Planet

I have to confess that one of the social networking tools I find most valuable is Goodreads. (It's a close second to Twitter, and way ahead of Facebook, Friendfeed, or Dopplr.) Unlike twitter, where I follow hundreds of people (possible because of twitter's minimalism) and am followed by thousands, on Goodreads, I follow and am followed by a small circle of friends and people whose taste in books I trust. As someone who loves books, it is the pinnacle of private social networking for me.

So it was with some interest that I read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. Much of the resulting commentary has focused on the problems this poses for LibraryThing, in which Amazon also has an invesment (via their recent purchase of Abebooks.) I'm a bit surprised that the articles have seemingly ignored the fact that Goodreads appears to be the market leader, at least based on data from compete.com:

Of course, that could change quickly if Amazon throws their muscle behind Shelfari and integrates it into their overall service. And there's the rub: we're entering a period of Web 2.0 consolidation. After all, web 2.0 is all about network effects in applications that get better the more people use them. And that means that companies with dominant share tend to get more dominant over time; that dominance need not be organic to start with (though it helps.) Over time, I expect to see companies who've achieved dominant market share in one market segment to use it to dominate a related segment.

But here's the counter: open and interoperable applications, including open social networks. When are companies with "point applications" of social networks going to realize that their best option, in the face of inevitable competition from big companies looking to dominate their market, is to join forces via shared social networks?

Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.

This applies to other specialized social networks as well. Sorry, even though I'm an investor in Tripit, I'm not going to try to rebuild the social network I've already got on dopplr, just because Tripit thinks they'd better add this hot functionality to what was already a unique and interesting product.

I've argued for years that one of the critical architectural decisions we can make about Web 2.0 applications is whether they are built on the "one ring to rule them all" model that we saw with Microsoft Windows and Office, a game where network effects drive a winner-takes-all marketplace, or the Unix/Internet model of "small pieces loosely joined," in which cooperating applications come together to build value greater than any of the pieces do alone.

We're entering the critical phase of that decision. Application developers need to embrace the "small pieces loosely joined" model, or they will be picked off one by one by dominant companies who've already reached scale, and who are practicing the "one ring" model. As Benjamin Franklin said during the American Revolution, "Gentlemen, we must all hang together, or we shall assuredly all hang separately." Now is a good time for LibraryThing and Goodreads to start talking about interoperability.

I just saw the trailer for Sony's new game The Last Guy. In it you run around a city trying to lead people to safety with a top down view reminiscent of Google Earth or Yahoo! Maps or Live Maps. People follow you around the city creating an ever longer line, while you try to avoid monsters. As your line gets longer you get more points and can do more things like surround buildings to free all the trapped people.

I was struck by how ingrained in our society this (relatively) new way of looking at our world has become. Google Earth is the most useful virtual world that I interact with on a regular basis and I doubt that I am the only one who feels that way. It is on its way to becoming its own gaming platform (if its doesn't qualify already). Google added a flight simulator mode and GoogleEarthHacks hosts Gemmo, an MMO for the geobrowser. The still-in-Beta Google Earth browser API included a milk truck game at launch (Radar post). WIthin a week of that launch someone had created their own flight simulator for the plugin (as predicted by Google's Ed Parsons).

These are good experiments, but I think that Google Earth's real gaming future will come via a realtime location-tracking game. A game where people will both review their steps and plot their next move in the geobrowser. The geobrowsers are ready for this game, but unfortunately the realtime trackers are lagging. Hopefully our phones, which are the most likely device to keep the cloud updated with our locations, will soon be up for the task (it seems like Nokia will be soon with the LifeviNe app; the iPhone won't be until it adds location-tracking as a background process).

BTW, if you want to get a feel for The Last Guy game play check out their promotional site. It lets you run around any website as though it were the game.

(LifeviNe via PSFK via @sarawinge)
(The Last Guy trailer via @elanlee)

Penelope Trunk's editor helps her improve her blogging and her tweeting:

In case you didn't know, I have an editor for my blog. This comes from being a columnist for so long. My editors were incredible—one was from Vanity Fair, one went on to the Harvard Business Review, and they definitely made me a better writer. So I have an editor for my blog, and if you think that's over the top, consider this: he also edits my Twitters. I mean, you can't write about sex and investors in the same 140-character phrase and still get funding unless you have an editor to save you from yourself.

What I've been doing while I've not been posting » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk

Of course, she's a professional writer and she probably has a gazillion readers. =) But maybe small(er) fry like me might gain a lot from asking an editor what he or she would do to make this blog even awesomer… =) Someday!

Here it is, fresh off the docket, Psystar's Answer with Affirmative Defenses with Counterclaims [PDF] to Apple's complaint. We'll read it together. And I'll work on a text for you, so we can all discuss it in detail.

Photos here.

If the presidential election ends in a tie, as it kind of did in 2000, I suggest settling it with a game of one-on-one basketball between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Why does Facebook bother with a “remember me” checkbox when it never does?

Related: I now have 212 friend request, 3 friend suggestions, 6 event invitations, 1 music invitation and 190 “other requests”. Saying this is too much doesn’t cover it.

To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers. Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....

Here are the full stats that comScore provided us, for the year July 07 - July 08:

	Unique Visitors (000)
	Jul-07	Jul-08	% Change
Total Internet : Total Audience	180,078	189,134	5
Radio	47,392	61,458	30
AOL Music	15,284	23,884	56
Yahoo! Music	23,075	18,725	-19
Clear Channel Online	10,697	9,394	-12
PANDORA.COM	2,551	4,834	89
Interactive One	512	3,515	587
CBS Radio	3,469	3,240	-7
NPR.ORG	1,717	2,538	48
Citadel Broadcasting Corporation	1,373	1,885	37
BATANGA.COM	1,239	1,810	46
Disney Music	1,721	1,598	-7
Cumulus Media Inc.	N/A	1,058	N/A
Emmis Communications Corporation	1,269	1,044	-18
Entercom Communications Corporation	786	789	0
ONTHERADIO.NET	704	622	-12
LIVE365.COM	963	582	-40
MediaSpan Group Inc.	1,428	482	-66
RADIOTIME.COM	147	446	203
AMERICANPUBLICMEDIA.ORG	303	386	27
1CLUB.FM	205	384	88
Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc.	236	352	49

Note that last.fm isn't categorized as 'Internet Radio' by comScore and as far as we know, it isn't part of CBS Radio listed above. We asked CBS (which owns last.fm) to send us the comScore data they have on last.fm, and here it is for the same period:

Notable Trends

AOL Music, with 23.9 million unique visitors in July 08, is the strongest. It recorded a 56% increase over the past year, so its growth is very good. Yahoo Music is second with 18.7M uniques in July 08, however it has decreased 19% annually since July 07. Clear Channel Online, the largest operator of radio stations (amongst other things) in the US, is a clear third with 9.4M audience in July 08.

As for the online streaming sites that began as startups, despite its continuing legal woes and the fact it can't be heard throughout much of the rest of the world, Pandora's US growth has been very impressive: an 89% increase from last year, to 4.8M unique visitors in July. Its competitor last.fm had just over 3M unique visitors in July 08, and 62% annual growth.

We also checked Compete and their stats are fairly similar, in terms of the trends, to comScore's. Compete has Pandora at 81.8% annual growth, with last.fm at 72.6%:

So the overall trend here is that both Pandora and last.fm are showing strong growth. But AOL Music continues to set the pace. Yahoo Music must be worried about its decline.

ReadWriteWeb Poll: last.fm and Pandora Still Most Popular

Our poll asked: what are your favorite online music streaming services? We ran almost the same poll last year. The results have shown that there is more diversity this year in the number of online music services that our readers tune into. While Last.fm and Pandora once again came out a clear first and second (respectively), other apps made a strong showing. Last.fm got 19% and Pandora 15%. Last year last.fm was at 31% and Pandora 29%, although last year's poll wasn't multi-choice.

Of the smaller services, Highnote, lala.com, Seeqpod all polled at the 8-9% range this year. Non-radio services such as Imeem and iTunes Music Service drew around 4-5%, while small but trendy services Hype Machine and Muxtape both came in at 4%.

So last.fm and Pandora are still favorites among the early adopter and tech-savvy people that read our site. But it's great to see so much interest in the many new online music startups (some of whom we didn't manage to fit into our poll, it must be said). As a matter of interest, here are some Compete stats for a few of the well performing smaller sites in our poll:

Hype Machine is perhaps the one to watch here, with 177% growth annually and on an upward trend. It grew 10.2% last month alone.

Conclusion

So AOL and Yahoo still dominate music streaming in the US, but last.fm and Pandora are beloved by many of our readers, and are growing fast in comScore too. We asked our panelists in our podcast show this week (link below) which sites they think will be popular this time next year. We'd like to ask the same question here. Do you see any dark horses amongst the smaller services, that may even show up in next year's comScore charts?

See also: Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss. This presents highlights from our podcast show earlier this week, in which senior representatives from Yahoo Music, Imeem and Rhapsody discussed online music trends.

Agenda:

* Microsoft and Novell extend partnership
* Oracle grows support for its own Linux
* Open source and commercial questions
* Doug Levin leaving Black Duck

iTunes or direct download (23:40, 5.4MB)

• Review of bicycle helmet effectiveness studies : quite a few case-control studies consistently demonstrating the protective effects of bicycle helmet use on shared roadways
  (tags: cycling helmets safety health statistics)

• Spammer-X’s numbers on spam profitability : he claimed that he made net $336k per year from spamming in 2004
  (tags: via:tzink spammer-x spam money pay profit motives)

Around the blogosphere you will see many left-wing writers criticizing Palin for lack of experience.  Maybe this criticism is correct, but these commentators are falling into The Trap.  Most American voters do not themselves know much detail about foreign affairs and their vision of an experienced leader does not require such knowledge.  Was it demanded from Reagan?  Doesn't everyone agree that Cheney and Rumsfeld knew plenty?  Rightly or wrongly, many American voters will view Palin's stint as mayor of small town, her background in sports, her role in a beauty contest (yes), her trials raising teenage children, and her decision to stick with her priinciples and have a Downs Syndrome baby as all very valuable and relevant forms of experience.  The more the word "experience" is repeated, no matter what the context, the more it will hurt Obama.  Palin needs to appear confident and capable on TV and in the debates, but her ticket is not going to lose votes if she cannot properly spell Kyrgyzstan or for that matter place it on a map.

Addendum: Here is early response over at The Clinton Forum.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Search Marketing & The US Presidental Race, Case Study: Sarah Palin
  After reading yesterday about how savvy both US presidential campaigns seem to think they are about search marketing, I decided I'm going to take a closer look at watching them. In particular, I noticed yesterday that both seemed pretty lame when it came to tapping into rising queries that...
• Google Tests Displaying Ads Under Search Results
  Tamar reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has confirmed that they are testing displaying search ads under the search results. You and I are accustomed to seeing AdWords ads at the top and right hand side of the Google search results page, but we never see them under...
• Search In Pictures: Mandi Perkins at Yahoo, Google Dance & Yahoo Safari
  In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more....
• Microsoft Acquires Market Research Firm Greenfield Online To Get EU Shopping Engine Ciao
  Microsoft successfully bid to acquire Greenfield Online for approximately $486 million. But Microsoft isn't really interested in Greenfield, it was after the company's subsidiary Ciao GmbH. Founded in 1999 and acquired by Greenfield in 2005, Ciao is an Munich-based EU comparison shopping site with user reviews....
• Ask Kids Relaunches With Cute Kids Features
  A few days ago, Ask.com relaunched Ask Kids, their search flavored for children. The Ask.com blog just wrote about the launch last night. Ask.com said the Ask Kids site was "built from the ground-up, with our own search technology." It seems like Ask.com added a "very strict" list of which...
• Human Hardware: Foraging for Information
  When looking to predict how MBA students and analysts would find information in a digital environment, Peter Pirolli found his answer in an unlikely place: animal’s foraging patterns. Pirolli, working at the Palo Alto Research Center, was trying to predict with some mathematical accuracy the behavior of humans when...
• Obama Vs. McCain: Display Vs. Direct Response
  The Wall Street Journal analyzes and compares the online marketing strategies, successes and weaknesses of the two US presidential candidates. McCain turns out to be the more savvy search marketer, while Obama does a better job at SEO and is investing more in online display advertising....
• Bill Tancer On 20/20 This Friday, Talking Search Behavior
  Many search marketers know of "data geek" Bill Tancer, who has long entertained folks at search marketing conferences with tales and observations of what you can tell about people through search trends. Bill's got a great new book coming out, Click, which shares those insights with a broader audience....

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Analyst trims Google estimate, Forbes

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Introducing the winners of the Android Developer Challenge I, Official Google Blog
• Tip of the week: Lat Long on Lat/Long, Google LatLong
• Google to buy GeoEye satellite imagery, News.com
• Live Search Maps Goes Live in Taiwan, Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google Ad Planner Vs. AdWords Placement Tool: Which provides better sites to target?, PPC Hero
• Google Updates Java Client Library for AdWords API, Search Engine Roundtable
• Sample SOAP requests for several adCenter API V5.1 calls - adCenter API Blog for Developers, adcentercommunity.com
• Your guide to the Inside AdSense blog, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Google Cuts Off Forestle, Google Blogoscoped
• Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know About, Digital Inspiration

SEM Industry

• Cre8asiteforums Interviews Members Wit, JohnMu and Lee, Cre8tive Flow
• SEOktoberfest, 3 Dog Media
• SES: Catching Up with Vanessa Fox, WebProNews

SEO & SEM

• Online Marketing Tips Video: Utilizing Video in Online Marketing Strategies, Search Marketing Gurus
• What's Broken in the Microsoft Development Stack?, Live Search Webmaster Center Blog
• Whiteboard Friday: A Farewell to Pagination, SEOmoz
• Aaron Wall and Wordtracker team up to publish - 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies, SEO Book
• Applying onsite seo to website template (or why separation of code and content is a good thing), SEOmoz
• Digital PR and SEO Series: Part 3, Online Marketing Blog
• Div ID="Header" Different SEO Tactics, Search Engine Journal
• For Local Search, It's All About the Online-Offline Gap, Search Engine Watch
• How Google Handles Flash in 2008, Former Googler Bergy Chimes In, Search Engine Roundtable
• Looking for Answers in a Search Marketing Forum? Be Specific!, Search Engine Watch
• Negative Keyword Filter for Google Webmaster Tools?, Search Engine Roundtable
• New Killer Keyword Research Ebook!, SEO Book
• Search Engine Penalties Are Scary, Says Most SEOs, Search Engine Roundtable
• Ten Top Tips for Tip Top Copy, SEOptimise

Social Media

• Yahoo Shuts Down Mash, 0-4 On Social Networking, TechCrunch
• LinkedIn Rolls Out Enhanced Groups Features, TechCrunch
• Traffic trends for Digg vs. nine other social news sites, Royal Pingdom

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• The 30 Easiest Ways to Get Links and Exposure
• Digital Point's Shawn Hogan Sued for Cookie Stuffing
• How To Get Started In Social Media | A Beginners Guide
• Google Automatic Match - Measuring the Cost of Skipping Keyword Research
• 10 Meta-Search Engines Reviewed and Compared
• The Great Social Media Traffic Debate - Niche or Generic Networks??
• When Blackhat SEO IS Ethical
• 11 Slimy Internet Marketing Characters
• Giving Your SEO Enough Info to Succeed?
• Social Media Marketing: Getting Long-Term Results

You know your industry has problems when mainstream comic strips make fun of you.

I’ve been researching stories that help demonstrate how the Internet has helped people make connections across cultural boundaries… and the ways in which it’s fallen short of its potential to do so. One of the stories that’s fascinated me is the story of how Filipino singer Arnel Pineda became the new lead singer of US rock band, Journey. For those who missed my post earlier this year, or the interview with Charles Osgood on CBS Sunday morning, the story goes like this:

In 2007, Arnel Pineda was singing with his band, The Zoo, in the Hard Rock Café in Makati, one of the cities that make up Manilla. The Zoo played long sets of soft rock ballads, the sorts of songs that topped the charts in the US in the 1970s and 80s. Zoo fan Noel Gomez recorded videos of their performances and posted them to YouTube, where they generated long comment threads from Filipino admirers, amazed by Pineda’s ability to unerringly reproduce the vocal stylings of legendary American balladeers.

While Pineda was already well known in Asia from his performances in Hong Kong and singing contests in the Philippines, You Tube displayed his gifts to a much wider audience. Specifically, he caught the attention of Neil Schoen, the founding guitarist of Journey, one of the bands The Zoo regularly covered.

Journey reached the peak of its popularity in the early 1980s, with a succession of chart-topping hits sung by Steve Perry, whose high, clear tenor gave the band it’s signature sound. Perry left the band for a solo career in 1986, returned for a reunion in 1996 and left the band for good 2007.

Finding a new frontman has been difficult - the songs Perry is remembered for are technically challenging and stretch the vocal range of many talented singers. And Journey’s fans, like those of many classic rock bands, are looking for performances that honor the original recordings, not a novel interpretation of the classics.

So Schoen was two days into a restless perusal of YouTube, watching videos of Journey cover bands, when he discovered Pineda’s uncanny vocal talents. Schoen emailed Gomez, who’d posted the video, and their email exchange - which Pineda initially dismissed as a prank - turned into an invitation to audition for the band. Pineda is now the frontman of Journey on a concert tour through the US, a tour that’s been warmly received by fans, who compare Pineda’s vocals and energy favorably to Perry’s.

---

I’m interested in the story because it seems like a realization of the highest aspirations some of us had for the internet when it entered the public consciousness in 1994. Here was a space that promised a common ground, a level playing field for people around the world to share their ideas and talents. (Needless to say, it’s never been truly level, as barriers of language, education and access make it likely that many geniuses living in rural Africa will go undiscovered.) The internet hints at a truly globalized world, one where the best person for the job has a chance at it, no matter what her accident of birth; a world where the best idea, invention or performance might win out despite the origins of its author.

I’ve been thinking about using Pineda’s story as a contrast to other, less hopeful videos that show how difficult it is to understand the needs, motivations and worldview of the person on the other side of the screen. For me, the paradigmatic video about disconnection in a connected age is the “Nigerian Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the video, a pair of young Nigerian men perform Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch. They’re performing because they believe they’re auditioning for a drama scholarship - instead they’re performing for the pleasure of Mike Berry, a “scambaiter” who spends his free time responding to 419 scammers, encouraging them to humiliate themselves and posting documentation on his website, 419eater.com. Some consider scambaiting an effective and amusing way to combat internet abuse and attempted fraud. Others wonder whether “some of the more derogatory baits say something about our darker selves, laying bare the divide between white and black, rich and poor, First World and Third?”

In thinking about how to frame a constrast between the videos, the Dead Parrot one struck me as more troublesome. It’s clear that email scams are pervasive and damaging, not just to the people cheated by them but to the economies of African nations, who now have difficulties persuading overseas business partners to enter into legitimate partnerships. While the jocular abuse on sites like 419eater is disturbing, so is the gangsta stance associated with celebrations of 419 in Nigerian culture in songs like “419 State of Mind“. The more I look at the phenomenon of scambaiting, the harder time I have feeling comfortable with the motives of anyone involved with the encounter.

The more I read about Pineda’s story, the more I realize that this story is complicated as well. One aspect I’d never bother to consider was the challenges Pineda might have had in getting a visa to audition in the US. There’s an intriguing forwarded email, posted on Filipino-community blogs like Flipland, evidently authored by a US embassy staffer at the visa section in Manila. The anonymous author tells the story of hearing The Zoo in a Manila club and being amazed by Pineda’s abilities. A week later, the author found himself sitting next to an immigration officer, who turned to him bemusedly, midway through interviewing a “nutjob” who wants to go to America so he can audition for Journey. The author offered to take the case, with some skepticism: “Given the malarkey you get at a Manila NIV window, this story only got points for being original. He produced some flimsy emails and letters, etc.” So he asked Pineda to prove his bonafides by belting out “Wheel in the Sky”. The author closes his story:

I said, “Look sir, there isn’t a person in this Embassy who would believe that story– going to try out for Journey!– not a soul would believe that. Except for me. I saw you sing last Friday and I couldn’t shut up about how your vocals were perfect Steve Perry.

So I tell you what. I’m giving you that visa. You’re going to try out. And you’re going to make it….”

For me, the story is a reminder of how fragile a success like Pineda’s actually is. It isn’t enough to be able to emulate Steve Perry and capture the attention of an eighties guitar god - you’ve also got to survive an encounter with (understandably) skeptical and suspicious US government bureaucrat. Pineda’s good fortune raises the spectre of a Srinivasa Ramanujan never able to leave his clerk’s job the Madras Port Trust office to join G.H. Hardy at Cambridge, helping push the boundaries of number theory.

(Not that Ramanujan’s story is an uncomplicated one, either. His intuitive working methods caused clashes with some of his British colleagues, and the difficulty of maintaining a Hindu vegetarian diet during WWI Britain might have contributed to his early death from hepatic amoebiasis. )

Filipino blogger and journalist Benito “Sunny” Vergara has a provocative and thoughtful set of columns in AsianWeek on Pineda’s improbable story. (Please see “Tongues like Parrots“, “The Man Can Sing Anything”, and “It’s Steve and It’s Not Steve“.) One column focuses on the idea of “plakado”, which Vergara defines as “a compliment given to bands that can unerringly reproduce what is heard on the plaka, or vinyl record.” (In an earlier post, he refers to a longer phrase - “plakadong-plakado”.) This highly accurate mimicry may be related to the popularity of karaoke machines that score performances based on their technical accuracy, their similarity to the recorded version. (If you’ve played “Rock Band”, this experience will be familiar to you.) With truly plakado singers, it’s as if you can close your eyes and imagine you’re listening to the original performer. Vergara observes:

This act of closing one’s eyes is important. It signals a kind of erasure of cultural difference: that these Filipino musicians are, in a sense, aurally alienated from the products of their musical labor, so that they act as substitutes or copies of “the real thing.” And part of the pleasure in consumption of this technical mastery is that the audience would open its eyes, as it were, and discover, to its surprise, its music uncannily reproduced by the Third World.

In a later piece, Vergara wonders whether Pineda has to erase his cultural difference (not to mention a difference in age and in experience) to experience his new life:

Do the guys hang out with him after work? What do they talk about — are they all friendly, or are the conversations sometimes awkward? Does he tell them stories about how he was a big Journey fan back in the day? Do the other band members reminisce about Steve, then remember he’s not there anymore?…

Does he feel lonely? Does he get homesick? Does he think about his former bandmates, his family, his people, his homeland, thousands of miles away? Does he get to sneak out, away from the tour bus, and find the nearest Filipino restaurant? Does he get tired of the American food on tour, and long for tapsilog in the mornings?

In other words, is it possible to become “the ultimate Overseas Filipino Worker” without becoming a little - or a lot - less Filipino? A version of the question applies to everyone who’s ever lived and worked within another culture - how does the experience of encountering another culture, living in another world, change you? Are you the same person after the experience? Is the reward - fiscal or otherwise - worth the price?

Commenters on Vergara’s post point out that it’s Pineda’s presence on stage - bold, striding, playful - that is impressing the fans as much as his vocal qualities. They’re not closing their eyes and imagining Steve Perry - they’re reveling in the dislocation of hearing a band sound just like they did 25 years earlier, despite faces full of wrinkles and an energetic Filipino frontman. But I think Vergara’s right to be worried - watching the interview on CBS, Pineda looks nervous… not necessarily unhappy, but clearly still adjusting to the profoundly weird developments in his life.

The internet - more than the telegraph, telephone, radio or television - has the potential to bring the rest of the world closer to us, to help us cross cultural boundaries quickly, casually, accidently. But the human work of bridging cultural distance hasn’t gotten any easier, and it’s still a challenge to understand the world we encounter. We’ve got a long way to go before the internet helps a British scambaiter empathize with a Nigerian spammer, or a Nigerian scam artist with an American victim. Maybe a Filipino balladeer is just the man to lead us as in bridging this disconnect.

I love the Web. I love Twitter. I love the way elections are becoming sources of entertainment. Take a look at this:

Little known fact Palin

Now that is viral.

Google has gotten itself into a little bit of a licensing game again. This time, the company’s open source leader Chris DiBona had to come out and reverse a previous ban of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) from Google Code open source project hosting. The thinking was that MPL represented only a minimal number of projects, so to cut down on license proliferation, Google would just leave that one out. However, it turns out that little license and the limitations Google created were critical to some pretty important open source projects and communities, particularly Eclipse.

DiBona says Eclipse’s petitioning is prompting the software giant to rethink its licensing approach: “We’ve resisted until now as we felt that the features of the Eclipse Public License (EPL) were not unique enough to justify its inclusion. This hasn’t changed, but how we think about licenses is getting a bit more nuanced,” DiBona says. Adding that Google wanted to support Eclipse developers and show solidarity with them, DiBona goes on to say that the May 2008 removal of the MPL from Google Code “seemed a little absurd.”

Google is adjusting and it should be commended for owning up to a goof (which seemed a little strange since it was complaining of possible combinations and interations that skyrocket as the number of licenses grows” at the same time saying community-specific licenses (EPL, MPL, CDDL) “tend to create islands of code.”

However, I’m wondering now about the AGPL, which is viewed as both a risk and an opportunity depending on your perspective. We’ve also seen Google open up recently and contribute code using the Apache Public License (APL), which is now compatible with General Public License (GPL) thanks to GPLv3. Both of those licenses are OK on Google Code, but still AGPL remains prohibited.

License proliferation is a real and significant issue, but for Google to claim its license bias lies purely in a desire to address that issue is somewhat disengenuous. There are other considerations, such as code-sharing requirements, which are extended to SaaS under the AGPL. One of the big strengths of free and open source software is the flexibility and freedom to choose among a variety of options, and licenses are no exception. Rather than explaining why it won’t allow some licenses as anti-proliferation, Google should figure out a way to offer more of the options including EPL, MPL and AGPL.

Trying to appear moderate is not always the best strategy for capturing votes during an election, reveals a new study. Extreme positions can build trust among an electorate, who value ideological commitment in times of uncertainty.

Here is the full story, with a hat tip to Eduardo Pegurier.  And here's Robin Hanson:

In a TV game show, pretty contestants were not better or more cooperative players, but other contestants seemed to act as if they were.

I don't know much about the substance or qualifications of Sarah Palin, but I believe that Democrats should be a little worried right now.  The otherwise-expected Romney and Pawlenty gifts have been taken off the table.

Addendum: Here's Palin talking economics with Larry Kudlow.

I know I need to approach this topic with kid gloves because there are many of you out there that either perform good deeds entirely selflessly or many of those that truly believe that you do. I used to be part of the latter group. Then I read The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley and realized something really significant:

Just because a good deed is performed to someone’s benefit, it doesn’t make the deed any less good.

In fact, as Ridley points out, in the absence of personal incentives to positively contribute to a community, the majority of people would not contribute at all. And there are incentives, even if indirect, to performing good deeds. Even if all of you are in the 0.01% of people who perform good deeds entirely selflessly, think about all of the people you’ve met in the world you could only convince to give more, do more and care more. Those are the people need incentives - for better or for worse.

I think about how current incentives work. I was chatting the other day with another Matt, Matt Langdon of the Hero Workshop. He was saying to me that he was setting up the Hero Workshop as a non-profit because he would feel bad about making a profit off of this work. Really? Why, I thought? There are plenty of people getting rich off of doing nasty stuff like making cigarettes and selling drugs and lobbying governments to keep us oil dependent. And there are even more people making millions from just producing a load of crap we don’t need. Why should the people contributing positively from the world have to take the martyr road? My second thought was, “No friggin wonder it is an uphill battle to get people to do stuff like Matt is doing!” Matt’s are rare. Dedicating your life for the betterment of others is a beautiful, amazing thing, but if you can’t pay the bills or provide financial security for your family and your future, you will probably end up getting burnt out really fast.

There is no reason for us to be holier-than-thou about our contributions (not to mention the very essence of holier-than-thou points to the fact that we want recognition, which means the act itself is not, after all, selfless). Good for those of us who have sacrificed ourselves for the benefit of the wider community, but we should never become martyrs because of it. We should, instead, be thinking of ways to create more of us to do the work…’cause at the end of the day we have to make a living…or at least I do.

I’m personally overjoyed that people are making gazillions off of the green movement (as long as it’s not a hoax). The fact that you can do good AND do well is an amazing incentive and, I think, the tipping point for people to actually start giving a damn…through consumption, yes, but if that’s what it takes, I’m all for it. This is America after all. We vote through our consumption…that we have a choice to vote for positive change is awesome.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about incentives and I think that people like Jane McGonigal and Austin Hill are doing amazing work in this area, incentivizing acts of kindness through gaming techniques. Ethically, people may have a problem with gaming human nature, but I don’t. To game towards the good is helluvalot better than to incentivize people towards acts of exploitation, waste, corruption and greed. And, believe me, the long-standing dominant atmosphere favors the greedy.

For the upcoming HeroCamp, I’m going to be concentrating on incentives. Having a 15 year-old who is not in that 0.01% has been eye-opening for me. He’s a good kid and very talented and I love him, but whenever I speak of heroism or positively contributing to the greater good, he rolls his eyes at me and calls me lame. What incentivizes him? Well, money is the biggest thing unfortunately, but he also plays games like World of Warcraft, where I watch him sacrifice himself and his points constantly to move his tribe forward. And when I asked him to come to HeroCamp and be our Lame-Meter, he agreed. I incentivized him with a voice…a chance to influence an outcome…a chance for him to shine. Okay, and a few days off of school, too, but that was less of an incentive than the rest. I asked him to be himself and told him that would be a key role in what we’re working on. The incentive is ego.

I believe that raising Whuffie is also good incentive that encourages positive contributions. However, I am not so blind as to ignore the way that people exploit this as well. There is an upside and downside of everything. We need to figure out better ways to reward those that are doing good in the world (and sometimes this means that they need to make money from it) and remove the incentives for people to exploit influence in the networks (by making it harder for them to make a living - refusing to buy their goods or read their blogs).

So, in conclusion, I believe that making a better world comes down to building in positive incentives (beyond ‘it’s the right thing to do’) for good deeds and removing the incentives for bad deeds.

I’m a Comcast internet access customer, and I don’t have a television here in Ann Arbor.  There, I’ve said it.  I remember thinking when other people used to say they didn’t have televisions that they were just being sanctimonious cranks.  I swear I’m not being a sanctimonious crank.

With a good internet connection, and a big/friendly enough monitor, you don’t need to subscribe to cable content any more.  I was thoroughly content watching the convention this week on C-SPAN.  But I was watching C-SPAN.org - and I was also following the Twitter feeds of thousands of people.  Plus I was watching the comments on DailyKos.  It was the most convivial, richest way to watch a major speech that I have ever experienced.

Having cut all of those cords (no landline phone either), I’m worried about a future in which Comcast gets to say that I’ve used “too much” bandwidth and have to be cut off.   That future is coming on October 1, when Comcast will implement a 250 GB monthly cap.  (Hat tip: Karl Bode.)

Comcast sees a future in which people use the internet to send a few emails or look at a few web pages.  They don’t want people watching HD content from other sources online, because that doesn’t fit their business model.  So rather than increase capacity, they’d rather lower expectations. 250GB/month is about 50-60 HD movies a month, but we’re not necessarily going to be watching movies.  Maybe we’ll be doing constant HD video sessions with other freelancers, or interacting with big groups all over the world in real-time.  Who knows what we’ll be doing - it’s all in the future.

But rather than build towards a user-powered future, Comcast wants to shape that future — in advance — in its own image.  The company is not offering additional bandwidth packages to people who want more.  They just want to be able to shut service off at a particular point - a point of bandwidth use that most people aren’t using right now, so that they won’t be unhappy.  By the time we all want to be doing everything online, Comcast users (the company hopes) won’t expect anything better.

Here’s a comment that makes the competitive picture clear:

Q.  How does this factor in with users of your Digital Voice service? On average how much bandwidth does that service take up?
Bill G. [Comcast]: Digital voice has no affect [sic] on this, the 250 gig cap is allotted for just downloads

So Comcast’s own services won’t be limited, just downloads of other peoples’ services and material.  And don’t get us started on those asymmetric uploads.

Comcast’s cap is being widely discussed, which is a good sign.  Building in an assumption of scarcity rather than building out better access - that’s strange.

What business doesn’t want to build capacity to serve the future?  I’ll tell you — listen, now — a business that’s confident it can plan for the future it wants.  A business whose plans don’t include serving as a neutral transport platform for other peoples’ material.  A business that is focused on maintaining scarcity.

The subject of this article sounds like a mock-cartoon version of repressive censorship laws. But the proposals are real. They have been widely discussed in the Brazilian blogosphere and to some extent in the Brazilian press and TV, but they've received hardly any attention in the United States.

The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way technical information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.

After reading yesterday about how savvy both US presidential campaigns seem to think they are about search marketing, I decided I'm going to take a closer look at watching them. In particular, I noticed yesterday that both seemed pretty lame when it came to tapping into rising queries that you can spot on Google Trends. That's what I'm going to be watching in particular over the coming weeks -- and today's a good start. Google Trends is lighting up with searches for McCain's vice presidential pick, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. How are the campaigns responding? Not so well.

Click to continue reading...

While it can sometimes seem like Skype has been around forever, today only marks the 5th anniversary of the popular VOIP client. When it was first released, Skype marked a huge improvement in voice quality over any other VOIP client at the time. Just a few days after its release, Skype already had close to 10,000 users online at any time. Since then, the company has added plugins, video calls, voicemail, Skype to phone calls, and many other features. Most importantly, though, Skype has changed how we communicate with each other and allowed us to run small, virtual companies.

The early days of Skype were quite exciting thanks to the novelty of the technology (and sometimes fraught with problems), but a good part of the reason for the original hype and success was that Skype's founders were also behind the notorious P2P file sharing application Kazaa, from which Skype inherited its P2P architecture.

Today, many a virtual business can only run thanks to Skype's ability to bypass the expensive phone networks. Here at RWW, we use Skype extensively throughout the day, and while other products like Gizmo might offer a similar feature set, nobody else ever got the market penetration that Skype got thanks to its early start.

EBay

But besides all the technical innovation, Skype's biggest news day came in September 2005, when it was acquired by eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion dollars. It doesn't seem as if anybody ever really understood why eBay decided to buy Skype and go ahead with this deal - or why they ever offered this much money in the first place. eBay never integrated Skype into the rest of its business and it was never quite clear how they would do that anyway, besides giving potential buyers an option to connect with sellers through it. In recent months, rumors have flared up repeatedly that eBay was trying to sell off Skype.

Skype 4

The user interface of Skype 4, which is publicly available, but still in beta, is a radical departure from the previous versions and hasn't exactly received many accolades for its new design yet. Skype is trying to put more emphasis on 'conversations,' but in doing so, the company has abandoned the typical horizontal IM layout for one large window with your contacts list and conversations all in one. This tends to take up a lot of space, though you can pop out chat or call windows.

Overall, we are not big fans of the direction Skype is going in with this new version, but given that it is still in beta, hopefully some of the UI weirdnesses will have been addressed by the time it launches. In order to focus its business more, Skype also just announced that it will disable Skypecasts, Skype's ability to broadcast to a large group of listeners, effective September 1st.

For the next five years, Skype's Josh Silverman says that he wants to see Skype move towards 'liquid communication,' where neither device nor place matters.

To paraphrase my good friend: Robin Hanson and I, good friends who sometimes blog-spar, will tape a bloggingheads TV show this Monday.  What would folks like us to talk about? 

Here are the answers from Robin's readers.

Tamar reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google has confirmed that they are testing displaying search ads under the search results. You and I are accustomed to seeing AdWords ads at the top and right hand side of the Google search results page, but we never see them under the search results.

Stephan Kopp commented with a link to a screen capture showing an AdWords ad at the bottom of the search results.

Click to continue reading...

In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Click to continue reading...

I am an architect and have been working with programs like Photoshop for years, but Spoonflower really opened up a new world for me: fabric design. It's a service that let's you upload an image to a web site and the company prints the design as a pattern on 100% cotton fabric. Their customer service is great, and I think the fabric is reasonably-priced: it costs $18/yard, not counting shipping, and an individual 8x8-inch swatch is $5. The site is still in beta, so I had to request an invite to use Spoonflower, but a week after contacting them I was experimenting with patterns and ordering fabric.

So far, I've placed three orders with three different designs (3x3 yards worth) at $ 66 per order, shipping included. The trickiest part was preparing the image file so the pattern matches up. I used the "define pattern" command in Photoshop to test my image files before I uploaded them. I defined the image size (150 dpi), set colors to LAB color space and saved the files in TIF format. After I uploaded them to the Spoonflower site, they were automatically tiled to fill the desired fabric size. Then I specified the shipping address, paid using my credit card and that's it! The turnaround was reasonably quick: my fabric arrived in a month (I live in Switzerland). I made a skirt with the fabric from my first order -- a present for my Mom (pic below).

A couple caveats: I have noticed some distortion after washing the fabric and there was a little color shifting from my original designs. Still, the color shifting and fabric distortion really are minor. Overall, I'm happy with the color accuracy and I've been very satisfied with my orders. I have been having a lot of fun with Spoonflower and will likely place my fourth order very soon. I am even considering setting up an Etsy shop to sell some of my fabrics.

-- Isabella Kuntz

Spoonflower

Beta invitation request

Skirt:

Pattern:

NOTE: definitely check out this blogger's enlightening side-by-side close-ups of fabric printed from her artwork. One of her conclusions: "strong graphic lines turn out better than images with subtle shading." Also, check the Spoonflower pool on flickr for more fabric samples, including this skirt. --sl

Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools:

World Textiles

Books on Demand

Brother Sewing Machine

I am an architect and have been working with programs like Photoshop for years, but Spoonflower really opened up a new world for me: fabric design. It's a service that let's you upload an image to a web site and the company prints the design as a pattern on 100% cotton fabric. Their customer service is great, and I think the fabric is reasonably-priced: it costs $18/yard, not counting shipping, and an individual 8x8-inch swatch is $5. The site is still in beta, so I had to request an invite to use Spoonflower, but a week after contacting them I was experimenting with patterns and ordering fabric.

So far, I've placed three orders with three different designs (3x3 yards worth) at $ 66 per order, shipping included. The trickiest part was preparing the image file so the pattern matches up. I used the "define pattern" command in Photoshop to test my image files before I uploaded them. I defined the image size (150 dpi), set colors to LAB color space and saved the files in TIF format. After I uploaded them to the Spoonflower site, they were automatically tiled to fill the desired fabric size. Then I specified the shipping address, paid using my credit card and that's it! The turnaround was reasonably quick: my fabric arrived in a month (I live in Switzerland). I made a skirt with the fabric from my first order -- a present for my Mom (pic below).

A couple caveats: I have noticed some distortion after washing the fabric and there was a little color shifting from my original designs. Still, the color shifting and fabric distortion really are minor. Overall, I'm happy with the color accuracy and I've been very satisfied with my orders. I have been having a lot of fun with Spoonflower and will likely place my fourth order very soon. I am even considering setting up an Etsy shop to sell some of my fabrics.

-- Isabella Kuntz

Spoonflower

Beta invitation request

Skirt:

Pattern:

NOTE: definitely check out this blogger's enlightening side-by-side close-ups of fabric printed from her artwork. One of her conclusions: "strong graphic lines turn out better than images with subtle shading." Also, check the Spoonflower pool on flickr for more fabric samples, including this skirt. --sl

Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools:

World Textiles

Books on Demand

Brother Sewing Machine

Weird story.

Mr Jetley said he first realised his security password had been changed when a call centre staff member told him his code word did not match with the one on the computer.

"I thought it was actually quite a funny response," he said.

"But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to 'Lloyds is pants' because they said it was not appropriate.

[...]

"The rules seemed to change, and they told me it had to be one word, so I tried 'censorship', but they didn't like that, and then said it had to be no more than six letters long."

Lloyd's claims that they fired the employee responsible for this, but what I want to know is how the employee got a copy of the man's password in the first place. Why isn't it stored only in encrypted form on the bank's computers?

How secure can the bank's computer systems be if employees are allowed to look at and change customer passwords at whim?