Mickeleh's Take

Twitter Marketing: Names and Powers

2010-10-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Tom Milsom's band, Sons of Admirals, has just released "Here Comes My Baby" a new single and digital bundle on iTunes and they are making an all-out push to land in the UK top ten during the first week of release. The song, a cover of a Cat Stevens hit from the sixties, has been reimagined for the twenty-first century (to bottow some pretentious twaddle from Brian Wilson's Gerhwin album).

As part of the marketing effort, Tom, spent a good part of the day yesterday on Twitter making good on the following twittered offer:

Buy the Here Comes My Baby bundle in iTunes today, tweet me a link to a screenshot, and I'll personally bestow upon you a unique nickname.

Turns out that, unlike the garden variety of nicknames, Tom's names also came with super powers. (see below)

Mickeleh's Take: Personal attention from a recording artist carries a lot of weight. But is this scalable?

Here are some of the names and powers Tom granted to people who bought "Here Comes My Baby."

@_heyduder Hooray! You are now SUPERCARLY. You can fly. And swim through brick.

@LacieDayParade Bow down to the almighty LACIE, PROTECTOR OF THE REALM OF FASHION! See an ugly shirt? BLAM. You can make that person vanish.

@greengoobermunc Hooray for MARTHA, THE TUBE QUEEN. You are now ruler of things in tubes, that are tubes, or the London Underground trains.

@Matthew_Gibson Hooray for KING MATTHEW of THINGS THAT MAKE SOUND WHEN YOU HIT THEM! Percussion's all under your watchful eye. Good luck.

@DreamlessJamie Hooray! Thanks JAMIE, RULER OF THE SLEEP REALM. Have fun RULING OUR DREAMS!

@NotUnspecial Hooray! Thank you LAUREN, GRAND VIZIER OF INSECTS. You now have supreme power over billions of creatures!

@_irisaurus Hooray for IRIS, EYEBALL QUEEN! You can see EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE

@BookWormVicky Hooray for VICKY, PRINCESS OF POISONOUS GASES! Use your new powers wisely.

@kthrnprrtt That is perfectly fine KATHARINE, GREAT MISTRESS OF WHEELS. You pretty much have power over anything that rolls now.

@claytonpeters Thanks CLAYTON, MASTER OF METEOROLOGY. You control the weather now. That's pretty neat.

@PotterMoosh Thanks CRYSTAL, SEER OF FAR-FLUNG FUTURES, the most POWERFUL ORACLE the world has EVER SEEN!

@SphereCase Didn't you get one? Aren't you THE IMOGENATOR?

@kaycanseeyou YAY! Thank you KATIE, DUCHESS OF SALSA (dance AND condiment)

@TupperwareBox :D You are MADZ THE IMPALER. You are SO PALE.

@emmaajedward That's fine, EMMA, PRINCESS OF THE PRESENT. You are in charge of making sure time-travelers don't get disoriented.

@poppybouttell Thanks POPPY, OPIUM PRINCESS! The good kind. From ancient China. Not, y'know, heroin.

@Becz005 YAY for BEC, MISTRESS OF CATS IN CLOTHES. Rule your small, weirdly specific jurisdiction well.

@somegwenperson Hooray for GWEN, PROTECTOR OF 9. We can't got into double figures without your vigilance. *salutes*

@EnglishRedhead That's great HAYLEY, QUEEN OF SPAINS. Any Spain that is not the real Spain, you've got that shit DOWN.

@SphereCase Hooray! Thank you, THE IMOGENATOR! Your special power is to CREATE THINGS FROM YOUR IMAGINATION! Go imagine world peace!

@Abko147 Hooray for PRINCE LIAM OF ORANGE! That's a whole 7th of the colour spectrum you now rule. Rainbows cannot occur without you.

@IFYimcool Thanks ALICE, QUEEN OF WINDOWS. Glass is your willing slave. Also, Bill Gates.

@penguin1124 Either way, you are SAM, PRIME MINISTER OF SMELL. That's a whole sense. Careful how you go.

@danisnotonfire aww :3 Thank you DAN, DEFENDER OF THE LEONINE RACE. It's your job to be a kind and gentle king to the world's lions :P

@HannahCaseyyy Hooray! Then I name you HANNAH, SPRITE QUEEN. You can defeat your enemies with huge torrents of lemonade. Not 7up though.

@beaderrick BEA, HELIUM QUEEN. Balloons are now your willing servants.

@mitziplz haha, best smiley face EVER. Thank you, ELI, MASTER OF THE ARTS. Your smiley faces strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.

@BrettBall Thank you BRETT, LORD HIGH MASTER OF THINGS THAT ARE SHINY. You rule the mirror kingdom. Congrats.

@MeBeDanni That's fine DANNI, DESTROYER OF WORLDS. You destroy worlds, sure, but only uninhabited ones to make new, awesome ones.

@xlaurax Thanks LAURA, SIREN OF THE SEAS. You are friends with the fish. Which is creepy AND awesome.

@Loftio Hooray! Thanks ALEXANDRA, LIGHTHOUSE QUEEN. Basically, you can see in the dark. Also through walls.

@thinkingphrase Hooray for LORD SIMON, CARBMASTER GENERAL. You are the ruler of potatoes, and also the enemy of people on the Atkins diet.

@SophStrawberry Thank you SOPHIE, QUEEN OF THE FOREST. You are now in charge of the tree people.

@nattalieee_ Hooray for NATALIE, PRINCESS OF STAMPS. Your super power is FREE POSTAGE FOR LIFE

@tommylyon Hooray! Thank you LORD THOMAS, DRAGON KING. Your special power is ABILITY TO CONVERSE WITH REPTILES

@LizzieParker Perfect! Thank you LIZZIE, MASTER OF NETS. You can control any net. So if people are wearing fishnet tights, YOU CONTROL THEM!

@courtneyybuzz COURTNEY, QUEEN OF NEWTONIAN PHYSICS. You're really good with momentum and trajectory and gravity...

@BBC_Fangirl LAURA AKA INFRARAY you can see through walls and hear things a mile away. Also, what those TV License vans do? You can do that.

@Marthatorwho MARTHA, DESTROYER OF DALEKS. You're, like, the most useful person on the planet sometimes. :D

@kennydude That's wonderful. You are LORD JOSEPH THE PERSUASIVE. You always win arguments and got your way. And the ladies dig that.

@helenlyhelen Awesome! You are HELEN THE MIGHTY, whose super power is BEING ABLE TO TYPE AT 200 WPM

@FearlessTSwift MOLLIE THE BRAVE, whose super power is BEING ABLE TO PREDICT WHEN THE DOORBELL RINGS FIVE SECONDS BEFORE IT DOES

@JBdaWonderLlama THE ILLAMANATOR, who roams the streets, hunting evil DARK LLAMAS

@xxkathleen KATHLEEN, FORK-QUEEN. You are in charge of every fork there is. Use your power wisely.

@JazzyPants_ JASMIN, PRINCESS OF THE SKY. Birds? Clouds? Planes? You now own 'em. Congrats!

@kirifarrell KIRILLY OF THE HILLS. Your super power is to be able to FLATTEN MOUNTAINS. Construction companies will pay you MILLIONS

@BAMstranks BETHAN, QUEEN OF THE MOON. That's right, you got the MOON. Your super power is SPONTANEOUS SOUP PRODUCTION

@Reganito REGAN, SCOURGE OF WORLDSUCK. Your special power is being able to extend your legs 20 inches IN ANY DIRECTION

@bonnniiee You are BONNIE, DFENDER OF AWESOME. Your super power is winning at card games, like, all the time.

@BeckiiCruel Your super power is being able to bend spoons with your mind. Spoons and wills.

@theojessop Thanks! You are LORD THEO, RULER OF AQUATIC CREATURES.

A Creative Commons Birthday Song

2010-02-16T03:08:00.000-08:00

I wanted to wish YouTube a happy fifth birthday yesterday without violating the copyright on the famous "Happy Birthday" song. Since I'm not in a position to pay royalties, I wrote my own original song and I'm offering it under a creative commons license. I an't imagine you'll want to use it. It's crap. But it carries the virtue of being free. So, use it if you will.

Several commenters on my YouTube channel were surprised to learn that "Happy Birthday is still under copyright. While there are those who doubt that the copyright is valid, the publishers are still collecting some $2 million annually, mainly from motion picture and television productions.

MIckeleh's Take: The copyright will expire in 2030. If I live to be as old as my dad, I might actually survive to hear you sing a royalty-free chorus of the more famous "Happy Birthday." Until then we can make do with this one.

A Song for YouTube's Fifth Birthday by Michael Markman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mickeleh@gmail.com.

Getting Lost My predictions for Season 6 premiere

2010-02-02T16:15:00.000-08:00

The clock is ticking to the premiere of the new season of Lost. This will be my last chance to speculate on what will happen. (Maybe I'm just doing this to compensate for the fact that I refrained from posting any iPad predictions.)

Turns out Jack was right. The H-Bomb goes off. Timelines are reset. The crash never happens. Oceanic 815 lands safely at LAX.

Mickeleh's Take: The series never airs. Abrams, Lindeloff, Cuse, and the entire cast find their bank accounts mysteriously drained of all their earnings from the show. George Bush is still president. We have never heard of Sarah Palin.

Tom Milsom Sings Lady Gaga

2010-02-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

I let the Grammy show go by without saying a word about it. How can I make it up to you?

You can find more Tom Milsom at tommilsom.com

Condensed Cream of iPad U-I Soup

2010-02-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Gizmodo for pulling these key demos clips together from the iPad Keynote

Mickeleh's Take: Knocking the iPad for being "just a big iPod Touch" is a cheap shot. There's a richness to this platform that will become even clearer when it ships and the apps start showing up.

The Party of iPad No Can't Filibuster

2010-01-28T04:04:00.000-08:00

Best Web Browsing or a big blocky question mark? Steve Jobs demonsrates how a lack of Flash support means the video element on the NY Times front page just can't play on iPad.

Even before Steve Jobs had switched off the Reality Distortion Field Generator, objections to the iPad starting pouring out (even from Hitler): no multi-tasking, no camera, doesn't replace my laptop, name sounds uncomfortably tamponic, AT&T. At the same time other folks were reaching for their handkerchiefs to wipe the drool off their chins and developers, sniffing out another app store gold rush were diving into the SDK (software development kit).

It turns out that reactions to the Apple iPad are as sharply divided as the U.S. Senate, but with this important difference: people saying no to iPad don't have the filibuster. The naysayers can't block the yaysayers from buying it.

The first truth about the iPad is that nobody outside of Apple yet knows the truth about the iPad. Of course it doesn't do everything a notebook does. It wasn't intended to. The critical question was posed by Steve Jobs early in the keynote: does iPad do a useful set of things appreciably better than a notebook? The list Steve proposed was this: browsing, email, photos, video, music, and games. I venture it's safe to say that the gaming experience on iPad will smoke gaming on a notebook. As for the others, the jury is out.

What's the experience really like? Will people really prefer it enough to shell out for three devices (phone, iPad, and notebook)? I don't see any reliable way to answer those questions without actually living with it for a couple of weeks. I'm curious about hands-on reports from folks at the launch event, but I don't put much stock in their brief encounters.

The second truth about the iPad is that the product Apple introduced yesterday is just a teaser for the product that will ship in March and April. And that, in turn, will be just a teaser of the product that will be available a year from now. What's missing? The apps and the content deals. And then the next rev of the OS.

Just as today's iPhone is very much defined by the apps available for it, so will the iPad be defined by apps that take full advantage of its larger size and faster processor.

The weeks preceding the launch were filled with rumors about negotiations between Apple and TV networks and print media. If there's truth to those rumors, it's likely that Apple had hoped to tell us more about the glories of subscriptions to content. The negotiations, if they are happening, clearly dragged on beyond intro date. But I think it's safe to expect a number of content-specific apps, not all of them free.

MIckeleh's Take: The party of iPad no has lots of good arguments. But until shipping, they're arguing against a phantom. They can stay on the sidelines jeering as loudly as they want. The iPad will still attract buyers. And the user-experience may well prove revolutionary.

Resetting the Clock on Analog TV

2009-02-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

I reset the countdown timer on the end of analog TV. Obama hasn't signed the bill which just cleared Congress. But since he asked for it in the first place, I'm considering it a done deal. If I'm wrong, I'll change it back.

Calling Foul on Pepsi for Their "Forever Young" Super Bowl Ad

2009-02-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

In the early 80's, when Steve Jobs recuited Pepsi marketer and president, John Sculley to run Apple, he famously challenged him with this question: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"

Pepsi's new marketers have built up immunity to such a challenge with a new ad theme, "Every generation refreshes the world." For today's Pepsi, there's no difference at all between selling sugared water and changing the world. (It's moot point, actually, because Steve Jobs has built up an even stronger immunity to any impulse he might have to hire another Pepsi marketer.)

The ad was exceptionally well crafted and executed, clever in its strategy, superficially enjoyable—but horrible nonetheless.

Here are my top four emotional reasons for wanting to run from the room screaming when this ad comes on. (I don't actually do that, I just press "skip" on my TiVo remote.):

I resent advertisers playing the cheap trick of licensing clips and tunes that trigger treasured emotional memories in the hopes of attaching them to their brand. (I have the last laugh here, because it's my resentment that accrues to their brand.)
I resent advertisers who entice Bob Dylan to sell his image, likeness, and music just to sell sugared water and thereby sully the glorious memory of his previous sellout to Victoria's Secret.
I resent advertisers who entice will.i.am to sell his image, likeness, and performance to enhance sugared water with the emotional resonance of the "Yes We Can" video he did for Obama's campaign.
I resent advertisers asking us to take solemnly the notion that we are what we drink. (At least when Heinkeken asked us to wrap ourselves in the mantle of their brand, they had the good humor to hire John Turturro to ham it up and play the post-modern irony gambit.)

In the classic cola wars going back to the sixties Pepsi has consistently tried to peel younger drinkers away from Coke with a series of youth-oriented campaigns—Pepsi Generation, Choice of a New Generation, For Those who Think Young. Someone must have noticed that members of the original Pepsi Generation are now sixty-somethings. Rather than throw the geezers overboard, they tried to embrace us by offering a split-screen duet of two young generations. From that perspective, the choice of Dylan and his song, "Forever Young," were brilliant.

It was an attempt to map Obama's post-partisan meme onto a post-generational landscape. In Pepsi's world, we now have two young generations, one of which just happens to be collecting Social Security.

Mickeleh's Take: Look closely at the matched images that Pepsi used in the spot. They're all perfectly equivalent except for the styling. The despairing message: nothing has really changed from then to now. It's all the same. It's merely refreshed. Just like the Pepsi logo and packaging. Refresh the logo, refresh the world. Forever young.

The Flavor Packet Song

2009-01-31T11:57:00.000-08:00

This is completely crazy and is mainly a testament to how deranged the world has become. I have (for the day, anyway) a top-rated music video on YouTube.

It's an original song by me (vocal, ukulele, MIDI drums and piano). As of now it's the #27 highest-rated music video on YouTube. (That ranking will, no doubt, start moving south as newer and better videos appear.)

BREAKING: Now it's #18!

The response has been incredible, despite the fact that I struggle to sing on pitch, can barely play, and I'm just stumbling around in the dark on GarageBand, Motion, and the ukulele.

It was done as a guest appearance on a channel called VlogRamen. They call their guest vloggers "Flavor Packets of the Week." Which is why the song is called "The Flavor Packet Song.")

In the UK, it's called "The Flavour Packet Song."

Me and the Gas and the Music

2008-12-29T17:08:00.000-08:00

iPod on shuffle, my eclectic music collection, and a hefty, happy dose of nitrous oxide, while two women whom I don't know all that well used sharp and spinning instruments in my mouth combined to give me a surreal and delightful two-hour cruise. Unlike Gilligan's crew, I have returned. I share with you the playlist. I assume you won't get the same effect I did, but it's the best I can offer without a license to practice dentistry.

Jimi Hendricks Experience: Voodoo Chile
Louis Prima: Angelina-Zooma Zooma
Louis Armstrong: Body and Soul
Carmen Miranda: Mama Eu Quero
Doc Watson: June Apple
Bob Dylan and The Band: It Ain't Me Babe (from Before the Flood)
Carmen Miranda: Weekend in Havana
Count Basie: Miss Thing
Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra: (Keep Your) Sunny Side Up
Bob Dylan and The Band: Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)
London Sinfonietta: Lullaby of Broadway (this 15-minute modern stereo performance transcribed from the soundtrack of Busby Berkeley's 42nd Street was the most surreal, thrilling, and endless passage).
The Beatles: Your Mother Should Know (the loopy version from Anthology)
David Holmes: Let's Get Killed
Red Nichols and His Five Pennies: Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula
Isley Brothers: Twist and Shout
Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers: Blue Blood Blues

At which point I was filled. Really filled.

YouTube Needs Widescreen. But Not All The Time

2008-11-26T01:08:00.000-08:00

In the same way as it has become a real time warning signal for such natural disruptions as wildfires, earthquakes, it was Twitter that first brought me news that YouTube was switching its native player to widescreen.

The first alarm came in all caps.

"WTF WIDESCREEN SERIOUSLY WHAT OMG"

WTF, indeed. YouTube going wide sounds like a good thing. Everything's going wide, even the humble Flip video camera. It's not so much that they did it, it's how they went about it: abruptly, disruptively, and discourteously.

Overnight, YouTube's entire legacy of standard format (4:3) videos were needlessly bracketed with black pillars. Was it really necessary to throw everything into the same 16:9 player? It's software dammit, not that physical collection of toxic metals, glass, and plastic that passes for a TV in my living room.

While many cheered, others were upset. Here's YouTube contributor, Nerimon, railing against this and other YouTube changes.

Side notes on Nerimon's rant: If you're just a casual viewer, many of these issues will seem obscure. But most builders and users of software will recognize the pattern. Unnecessary, unwanted futzing with "ain't brokes," while annoying rough edges remain unsanded and unbuffed. Nerimon is smart, funny, engaged, and a passionate, successful creator of content. He's a great example of the kind of customer who can help guide a development team away from the rocks and toward greater product excellence. If you make any kind of software you should take an earful of Nerimon. Think of him as a younger, funnier Dave Winer. Like Dave, all he asks is that developers listen to and respect their users.

Why frame everything at 16:9? Surely YouTube can detect aspect ratios and put up a player with the right aspect ratio. I did it. And I'm just a marketing dink.

Behold: The same clip, but this time Nerimon rails against pillars that aren't even there.

Is that so hard, YouTube?

It's easy to see why YouTube has to accommodate widescreen. Rival Hulu.com is rapidly growing the internet audience for widescreen, even HD movies and TV. If there are big, Google-worthy bucks to be had in online video, that's where they lie. YouTube has already cut deals with MGM, CBS, and Fremantle Media (those wonderful folks who bring you Idol, Got Talent, Let's Make a Deal).

But much of the active community of vloggers works with 4:3 webcams. Their content is usually a single talking head. Does it serve them well to go wide? Remember what Fritz Lang said when confronted with Cinemascope. It's a great format if you're shooting snakes and coffins.

Community-generated content on YouTube now finds itself competing with corporate media, not only for audience, but for some courtesy from the mothership.

Mickeleh's Take: YouTube big-footed the change without offering a warning to their creative community or providing guidance on how to prepare uploads for widescreen. That was just rude.

This is the Change We Need: Toughest Obama Commercial Yet.

2008-09-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Mickeleh's Take: I thought the last two were on the right track. This one pulls into the station and unloads a can of whup ass. McCain earned this one. As for the rest of us: let's get out there and canvass. Do you know how your neighbors are voting?

Keeping My Old iPhone (for now)

2008-07-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

iPhone 2.0 software delivers 80% or more of the value of the new iPhone HW. I know uber geeks will need the HW upgrade too. They can’t take the embarassment of being seen with an iPhone with a metal back. (Hint: put it in a case. Nobody will know.)

The new HW offers some peachy improvements: faster network, more accurate location finding, improved sound (kind of important in a phone). There's a rude awakening though, folks are discovering that running all those new radios will give you shorter battery life than the first gen iPhone.

The truly revolutionary advances are available through a software upgrade: App store… push notifications… MS Exchange integration… Enterprise IT support… push synchronization with PC’s and Macs… and above all an SDK and developer program. (memo to self: come back and translate this paragraph to human readable language.)

As someone in Redmond said quite famously: “developers! developers! developers!

Mickeleh's Take: If you don’t have iPhone yet, the new total value proposition should give you plenty of reasons to consider.

If you have a first gen… you really don’t NEED the upgrade except to meet irrational urges. (But if it weren’t for irrational urges, life would be pretty dull.)

Ethan Kaplan, Master of Irony

2008-03-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer posts that too many blogs are chasing each other's tails with meta-commentary about meta-commentary and gossip about gossipers. He says, "the end is near" and there's a drought of original thinking. "Most people wouldn't recognize an original thought if it bit them in the ass," he says.

Then, Ethan Kaplan chimes in with: "Wow, I agree with Dave Winer completely on this." Was that an original thought? Or a meta-comment? Or just delicious irony? I vote irony.

Mickeleh's Take: I agree with both of them (and everyone else making this point). But there's nothing new or original in noticing it:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes, 1:10).

On the other hand, it is not true that Ecclesiastes said, "Of the making of many blogs there is no end." That was Sifry.

What I Learned Last Week

2008-03-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the things I learned last week.

The Aurora Bridge in Seattle (over the Ship Canal on Highway 99) is the second most popular suicide bridge in the U.S. (behind San Francisco's Golden Gate).
Some of the jumpers don't wait till they get to the middle of the span where they would fall into the water, but jump from a point that's still over land so they fall into local parking lots, traumatizing the workers.
I'm a very bad prognosticator. I predicted that last week would be a "fine, fun week for Obama fans."
Three big shot tech executives (or ex execs) have signed on with McCain to bring us a third Bush term and a 100 years in Iraq. (Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of HP; Meg Whitman, outgoing CEO of eBay, and John Chambers (CEO of Cisco).
Steve Gillmor—whom I've only known as the wise and far-seeing tech oracle, impresario of NewsGang (a fine compendium of what's new, important, helpful, and interesting) and the NewsGang Live podcast— has also had a long association with members of the Firesign Theatre--and served as a producer on some of their projects (evidenced by the appearance of George Tirebiter on a recent NewsGang Live).
Dr. Bronners Magic Soaps include olive oil that combines the product of a grove owned by a Palestinian with that of a grove owned by an Israeli. (Yes... the hemp oil is still an ingredient; so is the peppermint.
The Prophet Jeremiah had an even harsher message and rougher reception than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Mickeleh's Take: Given my record, maybe I should predict a rough week for Obama fans.

New on the Soapbox: Ferraro's Game of Market Segmentation

2008-03-13T08:39:00.001-07:00

I keep two blogs, one mainly about marketing, the other about politics. But the two practices share a lot of commonality. What is a political campaign but an effort to market a candidate?

Over on the Soapbox, I offer Mickeleh's Take on what Former Congressional Rep. Geraldine Ferraro is up to. It's a nasty, cynical game. It's a game I know well because I play it professionally. She's not a racist. She's a marketer.

The Lord of the Ring: The Resignation of the Gov.

2008-03-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

When did the terminology change from "call-girl service" to "prostitution ring"?

Mickeleh's Take: What's next: "fee-based social media platform"?

(Tag:Spitzer)

The Deaf Dissing the Blind and Other Super Bowl Ad Follies

2008-02-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Super Bowl XLII was one of the rare contests where the game was better than the ads. Uplifting arc: triumph of the underdog. Suspenseful plot: the outcome in doubt until the final seconds. Karmic Justice: comeuppance to a team that may have been unfairly aided by videos with such disruptive potential that the NFL felt compelled to borrow from the CIA playbook and destroy them. Great Play: From the opening, near ten-minute drive putting the Giants on the scoreboard first, to Manning's improbable escape from a near-sack to deliver a 32-yard pass to the vicinity of David Tyree who defied physics to snare it and hold it pinned to his helmet, and the even more improbable ability of the Giants defense to neutralize Brady's brilliance.

But I'm not here to talk about the game.

Coke had one of the best of the heart-warmers, featuring Macy's Parade beloved character balloons breaking their tethers to pursue a Coke balloon. (Spoiler alert: It might have been on-brand for Coke, but isn't it off-brand for Charlie Brown to actually win?) If only Coke had stopped there. Instead they shoveled a few more millions over to Rupert and followed up with one of the worst ads for the game, featuring two of the most unloved, repellant characters in politics (Carville and Frist) in a cliche-filled romp through Washington D.C. "Have a Coke and a retch." You gotta know when to get off the stage.

A couple of sponsors tried to buy our love by doing good. Badly.

Pepsi did a spot to honor the deaf. It was broadcast in silence, rendering it totally inaccessible to the blind. High-consciousness by a pandering soft drink company.

Dell tried to buy cool by supporting (though not mentioning) the elimination of AIDS in Africa. A guy walks through town getting butt-slapped, oggled, tousled, touched, mobbed, cheered and kissed because he carries a Dell notebook branded with (PRODUCT) RED. This is some high-minded town. In my town, I'll bet most people have no idea that (PRODUCT) RED is Bono's co-branding foundation for raising money to fight AIDS in Africa. And they certainly didn't learn that from this spot. All the spot offers up is a mysterious: "Buy Dell, Join (RED). Save Lives." (If you visit Dell's website—or if you saw the announcement at Davos—you'll know that this (RED) series is actually co-branded by Dell and Microsoft Vista. Microsoft, apparently, didn't chip in for the spot. Saving their pennies to buy Yahoo!?)

Anheiser Bush, as usual, dominated the ad buys with strong spots. But this year, all but one were sadistic Bud Light laff riots. The remaining one was the obligatory heart-warming Clydesdale branding spot for Budweiser.

Too many spots, however, were brand forgettable. There were cute dancing lizards promoting something or other. A talking baby bought stocks on a computer from some web site or other. Charles Barkley was obnoxious on behalf of some telephone company that offered a cheap way to let up to five people bother you incessantly at no extra cost. Fox is happy to take your money, folks.

Mickeleh's Take: The best spot of the weekend wasn't on the Super Bowl. It was on YouTube. "Yes, We Can." by Will.i.am, setting riffs from Obama's South Carolina victory speech to music.

(Tags:Super Bowl Ads, XXXXX, Super Bowl, Advertising)

New on the Soapbox: What Hillary and Barack Said about John's Departure

2008-01-30T11:59:00.001-08:00

I have a new post up on the Soapbox comparing the statements that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have issued following the news that John Edwards is dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination.

Naturally, both of them are intent on scooping up as many Edwards supporters as possible. Both have issued gracious statements saluting John and Elizabeth. But Obama's statement is masterful in its ability to both echo and embrace John's language, his passion, and his cause.

Mickeleh's Take: Dave Winer has latched onto a comparison that Chris Matthews used last week on MSNBC: Clinton is Salieri—a workmanlike technician; Obama is Mozart—an inspired master. Comparing what Clinton and Obama have to say about Edwards is yet another example of how apt the comparison is.

(Tags:Edwards, John_Edwards, Barack, Obama, Barack Obama, Hillary, Hillary Clinto, HRC, Campaign, Democratic, Primary)

MacBook Air: John Mayer Nails the Positioning

2008-01-24T12:33:00.000-08:00

Just before he stopped blogging and deleted his archives, John Mayer posted a one line review of MacBook Air which nails the product's positioning:

"Macbook Air... Yes, it really is as cool as it looks. Lean, mean lifestyle workstation..."

(As of this writing, there's a clone of Mayer's site still available on honeyee.com)

When I lived in L.A. I was shocked that for somepeople "working on my tan" is considered a career. But that career is just a by-water of the larger industry, "working on my lifestyle."

By calling it a lifestyle workstation, Mayer captures the essence of MacBook Air. It's executive bling. It's what every consultant would like to whip out at a client meeting, what every status junkie would like to brandish at a conference or executive airport lounge. So what, if features and functionality are compromised to squeeze it into a lust object? "You can't be too rich or too thin." (Google tells me that might have been said by the Duchess of Windsor, but it isn't sure.) Now that there are millions and millions of iPhones out there, you need something to turn heads.

Mickeleh's Take: I bought a New Beetle the first week they went on sale in 1998. It was fun to take a hot and rare product out in public. I'm still driving it and somehow it's not drawing quite the same crowds. But I have my memories. Do I really have to purchase another dose of coolness? I'm cool enough. I'd have thought Mayer was too. Maybe that MacBook post triggered a shock of sanity and he got out of the blogging business and back to work.

(Tags:MacBook Air, John Mayer, New Beetle)

Such A Review! Newsweek's Steven Levy Starts with a Mohel Metaphor

2008-01-24T01:26:00.000-08:00

Three of the four popular press computer mavens have just published their reviews of Apple's MacBook Air. Surprisingly, they say more or less the same things that the bloggers said right after the keynote based on the specs. Go figure.

I'm sure that Ed Baig (USA Today) and Walt Mossberg (WSJ) have valid points of view on Apple's oh so thin sub-notebook. But only Steven Levy (Newsweek) is worth reading. Because only Steven starts his review with a mohel metaphor (Mohel is Hebrew term for ritual circumciser). I believe this is unprecedented in tech reviews.

Mazel Tov, Steven. I'm kvelling here. I want to give your cheek such a pinch.

Update, Turns out the fourth pezzonovate reviewer was actually first; David Pogue, devoted a piece of his Macworld Keynote roundup to MacBook Air last week. See comments.)

Mickeleh's Take: I know this is a just a short post. But if you rub a little...

(Tags:MacBook Air, Apple, Steven Levy, Circumcision)

Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis at Gnomedex. Again.

2008-01-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer today revisited his clash with Jason Calacanis at Gnomedex last August. I'll take that as an excuse to revisit it myself.

One residue of the long long years and late, late nights I spent trying to learn stand-up comedy is that I rarely take sides with a heckler. Except when it's a really good heckle. And last August at Gnomedex Dave Winer popped off with a pretty darn good heckle. Dave's timing was perfect. And he caught a good laugh. Jason was rocked back, but recovered well.

What followed was a heated series of back-and-forth blog posts between Dave and Jason that made it clear this was much deeper than an off-hand heckle. The ripples spread in one of those weekend Techmeme kerfuffles. In the aftermath, Dave and the TechCrunch20 conference parted ways, and then it died away.

Until late September, when Gnomedex host Chris Pirillo posted video of the Jason's session. With the video online, I've been able to confirm my memory—and my point of view—about the event. Here's how it played out for me:

Jason clearly created the opportunity for the heckle by mislabeling his presentation.

The title of the presentation was, "The Internet's Environmental Crisis." The description read:

"The internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters and we can stop them. Jason talks about all the garbage that is being thrown into our internet, and taking a stand against those spammers putting it there."

When Jason took the stage, he amplified that by saying he had asked Chris for the opportunity to speak because Gnomedex was not venture-capital-driven or press-driven event, but people-and-idea driven. (implication: I'm not here to pitch, but to share a POV). OK, I'm naive. And I don't know Jason Calacanis. So I took his title and description at face value.

The first eight minutes of content matched the labeling: a straight-forward historical review and a problem statement about how various Net applications were hijacked by marketers who polluted them with spam--beginning with email and moving through blog comments and search. What Jason called "selfish polluters" were folks who intruded on the user's intent to blast through their own message.

Up to that point, title, blurb, and speech were entirely congruous would have been a great setup for calling us to the barricades in some generalized solution: a movement, a technology, a platform that could end spam in our time (You know, "taking a stand against those spammers.")

But without warning, the grand cause of "taking a stand against those spammers" suddenly devolved into OK, now let me tell you about my new project, Mahalo." Maybe folks who know Jason, guessed that was coming. I don't. And I didn't.

I can't know if Dave was lying in wait for that pitch (pun intended), but he knocked it out of the park. The instant Jason made his left turn at Albequerque, Dave popped off, "what about conference spam?" Boom! there it is.

I thought was both funny and insightful (good funny is insightful, bad funny is just inciteful). From the laughs, the line clearly resonated with others in the audience. (I don't have polling to know how many others.) From the gasps, some folks were annoyed.

Jason seemed stunned and deeply wounded. Or as he put it in a post the next day, he felt "thrown under the bus."

I think I get why Dave's wise-crack hit him so hard. As he recounted, he had given this talk, in pretty much the same form many times before, but only when he had Dave Winer in the audience did he get slammed for it.

Except this wasn't a controlled experiment where Dave Winer's presence was the single changed variable. The context of Gnomedex was an even larger difference, as Jason acknowledged when he first took the stage. At a venture or press conference everyone would have gotten from the purpose of the event that Jason is here to pitch us.

And even at Gnomedex, had the talk been billed as "Here's Jason to tell us what he's been up to lately." or "Successful serial Web entrepreneur recounts his quest for the next big idea". or even "Jason talks about Mahalo, a new, spam-proof approach to search," we in the audience would have been fully immunized against Dave Winer's objections. I can't say Dave would have liked the talk any more. Given what he has consistently said about the product (including today), he would not.

But, he'd have been out of bounds to call it spam.

Mickeleh's Take: The lesson Jason took away was don't speak when Dave is in the audience. The lesson I wish had taken away was be upfront and call a pitch a pitch.

(Tags:Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Gnomedex, Mahalo, spam,)

Good Career Move. It is So Scoble To Explain It All In Depth

2008-01-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Robert Scoble announced and explained his next career move: heading to Mansuetto Digital to serve as Managing Director of a new venture, FastCompany.TV.

Having spent more than a year at PodTech doing video interviews of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Robert chose not to start a new company but to continue being a wage slave.

What is most valuable about what he shared on his blog is a frank analysis and explanation of why he chose to hire on rather than strike out on his own. Mazel Tov, Robert, on the move. And thanks for the insight into how you thought it through.

Mickeleh's Take: To spend more time with my family" is usually the lie that accompanies a resignation. To say it and mean it in connection with a new job is very menschy. The lure (and lucre) of the startup is so dominant in Tech culture, resisting it in favor of just getting a job is sometimes the braver choice. "

(Tags:Scoble, Scobleizer, Careers)

A New Apple Pricing Firestorm? $20 to Upgrade Touch

2008-01-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

Keynote Good News: iPod Touch has five strong new applications which were previously iPhone exclusives: Mail, Google Maps, Weather, Notes, and Stocks. They're included, with a bunch of other enhancements, in all new purchases.

Bad News: If you're an early adopter, hand over twenty bucks to get the new apps. I'm picking up a little grumbling out there. Clint Ecker on Ars Technica says the crowd went wild--and not in a good way. "A unified gasp was let up as well as a rowdy round of jeering." Uncle Speedo on Twitter just gave Steve the Cheney salute. The comments on Engadget are seething.

Look, there's always an early-adopter tax in tech. Moore's law forces it. But with the iTouch app fee coming on the heels of the iPhone price drop, isn't Apple learning to be extra abrasive about irritating its fan base. I wonder if they could have skated with $10?

Mickeleh's Take: Don't gloat, fellow iPhoners, about having these apps for free. We're already paying Apple a monthly tax through AT&T. And we'll get our app fees for sure when the third party apps show up.

(Tags: Pricing, Apple, iPod Touch, iPhone, Keynote)

Macworld Predictions: What's in the Air?

2008-01-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

So, Apple put up a banner in Moscone Center with the line: Something in the Air. In a refreshing blast of sanity, Macworld is still only number six on a Google search of the phrase (as of now, anyway). It's still beat out by an Australian soap opera and songs by Thunderclap Newman and Tom Petty.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere is buzzing with speculation about Wi-Max... really, really light PowerBooks... untethered services and movie downloads for Macs, iPods, and iPhones, and AppleTV.

Maybe. But I'm betting on one of these:

1. Steve Jobs will not appear in person onstage for the Keynote, but will webcast live from overhead as he buzzes San Francisco in the Gulfstream V that the Apple Board of Directors gave him in 2000.

2. Apple will finally offer an aerosole version of Steve Jobs's legendary "Reality Distortion Field." Spray it and get people to believe anything and buy everything.

3. Apple is going to bring us the great Tesla promise of electrical power transmitted through the air. We'll never again have to change or recharge a battery in any remote, phone, camera, toy, or iPod.

4. Apple will announce a strategic alliance with Wham-O to deliver MacBooks shaped like Frisbees. Steve will launch 50 of them out into the keynote audience. One will be caught by a German Shepherd.

5. Steve will have a vegan meal served to folks waiting to get into the keynote which will later induce the entire audience to re-enact the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles.

Mickeleh's Take: In the savviest co-branding stunt since he brought the iTunes store to Starbucks, Apple will join with Cirque du Soleil to replace all the Mac Geniuses with flying trapeze artists who will offer service and support while dangling upside down.

(Tags:Steve Jobs, Macworld, Apple, keynote)

Turning off the Screens, Accoustic Version

2008-01-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Walking in the neighborhood, I saw an acoustic version of the briefly famous stunt blacked out some of the HDTV displays at CES.

My local prankster used hand-cranked methods to flip a bunch of bulletin-board postings face to the wall.

Mickeleh's Take: Not famous, but funny. BTW, the next day all the notices were facing out again.

(Tags:Gizmodo, CES, TV-B-Gone)

The Last Word on Gizmodo v. CES

2008-01-12T06:05:00.000-08:00

Acres of big shiny glass—in the form of large-scale high-definition video displays—are the visual signature of CES.

If you were an anti-consumerist or environmentalist group looking to lodge a protest, make a statement and gain attention, contriving to turn that glittering glass black might get your cause some attention. Of course, you'd be ready to take the heat and proud to stand in the long tradition of civil disobedience running past Martin Luther King, Jr. through Gandhi, to Henry David Thoreau.

Oh wait... they opposed government actions. Never mind. Okay then, the short tradition of Robert Scoble scraping Facebook for email addresses of his friends. ("Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this wall.")

But if you're a reporter for Gizmodo, you do it for the comedy and the bragging rights. If you're the editor of Gizmodo post video to the Web and wait for the laughs and applause. Some laugh. But the grownups are appalled. If you're the publisher of Gizmodo, you tut-tut the whole thing.

The Gizmodians pulled a dumb, hurtful prank that embarrased presenters, devalued the investment companies made in CES, and, naturally, sparked a Techmeme-storm that's now subsiding.

Shout out to Rafe Needleman and Shel Israel for getting the public shaming going... to CEA for responding well--reported by Rafe: No collective punishment for bloggerville. They guy who did it is banned... to Dave Winer for reminding us that the bozo pranker isn't a blogger but a reporter working for a publication. (He was right. Turns out Gizmodo actually had business-class press credentials, not the coach credentials afforded to bloggers.) For those who were alarmed that the stunt tarnished bloggers everywhere, I say, "Huh?" Might as well say it tarnished twenty-somethings everywhere.

Mickeleh's Take: For those who say, lighten up and get a sense of humor about a dumb prank, I say this: I'll tell you what it was. It was heckling, that's what. Two Gizmodians walk into a club—comped no less—and try to impress their dates by talking back to the comics. As Lily von Schtupp said in the old west, "Are you in show business? Then why don't you get your fwiggin' feet off o' the stage." (Madeleine Kahn, I miss you. Mel Brooks, please stick around.)

Personally, I took this up a notch from where CEA had it. I've unsubscribed to Gizmodo in my reader. Brian Lam, I'll miss you. Not as much as I miss Madeleine Kahn, but I'll miss you.

Related: an acoustic version of this prank.

(Tags:Gizmodo, CES, blogging, TV-B-Gone)

Bush Admin To Remake U.S. Currency

2008-01-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul wants to return us to the Gold Standard. Bush & Halliburton have a better idea, move forward to a new monetary standard

Mickeleh's Take: Hats off to the folks at blimptv.net. And to Scott Beale at Laughing Squid for Tweeting about this.

(Tags:Bush, Halliburton)

What's in the Daily News? Or Any Other Paper?

2008-01-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

Kara Swisher, today, says farewell to print and embraces an online-only future. She explains that it's not just about saving trees, but embracing the virtues of the new medium of online journalism.

As if to underscore that drain-circling status of print journalism, there's an online access point for local newsapapers that calls itself a Newseum. (Images flash of Carl Akeley's exhibits of dead animals in The American Museum of Natural History. So lifelike. Except for their stillness.) Joni Mitchel said they put all the trees in a tree museum. Maybe this dead tree museum is it.

Coolest part of the Newseum is an interactive Flash map that lets you see the front page of newspapers around the country and around the world. (There's a faster but less cool list interface as well).

Mickeleh's Take: There's huge diversity in local papers. That diversity is on the endangered species list in the accelerating rush to consolidation. But if Kara is right--she usually is--we might have to file Newseum under "Last chance to See."

(Tags:Kara Swisher, News, Newsapers, Media Consolidation, Online, bloggin)

What Did the RIAA claim about ripping?

2007-12-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

There was another dustup this weekend over RIAA. It was originally spawned in early December by this Slashdot post which found this gem in a lawyer's brief:

Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies...

Is the RIAA really claiming what most of the commentariat has written: "illegal to rip CDs" and "personal compies are illegal," etc.?

As I (a non-lawyer) read the excerpt from the brief, the issue is not simply ripping the files as mp3s, but ripping them and storing them in a shared folder. Can someone take a deep breath and put those two clauses together? Is the loathesome RIAA really arguing against ripping, which surely comes under Fair Use, or against sharing what you've ripped, which in RIAA's view, is simply inviting people to steal it.

Mickeleh's Take: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance but the surcharge of freedom is not crying wolf every time the RIAA sneezes.

(Tags:MP3, RIAA, Sharing, Ripping)

How to User FlickrFan with iPhone

2007-12-28T14:37:00.000-08:00

Open iTunes, Select iPhone from the sidebar and then follow the same steps as outlined in my post on using FlickrFan with AppleTV.

Mickeleh's Take: Apple. Consistent U-I pays off.

(Tags:FlickrFan, Dave Winer, Flickr, iPhone)

How to Use FlickrFan with AppleTV

2007-12-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

I had a couple of inquiries about how I set up FlickrFan to work with AppleTV. Here's how:

To use Photos on AppleTV, you need to sync it with with one of the computers on your home network. I'll assume you've done that.

From the computer that is sync'd to AppleTV launch iTunes. (This is counter-intuitive for many. You'd guess that you'd manage the photos in iPhoto. But it's iTunes that is the master ap for AppleTV. It's a similar U-I to sync'ing with iPhone)

In the iTunes sidebar navigation, select AppleTV and then select the Photos tab. (By the way, you can select iPhone from the sidebar and follow these steps to sync your FlickrFan feeds to your iPhone. It's a tethered update, not a wireless sync, but still... it's cool.)

There's a pop-up menu that manages which photos get downloaded from your computer to your AppleTV. The two choices are to select some albums from iPhoto, or to point AppleTV to a specific folder on your hard disk drive. Select Choose folder...

Then navigate to screenSaverPics inside your Pictures folder. This is the folder where FlickerFan places the photos it downloads from Flickr and the AP.

Each feed appears in its own sub-folder.

Click the button for Selected Photos. Check the ones you want on your AppleTV. In the lower right of iTunes click Apply, then Sync. (The other choice puts all of the photos into one collection. Using this choice lets you be selective in your viewing. And you still get the option to view all.)

Allow a few minutes for the transfer (depending on the speed of your local network). and Voila!

The feeds are there ready for TV viewing. You can look at the whole collection or any individual folder.

Mickeleh's Take: So easy, even a marketing dink can do it.

(Tags:FlickrFan, Dave Winer, Flickr, AppleTV)

Thanks to Dave Winer, my TV has a New Channel

2007-12-28T06:28:00.000-08:00

My TV has a new channel this morning, thanks to Dave Winer, the Associated Press, and a bunch of my friends on Flickr. The channel shows photos—from the news and the lives of my friends. (In case you're wondering, that's a news photo above. Not from the lives of my friends. Back off NSA.)

As timing would have it, the debut of this channel today is dominated by distressing images from Pakistan related to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. (but without the inane gibbering of the cable news anchors.)

After a teasy weekend of buzz building, Dave Winer released the beta FlickerFan, a neat new product that will download photo albums from friends on Flickr and/or the news photo feed from the Associated Press—or any other RSS photo feed.

First round is Mac only and pre-wired to work with the Mac OS Screen Saver. There's huge potential beyond that, which, no doubt, will keep Dave and other clever coders busily digging for a while.

I like the promise of FlickrFan. It's built on a solid, stable code base and web standards, that Dave has been refining all century. I'm having fun with it. I wish Dave much success with it.

That said.

FlickrFan had one of the most bizarre intros I've ever seen--Robert Scoble webcast the first authorized demo from his Qik channel (is that pronounced kick or quick?) from his magic telephone—you heard me. His telephone. Amazing audio quality. Pretty darn good video quality. Another miracle of modern technology.

Gathering an audience with breathless hyperbole on his blog that promised a TV revolution, Robert launched into what seemed like an unplanned, unrehearsed demo. FlickrFan was not well served by being munged in with a bit of AppleTV, Media Center, and Xbox bashing, countered by the promotion of Mac Mini, browsers on TV. All of that is what politicians call "off message." It does nothing but provoke an audience to take issue with you.

Making things worse, the Qik channel had a come one, come all, anonymous chat widget that unleashed the evil wise-cracking gremlins lurking in many visitors. The chat got ugly fast.

You'd think Scoble would have absorbed the basics of how to do a good demo by now.Show the product... what it does... why you'd want it. Above all... plan and rehearse. What will you show? What will you do? What will you say? In what order? It can be loose. It can be off the cuff and conversational. But it can't be chaotically random.

The way Scoble pitched it, the price of admission was--trash your Xbox, put your Apple TV on eBay, buy a Mac mini etc. All for a free download that shows photos. Hmm.

At one point Dave called in to offer some live demo coaching. He didn't seem happy.

For what it's worth, I haven't trashed my AppleTV. I'm synching it with a folder on my G5 where FlickrFan is running. I set it up in about 8 minutes. I'll be sending Dave lots of feedback.

Mickeleh's Take: FlickrFan is a simple free download (for now), easy to install. It adds a bit of a good and a nice to my life. I'm a FlickrFan Fan

(Tags:FlickrFan, Dave Winer, Flickr, AppleTV, Mac Mini, Scobleizer, Robert Scoble)

Super Cool Saudi Arabia

2007-11-22T08:08:00.000-08:00

So, I log on to Facebook and see that my Saudi friend, Essam Al-Ghalib as joined a group called "Super Cool Saudi Arabia." For a minute, I thought it was about the hip side of the kingdom. Turns out that Super Cool is a distributor of window films and coatings that help insulate automobiles and homes against the hot climate.

Mickeleh's Take: If global warming continues, we all may be looking to join the cool kids.

PR Gaming that Still Works: The eBook Fifteen Years Ago

2007-11-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

Fifteen years before Steven Levy had his exclusive with Jeff Bezos and gushed over Amazon's Kindle for Newsweek, Phillip Elmer-Dewitt in Time bowed to some nifty demos and exclusive PR access to a pair of CEOs, resulting in some unskeptical puffery on Voyager Expanded Book series for the Apple PowerBook in 1992:

... makes the experience of reading a book on a screen amazingly close to reading it on paper. "It's the first thing I've seen that I could curl up in bed with," says Nora Rawlinson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

... displays the text on clean white pages that replicate the design of the hardback rather than using the scrolling strings of text so familiar to computer users. A touch of a button turns the page or allows the reader to flip back and forth. Users can dog-ear the corner of a page to mark their place, or attach an electronic paper clip for easy reference. Passages can be underscored or marked on the side, and there are generous margins for putting down notes.

The computer also brings benefits not offered by ordinary books: a backlit screen that permits reading in a darkened bedroom without disturbing a spouse, the option of enlarging the type to reduce eyestrain, the ability to copy passages onto a "notebook" page, and a search feature that displays occurrences of any chosen word, name or phrase. This last option could prove handy for, say, recalling the identity of an obscure Dostoyevsky character who suddenly reappears after 100 pages.

Here come those same features and bennies again in Kindle (plus some substantial new ones thanks to the networking and Amazon's back end).

BTW, Brian Caulfield in Forbes, and Seth Weintraub in 9to5Mac both compare Kindle unfavorably to iPhone as a platform for eBooks. The sharpest comparison —with the zingiest headline— is from John Paczkowski at Digital Daily.

Today, there's another company called Voyager. This one's in Japan. Guess what they're selling? Ebooks for iPhone and iPod.

Mickeleh's Take: I was at Apple when Expanded Books was launched for PowerBook. Neat idea. Good feature set. But you had to work hard at really liking the experience. PR can get you only so far. It's really up to the customer experience to deliver. Wait patiently for customers to report on the experience of Kindle.

(Tags:Voyager, eBook, Kindle, Amazon, Time, Newsweek, PR, Apple)

Amazon's Shiny New Thing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

2007-11-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

This year in tech started with Steve Jobs eclipsing all the news from CES by cranking up the reality distortion field in a rocking demo of the iPhone at Macworld. Result: instant off-the-charts technolust, teaser ad at the Oscars, anticipation, brilliant PR and advertising buildup, lines around the block, and last week's cover in Time as Invention of the Year. (Yes, and a healthy dose of carping about closed-system, locking to AT&T, bricking, etc.)

As the window for this year's new products closes, Jeff Bezos snags the cover of Newsweek with a Steven Levy exclusive that goes ga-ga for Amazon's new electronic book reader, Kindle. (That's, of course, the gold ring in the tech PR game: offer an exclusive to an A-list mainstream writer in exchange for a cover and hope for a gushing preview.)

But if Bezos is checking Techmeme or his opening share price this morning, he may be disappointed. The shiny-new-toy crowd is raining skepticism and scorn (Scoble calls it "hate") on the product even before it's official announcement. Jeremy Toeman predicts failure in a well-argued piece, calling it a solution in search of a problem. Many folks pronounce it ugly. (Levy blogs that it doesn't really look as bad as the photos suggest. File that under faint praise.)

Here's my take on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good:

The Amazon brand will put the category of ebooks into play more effectively than any other current player. It's already interrupting us on the way to buy books the old-fashioned way. You can't buy that much exposure.
The always-on networking (they call it Whispernet, in honor of the stereotypical shushing that librarians are lampooned for in cartoons?) makes it ideal for subscriptions to newspapers, periodicals, and blogs—and impulsive shoppers who need instant access to books. (I need a couple right now, and Kindle would save me a trip to the library or the local Barnes & Noble). It's an on-demand world.
The hygiene factors seen about right: size, weight, screen brightness, battery life.
If you rely on a suite of specialized reference books, you can have them always at hand.
Another thoughtful and practical instantiation of concepts from Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay can make books more useful with personal annotations, cross-referencing, and community commentary.

The Bad:

DRM will lock your purchases to the device. Can you share books with family members? Pass them on to friends? Re-sell them?
With the New York Times dropping the pay wall and Wall Street Journal about to, isn't it swimming upstream to sell newspaper subscriptions for an ebook?
Where iTunes and iPod made it easy (if a bit tedious) for me to capture the music from my CD collection, I cant digitize my existing library. The only way to get books into the Kindle is to buy them again from Amazon. Publishers will love this. Amazon will love this. I won't.
The price ($399) is high. And this unecessary object falls pretty low on the list of unecessary toys that I lust for–especially for an object whose main purpose is to insert another siphon into my bank account.
That name. Kindle? Books and Kindle don't go together. Sorry.

The Ugly

An iPhone, it's not.

UPDATE: Joel Johnson offers some useful information on Boing Boing. The system isn't as closed as I feared. There are a number of ways to get files onto it besides just buying them from Amazon.

In the mid-nineties, The Voyager Company (progenitor of The Criterion Collection) offered a series of Expanded Books for the Apple PowerBook—distributed on floppies. Among their titles, The Annotated Alice, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Jurassic Park. The time wasn't right. The hardware was too heavy. The fonts were hard on the eyes. We're a lot closer now to delivering a good experience with the technologies available to Amazon.

But books—physical, dead-tree books—are just fine. And very hard to beat.

Mickeleh's Take: Ebook readers are inevitable. But they will be slow in coming. Most of the early Kindle-bashing (including mine) is just hypothetical. The proof will be in the U-I and the experience. Ignore everything you read today about Kindle—including this. Tune in again next week for real experience. But not here—I'm sitting this round out.

(Tags:Amazon, Kindle, Amazon Kindle, Bezos, iPhone)

KIndle? As in Farenheit 451? Pollution-free bookburning

2007-11-18T17:52:00.000-08:00

Hey, Bezos? You're calling your e-book reader Kindle? As in book-burning? Fast-forward to when the fascists take over. Oh wait, maybe that's happened. OK. Fast-forward to when the fascists can drop their mask. My library is DRM'd. I have an always-on connection to Amazon headquarters. Book-burning can be replaced by pollution-free book-zapping.

Mickeleh's Take: Memo to self: stop blogging like a paranoid nerd. You're already on that list. But seriously, folks: is naming an electronic book reader Kindle, a) arrogant, b) brilliant, c) clod-headed, or d) daring?

(Tags:Amazon, Amazon_Kindle, Bezos, e-book)

Will Open Social Beat (or even match) the User Appeal of Facebook

2007-10-31T08:01:00.000-07:00

To many folks open equals good and closed equals evil. So the news that Google will promote an open API for social media across the web, is quickly short-handed to "Google unleashes Facebook killer."

Not so fast, say I.

Don't lose sight of the strong user appeal of Facebook--a large part of which is predicated on the fact that it's a walled garden--simple, neat, cozy, consistent. And Facebook is where my friends are. Not just my geeky friends who fly mothlike to any new shiny thing that launches on the web, but my tech-laggard friends, too.

The open question on Open Social is what user experiences will developers create? Will they appeal to and resonate with a broad public?

Open Social may have more potential than Facebook. But whether that potential is realized will depend not on what developers and advertisers see in it, but what users see.

When social is everywhere, will social be special? Or just the price of admission.

Mickeleh's Take: Remember when Zune was touted as an iPod killer? Remember that iPhone, (closed, locked iPhone) is a runaway hit.

(Tags:Google, Open Social, Facebook)

Three Reasons I'm Not Reviewing Leopard. Yet.

2007-10-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

[note to Techmemers: this post isn't about installing Leopard on a PC.]

1. I don't have it.
If I had ordered it from the Apple Store online—or headed out to the Bellevue Square store to buy it, I would have it now. Instead, I ordered it from Amazon. Where Apple shipped in advance for arrival on Friday, Amazon shipped on Friday for arrival next week. This was a tactical blunder on my part, but I'll blame it on Harry Potter. Amazon managed to get me a copy of Deathly Hallows on release day. I assumed they'd do the same for Leopard. Silly me.

So while everyone else is Twittering and blogging about unboxing, installing, waiting, and hating the reflective Dock, I got bubkis.

I tried to escape into the real world so as not to feel like such a laggard. But at a restaurant last night, our waiter, Hector, spotted my iPhone and asked me if I had Leopard yet. I had to admit that I didn't. He said, "How come, it came out yesterday, you know." I didn't deduct his geekly oneupmanship from his tip. But I thought about it. (Hector didn't have a review for me. He had sent his girlfriend to the Apple store to pick up the disks, but he had to leave for his shift, before the installation completed. He was dying to get back to it.)

2. You don't need me.
Come on, you've already read at least five reviews of Leopard. If not, Techmeme has a handy list. So does Google. (Hmmm. Maybe I should blog a review of the reviews, complete with a feature checklist. Memo to self: deprioritize that task.)

3. I'll write about it after Thanksgiving.
What I'm planning to report on is whether Leopard in any way changes my work, world, play, and social graph in any significant way. And that's going to take some time to develop. (Unless like R. Crumb's meatball, Leopard confers instant enlightenment. Based on the reviews
read so far, it doesn't).

Mickeleh's Take: Hector, if we meet again, you'll have to tell me what you think of Leopard.

(Tags:Leopard, Mac OS X, Apple, Mac, Macintosh)

iPhone Tip: Looking up Businesses? Use Maps.

2007-10-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Quick tip for iPhone users: If you're looking for the phone number of a local business, use Google Maps for a fast, filtered search—even if you're not trying to map the location. You'll get a short list of candidates, and when you tap the the arrow in the label attached to the map pin, you'll get name, address, phone number, and URL (if they have a website). It's one tap to dial, go to the website, or save the listing in your Maps bookmarks, or add a new listing to your phone contact list.

Mickeleh's Take: I use map searches most frequently for phoning in reservations to restaurants. I'd love a mash-up of Zagats with Google maps.

(Tags:iPhone, iPhone_tip, travel)

Social Media Tracking SoCal Wildfires

2007-10-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Robert Scoble for pointing to this Google Mashup from the L.A. Times that tracks the fires currently burning in Southern California.

Allen Stern, commenting on Scoble's site also links to his own page tracking the fires.

There is some dramatic coverage posted to Flickr. And YouTube.

My prayers and good thoughts for the saftety of all.

Apple Earnings Blow Past "Whisper Number"; Just Warming Up

2007-10-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Apple on a reporting spectacular quarter and fiscal year. From the official release:

The Company posted revenue of $6.22 billion and net quarterly profit of $904 million, or $1.01 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $4.84 billion and net quarterly profit of $542 million, or $.62 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 33.6 percent, up from 29.2 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

They did over $24 billion in revenues for the year.

The current quarter should be even more spectacular. It's traditionally Apple's best. Leopard will ship. People who have deferred hardware purchases to wait for Leopard will buy Macs. The new iPods continue to be a popular gift. And the iPhone is charging ahead at $399. But, of course, with everyone expecting great results, the pressure gets even higher to beat those expectations.

Mickeleh's Take: For anyone holding Apple shares, it's time to sell just a few and tip the croupier by buying some Apple goodies.

(Tags:Apple, Apple Earnings)

Oops! New iPhone Ad Refers to a Site That Requires Flash

2007-10-22T04:57:00.000-07:00

Oops. Watching TV last night, I saw an embarrassing new spot in the iPhone testimonial campaign. It features Ken Davenport, producer of the off-Broadway play, My First Time.

He talks about how he uses iPhone to access the fan site for his play and gauge audience reaction.

I happened to have my iPhone in my pocket. I Googled "My First Time" and found the play's website. Oops! It's a Flash site. And iPhone doesn't run Flash.

You can watch the Apple spot here.

Mickeleh's Take: Maybe I should do a testimonial about how watching TV with the iPhone in hand lets me be a goofy nerd and bust commercials.

(Tags:iPhone, Advertising, Flash, My First Time, Ken Davenport)

Markoff Didn't Do the Math on Leopard vs Vista Pricing

2007-10-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

John Markoff in this morning's NYT gives Steve Jobs a platform to tout Friday's release of Mac OS X Leopard. While Jobs graciously declined to comment on Vista's slow sales and lackluster reviews, he did slip in a zinger about pricing. He said that with Leopard, "“everybody gets the Ultimate edition and it sells for 129 bucks, and if you go on Amazon and look at the Ultimate edition of Vista, it sells for 250 bucks.”

Right. And Steve's other point: Apple has been tossing out a big cat every year and expects to keep it up for another decade.

On the other hand, it took Microsoft seven years to get Vista out the door, with Windows 7 slated for 2010.

So, Microsoft collects their $250 upgrade tax twice in the decade ($500) and Apple collects their $129 tax eight times ($1032). It's the ol' "eight easy payments" game

(OK, there's a big fallacy in this analysis: nobody keeps a computer for ten years. At some point(s) you get a new computer with the OS bundled. And surely the 2010 versions of either Mac OS or Windows won't even run on a 2000 vintage computer. On the other hand, in a multi-computer household, there are always a few computers that will need the upgrade. The screen-sharing features in Leopard will create viral pressure to promulgate this upgrade. Except among the paranoid.)

Mickeleh's Take: I never doubted that Apple could sustain another decade of innovation. The only question is have they run out of cat names? After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard where do we go now? Tabby?

And, yes. I've already ordered the family pack.

(Tags:Leopard, Vista, Mac OS X, Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Markoff, PC)

Can Leopard's Super-Smart Client Make Us Love Email Again?

2007-10-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Apple is on the verge of releasing an email-on-steroids client as part of Leopard (next major release of Mac OS X, slated for Oct. 26). The release hits at a time when alternatives to email are in ascendance. (see, for example this Business Week debate in which Robert Scoble steps forward as the champion for the "moving past email" camp.)

So it's worth asking, is Apple on to something or out of step with the zeitgeist? How will Leopard's mail fare in a Web 2.0, social net world?

Prince McLean at Macinsider has the history of mail on Macintosh, including third-party software and the major tributary branch that began at NeXT. McLean covers two massive, visionary, but unsuccessful and largely forgotten projects from the 90's, PowerTalk (AOCE) and Cyberdog. Both of these projects could be poster-children for how Apple went off the rails during the Steve Jobs interregnum; they overwhelmed available hardware, underwhelmed the market, and screwed the developers.

They also were terribly timed and irrelevant before they shipped. They completely misread the impact of the dominance of Windows, the rise of Internet-based mail standards and the explosion of the Web as a mass-market phenomenon. (Cyberdog had a Web browser, but in those days, Netscape had the world's attention, setting the pace for innovation and enhancements to HTML. Cyberdog could only chase after the evolving Web like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit.)

In McLean's article, this past is prologue to a rundown of what's in the Leopard version of Apple's email client. If you want to skip the history, you can start right in with his description of what's ahead on page 3. It's almost as breathless as Apple's marketing page for Mail.

The new Mail will bid to be a center of our personal workflow, incorporating to do lists, notes, RSS reader and smart integration with Calendar and Address Book and more—thanks to the return of Apple Data Detectors. (This bit of technology from pre OS X days can parse your email for events, addresses, contact info and intelligently offer to file it or act on it.)

Mickeleh's Take: Email isn't going away any time soon. Apple's approach has the potential to transform the way we deal with it. But exploiting the full potential of the features baked into Leopard's email client will require lots of behavioral change on the part of the user. I'm skeptical, yet hopeful. But the acid test is whether Apple's new mail client will seduce Scoble.

(Tags:Leopard, email, mail.app, NeXT, Apple, Mac OS X, Scoble)

Loren on the Plight of the iPhone unLocker

2007-09-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

Our story so far: Apple releases the iPhone. It only works with AT&T in the USA. Some folks hack it to unlock it for use with any mobile carrier (losing some features in the process, but gaining freedom). Apple discovers that some of these hacks "cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable" after the next software update. Oops.

Loren Feldman, of 1938 Media, master of empathy, commiserates with the brave souls that unlocked their iPhones.

Mickeleh's Take: Look on the bright side: you still get your $100 store credit.

(Tags:iPhone, , unlocked iPhone , Apple, 1938 Media, , Loren Feldman, funny, humor)

Microsoft Tool Forecasts Continued iPod Dominance over Zune

2007-09-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

Steve Rubel points to a new Microsoft tool that helps advertisers sharpen their ad buys by rating the Online Commercial Intent of various queries and visits to websites. The idea is to rate the value of advertising not simply by counting impressions exposed to a target audience, but by whether the audience visiting a given site or entering a given query has a commercial intent to purchase.

Enter a URL or a query into a tool and you get a rating. Rubel lists various popular sites by their Commerical Intent index, with Consumerist and Gizmodo ranking at the top and Web 2.0 faves Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter ranking near the bottom. (Bear in mind that there's a hefty disclaimer saying this is merely proof of concept and "the tools do not provide or display conclusive results; rather, they are designed ro produce anecdotal information that might indicate a trend or behavior that seems pertinent to an individual advertiser.")

For fun, I tried queries on iPod and Zune. Turns out that people searching for iPod have better than a 93% commercial intent, while those searching for Zune have between a 68% and 76%.

Oddly, the tool won't give you the same number twice in a row. For Zune the results varied widely: successive submissions yielded results of 0.7259, 0.7496, and 0.65499.

Mickeleh's Take: Anybody remember back a year when Zune was promoted as the iPod killer?

Google Docs May Be Good. Their Video is Great

2007-09-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

Today, Google fills out their online application suite with a presentation tool. I don't have time to evaluate it and review it. I don't need to, because I'm sure that others are rushing to do so. Check with Techmeme.

What I'd like to do is review the marketing video that introduces the concept on Google's blog. The video was made by CommonCraft and it's brilliant in its simplicity and clarity. CommonCraft, by the way, is two folks who live just across the lake from me in Seattle: Lee and Sachi LeFever.

They found simple visual metaphors, a low-cost production technique and, above all, they make the benefit of the product crystal clear. If you need to explain something complex, get in touch with these folks.

Mickeleh's Take: I love that you can see the strings. That's the coolest thing about this video.

iPhone Early Adopter Tax refund? (Thanks Unca Steve)

2007-09-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

I'm sure there's something I'll be able to do with my $100 store credit. Kudos to Apple for responding so quickly to the waves of resentment triggered by the sudden dramatic price drop on iPhone.

I'm in New York with the MWA production crew that put on the HP event last night. Two of my colleagues (including the actual MW of MWA) snapped up two of the now cheaper iPhones.

I'm posting from the Apple Fifth Avenue Store looking for Genius Bar service since my MacBook suddenly decided to show me the dreaded folder icon instead of booting up.

The place is mobbed at 10:15. Everyone is schnorring some free computer and internet access. Except for the fact that there are no drinks and no chairs. And the tables are a little low for comfort, the place has the feel of an Internet Cafe.

One of my fellow net schnorrers is dealing with the low table by adopting a Senator Craig style wide stance. But with the trousers up.

That iPhone Early Adopter Tax (shrug)

2007-09-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

I missed the announcement yesterday. (I was working with the MWA team on producing the HP product event that ran last night, and somewhat pre-occupied.)

I learn this morning that Apple had revved the entire iPod line, but the only bit that penetrated my pre-occupations yesterday was the price-drop on the iPhone. (The Jefferson Graham and Ed Baig Q&A with Jobs focused on the price drop and captured the lede this morning on Techmeme as well.)

The only email I got on Apple's event this morning was on the price-drop. Someone asked me if I had any theories. Yeah, I got a theory: Steve wants to sell a shitload of iPhones.

iPhone was clearly designed (and marketed) for the mainstream. Apple is buying a lot of TV time to get the iPhone mini-demos in front of gazillions of viewers. But $600 for a phone is not mainstream pricing. Frankly, neither is $400. Ah, but $400 as a price-drop from $600? Now that smells like a bargain.

Mickeleh's Take: A price drop on iPhone was inevitable and widely predicted. The surprise was the timing. So soon? I paid $200 for only six weeks of what Owen Thomas pegs as nothing more than smugness? Did I overpay? Could I have bought that much smugness for less? Probably not.

(Tags:iPhone, Pricing, Apple, Steve Jobs)

Criswell & Scoble Predict

2007-08-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Here's my take on the recent unpleasantness instigated when Robert Scoble offered sweeping (and very unlikely) predictions of the future of search.

Back-story for those who don't follow these things. (For those who do, then skip to "for those who do.") Actually, for most of those who don't follow these things, this is your stop.

Last weekend, Robert Scoble posted videos to his Kyte channel with some brave predictions about the future of search. A ton of bricks fell on him. He cataloged some of the heaviest bricks on his blog. The refuteniks rated Scoble's original video somewhere to the south of the immortal Criswell opening of Plan Nine from Outer Space.

Many bits were slaughtered, splayed, and sprayed through the ether in the mayhem that ensued. Robert fought tirelessly and railed against his enemies (Nixon nostalgia?) until Dave Winer reminded him that he actually knew better. Dave can get Robert to listen (sometimes). Things changed. But while Robert responded to Dave's post, IMHO, he never quite embraced the essence of it.

For those who do follow these things, pick it up here:

I think there were (at least) six layers to this perfect storm.

1) Robert's predictions about the future of four companies—unlikely scenarios based on misperceptions and shaky assumptions;
2) Implied endorsements and embrace of Mahalo, Techmeme, and Facebook--and the entrepreneurs and/or developers behind them.
3) Robert's presentation and medium—unsearchable, unskimmable, requiring a higher investment on the audience than text; (and being harder to revise and improve before posting.)
4) Robert's persona in the videos as all-knowing oracle—belied by the preposterousness of the story and incompleteness of his knowledge; He didn't present it as a hypothesis to be tested and vetted, but as a done deal. (Did anyone hear the famous Scoble laugh in the Skype videos? I confess, I bailed long before the end, so I don't know for sure.)
5) Robert's standing and status in the blogosphere—which will always draw challengers.
6) The size of the bet that Robert made by the magnitude of his claims—he was going for broke and claiming first chair in the visionary section.

Some of the prominent participants in the melee were clearly gunning for Robert based on 4,5,6. (And you know who you are.)

It became impossible to track the conversation back to layer 1 where the collaborative dynamics of "we'll fact check your ass" apply. Anything less than agreement became an attack.

It's clear, however, that Dave's relationship with Robert gave him a unique standing to break his cycle of defensiveness.

Mickeleh's Take: If it were possible for everyone to focus on the top layer and talk about the story and why it might or might not be plausible, the conversation would have had a different tone.

Note To Politicians Planning to Take August Off

2007-07-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

August is much in the news lately. We've come to the point where months get two weeks of promotion just like new movies.

What we're told about August is that the Iraqi parliament plans to take it off. So does the President. So does the U.S. Congress. But not, of course, the soldiers and marines serving in Iraq.

So here's something to think about during the month of August. The month is named is named for the Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar about whom Edward Gibbon wrote:

... it was easy for him to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial.

Know any current "remote wars" that might apply to? "... the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial."

Mickeleh's Take: Hey, Bush: Still looking for legacy? Try peace. You've already demonstrated you're hopeless at war.

Scoble fires back at Nielsen.

2007-07-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

Did Jakob Nielsen actually attack anyone in his recent Alertbox?

Doesn't really matter. Robert Scoble, took it personally and worked himself into a high dudgeon. (BTW: Do dudgeons come in low and medium, too? or is it only high?)

(Cue Carly Simon: "You're so vain. I'll bet you think this blog is about you. Don't you? Don't you?")

OK, here's da ting: Suppose that Nielsen had advised people to be like Scoble. That advice would be impossible to follow. Scoble is a force of nature. He never stops. He's relentless.

When I was ten, my piano teacher told me that in my entire lifetime I could never even copy all of the music that Bach composed in his lifetime. Likewise with Scoble. I could never just watch all the videos he produces. I could never even read all the posts he writes, all the tweets he tweets, and I don't even want to think about keeping up with him on Facebook.

Robert Scoble is generous and open, often wrong and insufferable, but right more than wrong. If journalism is the first draft of history, Scoble's blog is the zero draft sketchbook. But that's okay, because he's gathered an audience of friends, fans, boosters and detractors who provide corrective wisdom or unbridled inanities that make Scoble appear wise by comparison.

Mickeleh's Take: Here's why Nielsen's advice is better than Scoble's: a mere mortal has a chance of following it. There's no point in trying to be Scoble. The job's taken. (Oh, and by the way, didn't Scoble actually follow Nielsen's advice when he worked with Shel Israel to write Naked Conversations?)

PS: I read Scoble much more often than I read Nielsen. But I have a t-shirt with Nielsen's picture on it.

(Tags: Jakob Nielsen, Robert Scoble, Scoble, Shel Israel, Blogging)

Can I Post on Jakob Nielsen's Advice Not to Post?

2007-07-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen makes a cogent case for slowing the pace of discourse. He favors writing serious, well-researched articles rather than snappy blog posts. (Scoble, Winer, Israel, et al. not withstanding.) Whether your aim is to promote yourself as an individual expert or to promote your business, Nielson argues for quality and substance over quantity. (My favorite blogger who embodies this philosophy: Guy Kawasaki)

Nielsen may be right. But it doesn't matter any more. Our brains are hopelessly scrambled and scrunged. After a decade of blogs, two decades of PowerPoint and SMS, six decades of TV—both programming and advertising—and a century of research and development in how to by-pass logical discourse that runs from from Hopkins to Bernays to Goebbels to Luntz, it's just too late. If people don't get it in a quick emotion-charged hit, they're on to the next thing. We're always reaching for the clicker—whether it's the remote or the mouse.

Jakob is standing athwart history. The game was over before it began. The late Neil Postman nailed it in his 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. We've moved on to the age of the sound bite embodied by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. (If they merged, they'd have a great name. But is it for a law firm? ad agency? or do they do repo for auto loan companies?)

Update: Scoble fires back at Nielsen. (But did Nielsen actually fire at Scoble?)

Mickeleh's Take: It's the age of the dot-com meets the dot-dot-dots. Walter Winchell, Herb Caen, you left too soon.

(Tags:Blogging)

iPhone Parody Ad: The Real Internet (minus Flash)

2007-07-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Scoble for the pointer. (Scoble is prowling and posting from the iPhoneDevCamp being held at the Adobe offices. Y'know Adobe... the folks who sell Flash. But this isn't Adobe's conference; they're just one of a couple dozen sponsors of this BarCamp. Oh, and it's most certainly not Apple's conference, either.)

Mickeleh's Take: I knew I was wise to wait. (Keep telling yourself that, Mickeleh. How long will you be able to hold out?)

(Tags:iPhone, Flash, iPhoneDevCamp)

On the Soapbox: Top Ten Rants on the Scooter Commute

2007-07-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Over on the political side, I've linked to the top ten rants I've seen on the Scooter Commute. (It goes to eleven and includes some bonuses.)

Mickeleh's Take: They knew we'd be outraged. But they're counting on the outrage to fade quickly as some other news crowds this out of the headlines. The best ways to keep it in the headlines: write to Congress. Encourage inquiry. Blog about it. Write letters to the media. Post on Other blogs. And stay informed.

Steve Jobs' Other June 29 Product Launch: Ratatouille

2007-06-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

If Steve Jobs had just brought us the iPhone on June 29, 2007, dayenu--it would have been enough. But that date also marks a simultaneous launch of a groundbreaking product from Steve's other company, Pixar (now in the corporate maw of Disney): Brad Bird's Ratatouille. (If you're lucky enough you can find out where it's playing on your iPhone.)

The review I'd write, had I time and talent is by A.O Scott in the New York Times. But don't read the review until you've seen the movie. Scott gives away too much that you should have directly from Bird.

Bird takes the standard formula for commercial success in animation (write for the kiddies and throw in some sophisticated jokes and cultural references to keep the parents from squirming) and turns it on it's head. Ratatouille is a film for adults about the essence of excellence and the soul of creativity with enough madcap mayhem, chases, fireworks, spills and gags to keep the kiddies from squirming. (It's been known since the dawn of movies: falling into water is funny. Remember that if you ever want to make a comedy.)

As in The Incredibles (2004) Bird finds a way to translate the look of drawn caricature into the language of 3-D models. The character design is hilarious, and the character development is rich and distinct—even for the supporting cast. As in every Pixar feature, the look of every frame is meticulous, thoughtful, and invested with love and delight of craft. The best Pixar features are love songs to the worlds that inspire them. Just as Cars bursts with deep knowledge and joy of car culture, Ratatouille takes food, kitchens, and restaurants seriously. The filmmakers tackle the challenge of depicting the senses of smell and taste without resorting to the cartoon cliche of wavery, wafting, smoky aroma lines. This film is so delicious, you can almost taste it.

Moore's law and an army of clever coders will guarantee that each year's crop of big budget animated movies will have richer palettes of texture, lighting, fire, fur, and liquids to throw up on the screen, But what catches our breath and holds our attention in a Pixar film is not the atmospherics, but the story. No one works harder or better at building animation stories than Pixar, and Ratatouille has, perhaps, their best, most satisfying story ever. Director Bird also has screenplay credit on Ratatouille and shares story credits with Jim Capobianco and Jan Pinkava.

Mickeleh's Take: As a meditation on excellence and creativity, Ratatouille can be taken as a commentary on iPhone. Great movies and great products (like great kitchens) are the product of teamwork, top ingredients, dedication, risk, and love. They also are expressions of a singular, driven, creative vision. Chuck Jones said that it's combination of a lot of work and a lot of love, but when it's done right, all you notice is the love. Thank you, John Lasseter. Thank you, Steve Jobs. Thank you, Brad Bird.

(Tags: iPhone, Ratatouille, Apple, Pixar, Animation, Movies, Steve Jobs, Brad Bird)

iPhone is Bigger than Paris Hilton (Today, Anyway)

2007-06-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

As the six o'clock iPod launch hour marched westward across the U.S. time zones, CNBC gave it the kind of coverage that cable usually reserves for wayward blonds, and school shootings. Feeds from Palo Alto, San Francisco, Walnut Creek, New York, and Chicago. Pundits, geeks, business folks gladly volunteering to become props and shills for the promotion of iPhone. The privilege of being in line was payment enough. (except for those few who sold their place in line to the more privileged and less sane at prices from $400 to $700.)

Mickeleh's Take: Kudos to Apple for a communications and PR blitz that managed to knock coverage of America's wayward blondes off the air for a few hours.

(Tags: iPhone)

Survey Most Dem Candidates Use Linux; Repubs, Microsoft

2007-06-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

Kos points to a survey by Douglas Karr of the server software running presidential candidate websites. Kos notes:

... several Republican campaigns are using Rackspace, which is one of the most expensive hosts around. That's money pissed down the series of tubes. Most Republicans are on Windows, most Democrats are on Linux. The lone Democrat to host their site with the evil empire? Hillary's, of course.

Mickeleh's Take: There may be more to that Hillary/1984 parody than we thought.

(Tags: Windows, Linux, 2008)

Does this mean Cory Doctorow Isn't Getting an iPhone?

2007-06-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Pop Quiz: Which of Apple's iPhone partners is famous for the motto "Don't be evil"?

Hint: it's the one that finds seafood restaurants for people in San Francisco who hanker for calamari while watching Pirates of the Caribbean.

If you answered AT&T, you might want to take a refresher course at the university of Boing Boing with Professor Doctorow. He doesn't actually say they're evil, but he does call them scumbags and vows, "Seriously: the only day I wouldn't piss on AT&T is if they were on fire."

A tip of the Mickeleh Yarmulke to my sister for pointing me to Cory's post.

Mickeleh's Take: If anybody sees Cory Doctorow with an iPhone, ask him who his carrier is.

(Tags: ATT, AT&T, iPhone, Cory, Cory Doctorow)

Are People Ready for Another Techmeme Circle Jerk?

2007-06-23T09:36:00.001-07:00

You bet they are. It's the weekend, so out in the blogosphere, you'll find a gazillion people ready to spend their time reading and writing, huffing and puffing about some grand ethical issue exposed by Valleywag and facilitated through Techmeme.

And what are people ready to churn up the internets about this weekend? It's a John Battelle-brokered scheme to let A-list bloggers pocket some Microsoft bucks in return for a saying a few words about a Microsoft marketing coinage. (These would include, for example, a famous A-lister whose nose turned in the direction of up at this declassé version of blogging for dollars. But who now takes the Talmudic view that it's okay for a woman to lie about her age because everyone knows that's what they do.)

Mickeleh's Take: If I were to have an opinion about this one it would be Dave Winer's. And if I were to point to someone who handled this almost honorably, it would be Om Malik. (I say almost, because a close reading reveals he's offering only an "I'm sorry you were offended" non-apology perfected by politicians. I say honorably because he promises not to do it again.)

But I'm sitting this one out. Disclosure: nobody paid me for not offering an opinion.

(Tags: techmeme, people ready, Microsoft, Pay Per Post, Federated Media)

YouTube on AppleTV; it lasted a night, now it's down; back after power-cycling

2007-06-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Had some folks over to play with AppleTV (now with the great taste of YouTube).

Here's the good news: It's fun. If you have folks in the room, browsing on TV changes the YouTube experience into a comfortable social experience. Some of the clips look very fine. They even show up in full widescreen glory. (see Matt Haughey for more on this.). . Low bit-rate clips that suck on a PC screen suck as much or more on TV.

My sister had an a-hah moment, saying that with YouTube, AppleTV finally makes sense to her. My roommate logged into his account through the TV interface and was able to browse through his favorites to show some of his clips. Performance was excellent—a short pause for buffering and then the clips played through smoothly. We didn't see any that had to pause or hiccup to gulp down some more bits

The bad news: While it let me log in, when I tried to save a clip to my favorites, it suddenly said it didn't recognize my password. (My roommate didn't have this problem.) One gotcha: it's likely that most of the clips in your Favorites are not yet available on AppleTV. Only a tiny fraction of the YouTube library has been encoded in H.264 as required for AppleTV. Most of them are still in Flash video format.

The worse news: This morning, I couldn't get the lists for Most Recent, Most Viewed, Featured, or Top Rated to load. (endless spinning). History, which I guess is cached on the box, came up and I could stream any of the clips on that list, so I'm pretty sure the box is online. After unplugging and replugging the AppleTV, YouTube worked as expected.

If you want to sample the experience for yourself, Brian Lam posted a tour on Gizmodo.

Mickeleh's Take: Last night I saw the future. This morning I learned that the future isn't here yet. Maybe it will work better on iPhone.

(Tags: AppleTV, YouTube, YouTube on Apple TV)

Cool Tool for Cooks: Grease Blotter

2007-06-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Kevin Kelly offers a neat tip for cooks who need to get the grease and fat out of stews and such.

Mickeleh's Take: Think of it as liposuction for soups stews.

YouTube on AppleTV; first look

2007-06-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

The download completed. (had to keep checking, because AppleTV went into screensaver mode). Then another click to install and restart. Bonus: you get another view of the startup movie.

Neat translation of the YouTube U-I into AppleTV. (Could it be anything less?) Video quality? Better than I expected, but it varies per video.

There's an onscreen keyboard for search (you can navigate by arrow keys on the remote), and another keyboard with a different design and many more, much smaller characters for logging in to rate videos and save to your favorites.

The announcement said that they'd start with 10,000 videos available in the ecoding format that AppleTV requires (H.264), and it's already up to 11,500. The plan is to have the entire library available by year's end.

I'll offer a considered opinion of the experience after I've used it at leisure. But at first glance, it's a solid and well-designed translation of YouTube to the living room.

Mickeleh's Take: I wonder how many AppleTV users will a) know that the update is available, b) know how to pull it down, c) take the trouble to do it? Compare this to, say, TiVo, Moxi, or any cable DVR: when a software update is ready, it's pushed to the box willy-nilly. Apple is following PC rules—don't mess with the user's software without knowledge or permission. But now that they're in the CE space, maybe it's time to be a little more paternalistic.

Either way, the triumph is this: Finally, something even more mind-numbing than TV. Technology Marches On.

(Tags: AppleTV, YouTube, YouTube on Apple TV)

YouTube on AppleTV; downloading now

2007-06-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

Apple announced an update to AppleTV software available today. They don't push it. You have to go into Settings and ask for it. Which I did. Spinning.

Vince Foster's Revenge: Clintons Gleefully Wear The Mantle of the Mob

2007-06-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, it was funny. Someone emailed me about it. I passed it on. I mentioned it on Twitter. It made Olbermann. It was the funniest Sopranos parody by a politician ever. Not quite on the level of the great MadTV parody of a few years back, but a fine piece of work. Hill and Bill as Tony and Carm. (Carm and Tony?)

I don't want to overthink this but I can't help myself. Tony's song was "Don't Stop (Believing)" Bill's was "Don't Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow)." Hmm. Did they really want to revive all of the Bill Clinton whacks his enemies crap? Hmm. Did they have to pick a song by a Canadian? Hmm. That Canadian? Do they know that half the country thinks that the cut to black at the end of the Sopranos signifies that Tony was whacked? Hmm.

Mickeleh's Take: Great way to co-opt the culture and soften the candidate's image."You and I were meant to fly." —Celine. "Fly, you fools!" —Gandalf

(Tags: Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Sopranos, Sopranos_parody, Clintons)

Addendum: Things you can learn in the blogosphere. The Clinton spot was filmed at the Mount Kisco Coach Diner. If you're ever there, try the chocolate pudding, says Marty of Martin's Musings.

Second Addendum: Did I say, "soften"? Stacey Parker AAB has thought this through much more deeply than I.

Krya Sedgwick Blurts About a Demo Steve Jobs Never Showed Us

2007-06-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

This morning's Fake Steve Jobs post warns of the inevitable media backlash against Apple. (Thanks, Scoble, for the tip.) Fake Steve, as usual, offers truth, wisdom, comedy, and darn good writing. I think he's right about the backlash. When Christopher Escher was doing PR at Apple, he called it the clock theory: when you're at the top of the clock (noon), it's time for the media to start predicting your fall. When you hit bottom (six), it's time for the comeback story.

But it ain't happening yet.

Early Friday morning on Conan, Kyra Sedgwick gave Steve and Apple a priceless plug, asking us to imagine a demo that, so far, has never made it into a Steve Jobs Keynote.

CONAN:
I’m curious about something. Your career is, of course, going very well, but this must be a little difficult—your husband, of course, Mr. Kevin Bacon, lives in New York with the kids. This is, uh, so you’ve got to keep this relationship going long distance. That’s gotta be difficult

KYRA:
Yeah, it’s hard. You know, but there’s the phone and there’s iChat.

CONAN:
iChat!

KYRA:
Yeah

CONAN:
Is I chat..? You find that better than the phone?

KYRA:
Yaah. Because you know, you can see each other and… (long pause, lips pursed). Let’s just say I’m really grateful for Steven Jobs.

CONAN:
Right. Right.

KYRA:
He’s kept my marriage together.

CONAN:
Right. So... it gets kinky over iChat? Is that what you’re suggesting?

KYRA:
Maybe. Sometimes.

CONAN:
You know I dfon’t think that’s what… I think when they came up with the computer, they weren’t… that wasn’t their first thought. Maybe it was?

KYRA:
But It was there second thought. Let me tell you. Because, I mean, I Chat, I mean realy. What are people gonna use that for

CONAN:
But how hot and heavy can it get on iChat.. I mean, I’ve experienced that a little bit. It doesn’t look like you can really be whoo-whoo-whoo- (pantomimens lifting his shirt to flash his chest) It doesn’t look that exciting to me.

KYRA:
You have to use your imagination. No it’s good though. It’s gotten better and better.Maybe you don’t have the right camera.
CONAN:
You just solved all my problems

Mickeleh's Take: So, does that earn Steve a Kevin Bacon number?

(Tags: iChat, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Steve Jobs, Fake Steve)

Safari for Windows Take 2: It's all about iPhone

2007-06-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

Tim Moynahan has the clearest take I've seen so far on the impact of Safari for Windows. Sez he: it's a ploy to get the Windows development world engaged in apps for iPhone.

Safari for Windows

2007-06-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

An Apple branded browser for Windows is something nobody expected and nobody needs. If you have Windows, you already have a browser (IE7), and if you don't like IE7, you can choose Firefox, If you don't like Firefox, you can help yourself to any one of a sturdy bunch of excellent hopefuls. Obviously, Safari for Windows is just a big yawn. Or so you'd think.

Take a gander at Techmeme this morning and it seems everyone in the world wants to say something--usually something critical--about Steve Job's announcement yesterday that Apple was releasing Safari for Windows. Ryan Block is skeptical. Michael Gartenberg hails it as a "great strategic move." While I'd expect the pundits and analysts to pundificate and analyze, it's astonishing to see the large number of folks who took time from their busy Monday to not only follow the keynote, but to download the beta, test it, and blog about it. Top takes: vulnerability to malware, fuzzy font-rendering (though this one is debated), and yes, it's fast.

Mickeleh's Take: Don't we have anything better to do than download irrelevant software? Shouldn't we outsource this odious task to India or China? When Walt Mossberg quizzed Steve at the D Conference about why Apple was doing apps for Windows, Steve quipped, he was bringing ice water to people in hell. If the critics are right about Safari font rendering, I guess it's fuzzy ice water.

(Tags: Safari, Safari Windows, WWDC)

The Sopranpose

2007-06-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

How can anybody complain about an episode in which A.J. discovers Dylan, Agent Harris gets laid, Little Steven gets to relax his mouth and hair from the silly Sil grimace and do, Paulie gets to call Tony, "my liege," and we all get to enjoy a nice game of Pop Goes the Weasel's Head?

Mickeleh's Take: Ending Schmending. Kudos to David Chase and the entire cast and crew.

(Tags: Sopranos, The Sopranos, Soprano, Soprano finale, David Chase)

2007-05-20T11:33:00.001-07:00

I'm back

2007-05-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Good gracious, what a hiatus. I've been "off the air" almost as long as the gap between Heroes episode 18 (Parasite) and 19 (.07%). You'd think I'd fallen off the edge of the world. I tried to, but it turns out there is no edge of the world, so I wound up in Shanghai instead (working with the MWA crew on the HP "Mobility Summit"). I know I could have blogged from Shanghai, but I was having too much fun. Or I was working too hard, which is much the same thing in the workaholic game).

Fame and the Future of Mass Murder

2007-04-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I took NBC to task for its ~~willingness~~ eagerness to advance a killer's agenda of becoming famous. On Huffington Post, Cintra Wilson takes it further. Reminding us that Cho explicitly aligned with the Columbine killers and sought to top them, she asks whether NBC hasn't contributed to raising the bar and ensuring that the next sick mass murderer will do even more damage than Cho.

I think we can cut through the arguments about whether future "copycat" killers are likely. They're inevitable. The VTech killer himself tells us that he was a disciple of the Columbine killers. Some tiny fraction of human brains turn out to be horribly buggy. And some of the buggy ones will inevitably be drawn to the fame game. As with TV ratings, movie grosses, and IPOs, unique visitors, and Technorati rankings, the infamy game has a scoreboard.

How long will we wait for the next buggy-brained sociopath to go off his meds and play a round of "Can you top this?" It might be years, but it will happen.

Next time, however, the mediation of a major broadcast network may not be necessary. (for the early-adopter crowd, it wasn't necessary this time.) Dave Winer contemplates the marriage of our evolving arsenal of social media services and abuser-generated content. Dave also has some worthwhile links to other voices in this grim conversation.

Earlier in the week Dave and Doc Searls argued for the release of the entire package unedited and unexpurgated. Doc views it as an application of crowd-sourced debugging:

"More eyes will make the this bug shallower. It may save lives. Even if we see a zillion mashups of the original video, which we'll see eventually anyway."

Doc expanded on that on an NPR interview with Xeni Jardin and in his own blog.

Jeff Jarvis takes the same position that got Tex Antoine fired many consciousness-raising revolutions ago.

Mickeleh's Take: NBC should have used their editorial judgment, but reversed the filter. Instead of broadcasting and posting the Rambo-glam dress-up movie posters and the bling-envy poetry, they should have aired the sickest, most profanity-laced, and least comprehensible rantings of the killer. That would have serve two purposes: If Doc is right and crowd-sourcing the bugs will help us fix them, then NBC should have put the buggiest bugs out there. If Cintra is right and copycats will look to Cho for guidance, then NBC should have made it really hard for anyone to latch on by showing Cho only at his least accessible, and most incomprehensible.

(Tags: VTech, VT, Virginia Tech, Cho, Cho+Seung+Hui, NBC)

By Airing Cho's Video, NBC Became His Willing Accomplice

2007-04-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

VTech killer Cho Seung-Hui had a grandiose suicide plan that began with mass murder and concluded with a worldwide airing of his raving grievances and poses. He accomplished the murders by himself. But to complete his scheme he enlisted NBC. They were more than happy to carry out his wishes, confirming a killer's right to show under the guise of the public's right to know.

At long last, having recovered a sense of decency and firing Imus for hate speech, NBC dropped to full pander and gave Cho more coverage than he could have hoped for.

Even Keith Olbermann, who a week earlier had pressed his managment to drop Don Imus, participated in the spectacle of all-Cho all-the-time.

Fame, notoriety, and attention are prime motivators for the deranged, tormented souls who do mass murder. By fulfilling Cho's desire to be the auteur of his own world-wide video portrait, dumb-as-a-peacock NBC became his willing accomplice. They've demonstrated to other carriers of simmering, ungoverned rage, that major broadcast networks will assist them in reaching a worldwide audience.

Mickeleh's Take: Where advertisers have to pay cash for airtime, NBC offers it to mass murderers for the price of bullets and corpses. This is not comforting.

(Tags: VTech, VT, Virginia Tech, Cho, Cho+Seung+Hui, NBC)

Senator Edwards' Statement on the Shootings

2007-04-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

I don't look to presidential candidates for comfort and grace in times of disaster.
But this morning I found it in Senator Edwards' statement on the Virginia Tech shootings.

"We are simply heartbroken by the deaths and injuries suffered at Virginia Tech. We know what an unspeakable, life-changing moment this is for these families and how, in this moment, it is hard to feel anything but overwhelming grief, much less the love and support around you. But the love and support is there. We pray that these families, these students, and the entire Virginia Tech community know that they are being embraced by a nation. There is a Methodist hymn that gave us solace in such a moment as this, and we repeat its final verse here, in hopes it will help these families, as it helped us:

'In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity;
In our doubt there is believing, in our life, eternity,
In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.'

Our dearest wish is that this day could start again, with the promise of these young people alive. Knowing that cannot be, our prayer is for God's grace and whatever measure of peace can be reached on this terrible day."

CNN has compiled this with statements from other candidates.

New Information on Gonzo-gate: Did Bush OK Firing Iglesias?

2007-04-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

There's new information linking Bush to Gonzo-gate. I just posted about it on the Soapbox.

(Tags: Bush, Rove, Gonzalez, Domenici, Attorneys, Iglesias)

Why Imus Had to Go—David Carr Nails It

2007-04-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

David Carr in The New York Times analyzes the perfect storm of forces that converged to force Imus off the air (and the cable). Why was "nappy-headed hos" any more egregious than previous bits of nasty Imus insult that passed without consequences? Carr explains why Imus was doomed this time.

Mickeleh's Take: The fatal Imus flap sullied the brands of both NBC News and CBS while driving away advertisers. That Imus was suddenly unsustainable while Savage, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck, Boortz, and Gibson continue to cruise along pleasing their audiences, advertisers, and networks is outrageous. Imus was simply was crude and mean (not that I'm defending crude and mean). But these other guys are not only cheapening discourse, they're aligned with forces and agendas that are ruining our environment, trashing our constitution, depleting our military, and keeping us at war. If you sully brand CBS, you're fired. But if you trash brand USA, you get to keep your microphone? Before this firestorm abates, I wonder if it can take out one or two of the truly bad guys. (Media Matters has transcripts on these verbal vermin).

Amen to Al Franken, who told Larry King that CNN needs to can Beck.

Questions: Anyone listen to Howard Stern this week? Did he have anything to say about it? Will Imus pack it in this time or wind up with another (maybe satellite) show.

(Tag: Imus)

A Haiku About Twitter

2007-04-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

A haiku (not a Jaiku)about Twitter.

Messages online
From people I've never met,
Junk food for the brain.

Mickeleh's Take: Find me on Twitter, here.

(Tags: twitter, Jaiku, Haiku)

Thanks to Scoble and His Twitter Friends for Hot Mac Software Recommendations

2007-04-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

Now that Macs can run Windows (thanks to their Intel processor and Parallels), Robert Scoble has decided it's safe to switch. As a Mac newbie, he reached out to his vast followership on Twitter (more than 2500) for software recommendations and they came pouring in. If you're a Mac user, it's a good list to peruse.

Mickeleh's Take: I've been on Mac since 1984 and I found a few gems I hadn't known about. If you have some to add, you might leave a comment on Scobleizer.

(Tags: Scoble, Robert Scoble, MacBook, MacBook Pro, switchers, Mac software, Mac utilities)

Dave Winer: The 10-year Anniversary That Almost Wasn't

2007-04-02T13:09:00.001-07:00

Last year, April Fool's day fell on March 13. On that day, Dave Winer posted on why he would stop blogging. Thank goodness he thought better of that and Scripting News persists. Yesterday, it passed its tenth anniversary. Mazel Tov.

Mickeleh's Take: Dave earned my eternal gratitude for writing Think Tank and More. He could have stopped there. But he didn't and he still hasn't. Consider that for most of his career he's worked as an individual or as leader of very small companies, yet he has done more to shape what I and many others do on the net on a daily basis than most of the giants. Thank you for being a hero not only to me, but to scads of my other heroes. Keep the fires lit. And keep holding everyone's feet to them.

(Tags: Winer, Dave Winer, scripting.com, Scripting News, Anniversary, Blogging)

Last Year On Mickeleh's Take: Pesach, Roosevelt, and us

2007-04-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

Pesach begins tonight. Because of the way the Hebrew lunar-solar calendar occasionally adds a leap month instead of a leap day, Pesach coincided with the anniversary of FDR's death. I wrote this on that occasion.

Mickeleh's Take: Still holds.

(Tags: Pesach, Passover, FDR, Roosevelt)

EMI Deal: iTunes Gets First Dibs... But EMI Will Offer to Other Retailers

2007-04-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

There are two reasons why I (usually) buy CDs from Amazon rather than download them from iTunes: no DRM and higher sound quality. Those reasons went away (for some recordings) when EMI and Apple announced a new tier of DRM-free, higher bit-rate tunes. (At least that's how Steve Jobs sees it. It remains to be heard how the well the improved--but still lossy--tracks compare to CD quality.)

Price on a single tune goes up from $.99 to $1.29, but the album price stays the same. (This is the second move from iTunes aimed at offering incentives to buying the album rather than cherry-picking favorite cuts. Last week they offered to allow people to complete albums for the price they would have paid in the first place.)

A neat deet: If you have already bought the lower-quality DRM-shackled version of the song for $.99, you can upgrade for the price difference--$.30.

While iTunes gets first crack at this deal, EMI said it will offer the same deal to other retailers in a choice of formats (AAC, MP3, WMA, and others).

Mickeleh's Take: I'm seeing one of those movie scenes in an aquarium where the camera cuts to a small crack in the glass. And then keeps cutting back as the crack lengthens, until, with a great roar and a rush of waters, all the actors are drenched and covered in fish. Thanks, in advance, for all the fish.

You don't suppose that EMI decided to set the music free in honor of Pesach (also known by it's slave name, Passover.)

More at Techmeme

(Tags: DRM, iTunes, EMI, Apple, Music)

One Week With Apple TV

2007-04-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with these pictures? The copy in this Apple promotional graphic says "widescreen TV," but all of the TV images are standard 4:3 format. Hmmm. It's a good metaphor for the gap between the promise of Apple TV and the reality. But for me, the reality is plenty good (for now).

I'm late with my promised Apple TV review because I can't stop watching and listening to it. The boob tube is back and this boob is glued to the couch. All in all, though, I'm watching much less of the stuff that comes down the cable channels. (We used to call that stuff TV, but I think we're going to need a retronym for it à la "snail mail" and "acoustic guitar.")

Apple TV has been one of the year's most anticipated, reported, reviewed, analyzed, (and, now, hacked) products. So, if it's a topic that interests you, you probably know more about it than I'm about to reveal. But that's blogging for you, thousands of people writing more or less the same thing over and over. Let me thank you in advance for reading it here.

What you've heard and read is all true: Setup is astonishingly smooth and effortless, the U-I is engaging and clean, with a dash of tasteful eye candy (iCandy?).

Apple TV performs as advertised. It does not, however, perform as fantasized. As you probably know by now, it has its limits. It presents in last year's sound and picture quality (last century's, actually). It doesn't get YouTube. It's not a DVR. The movie section in the iTunes Store has bupkis. Apple TV has a tiny hard drive by today's expectations (40GB). It gets very warm to the touch. And, yes, XBox not only does more, but Xbox Live offers true HDTV. (And they announced more HD titles this week.) how much more does Xbox do? Jodie Cadieux reminded me that XBox is even stopping drug and gun trafficking in Mexico as officials there are giving out a free Xbox for every gun turned in to law enforcers. Match that, Apple TV.

That Apple TV, despite its limitations, has captured so much attention and early success mystifies some and infuriates others. I'm not here to argue the case. I'm just here to testify that I'm happily enjoying my Apple TV for what it delivers, and I'm not fretting about what's missing. It will get here.

I took Apple at their word: iTunes on my TV. That, right there, is enough to give me two things I've been waiting for: I wanted to connect the music collection on my office computer to the really good sound system in my living room. Second, I made a pledge to Scoble to watch ScobleShow, when I could do it on Apple TV. (is that a recursive reason?) Well, there's lots of other good video podcasts worth subscribing to. Kasper Hauser and other video podcasts on the big screen. Turns out that, even though Ze Frank has ended The Show has putting the archives up on iTunes.

More than I expected

I can tell you that I not only got the two things I bought it for, but I found some bonuses: It was easy to convert my own videos into Apple TV format (QuickTime Pro 7.1.5 has a command "export movie to Apple TV). Now I have Day of the Longtail and a bunch of other videos I worked on with Peter Hirshberg, Michael Witlin Associates, etc. into Apple TV format where they stand ready to inflict on unsuspecting house guests. What's more, it's not a big chore to download clips from YouTube and convert them to play on Apple TV.

Music from background to foreground

Even though the product has "TV" in its name, what I value most is is being able to hear my iTunes music on my best speakers. (Sneaker-netting the iPod into the living room or using AirTunes with Airport Express wasn't cutting it because there's no big screen U-I for browsing.)

Apple TV's oh-so-tasty screen saver is simple and satisfying, offering a multi-plane display of over lapping album art. (memo to self: resist temptation to re-scan all album art to higher resolution.)

About that Teeny Hard Disk Drive

I'm not overly concerned about the small hard drive. The drive is required only for photos. For all other content, you can stream from your computer(s) to Apple TV. I'm having no problems, no glitches streaming over my home WiFi network . (Your mileage may vary.)

The catch is that I have to have my computer on and iTunes running. If I could fit all my content onto the internal Apple TV drive, I could leave my computer off while using Apple TV. If you're running from a notebook, you can leave the house with it, and the folks back home can still enjoy the Apple TV. With content on the internal drive, you can even unplug Apple TV, take it over to a friend's house.

In order to manage what actually gets sync'd to Apple TV, iTunes 7.1.1 has set of panels, similar to the panels for managing the content that syncs to your iPod. You set set which playlists, photo albums, or podcasts should sync to Apple TV.

Up to Six Computers Can Play

Up to six separate computers can register to stream to a single Apple TV, so if your household members have multiple computers, they can share a single Apple TV. Only one computer, however, can register to sync content to the Apple TV hard drive. You can mix and match PCs and Macs.

How good is the picture?

Depending on the source, it varies from yuck to not-half-bad to pretty close to DVD—and occasionally better. So if your goal is a new source of HDTV quality programming, look elsewhere.

How good is the sound?

Quality is fine. But it's stereo or Dolby pro-logic only. Despite the presence of a digital audio port (optical S/PDIF), Apple TV does not now support discreet 5.1 or 7.1 surround formats.

Ben Drawbaugh offers a clear table on the technical limitations of Apple TV vs HD DVD

Mickeleh's Take: March has seen some huge steps aimed at flipping TV away from the established cable and satellite walled gardens for delivering TV shows and movies. Online video is moving in. Amazon Unbox started downloading movies to TiVo. NBC Universal and News Corp. initiated an everybody-but-Google consortium with AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo planning to put a vast film and TV catalog online. Joost beta went live. And Om Malik launched a redesigned NewTeeVee to report on it all.

There's little doubt that a revolutionary change is underway, but it's one that will be years in the making. Bandwidth and intellectual property battles are the biggest constraints.

What's makes Apple TV successful despite its limitations is that it fits well with the current state of things. For me, cable is still my only source of HD programming. But for music, podcasts, and TV access to my own videos, Apple TV is proving well worth it.

(Tags: Apple TV, HDTV, podcasting, podcasts, video, videos, TV, Apple, music, cable)

Hey, Internets: Stop Spoiling the Jokes. I Mean it.

2007-04-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Hey, Internets: Here's what's not cool on April Fool's Day. It's not cool to say so-and-so has a Great Joke up on the web. Stop spoiling the gags.

If you spot a great bit of fraud, perpetuate it. Comment on it. Go along with the gag and rope more people into it. Or just keep your frickin' fingers off the keyboard and let it be.

But please stop blogging, twittering, emailing that so-and-so has a Great Joke. We won't think you're a sucker if you pretend to fall for it. Or even if you do fall for it. We'll thank you.

If you want to heap praise on an April Fool's story or confess that you fell for it, please wait until tomorrow. And that includes A-listers. You don't get a pass on this.

Mickeleh's Take: I will never forgive the anonymous fanboy who passed me as he was leaving the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on May 21, 1980 while I was standing in line for the second showing on the opening day of The Empire Strikes Back and who proclaimed loudly to his companions, "Who woulda believed that Darth Vader was Luke's father." It was only after I saw the film that I learned the correct response to such a revelation: Make a screwy looking face and scream, "No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-." (Yeah, it serves me right for waiting for the second showing. But hey, I was at the first showing of what was then called Star Wars on May 25th 1977 at the Charles Theatre in Boston.)

(Tags: April Fool, Spoilers, Star Wars)

Francine Explains the What's and Wherefores of Nanotech

2007-03-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Francine Hardaway posted a clear, concise, intro to nanotechnology as a business opportunity. She covers the basic questions: what? what for? why? and why now?

Mickeleh's Take: Francine explains it so well, even an English major can understand it. Even an English major who stumbled into marketing.

(Tags: nanotech, nanotechnology, Francine)

Apple TV Claims First Victim: HP Drops Digital Entertainment Center

2007-03-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

[sheepish grin] This is the same point I made in an earlier post. I just like this headline better.

Mickeleh's Take:There's no direct connection between the Apple TV launch and HP dropping DEC. Both choices are informed by the same read of the market. It's actually a tribute to HP's new marketing savvy. They're getting smarter about what consumers will and won't find attractive.

Disclosure: I've worked with Michael Witlin Associates on some HP marketing projects.

New Blow to Vista? HP Drops Their Media Center Line

2007-03-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

Is this the biggest blow to Vista since Chris Pirillo's breakup last month? HP is dropping its version of Media Center rather than migrate it to the new OS. The HP Digital Entertainment Center was the slickest package for making a PC fit into the living room.

CE Pro has the news, including this full-throated make-nice statement from product manager Doug Robert: "It doesn't mean Media Center isn't going to be successful. It's just that we're discontinuing development." (Translation: "It's not you; it's me.")

Mickeleh's Take: This is not so much a slam at Vista as a recognition that asking people to pay the price of a full PC to sit next to the TV is hookah-vision marketing. A Mac Mini, maybe, but not an $1800 to $3000 behemoth. What you want near the TV is a client device such as Apple TV, Xbox, SlingCatcher, or the Netgear Digital Entertainer EVA8000. (memo to Netgear: hire a naming consultant.)

HP, meanwhile, is pursuing a new vision for getting digital media from the PC to the TV: but first you have to buy an HP MediaSmart TV...

(Tags: HP, Media Center, Apple TV, Xbox, SlingCatcher, MediaSmart TV)

Apple TV: Scoble Likes It!

2007-03-23T04:18:00.001-07:00

Robert Scoble was an early skeptic about Apple TV. He not only bought my argument (that it would be an easy way to get his own video podcasts on the big TV), he bought the product and now says it rocks.

Mickeleh's Take: Told ya.

(More on Apple TV this weekend when I set mine up. It stings to be such a technoloy laggard.)

(Tags: Apple TV)

Other Mickeleh's Takes on Apple TV:

Pixel-Punchy Scobel's Rant about Apple TV
The Big Gotcha of Apple TV: It Might Not Work on Your TV
Apple, Pioneer of Accessible Solutions, Neglects Closed Captions in Apple TV

ABC Mulls Pop-up Ads for TV to Trick DVR Owners Into Watching

2007-03-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

~~Newest nefarious scheme to make us watch advertising~~:

Newest brilliant idea to defeat the rude habit of DVR viewers who skip your commercial: Where today's practice separates shows from spots with a discrete dip to black, ABC tells advertisers their spots may actually start playing on a screen inside the show (on that TV in the corner, perhaps, or someone's cell phone) and then pop-up to the viewer's full screen.

Looks like we may be moving from product placement to commercial placement as TV gets more like life. Ads will be everywhere.

Thanks to Cory Bergman at Lost Remote for spotting this.

Mickeleh's Take: The current practice of writing to a suspenseful cliff-hanger at each act break actually increases the viewer's motivation to skip the ads and get back to the story. Will writers and producers take to the new practice and work commercial placement into their stories? If ABC can charge a premium for an in-story placement and shares revenues with the shows, you bet they will. Can't wait for Aaron Sorkin to build a preachy episode around this on Studio 60.

(Tags: TV, Advertising, ABC)

Props to Arianna for Outing the Author of Hillary 1984 Mashup

2007-03-21T17:40:00.000-07:00

Arianna Huffington and the HuffPo staff did some digging and found out who made the Hilary 1984 mashup. He's Phil de Vellis and he tells all on HuffPo.

Is this How You Dress for Congress? If the Globe is Really Warming You Do.

2007-03-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Styles, They Are a Changin'.

Above: In 1920, this is how folks dressed to line up to get into a Ebbets Field and watch a game: Suits, ties, hats. (Well, it was the World Series.)

Below: Today, this is how Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Denmark, dressed to testify before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works: a short-sleeved polo shirt. What's that all about?

Mickeleh's Take: The contrast between suits to a ballgame and polo shirts to Congress might communicate more than just a radically changed fashion sense. Lomborg's message is that Gore, though well-intentioned, is exaggerating the dangers of global warming. But doesn't that 1920's World Series crowd looks like they got dressed on a much cooler planet than ours? Lomborg desses like someone on a rapidly warming globe. Visuals trump verbals every time.

(Tags: global warming, fashion, Gore)

Why Did the Hillary Video Take Off? Drudge!

2007-03-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

The Hillary video was posted to YouTube on March 5. Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post linked to it the same day. They generated a little more than 23,000 views between them.

It didn't go hockey-stick until yesterday when it started airing on TV News. And who do the TV news desks follow like sheep? Greg Sargent on the TPM Horse's Mouth blog tells who. Matt Drudge posted it late Sunday evening. And that when the TV networks got interested.

Hillary Meets Orwell With Surprising Resonance

2007-03-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I completely misjudged the impact of this one.

My sister emailed me early yesterday to check out Vote Different, a slick mashup of Apple's 1984 commercial and Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign announcement.

In my years at Apple I'd seen more parodies and mashups of 1984 than I can remember. For Marketers, riffing on 1984 is about as common and trite as comedians riffing on The Wizard of Oz. So my first reaction was to dismiss it as yet another 1984 ripoff.

Oh, was I wr... wr... wr...

Over the last 24 hours, Vote Different has gone hockey-stick, with well over a million views. Last night Olbermann devoted an entire segment to it, running it continuously as cheap B-roll.

There's something about Hillary as a droning Big Sister that sticks. Whoever authored this piece gets the grammar of media, and the power of resonance. A fine example of Tony Schwartz's key insight: the most powerful communication is something that resonates with what you already know, feel, and believe. Even though Vote Different leeches the insight, design, and production investment that Apple made with Chiat/Day and Ridley Scott back in 1984, let's not forget that the original ad was leeching on the resonance of Orwell's novel and imagery.

Mickeleh's Take: The tagline of Vote Different promises that we'll see why 2008 won't be like 1984. Not so. In our new political and media world every year will be like 1984.

(Tags: Campaign , YouTube, Media, Apple, Advertising, Hillary, Obama)

Cleaning Tips for Black MacBook

2007-03-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

I just de-smudged, and de-oiled the finish of my black MacBook. Looks good as new.

Playing Heloise for MacBook, Josh R. Holloway has the recipe--and the disclaimer (expanding on a hint on the InsanelyMac Forum).

Mickeleh's Take: Mickeleh offering cleaning tips? The world must be coming to an end.

(Tags: MacBook, Cleaning)

Robert's Rules of Order: Scoble Nabs Three of Top Four Slots in Google Search for "Robert"

2007-03-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

Search Google for "Robert" today and three of the top four results are for popular blogger Robert Scoble. Mysterously, an obscure actor who once played fictional taxi driver Travis Bickle and actual boxer Jake LaMotta manages to squeeze it into slot three.

Microsoft's live.com lists the Wikipedia article on the name "Robert" first, and then moves on to a pantheon of iconic Roberts, such as composer Schumann...poets Burns, Frost and Service... actors DeNiro, Iler, Prosky, Duvall, Downey Jr., and Mitchum... comedian Schimmel, blues maestro Johnson... photographer Mapplethorpe, wine maker Mondavi, attorney general and senator Kennedy, authors Sabuda and Stevenson ... singer Palmer, pig farmer and serial killer Pickton... and Broadway's own Goulet. You'll go through pages of Roberts before running into geek blogger Scoble.

Guess which one Scoble thinks is a better search engine?

Mickeleh's Take: Will "will Google supplant Microsoft" supplant "Mac vs. Windows" as stronger link bait?

(Tags: Google, Microsoft, scoble, search)

Dear NBC: Tone Down the Heroes Spoilers, Please

2007-03-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

I share Jeremy Toeman's complaint about NBC airing too many spoilers in their promos for Heroes. It's not just the "next week on..." preview at the end of the episode—I know those are coming and I can duck them.
But, as Jeremy points out, NBC is peppering clips from Heroes throughout their schedule. You never know when they're going to hit. (Hey, NBC, don't force me to use the nifty 30-second skip button on my Moxi to blow past all your promos and ads. I know you don't want that. But what choice do you give me? Oh yeah, I can stop watching anything on NBC except Heroes.)

Mickeleh's Take: It's getting worse. The newest wrinkle is to run promos within the episode for something that will happen in the next act. Gimme a break here. Heroes is a hit is because of WOM, WOW, and WOB (word of mouth, web, and blog). It's built to hold an audience. Trust it. If it ain't in the writing, casting, & production, then pimping an explosion in Act IV, won't get me past Act I. If I need an explosion fix, I'll reach for the DVD of SCTV and watch Farm Film Report. They blowed up things real good.

BTW: Check out Jeremy's Unofficial Heroes Drinking Game. But not if you're driving. There have been some chugs in recent episodes.

(Tags: TV, Heroes)

The Big Gotcha of Apple TV: It Might Not Work on Your TV

2007-02-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

Apple says it's going to be a little late turning its homework on AppleTV (see AppleInsider for the deets).

That give them a little breathing room before the flood of buyers returning the product in droves because they can't make it work with their televisions.

Apple says it clearly, if not prominently:

"Apple TV works with widescreen, enhanced-definition or high-definition TVs capable of 1080i, 720p, 576p, or 480p resolutions..."

But I wonder how many people won't notice that until they open the box?

While TVs that meet Apple's requirements dominate current retail sales, they're far from dominating the installed base of TVs. (See also Scoble's lament that his Dad isn't in the digital TV generation.) If you have an older TV, you're just not going to be able to make the connection.

Mickeleh's Take: There are more than enough modern TVs to make Apple's numbers, but there are also many more older TVs that will make headaches for the returns counter at the Apple store. Apple's delay on shipping the product gives them another few weeks to stock up on aspirin.

Other Mickeleh's Takes on Apple TV:

Pixel-Punchy Scobel's Rant about Apple TV

Apple, Pioneer of Accessible Solutions,
Neglects Closed Captions in Apple TV

Newest Mad Scientist Threat: A Machine that Remembers Everything

2007-02-21T01:30:00.000-08:00

[This article spans technology and politics, I've cross posted it in Mickeleh's Soapbox.]

The Scooter Libby case goes to the jury today. It hinges on this question: did he lie to the FBI about how and when he learned about Mrs. Wilson, or was he innocently mis-remembering?

Apparently, we will soon have the technology to expedite trials like this. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, in Scientific American, describe research they are doing at Microsoft on harnessing the technology to record everything.

Scientific American: A Digital Life [ INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ]
New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive

Storage is getting cheap. Processors continue to obey Moore's law. Network access is getting ubiquitous. Sensors of various types being embedded everywhere. (Carry a cell phone? Then you're carrying a microphone and a camera that know where you are. hmmm.)

Mickeleh's Take: Feds Using Cell Phones to Eavesdrop
...feds can download software to many kinds of cell phone and then have the ability to turn on the microphone and listen in. Even when the cell phone is turned "off."

Bell has amassed 150 gigabytes of data in six years, and his descriptions of what he can do with it make it sound really cool. Without a good overlay of intelligence and analysis, an archive of everything in our lives might turn all of us into clones of the Borges character Funes, the Memorious, who remembered everything but understood nothing.

Bell and Gemmell acknowledge that "the prospect that identity thieves, gossipmongers or authoritarian states could gain access to such records is frightening." And, with the optimism of every scientist in a fifties sci-fi movie seem assured that technologies can be tamed so as to minimize potential dangers. I wonder if Admiral (Total Information Awareness) Poindexter would agree.

(See also my recent posts in the Soapbox: To Engineer a Totalitarian Takeover, First Appoint a Clown to Be President)

Mickeleh's Take: Is it time to join the Luddites yet?

Mind of an Impressario, Soul of a Venture Capitalist, Heart of an Agent

2007-02-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Mickeleh's Take: That Tail gets longer by the minute.

What's Web 2.0, Anyway? The Video

2007-02-08T09:13:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University. The director has placed a higher quality version on MediaFire and made it available for download. For more info, click through to YouTube and then click "more" to the right of the video window.

Mickeleh's Take: I love this video. There's much to learn here, both about Web 2.0 and using motion graphics to tell a story.