The Gong Show

It’s that time of year again. Here’s my list for the Top 10 Albums of 2007. These aren’t necessarily my favorite now… instead, this list reflects how much I liked these albums over the course of the year at the peak of my obsession over each one.

1. Justice: †
2. Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
3. Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
4. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
5. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
6. Caribou: Andorra
7. Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. The Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
9. !!!: Myth Takes
10. Blonde Redhead: 23

and since all good Top 10 lists have 11 items…

11. Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew: Spirit If…

Also, the most over-hyped album of the year (or, in other words, the “I don’t get it” album of the year): M.I.A.: Kala

I’ve been reading up on copyleft licenses. I’ve been tackling the question of whether the GNU FDL (GNU Free-Document License – the license for all content at Wikipedia) is compatible with more proprietary licenses? In other words will it be possible to straight-up copy all Wikipedia content and drop it into Google Knol?

You have to imagine that some young hacker is going to write a Perl script to take the content from every Wikipedia page, put it all in Google Knol, and then claim a piece of the AdSense revenue that Google shares with authors. This is inevitable. The bigger question is: is this legal?

The answer to this question depends on the license Google chooses for the content on Google Knol. I don’t think that’s publicly available yet (except to the invite-only beta testers), so perhaps it’s not possible to answer this question now. Is the GNU FDL compatible with Squidoo’s license? Or with HubPages’ license? Or Mahalo’s license?

UPDATE: The sample Google Knol page (linked from the Google blog post announcing the launch) invokes the CC Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This license is very liberal and does not explicitly block commercial reuse. However, because it’s a CC license, it’s not compatible with the GNU FDL currently. Wikipedia claims to be working on CC compatibility, but now that Google is endorsing CC licenses with Google Knol, I suspect that Wikipedia will be more reticent to adopt CC.

This is a fascinating update because it means that Google Knol content can legally be used in Wikipedia, Mahalo, etc… but the opposite is not true. That said, I’m sure we will see Wikipedia content all over Google Knol because no one respects copyrights anymore.

Wow! The Lost in Translation whisper is finally revealed. Part of me wishes I had not seen this so be cautious if you’re a big fan of the movie. But still, this is really cool.

I got this viral email today. I’m sure it has been making the rounds in the Boston area, and I thought I would give it a more national audience.

Subject: FW: God

Three quarterbacks, Manning, Romo and Tom Brady, go to heaven to visit God and watch the Celtics play a game. God decides who will sit next to him by asking the boys a question…

God asks Peyton Manning first: “What do you believe?” Peyton thinks long and hard, looks God in the eye, and says, “I believe in hard work, and in staying true to family and friends. I believe in giving. I was lucky, but I always tried to do right by my fans.” God can’t help but see the essential goodness of Manning, and offers him a seat to his left.

Then God turns to Tony Romo and says, “What do you believe?” Tony says, “I believe passion, discipline, courage and honor are the fundamentals of life. I, too, have been lucky, but win or lose, I’ve always tried to be a true sportsman, both on and off the playing fields.” God is greatly moved by Tony’s sincere eloquence, and he offers him a seat to his right.

Finally, God turns to Tom Brady: “And you, Tom, what do you believe?” Tom replies, “I believe you’re in my seat.”

I just discovered tonight that my blog’s WordPress template had malicious javascript in it that did evil things involving stealing data via an ActiveX control in IE 6 and earlier.

1. My apologies to anyone that was affected.
2. If anyone else notices that their WordPress template is doing *very bad* things to IE users, you should look in the WP-config.php file for the malicious code. This isn’t immediately obvious because it’s not available for editing in the theme editor. Had to Grep to find it.
3. This is yet another reason to switch to Firefox, if you have not already done so. The holiday season is a great time to convert your parents’ computers too while you’re home.

Sarah has a poignant post about how Mark Zuckerberg’s apology for the Beacon controversy is very reminiscent of his apology a year ago regarding the News Feed. Yet, as Fred points out, Facebook’s News Feed was a powerful UI innovation — likely the most important UI innovation since del.icio.us popularized tagging.

So, is Beacon fated for similar long term success after an initial backlash just like News Feed, or will this re-run end differently this time?

My vote: The mainstream audience will adopt personal broadcasting of consumerism. In fact, I bet an implicitly generated feed of purchasing behavior will lead to all kinds of interesting explicit gameplay dynamics (remember Shop Til You Drop?). But, will Facebook reap the rewards that comes with this end-game scenario after sparking so much controversy? I’m less certain about that, but my bet is, again, yes. The negative PR will fade away, but Beacon will remain in place and will generate all kinds of interesting (likely unintended) use cases.

Hot Chip is only playing two shows in the US on their latest tour. One in LA and one in NY. Tickets for the NY show at the Highline Ballroom went on sale at 1pm on Saturday. I pinged the Ticketmaster server at 1:02pm… and they were all sold out. Total bummer.

Check out what I’m missing; here’s my favorite Hot Chip song “Over and Over.”

Scoble’s musings on why enterprise software isn’t sexy takes a narrow view of enterprise software. The enterprise software that really excites me is the stuff that’s aimed at consumers initially, and then consumers bring the software into the enterprise from the bottom up, solving their individual problems first and being adopted by the organization once many of the employees are already using the solution. Visible Path uses this exact model for selling into the enterprise: wait for individual consumer adoption in a company, and then once those individuals reach a certain threshold, sell into the CIO.

Some examples of this bottom-up enterprise software adoption pattern:

The quintessential example is IM. AIM was initially looked upon as the frivolous time-waster of 90s-teenagers. Now, it’s a staple of every office. In my last job IMing was so critical to productivity that we had a corporate Jabber network setup so that everyone would know each other’s screennames.

Linux evolved into a crucial enterprise developers’ tool because students were taught how to program on the open source operating system in universities, and then they brought their academic Linux experience into the work place to solve engineering problems.

I find bottom up pattern of enterprise adoption interesting because consumer software is much more focused on user experience than enterprise software, so the result is often much more user friendly software. Traditional enterprise software developers simply aren’t incentivized to design nice interfaces because a good-looking UI is not what’s going to land the big contract with a Fortune 500 CIO.

Check out this visually arresting series of photos from killer concerts during 2007; it’s well worth your time. These snapshots appeal to that little corner of the mind (everyone has this corner, I’m sure) that says, “Kick your chair back against the wall, quit your job, find the closest crowded street corner, and rock out like your life depends on it.” In that daydream, without a job I guess your life does depend on it ;)

[Photo is "GIRL TALK" by Nilina Mason-Campbell]