Cool NYC Apartment for Sale
No, not mine... this place belongs to a friend. Tell him I sent you...
Twitter Strikes Again
So last night, I had a late meeting and I wound up in Union Square at 10PM having not quite eaten yet. I really don't like eating alone and so I figured I'd just give Twitter a shot.
Me: Anyone hungry near union sq?
Avi Karnani, two minutes later: I'm walking back from the office, through union sq right now actually, looking for food.
The most bizzare thing is that its the second time that Avi and I have met up this way... and it's the only two times we've met. We meant to try to connect at SXSW and it didn't happen... but not too long after, I twittered that I was going to a nextNY bar outing and he just happened to be in the area. I bumped into him in the bar, only to find out later that it was my Twitter that brought him there.
I think the key to Twitter's geolocation capability is the broadcast model and its simplicity. I didn't need to have GPS going or post cross streets or anything... and Avi didn't need to identify his location either. Twitter doesn't know the difference between "union sq" and "peanut butter" but an actual human in NYC clearly knew where I was.
Twitter still needs to figure out group features and ways to market this to localized groups of people, which this works best for, but b/c I'm lucky enough to have lots of techy friends using it in the same area, I'm finding it very useful.
Web 2.0 LolCat
Andrew made this based on #5 of the Web 2.0 Sucks List... Hilarious! I love LolCats.
nextNY Social this Friday at Coppersmith's
If you're looking to meet up with other up and comers in the NYC digital media and tech scene, drop by Coppersmith's after work this Friday.
April 27th… Coppersmith’s 6PM-9PM
793 9th Avenue (bet 52nd/53rd).
Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks
- The finger pointing culture of fear will always dominate a culture of openness. Media
thrives on taking people down and creating a general fear of the worst
possible outcome. Whether it's trying enact anti-MySpace laws or
firing everyone who says a dirty word or two, until we hold our noses
and fully embrace freedom of expression in this country, we're going to
hold back the real potential of the internet as a medium of
conversation and open exchange. Everyone will be too scared to publish
anything thought provoking for fear of being stoned by glass house
dwellers.
- The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and lightweight... Too many people building features, not applications, or, gasp, companies. People are confusing design with innovation. Just because you add AJAX and rounded boxes to something does mean you have innovated.
- Web 2.0 hasn't even come close to breaking open the carrier choked mobile world. E-mail and WAP? That's what I'm paying unlimited data for? Come on. We can do better than this.
- Web 2.0 is a conversational vacuum. I'll prove it. Unless you live in the Valley, walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user... You've got six hours. Go. Trust me, we're talking to ourselves. (Don't get me wrong... I really like Twitter... We just need to remind ourselves about how close to the edge we all are out here.)
- Spelling and grammr (beta) have gone to hell in a handbasket. I'm in ur domainz, droppin' ur vowelz.
- M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks... Dodgeball, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog... Some of the most innovative startups have been swallowed into the black holes of big companies, abruptly halting their innovation paths. Unless we get some more robust business models, some more risk seeking entrepreneurs, maybe a real IPO market, most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won't make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience. (Pleasant exceptions being the Office-like apps at Google...)
- Content licensing is still a bottleneck. Web 2.0 is all about people and sharing, two things that music and video content owners don't seem to be big fans of. For now, much of what we share is illegal or user generated. Freely shareable stuff probably makes up about 2% of the millions of hours of content ever created professionally. I'd like to blog a clip from the A-Team... Not only can I not access it easily, I can't clip it easily, and I sure as hell can't publish it legally. Yet, no one current monetizes it on the web, so it just sits and collects digital dust.
- The really juicy data will always remain locked up... I'd very much like to be able to share my purchases, particularly restaurants, at my own discretion. Of course, that data is at Mastercard, and I think I'll start wearing "I love the RIAA" shirts before Mastercard starts creating personal RSS feeds or APIs for users to take their own financial data to various applications. The same with my credit history. I need to sign up for lots of junk mail to get a credit report... and don't even get me started on my own medical history.
- A lot of powerful people don't participate. How many VC's out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile? Any Sony bloggers out there? What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside. How about my elected representatives? They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there? (And not watered down campaign blogs... actual blogs written by the actual people.) We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.
- MySpace is the most popular social network. Seriously, is this the best we can do? Spam, hacking, viruses, one song at a time, and no developer network or API? Facebook is such a better product, but it's really pretty limited as a self expression tool. Plus, neither really comes close to being able to be my digital home on the web as much as my blog is.
This fucking blog will now be blocked by ScanSafe
Think of ScanSafe as a kind of enterprise NetNanny for Web 2.0. They just came out with a report that paints the blog world as a seedy hangout for foul-mouthed pornmongers.
"ScanSafe's Monthly "Global Threat Report" for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from "adult language" to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they'd hope that you'd use their products to do so. ScanSafe says that it discovered the "offensive" nature of blogs by analyzing more than 7 billion web requests coming from their corporate customers."
I don't think professional people need a piece of technology to prevent them from seeing a dirty word here and there. If your employees are accessing truly inappropriate content at work, perhaps you should beef up your screening not in the web browser, but in your HR department. Just a thought...
iPod Killed the Radio Star
It's really interesting to see how Arbitron is positioning the statistics on digital radio it just came out with, specific to the effect of portable media devices.
So here's the first stat:
Fewer than one in ten report less over-the-air radio listening specifically due to time spent with their iPod/portable MP3 player.
Phew! Ok radio execs... you can all rest easy and breath a collective sigh of relief... oh... wait...
While 70 percent of Americans age 12 and older do not own an iPod/portable MP3 player, and an additional 15 percent report the device has had no impact on radio listening, nine percent say they are listening to less over-the-air radio... Radio sees the most impact on listening from iPod/digital audio player owners age 12-24.
Ok, hold on a sec. So, if I'm reading this correctly, 30% of the people who own portable devices are listening to the radio less, and that impact is largest among the 12-24 crowd?
Well, that's kind of a different animal isn't it? What happens when these 12-24 year olds grow up and get replaced by another generation listening to the radio less?
To me, this represents a clear trend that should make radio execs worry.
Terrestrial radio is that it isn't net native, and frankly, neither is the iPod. In other words, neither really takes advantage of all the things the web enables you to do... discover music, connect to others with the same interest, observe, remember, and publish your own interests. That's what creates the opportunity for services like last.fm.
The big advantage that the iPod/iTunes combo has is that iTunes gets right in the stream of your consumption with monetization. You're listening on iTunes, you want more music, and its just a click away. Have you ever heard a song on the radio and wanted to own it. It's nearly impossible. You either need to wait for the DJ to come on to tell you what was playing or you start playing "guess that tune" with your friends. Clearly, radio needs a compelling reason to bring you to their site to do more than just listen to a webcast... There's a really interesting opportunity for radio stations to leverage the brand they have created on air, the personalities they promote, and their ability to monetize music to encourage music related engagement on their sites... but what does that look like?
I'd be interested to hear from anyone involved with the broadcast radio industry on this.
Green NYC?
So Mayor Mike is trying to get the city to go green by instituting the same kind of anti-congestion tax that is currently in place in London, where cars are charged for entrance into the heart of the city during peak hours.
Why?
Try driving in the city during rush hour. That's why.
Hey, I'm a car owner in the city and I'm the first one to say that this is a great idea. We all need to be using public transportation more... cars are bad for the environment... and the city is too crowded. Some people are saying that this tax will hit the working class, but you know what? The working class takes the subway. The only people I know who drive into the city during rush hour are the rich suburbanites. Stand outside a midtown parking lot during rush hour in the morning and look at the cars... they're Porches, Mercedes, etc... No family Trucksters here. I'm all for it. Bike to work!
Also, friends of mine who work for various political campaigns are saying on good authority that Bloomberg has decided to run for President in 2008. I hope so. I love anti-politicians, and he's not some old money rich guy... he's an entrepreneur... a self made guy. What he lacks in personality, he makes up for in business savvy and I think its about time someone starts running this country with a little logic and practicality. I'd vote for him.
Doritos Fight... Killer Online Advergame
This new Fight for the Flavor Campaign from Doritos has a fantastic two-player boxing game with bags of Doritos.
Check it out and feel free to challenge me... I'm ceonyc.
Does anyone know who built this? What agency?
Kill Them with Kindness
I had an interesting encounter Saturday night. I ran into friend of mine that I was once closer to, but had long since told me that they didn't have enough time to still be my friend. This person was at an alumni event.
When I saw her, I came up to her, gave her a big hug and asked about her life and what she was up to and shared my stories. She had broken up with a boyfriend and I told her that she'd meet the right person someday.
At one point, she stopped me and said, "Why are you being so nice to me?"
She knew she ditched me as a friend and she couldn't figure out why I was bothering to see how she was. I just said simply, "What would be the point of being any other way?"
I wound up driving her and her friend back to Queens... it was a beautiful night and I had the top down. She was pretty worse for wear by the end of the night and I really didn't want our mutual friend to have to deal with dragging her around the subway. Turns out that she lost her keys and I even had to turn around after driving 8 blocks away to help her look for them in the car and make sure she was ok.
Why bother? Why not just ignore this person and let any negative feelings I had for them just fester...
And incredibly smart person summed this up better than I could:
"I just don't see the point in wasting time or energy on
maintaining -- actively nurturing, in most cases -- sustained negativity
toward someone or about something. It mostly harms YOU, makes YOU less
happy, makes YOUR whole emotional world smaller, narrower, less enjoyable...
and it definitely doesn't, as you point out, do anything to inspire better
treatment from others either."
The fact that this former friend probably woke up maybe realizing that she had lost a good guy as a friend and probably didn't deserve the concern I showed her as a friend the night before is surely much more effective than whatever reaction she might have had to a dirty look or me telling her off.
And frankly, it felt very good to be the good person. Not the bigger person, but just the good person all around.
Add my PPC-6700 to Charlie's list of things lost, stolen, or broken
Ok, since I joined USV in February 2005, I've...
Broken two Treo 650's.
Had a Canon S500 stolen.
Dropped a Fisher C-1 in the Hudson River.
Had my bike stolen.
Had my car roof and one tire slashed.
Had a power source blow out on my new computer HP Media Center.
Finally had my old computer die out on me.
Lost my baseball glove.
Had my first PPC 6700's USB port break, rendering it unchargable.
Well, today, add my replacement PPC 6700 to that list. It was stolen, along with several other phones of ZogSports football players, from Riverbank State Park on 138th/Riverside Drive. When I went back to tell the ref, she already had two or three other phones on her list. Later on, I called my phone, and some guy picks up and says he wants 100 bucks for the phone back. Right, like I'm going back up to 138th street with a 100 bucks cash at night to buy my own phone back from a guy who won't just return it. I told him to drop it off at the police station, leave his contact info, and I'll make sure he gets a $100 reward. He wasn't up for that, and so I wasn't up for showing up to get my phone. I'll talk the loss, thanks.
So, tomorrow, I'll be going back to my slightly glued together Treo 650, quite unhappily.
Oddcast Office E-mail Hilarity
Officewide e-mail from our office manager...
From: Deborah L. [mailto:name@oddcast.com]
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 12:05 PM
To: nyoffice@oddcast.com
Subject: Cookies in the kitchen :)
Response from our CFO re: someone on her staff...
From: Gally P. [mailto:name@oddcast.com]
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 12:24 PM
To: 'Deborah L.'; nyoffice@oddcast.com
Subject: RE: Cookies in the kitchen :)
Except for the Peanut Butter one, which is in Riv
________________________________________
To Air or Not to Air: The Cho Multimedia Manifesto
In 1975, Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford. A Manson follower, she wanted to give old Charlie the opportunity to testify at her trial and spread his message to the world, knowing that it would be covered by the global media community.
If only she had a digital camera and the address of NBC... that would have made mass distribution of hate much easier.
"After much debate", NBC decided to run clips (of course, spread out over time to get ratings) of the Virginia Tech killer's "Multimedia Manifesto" on national and online broadcasts.
Right... As if there was even a chance that NBC wouldn't have posted as much of this "news" as possible. The twisted reality of human nature is that I'm sure NBC execs can't help but feel a just a little bit lucky it was them that got the video, not Fox, or *gasp* YouTube. (We all probably would have if we worked there, despite the obviously tragic nature of the events.) Score one for the peacock. Because whereas 30 unfortunate students at VT accidently stepped on a landmine, NBC accidently fell into a goldmine.
Explain this logic to me. If NBC Sports covered a baseball or football game, and someone ran out onto the field naked, they would go out of their way not to record the idiot so as not to encourage that kind of behavior.
Yet, the ravings of a lunatic who clearly references the Columbine killers by name that he learned, that we all learned, through the media... that goes right up into the ether for mass consumption.
How can we justify the airing of this video as news? Is this informative? It's hard to argue that this won't encourage other troubled kids looking to lash out against the world.
Kill as many people as you can, send the video to NBC, and become an insta-martyr. It's that simple.
This is becoming a multimedia car-accident in the worst way... and onlookers of car accidents often get into accidents of their own as they watch.
Does the media encourage people to kill? No... but does the behavior of the media and borderline glorification of killers 'cause people to want to make a bigger splash--to go out in a blaze of glory killing off as many people as possible... I gotta say its an awfully compelling argument.
Isn't this kind of hate poisoning our airwaves worse than what Imus said... or hey, at least as bad?
This kid committed this act knowing full well the scope of media attention this would draw. He didn't kill 30 people out of blind rage. He did it as a calculated statement to the world that he knew we'd all jump at the chance to broadcast. It's not just NBC. It's all of us. Everyone who sticks to NBC over the next few days to see more clips. Everyone, including myself, who publishes about it. We are a media machine and Cho Seung-Hui is playing us like a violin.