The Gong Show

It seems to be the $64,000 question in this buzzless launch: Why upgrade to Vista?

• It sounds like the whole Aero Glass UI is just going to bog down my computer.
• I don’t need Vista for Office ‘07, so I won’t have compatibility issues that force me to upgrade.
• It costs money (and more importantly, time) to upgrade.
• I don’t have a touchscreen, so all those cool tablet bells and whistles are useless to me.

I’m sure I could go on, but the point of the post is not why I shouldn’t upgrade. I have plenty of those reasons. I want to know why I SHOULD upgrade? Techmeme doesn’t seem to have any answers in the wake of Ballmer’s announcement. Ballmer certainly didn’t convince me. I just don’t get it, and I think many people are in the same boat as me. That’s why the buzz on this OS launch is flat.

…and you’ll find a URL to this rocking Tenacious D themed Guitar Hero clone flash game.

Caroline McCarthy a NY-beat reporter for CNET gets on Arrington’s case over typos in the name “BitTorrent.” This has gotta be a slow news day for the CNET folks. Here’s Arrington’s response for the curious. I met Caroline a few months back, and I liked her, so I’ll cut her a break.

But there is a bigger story here than cross-blog snipes…

I have received the same criticism for my unfiltered and grammar-error-riddled content from time to time (less from CNET and more from friends and family). I think that rough content is part of the allure of blogs. A blog post should not be taken as unbiased, totally sanitized, copy-edited, sources-checked fact. On the contrary, that’s why most blogs are so great: they’re raw, unedited opinions that typically cut through bullshit and get right to the story (and often, like in the BitTorrent case, scoop the story). Typos like those in Arrington’s piece on BitTorrent come with the territory of being unfiltered.

The comments on blogs are even better! They don’t have to setup a story or build a point over a paragraph or two. Comments are often two lines of pure gold: content-rich, unfiltered opinions that get right to the point and often deliver previously unseen insight. I’d love to see a good execution in comment aggregation to effectively search this high signal-to-noise-ratio source.

Anyway, I don’t apologize when people find my content rough, and I appreciate it when I find rough content elsewhere. I really hope that as old media continues to shed traditions in favor of new media practices they also learn to appreciate the value of unfiltered posts.

Can anyone recommend a decent Google blogger for me? I’m tired of Matt Cutts (he has a good blog, but I need fresh subject matter. I can only take so much SEO when all I really want is Google culture gossip).

Here is some of the best stuff I have found on YouTube recently:

(Link if you’re reading in RSS). This is visualization of a DJ scratching. The “how does it work” is pretty neat.

(Link if you’re reading in RSS). I think I would categorize this as Machinima. It’s made using a web-based Flash game called Linerider. Play with Linerider for a little bit to appreciate how difficult this must have been to make.

(Link if you’re reading in RSS). I often cruise through the timelapse tag at YouTube, and this is one of my favorites.

(Link if you’re reading in RSS). Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors. This commercial is shot the same way he ends all his movies: a long, highly coordinated cut with characters popping in and out of the scene, yet the whole thing flows as the camera cruises along… very cool.

I bought a wireless mouse and keyboard on Jellyfish the other day. The purpose was two-fold:

1. I wanted to try out the Jellyfish “Smack” auction-type-thing that was featured on TechCrunch. Sounded like an interesting idea, and I think best way to grok a service is to try it, so I did.
2. I wanted a wireless mouse and keyboard so that I could hook my laptop up to my TV and play videos, like YouTube, on my TV from the couch.

I believe that the future of everyone’s living room will have a computer (no cable box, video game system, DVD player, stereo). So, I thought I’d try to jump forward in my own living room before the appropriate software and web services have been built to support such a vision.

The keyboard/mouse from the couch setup works pretty well. My TV is not big enough to write emails from my couch, but I can certainly watch videos and play games in a manor more suited to leisure than sitting at my desk.

In light of my living room experiment, I resonated with the current meme started by the BBC about the dent that YouTube is making into traditional TV.

In the BBC article Ricky Gervais was quoted as saying that online video like YouTube would never replace traditional TV, but TV will come to embrace online video. Ricky says:

You can’t knock up an episode of The Sopranos or 24 on a little handheld digital camera.

I think Ricky underestimates the power of online video. It’s true that prosumers cannot produce content like The Sopranos on their digital camcorders but they can certainly produce content equally as entertaining to certain niche audiences as The Sopranos. If the content wasn’t equally as entertaining, then why are people migrating away from TV viewing and towards online video viewing?

As I write this post, the my TV is on with the Green Bay/Seattle game in the background, so I’m clearly not evangelizing for the end of traditional television. However, I am eager for the future of entertainment and the changes in media in which it will be delivered.

I find that the media review sites I like the most are those that are not exclusively review sites. The best example is Penny Arcade for video game reviews. A game’s MetaCritic score does not hold as much influence with me as a favorable anecdote in the “news” section of Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade is not in the game-review business, but their reviews are better than all others becaue they are so candid.

The same is true in music. I like Pitchfork and Stylus, but when a blogger (trusted or otherwise) writes about a great new album he or she can’t stop playing, I am much more likely to investigate further and seek other blog reviews on The Hype Machine.

There’s something about the forced nature of sites that do reviews exclusively that makes them less trust-worthy for me (perhaps, in part, because reviewers are paid to write).

The rich content of casual reviews is evidence of the influential power of the blogosphere.

I wish I had a better way to navigate and search for casual reviews. Right now I use a combination bloglines search (better than technorati search), feed aggregation (also through bloglines), and del.icio.us search. It feels very inefficient and hacky. I want a solid aggregator for casual reviews from the edge.

An emerging company I consult for wants a wiki, and I don’t know what platform to recommend. Does anyone have a wiki platform they recommend (and why?)?

At Union Square Ventures, we use JotSpot, and I have only positive things to say about it (especially with regards to ease-of-use). I would love to give them JotSpot, but since the Google acquisition, JotSpot is closed to new registrations, so that’s not an option.

My other wiki experience is with MoinMoin and MediaWiki, and I think both of them are too difficult for the less-tech-saavy members of this company (especially compared to Jot). Has anyone used SocialText or Twiki with success? Cost is not an issue for this company, so that’s not a reason to discard SocialText.

The usage will be primarily collaborative document editing (some pdfs involved). and group commenting on lists. No really specialized stuff like coding, calendaring, blogging, etc.

Thoughts?

I was crusing around YouTube when I came across an Arctic Monkey’s video that disabled embedding into other pages at the request of the content owner: Domino Records. How lame!

The little embed box on the YouTube page for the video says: “Embedding disabled by request.” I tried to see if I could work around this limitation by taking the embed code from another video and swapping the video id in the appropriate places in the embed code. Here is the result of my attempted work-around:

I was unaware that YouTube is disabling embedding at a content owner’s request. Perhaps this option has been available to content owners for awhile, but if so, I’m out of the loop.

I have a couple opinions about disabling embeds on YouTube:

• YouTube must be paying a rev share for this content. Content owners likely don’t want their videos to be played if they are not paid for the play, and YouTube can only do a rev share on videos played on their own site (until they develop ads embedded in the video). So, disabling embedding is a natural conclusion from these circumstances. This is greedy.
• Another reason why content owners might want to disable embeds is they want to control the messaging around their video. Content owners like Domino Records want to stop users from presenting their videos along side offensive, insulting, or otherwise unacceptible material. This is less greedy, but still lame.
• YouTube is turning off the feature that allowed them to become the 800 pound gorilla in online video. It was MySpace and blogosphere embeds that let YouTube rocket past previously established competitors like Veoh. YouTube has reached a critical mass, so I don’t think disabling embedding for a limited number of videos will effect their growth at this point. But, it’s pretty odd that YouTube would allow owners to disable the feature (more so than any other feature) that defines YouTube.

Anyone know how long content owners have been able to disable embedding?