Group Blog Claiming on Technorati
We want to claim the nextNY blog, but we have numerous authors. There doesn't appear to be a way to do this on the site... what's the right protocall for this? I don't want to claim it by myself and hog it... because others will certainly contribute more. Ideas?
My mom the avatar... plus some neat voice tools, GotVoice and WavePad
So I started using GotVoice, which checks my cellphone voicemail and sends the files to me in an MP3 files. I love GotVoice because I really find it a pain to dial my voicemail and navigate menus to hear my voicemails. Actually, I pretty much hate the phone in general. Converting voicemail to MP3 can be a dangerous tool in the hands of anyone who works for a talking avatar company. :)
Combine that with this really powerful free audio tool I just found, WavePad, and you have my mom the avatar... live on my blog. Wavepad is like SoundRecorder on steroids.
Here she is. Click the play button on the right side of the box to hear her speak. I'm so going to get in trouble for this. Love you mom!
Infringement... Copyright Infringement
Sony has yanked all of the Casino Royale trailers from YouTube.
Huh?
We're not talking the whole movie here... we're talking the advertsing trailer.
Aren't they incentivized to get this thing playing in as many places as possible??
I had this playing on my blog and my MySpace profile for months leading up to the opening.
If you're in charge of movie trailers, no matter how big or small your movie is, and you don't have them uploaded to YouTube, you're an idiot. That's it. You're just an idiot.
Click to Devolve
Am I the only one that doesn't get "click to call"?
Isn't one of the great promises of the web the fact that I don't have to deal with salespeople, customer service reps, plumbers, etc. over the phone? When's the last time that was a good experience?
I just want "click to schedule an appointment" or "click to get my question answered promptly". Click. Click. T-o-i-l-e-t... l-e-a-k-i-n-g... 3-4-5-6PM. Today. Click. Why do I need to get on the phone? Are phone directories that bad? Plus, with some click to call systems, I click for "random plumber who outbids the other guy for my call". Is that really the way I want to shop for those services.
Hmm... who's the guy who paid the most to find me who also now has the highest overhead to pass on to me?
Plus, now I've got to give the interweb my phone number. I'm sure a lot of people don't trust that either.
I'm way short click to call as a service... maybe I'm missing something?
Avatar... Shaken, not Stirred
I changed my avatar's look to something a little more...suave and sophisticated. Click the play button to hear him introduce himself. :)
Last.fm Friends?
Hey, if anyone else uses Last.fm, please feel free to add me as a friend. I'm curious as to what everyone else is out there listening to.
Of course, I'm ceonyc on it.
Taze me once, shame on me... Taze me twice, shame on you
I had only heard a little bit about the UCLA Tazer incident... Student fails to produce ID, gets Tazed.
At first I was pretty ready to defend the police, b/c, as a former resident assistant in a dorm, I'm a big believer in strict security regulations on campuses concerning who should be there and who shouldn't. I remember when Fordham students used to complain when security guards wouldn't let them into dorms they didn't belong in late at night, particularly after they were out drinking. Some of the altercations definitely got pretty heated, but usually, the security guards stood pretty firm.
To the students, it was an annoyance... but I also saw the other side of it. What if you let one someone slip by and someone gets beat up or raped? Now you wish the security wasn't so lax.
But then I saw the video on YouTube... it's pretty disturbing.
It made me stop and think. Video is a powerful medium, but it's also a bit misleading. We only see the Tazer incident. We never saw the kid being asked to leave before the cops came or how he acted that made someone at the library call the cops.
It's hard not to have an emotional reaction to this. The kid is yelling and screaming in agony and you immediately have a sympathetic reaction to him.
But then I thought about what he was screaming... "Here's your Patriot Act..." Lots of political messages.... I dunno... me personally, I think I'd just be crying my eyes out from the pain. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be making it into a political issue on the spot. To me, here's a guy with a bone to pick with authority.
Ever got stopped by a cop? Most of us are usually a little bit nervous. I got stopped in September for allegedly doing (I hate to admit how lame this is, b/c I drive a Mustang with 300HP)... 49 in a 30. (go ahead, giggle) But yeah, I was nervous. The LAST thing I was going to do would be to give the cop a hard time and not show my ID. I listened carefully and complied. I did not get Tazed. That's the way most of us act.
Let's say this kid is there up to no good. Let's say he's a kid with a history of violence who has been banned from campus who is there to mess with someone... if you're a cop... you just don't know without an ID. When someone starts resisting, you get suspicious.
So, I have to be honest, I think I'm ok with the initial Tazing. If you are somewhere that requires ID, you don't show it, and you do not leave upon immediately being asked to, in today's world, I think you're really rolling the dice. With all the school shootings and terrorism we have to live with, I think that's just common sense, really. So, cops, if I'm somewhere I shouldn't be, and I don't listen to you when you ask for me ID, please Taze me.
And yes, Tazing seems violent, but what are the alternatives? Should the cops have hit him? Pointed a gun? How do you get someone who is resisting to leave? Should they dress up in those goofy Sumo suits and belly bounce him out the door?
That being said, I think the cops definitely got trigger happy. Unless this kid was on steroids, I tend to think that one Taze should do it... and I'm not surprised he couldn't stand up. That's like kicking them in the shins and threatening to kick them again if they won't stand up. When you Taze someone, you should be able to yank them out right away and arrest them or kick them out of wherever they are or do what you need to do. Threatening to Taze them again or threatening to Taze others isn't the right way to do it. You Taze when you need to, not as part of a "negotiation".
So, at the end of the day, I think this was a kid with an obvious bone to pick that acted in a way that got him on the wrong side of the law. Add that to some Tazer happy cops who don't know the appropriate use of a dangerous weapon, mix in some YouTube, and you've got yourselves a mess.
The student should be suspended and so should the cops. If I were this kid's parents, I'd be pissed at the police for not training their officers properly but also pissed at my kid for not listening to authorities from the start.
Please Don't Sell MyBlogLog
Dear Eric and Scott:
Please do not sell MyBlogLog to Yahoo! or to anyone else at the moment, without taking at least one shot to build this into something bigger. I don't want to tell anyone else how to live their life and it's easy for me to say this, because no one is offering me millions of dollars for anything, but I think if you sell now, we will have all collectively missed a big opportunity.
Current social offerings fall way short. They neither represent how I socialize in real life, nor do they come close to representing my network of connections on the web. What I love about MyBlogLog is that it forms naturally... organically... and it follows me around in most of the places that I spend my time online. It has connected me with my readers and has so much potential at this early stage.
I really believe there is little chance at it reaching this potential within the confines of a company that is obviously internally conflicted.
There are a lot of things in the Web 2.0 world that are features and not companies... that won't ever grow past 50, 000 users. I believe MyBlogLog is different and I hope you do, too. I can see a future where every place I visit on the web is socially enabled by MBL and that my network is a true representation of who I share interests with. I want to go to ESPN and see who the other Bill Simmons readers are... and see who else is checking out kayaking pages and the nextNY blog. Most of the people on the web are lurking and MBL shines a light on the audience. That is valuable to both to the publishers and to the audience. There are so many ways to go here, it would just be a real shame for it to become a zombY!
Thanks,
Charlie
****
Readers:
If you believe that Web 2.0 companies driven by great ideas have the potential to be more than just misplaced or forgotten cogs in someone else's machine, tag this post, share it, blog about it, link to it, etc... Send a supportive message to the creators of the services you love that their community is behind their quest to make a bigger dent in the online world.
Casino Royale Rocks
Saw a sneak preview of the new Bond movie, Casino Royale, last night. I'm a huge 007 fan, so I've been looking forward to this movie for just about after the credits of the last one started rolling.
Well worth the wait.
I saw in the paper that Daniel Craig brings the franchise back, but I don't want to say that because I think Pierce Brosnan was the one who actually did that... bringing it back from License to Kill, which was, in my opinion, the worst Bond ever. (A View to a Kill can't be the worst, because it has Christopher Walken.)
Casino Royale starts out with Bond even before he was a "00" agent... resetting the story just like they did with Batman Begins.
Daniel Craig reminds me of Connery's Goldfinger performance. Rough around the edges, but every now and then he flashes a smile without being cheesy.
The story, and their actually is one, is well thought out and not predictable at all. Just go see it... even if you're not a Bond fan... it's a great action movie for anyone.
What if this didn't happen on Etsy?
Team Etsy: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Etsy User Community: Yay! We love you.
Here's how it would look if some other sites went down for two days:
MySpace Tom: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
MySpace Users: Fuck this... we're taking our thong pics to Friendster.
Facebook Mark: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Facebook Users: Fuck this... we're taking our drunken pics to Friendster.
Friendster Jonathan: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Friendster Users: *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* Ah, lunchbreak... Back to work, *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click*
YouTube: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
YouTube Users: Fuck this... now we're going to have to figure out how to use BitTorrent to get our illegally posted television clips.
Pincus: Fuck it. We're taking the site down for two days to make it fuckin' better. Fuck our site and everything else.
Tribe members: Why does this guy keep cursing at us and what was with the blood on the logo? Can't we just talk about sushi and Burning Man in peace?
Craig: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Craiglist Users: Do you ski?
Linden Labs: We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Second Life Residents: Run for your virtual lives! Hide in the American Apparel store! They're going to unplug us! Let us live! Let us live!
Jeff Jarvis: I'm taking Buzzmachine down for two days because old media sucks and they don't get it.
Buzzmachine readers: Death to old media! Death to old media!
NJGuido.com Webmaster: We're taking NJGuido down for two days to make it better.
Guidos: You think you're better then us? Huh? You think you're fuckin' better than us?
Fred Wilson: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.
AVC Readers: That's fine... we'll just listen to the Arctic Monkeys in the meantime.
Me: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.
Thisisgoingtobebig Readers: Just promise us you won't go back to the gray on black.. that was awful!
Web 2.0 Whac-a-Mole sucks
The great thing about being a Web 2.0 entpreneur is that you could build something usable and more importantly, noticeable, on your own dime (or a few friends and family dimes) and get it bought by confused old web media companies playing Whac-a-Mole with startups.
From what I can tell, Google actually has a vision for their acquisitions: Total digital domination from every angle. Hey, at least it's a goal, or a loose collection of many goals. Regardless, when they bought Writely and Jotspot, you could at least say, "Ah... I see, that makes sense. They're building an office suite." Or, when they bought Dmarc, you could say, "Ah... they want to dominate radio ads, too." In fact, that strategy has so much logic, you could even make the connection and ask, "How long before they buy Spotrunner?"
Try asking yourself who Yahoo! or NewsCorp will buy next... or CondeNast. Who the hell knows, really? There are a lot of acquisitive players out there that I think are making bad homes for startups.
What's worse is that, post-acquisition, some very good ideas are showing very little of the inginuity and continuous product development that made them great in the first place. It's not surprising either. If you are independent, you're trying to run for the gold, beat out your competitors, win the game. Within a big company with a little money in the pockets of the founders, it's highly unlikely the push to innovate will continue. Does anyone think Reddit is going to become any more disruptive or gamechanging at Wired? Sure, it might be more users, but expect any innovation to slow to a crawl.
And that really sucks for users. For some of these startups, we only got to see a taste of what they could have been with a little more development. What ever happened to Konfabulator anyway? Did the end users really fair much better with that company in the hands of Yahoo! than the would have had they gotten some VC funding and tried to build a bigger company? The acquisition environment we have now is really killing innovation and cutting companies off at the pass before they have a chance to make a much bigger impact on the web.
Don't get me wrong. It's hard to turn down these offers... but I was talking to an entreprenuer the other day who said to me, "Listen, I've never had the check put in front of me, but to be honest, I want to do something bigger. That's the reason why I got into this in the first place. I sort of feel like I should go big or go home." I'd like to think I'd have the same sentiment, especially seeing what seems to happen to these startups after acquisition.
At what point does anyone start wondering whether or not some of these companies are acquiring just to crush these startups?
What's your list of companies that are currently private that you hope take a shot at something bigger before getting assimmilated?
2006 ZogSports Fall Dodgeball Champs: Dodge This!
Last night, after 2 kickball seasons, 3 other dodgeball seasons, 3 softball seasons and a football season, on my 10th try, I finally won my first ZogSports Championship! After going 18-6 in the regular season and finishing in second place, Dodge This! edged out Chico's Bail Bonds for it's rightful place in obscure sports history.
Pictured (L to R): Allison Auman, Rebecca May, Alex Lunney, Nancy Kish (seated), James Pastore, Charlie O'Donnell (me, seated), Abby King, Evan Timbie, Erick Bond, Courtney Bongiolatti. Not pictured: Doug Miller (injured reserve)
nextNY Blog about NYC Tech
The group at nextNY decided that NYC tech could use another voice... or 400 of them... so we started blogging. Go take a look. We're going to profile NYC companies, people, cover events, etc...