities have been cut in half, that workers are producing half of what they produced the day before? If share prices mirror reality at all, they frequently do so with enormous lags and leads.
The notion that the new economy never existed is ludicrous if we look at how deeply it has already restructured even the biggest and least Internet-dependent corporations. Their hierarchies are more flat, their products more customized. Their skill requirements have changed as muscle-work declined and mind-work increased. Alliances and complex supply webs have reduced vertical integration; markets have nichified. Firms are forced to innovate and operate at a faster pace than ever.
There are today more than three million digital switches for every human being alive on the planet. They are not going to go away. There are nearly half a billion PCs on the planet -- one for every 13 human beings. They are not going to go away, either, unless they are replaced by even more advanced networks and technologies. The Internet, spreading at high speed from China and India to Brazil, is not going to go away.
Are hundreds of millions of mobile phone users going to throw their phones away? With or without broadband, will all those hand-held devices evaporate?
The obvious, inescapable fact is that the revolution is real, and it manifests itself at many levels simultaneously. Internationally, we see it in today's drive toward globalization and the mounting backlash against it. Politically, we see it in novel battles over privacy and intellectual property. We see it in America's increasingly intangible exports. We see it in breakthroughs in genetics and in the manufactured panic over genetically modified food. We see it in the phenomenal rise of media power -- and the public's rising hostility toward it. We see it in intergenerational relations. We see it in a polarization of wealth. We see it in fears of a so-called digital divide. We see it in a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Europe and Asia. These changes are not independent of one another. They are part of a larger pattern.
Something new is arising on the planet and it doesn't fit the assumptions, models and paradigms left over from the industrial age. It is a new civilization of which the new economy is only one part.
The economic turbulence, moreover, has only just begun. To understand why, we need only ask a simple, frequently unasked question: What comes after the first digital revolution? Stunning and powerful as it is, the digital revolution is not the only source of fundamental change. In science, we've just achieved the first imaging of orbitals -- the so-called glue that holds the atoms of the universe together. Stem-cell advances point to our ability to regenerate human organs. We're making less visible breakthroughs in fields as diverse as conductive polymers, composite materials, energy, medicine, cloning, supra-molecular chemistry, optics, memory research and scores of other fields.
But it is, of course, in genetics and biotechnology that the most powerful effects are about to be unleashed. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has already approved some 80 drugs and vaccines developed by the biotech industry and another 350 or more are already being tested on humans.
We have barely begun to feel the impact of the biodigital convergence. For example, we now have clues to the genetic manipulation of certain forms of intelligence. Imagine what that might mean to a knowledge-based economy --but also what social and political dangers might arise from such manipulation.
Day after day these discoveries are pouring out of our labs. Many, at first glance, seem unimportant. But that's because we typically think of them as unrelated to one another. In fact, many of them will converge. And when they do, they could astonish us.
Of course, all these advances rely on computers and digital technology, as well as on the Internet. But many have implications that will feed back into, and change, the future of information technology itself, whether in the form of biochips or DNA-based computing, and, who knows, new communications technologies based on DNA models and biochips.
The First Phase
It is now clear that the entire digital revolution is only the first phase of an even larger, longer process. If you think the revolution is over, get ready to be shocked again as information technology fully converges with and is, in turn, remade by, the biological revolution.
In the first phase, information technology revolutionizes biology. In the next phase, biology will revolutionize information technology. And that will totally, once again, revolutionize economies. Together these represent a turning point not just in economics, but in human history.
The upheaval in the stock market is extremely painful. But we will look back on it as a minor spike in the early history of the new economy of the 21st century.
October 02, 2005
Batman Begins
Liked it. Pretty cool to see how they transformed Chicago into Gotham City. The only thing I had a problem with is that I wasn't crazy about the villains, and their M.O. was a little suspect. Overall, though, recommended.