Apr 26th, 2008Here’s a great article by Clay Shirky about how much time society spends “consuming” content (in this case, watching trillions of hours of television each year), in lieu of producing content — from creating a lolcat to editing a Wikipedia entry. I wonder where he would draw the line, however, in what constitutes a waste of social surplus. Is watching the news on TV still a waste, or is it just a waste if it’s mindless entertainment like sitcoms? What about reading a book, or playing a videogame? Or reading a web site, as opposed to contributing to a web site (in the form of comments, editing content, etc.)? I see where he’s going with his thesis, but it seems like a slippery slope.
Archive for April, 2008
Tomorrow I’m off to Las Vegas for Interop - the biggest show we produce all year. We’re expecting about 20,000 people at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, and about 500 exhibitors. I’ll be managing the show photography and posting the best pics to the Interop photo gallery, encoding and posting the keyote videos, managing the “digital signage” (two plasmas running ads and content updates at the entrance to the expo hall), updating the event homepage with new content, and doing some other stuff as needed.
We have a bunch of people already on the ground at the show, and they’ve set up some cams streaming live video. Some cams are fixed, but others you can pan, tilt and zoom yourself, from your browser - it’s almost like being there. (They’ll be pulled down on Thursday.)
Also looking forward to celebrating Marco’s 40th birthday with some friends (Farino, Kuhns, Noble) who are flying down on Thursday night.
While you’re wondering how much food to stock up on for the coming food shortages, here’s something that should provide some relief, if correct: a new report is predicting oil prices will start to fall. In a new report, Lehman Brothers’s oil strategist says that supply will catch up to demand, thanks to new refining projects coming online:
Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year. We have pretty significant projects starting soon in Saudi Arabia, and large off-shore fields in Nigeria…
I hope he’s right. There’s a part of me that believes that the high gas prices are hoping to spur automobile fuel efficiency, but in the short run it’s driving up the cost of everything. And that’s damn scary.
I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:
Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.
Here’s a short clip of my team (from the Marin Rowing Association) on the San Francisco Bay, in the waters near San Quentin — our home course. Filmed in late March ‘08, this was a practice 2k race in preparation for the San Diego Crew Classic that took place at the beginning of April (which we won). We’re the first boat shown in the video (among 4-5 others shown); I’m the last guy in bow with the red jacket.
I just discovered a great new (still in beta) search engine, Searchme, that uses a coverflow-like results page. If someone had described this to me, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It sounds a little gimmicky, but it works really well. You can flip through web pages really rapidly, see the context for the search term within the page, and hone in on what you’re looking for quickly. One gripe is that the results themselves aren’t as accurate as good ol’ Google.
Update: Hmmm, each page I flip through in the coverflow is added to Firefox’s web history. A single seach should add one page to the browser history, not umpteen-thousand.
My long-time friend/colleague, Jen Pahlka, was interviewed this morning on San Francisco’s biggest rock radio station, KFOG. She was talking about Web 2.0 Expo, going on this week at the Moscone Center. (Jen’s the general manager of the event.) Unfortunately I missed the interview — I’m a die-hard NPR listener in the morning — but I got a recording of it from our PR manager. I was going to upload this to an FTP site for my friend Chris Hecker (who happens to be Jen’s hubby) to listen to, but might as well post for the world. 
Note: hope you like Edie Brickell - the first 2 min is the end of a song that led into the interview.
I can’t say I’ve followed the murder trial of Oakland resident Hans Reiser that closely, but now that it’s close to wrapping up, it’s definitely getting a bit comical. (But not for the defendant, I think.) Reiser, accused of killing his wife back in ‘06, apparently doesn’t think much of his defense attorney William Du Bois, and tried to change lawyers about a week ago. Judge Larry Goodman laid into Reiser, saying Reiser was”trying to make a mockery of [the] proceedings.”
Fast forward to today. Du Bois, winding up defense arguments to the jury, said it is “inconceivable” (hopefully in his best “Princess Bride” voice) that Reiser killed his wife. However, if he did, it would only be manslaughter. Huh? Why would a defense attorney leave the door open a crack like that for the jury? If I were on the jury, I’d take that to mean that even Reiser’s lawyer has doubts about his innocence.
Further, Du Bois laid out the prosecution’s argument for the jury, saying that the way the evidence has been presented makes it look like Reiser’s guilty no matter what:
“So if it’s clean, we can infer guilt,” Du Bois said of the car. “If it’s dirty, we can infer guilt. If he made a phone call to his wife only once, we can infer guilt. If he made many, you can infer guilt” on the ground that he was trying to throw people off, Du Bois said.
I’m no lawyer, but a lesson I recall from my rhetoric 1A class is never make a point for the other side. Clearly that didn’t occur to Du Bois. Du Bois then levels some personal attacks on his client:
“You may dislike him - that would put you in the majority of people who know him - but he didn’t commit the crime.”
Apparently Du Bois also likened Reiser to a duck-billed platypus, in some effort to make the jury understand that he’s a weird creature.
So I’m thinking now that Reiser did murder his wife, his attorney knows it and is trying to backhandedly get him convicted, and that the two men deserve each other.
This one’s a long-time favorite of mine. Not sure why, but it definitely got me into Harvey Danger’s song again. All filmed in a single take - nice! I can’t remember the name of the company, but I know it’s the same one that Busted Tees is part of. (Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve bought a few shirts from them.)
Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.
