The Gong Show

I should start by saying the openness junkie and information architecture geek in me is absolutely giddy over the outlines I’ve read about the OpenSocial API.

But, the HCI/User-Experience geek in me is skeptical. The title of this post says it all: what’s the value of OpenSocial to the end-consumer? If I can play Scrabulous on Facebook, why should I (as an end-consumer) be excited that developers can easily offer me the ability to play Scrabulous on Orkut, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc…? I’m happy with Scrabulous on Facebook. I don’t need to play it on another social network.

Maybe the value to the end-consumer will become more obvious as more details are released next week.

[Side Note: yes, OpenSocial already has a wikipedia entry. It was created today at 8:52am. Brilliant.]

In the context of the California wildfires, and now earthquakes, I thought I’d share one of my favorite quotes ever:

Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy the disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. [Don Delillo, White Noise]

So great.

Side note: I love how Twitter has been used as an emergency response tool in the wildfires. And, how did I learn an earthquake just occurred an hour ago? From twitter, of course. See the feed that informed me below:

My music collection is bigger than my iPod capacity, so I have a subset of my albums that I’m ignoring for months at a time. I would rotate these albums in more frequently, but it’s a chore to do this in iTunes.

Anyone have a solution to this problem they like? I’d like to see a plug-in for iTunes that randomly shuffles entire albums on and off an iPod… Anyone heard of something like this?

Scott Heiferman wrote some strong words about the New York tech scene in response to John Heilemann’s NY Mag piece. Scott says that if he could do it all over again, he would have initially moved to Silicon Valley instead on New York:

If I was 22 today, in Iowa, making [the decision between New York and Silicon Valley], I’d probably choose Silicon Valley. It’s a shame because New York really is a great place to live. Thankfully, you can escape New York’s finance-media-advertising obsession. The Bay Area & technology is like LA & entertainment: Inescapable.

However, he couches this statement by saying the Silicon Valley companies don’t succeed because of where they are located; they succeed because they serve a vital purpose to millions of people and can exist anywhere.

Silicon Valley Companies succeed because of who they are, how they are, why they are… not where they are. It’s just been a coincidence. The non-SV companies haven’t had the right who/how/why. A company that NEEDS to exist — a company with a vital purpose to serve millions of people’s real needs — will attract the people to bring it to life — and it can exist anywhere. [emphasis added]

I appreciate Scott’s honest feelings, and I like his pragmatic approach to this discussion. New York should have a chip on their shoulder when comparing themselves to Silicon Valley because no massively impressive internet company has been built in New York to date. Doubleclick was close, but at the end of their long history, they exited to a more impressive Silicon Valley company.

That said, I believe there are tech companies in New York striving towards Scott’s lofty expectations. There are web services here that will serve a vital purpose to millions of people in any location. Scott’s own company Meetup is one of the ones on that trajectory. The goal of this post is not to single out which are the best tech companies in NY, so I’ll refrain from further examples.

Instead, the purpose of this post is to highlight the importance of aiming HIGH. With every tech company I meet, I hope the entrepreneur aspires to be an indispensable resource to his or her customers. When it becomes obvious to me that’s not the goal… when the entrepreneur is actually looking for the quick flip to [insert Silicon Valley giant], you can hear this incredibly powerful sucking sound that implodes all the energy in the room. There are many green fields on the internet, many opportunities to build big businesses. But, those opportunities require thinking equally as big, and turning down some tempting checks. Based on the people I’ve met over the last year, I have confidence a New York company will get there.

This is pretty interesting. AdaptiveBlue just released a bunch of widgets for popular sites that have semantic smartlinks baked in. I’m now displaying my upcoming Netflix queue on my blog sidebar (right side), each movie is one of the next three movies in my queue. You can click on each movie and use a variety of web services to learn more about the cast, similar movies, etc…

Check out the complete list of site coverage and widgets.

And, if you’ve got any good recommendations for my queue, let me know. Right now I’m finishing up Season 3 – Part 2 of Entourage on DVD. Looking for some meatier thought pieces to supplement the mindless action flicks upcoming on my queue.

Oh sweet… cask beer is making a comeback.

When I was in Salzburg a month ago, I went to a small brew house called Augustiner (not the Augustiner in Munich, a different one… though I went there too). I was standing in line waiting to fill my liter when I heard a terribly loud cracking noise. Three short echoing CRACKS: it was a little disconcerting at first. But, then I realized that the sounds were coming from behind the bar. The barkeep was taping a new cask because the last one ran out, which involved cracking to the wooden plug to insert the tap. Totally old school.

I hope in light the resurgence of cask beer I’ll be able to see this ritual again in a Manhattan bar soon.

[Found via the always-excellent BuzzFeed]

Ars Technica has a timely article about how the Net Neutrality issue is gaining traction again in the wake of some mistakes by the carriers. What were the infractions?

• AT&T censored political lyrics in a Pearl Jam webcast (then apologized).
• Verizon initially blocked a mass text message from NARAL Pro-Choice America (then apologized).
• Comcast was found to be delaying BitTorrent and Lotus Notes traffic (and remains unapologetic).
• AT&T's new terms of service appeared to prohibit criticism of the company (the company apologized and changed the terms).

[all points quoted from Ars]

It’s interesting that the debate was reignited when it was framed in the context of first amendment issues. Prior to these events, the major net neutrality argument was a financial one: carriers could get greedy and charge both web services and end-consumers money for “fast lane” access. That financial argument didn’t resonate with people because there wasn’t any strong examples of misbehavior by the carriers to support the argument. It was generally hypothetical.

But, now there are first amendment violations that exemplify the necessity and urgency of net neutrality legislation. I think these first amendment violations represent a stronger argument because it is more personal; it strikes at a more fundamental perceived right. People expect corporations to be greedy, so the financial argument for net neutrality didn’t surprise anyone. But, free speech is more sacred. In the public eye, blocking political lyrics and blocking text messages by NARAL is far more unsettling and is not commonly expected behavior by a corporation.

Simply put, to argue for Net Neutrality using first amendment violation examples is sexier. And I welcome this discovery. Just how sexy is it? Sexy enough that Obama made it a featured part of his platform.

I’m trying out a new comment system from Intense Debate. If you have any thoughts about it, let me know what you think (unless you can’t comment at all for some reason, in which case email me… my address is on the top right of this blog in an image).

I saw jazz pianist Matthew Shipp play at Columbia’s Miller Theatre this weekend. He was playing a style he called “Nu-Bop,” or… that was just what he named his quartet… I have heard of nu-jazz before, but never nu-bop, so it was cool to jump into something new.

The quartet played two sets, and each individual set was nonstop music. There were no jazz standards upon which the musicians were improvising, at least none that I recognized. Furthermore, there wasn’t a consistent thread or chorus that the musicians anchored there improvisations on… there was a theme, and everyone was in key, but at most times it sounded more like a wall of sound than a song.

There were two big highlights for me.

1) The tenor sax solo by sideman Daniel Carter was crazy. His solo was just him, no supporting beat or rhythm, so when he took a rest, the whole room echoed in silence. Then, when he would resume again, he evoked sounds from the Tenor that I never knew was possible. He could make it play 3 different notes at the same time, and all in harmony with each other. The mic also picked up a hum that emerged from the side of his mouth as he wailed away. Some parts were soft and intimate, while others were an absolute assault on the audience, and none of it was like anything I had heard before.

2) The duet between Guillermo Brown (drums, laptop) and Matthew Shipp was remarkable. Brown used a combination of a drum kit, sampler, and laptop to produce a electronic, yet earthy, sound that provided the perfect contrast to Shipp’s grand piano. He’d use the drum kit as a source for the sampler, which he would then reverse, echo, delay, etc and spit out on top of more drumming. It came as no surprise to me when I read that Brown has done significant work in techno with DJ Spooky. At times, it sounded more like 4 drummers playing at once. By that description alone, it seems like Brown should have overwhelmed Shipp’s piano, but Shipp was lightning fast, carrying 3 or 4 interesting improvisational threads at a time, so he kept up well.

I’ve been to 8 concerts at Columbia (excluding the PostCrypt shows I went to) and this concert was by far the best. It was both wildly original and audaciously beautiful. I’m eager to see Shipp live again, hopefully with the same line-up.

Here’s the best Shipp video I could find on YouTube (embedding is disabled on this video, so just click through the link), and it give you a good idea of Shipp’s sound. Daniel Carter’s in this video too. However, this video doesn’t hold a candle to the concert I attended.