Pay-per-Click Marketing comes to Television
Tivo and Amazon have teamed up in a partnership that anyone following the two could have seen coming. It will soon be possible to click your Tivo remote and order items like the latest album from the musical guest on the David Letterman show.
The concept of using your remote to purchase stuff you see on TV is an old one but it’s never taken off. This time, based on the success of Amazon’s one-click fulfillment platform (including the ingenious mobile version), it might just succeed. They just need to get more than 4 million Tivos into US homes.
Gnip is Ping spelled backward
Congratulations to Eric, Jud, and the crew on the launch of their new service, Gnip. MyBlogLog has been using Gnip for a few weeks now and we’re pleased with what we see. Submit and item to Digg and it’ll move your update to the top of our polling queue and you’ll see your updates on MyBlogLog within a minute or so.
Even more exciting is that Gnip solves the infrastructure problem that each member of the social media ecosystem has stuggled to resolve. How to get updates out to their partners and how these partners can read them in effeciently. With this and other common problems out of the way, we can all focus on high-order benefits. From the Gnip blog:
We’re incredibly excited by the bounty that Web 2.0 has created. We are living with an embarrassment of riches in terms of shared information and experiences. But it’s overwhelming. I personally believe that Web 3.0 will herald a return to the individual — story, picture, friend, experience — because in aggregate, that which has great meaning often becomes meaningless. So it’s up to these awesome new services to take the Web 2.0 bounty and find for each of us those few things that will fundamentally enhance our lives. To give us something meaningful.
Google’s Flash-Eating Spider
This announcement is definitely cool and will open up whole new areas of the web to search. But truthfully I just wanted to post this because it lends itself to a great headline.
From the FAQ posted on the Google Webmaster Blog:
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Alameda Theatre Restored to Art Deco Grandeur
When I moved to Alameda four years ago I was struck by the beauty of the local movie palace. It was clearly from a different time, built before VCRs and DVDs, when going to the movies was a social activity, an occasion which you would dress up, put on something special.
Since closing its doors in 1979, the Alameda Theatre has been a roller skating rink, a disco, and most recently, a gymnastics studio. There was quite a bit of debate over how to revive the building which had, over the years, become infested with rats, water damage, and an alarming amount of pigeon shit.
Alameda is an anomaly in the Bay Area, debates rage over improvements. There is a decades old measure in place that prevents any multi-story condos or apartment buildings and the debate over how to sustainably develop the long-abandoned naval base on the West end of the island is regularly featured in the opinion pages of the local papers (we have two). The final agreement with the developer of the theatre included construction of a 300+ car garage and several mini-screens in a newly constructed addition. The thinking was that a single screen would never be able to draw the audience necessary to make the $9 million investment pay off. Debates raged with the traditionalists opposed to what they called “cineplex” - eventually the developer won over the city council and development went forward.
Unfortunately one casualty of this theatre has been that our local pocket theatre which I’ve written about before. Apparently there’s a strange arrangement that’s been made between the Alameda Theatre and the big studios that only allows first run films within a certain geographic radius. This little theatre with donated couches for seating was within that area so they could no longer feature the films that they felt brought people to their doors. Several people suggested that they could feature “art house” films but the owner confessed that artsy types don’t really go for the soda & popcorn which made up his margins. Izumi had the idea that he could still stay in business if he ran classic kids films (the Disney classics, Little Rascals, Lassie, etc) but the decision has been made and he’s showing his last filmings today. In my mind it’s unfortunate but the additional exposure for Alameda via the refurbished Alameda Theatre and the new business (and tax revenues) it’ll generate is worth this small sacrifice.
On opening weekend the renovated Alameda Theatre opened it’s doors to the community with free screenings of classic movies from the theatre’s golden age. I caught the Wizard of Oz with the family which was a real treat to see on the big screen. It was easy to imagine how incredible it must have been, at the height of the depression, for folks to come into what can only be described as a movie palace and see color moving images for the first time. Experiencing the film in the theatre, Oz’s themes of faithfully following the yellow brick road but that no wizard can grant you what you need, you ultimately need to find it in yourself rang true in context like they never did before.
After the film, we joined all the townspeople and toured this new structure and could not believe that such a small town as ours could play host to such an amazing piece of architecture. It was as if Radio City Music hall opened up on Main Street. Kids were riding up and down the escalators as if they’d never seen one before. Everyone was smiles.
So far so good, everyone in town I’ve spoken to has seen several films since opening and we all just went to see the new Pixar movie, Wall-E and when the previews started to roll, people in the crowd yelled out “Focus!” and there was a brief intermission as they threaded the second reel halfway through. One of our neighbors across the street serves popcorn. They’re still working out the kinks but I kind of like it. The theatre has a real community feel despite its grandeur.
New businesses are opening on either side of the theatre (a wine bar and a gourmet hamburger place) and, from what I hear, business is up and the line at the local ice cream shop is always long. I was skeptical that this project would ever get off the ground but, now that it’s open, I’m glad and hope it leads to a revival of Alameda’s Park Street district.
Other resources:
- Alameda Theatre website
- Short documentary on the history of the theatre
- My flickr photoset
- Alameda Magazine article
- Alameda Currents, local TV channel, covers opening gala
Watching the Oakland A’s
I had a windfall a couple weeks ago when our neighbor ended up with extra tickets to a sky suite at the Oakland Colesium. We went with Tyler and the neighborhood boys to see the Yankees play the A’s. On the way back from getting cotton candy, a photo service vendor took a photo where I found the picture above. More photos from the game on my flickr set.
Custom Book Jackets Drive Awareness
From the folks that brought you the Day in the Life and America 24/7 photo books, comes their latest project which takes a peek inside homes across America. As they have done in the past, they are offering custom book jackets and they have a cool little app where you can upload a photo and preview it. It’s a great way to customize the gift, like engraving the back of an iPod.
They also let you grab your preview and embed it as I’ve done above. Nice little social media hack that gets the word out.
Spore is doing something similar with it’s Creature Creator as people share their creations with each other. As of today, there are over 5,400 images uploaded to flickr already, only a few days after the release of the program.
Doh! Comments Deleted
Chalk this one up to user error.
You should never try and de-spam your blog after a night out on the town. I was a bit frisky on the controls and the AJAX-y WordPress UI flipped from showing comments awaiting moderation to comments approved before I could stop myself from clicking, Delete All. I think I lost about 14 comments
I tried to get a back up but it’s turning to be more of a pain than it’s worth and I need to move on. To those that got wiped - Sorry!
IT Conversations - Jon Udell & John Buckman
Listened to a great IT Conversations podcast the other day in which Jon Udell and John Buckman (founder of Magnatune) had a great exchange on the future of online music.
Once the iPhone 3G enables all-you-can-eat streaming for music, the ipod becomes just a local cache, a hard disk buffer for music that you would normally stream on-demand. Once you can get whatever music you want wherever you are, then availability of music is not the friction, it’s management of your collection and navigation interface (Udell calls it the namespace) of whatever device you’re using to access your collection.
Will iTunes’ crowdsourced playlists and smart folders become the ubiquitous method to interface with your music?
FriendFeed Needs Trackback
The success of distributed commenting systems such as Disqus, Intense Debate, and most famously, FriendFeed have generated a heated debate over if we should let discussions break out all over the place in small pockets or try to gather them all together in context with the source material so that everyone can benefit from a collective debate.
On the one hand, you have those that encourage everyone to “go with the flow” and let discussions take place inline, wherever convenient. Duncan Riley falls in this camp with his post last week about Blogging 2.0.
On the other, you have those that want to pull the discussion back into context. If it’s a blog post, they would like to see these distributed pools of discussion pulled back together under the original blog post. Fred Wilson falls into this camp with his post today, Leaving the Instigator Out.
Call me old school but I’m with Fred on this one. I think it’s possible to have both cookies - keep discussions distributed but at least tie them together so you’re not logging to sites across the web trying to chase down the latest discussion. The solution is to revive the long forgotten Trackback.
Trackback was developed by the blogging pioneer Six Apart back when blogs expanded beyond a close circle of friends and there was a need for blogs to notify each other when they were expanding on a conversation and moving it to a new venue. The standard practice was that if you wanted to take someone’s idea and expand on it a bit more than would fit comfortably into a comment box, you would post about it on your own blog and trackback to the original post. This would do two things:
- send a ping to the original blogger so that he or she would know that you’re expanding on their idea,
- add a link in the comments section so that people reading the original post could follow the discussion over to the new blog post
Trackback was a very simple technology but it provided a thread that linked the two posts and brought the readership of both posts together. If you were moving the conversation from one blog to another, sending a trackback ping was the right thing to do, it was common courtesy, an attribution. That link, that attribution, is what has gotten people up in arms. Without this link, both the original blogger and the reader of the original post are cut off from distributed discussions and that just doesn’t seem right or efficient.
US Mortgage & Credit Crisis, How did we get here?
I could never figure out how banks and securities dealers talked themselves into loaning money to people that common sense would tell you never could repay their obligation. Listening to this episode of This American Life - Giant Pool of Money revealed that it was incremental greed that drove each link in the chain to justify the crazy loans that were extended - a kind of slow boiling of the frog - which gradually upped the ante until the market could no longer sustain it.
A vital oversight often overlooked was that with the Mortgage-Backed Securities that were famous for bundling up poorly graded loans with a few high-performing loans to basically pretty up a pig, the complex risk management tools that were used for analysis failed completely because of the lack of historical data.
Very simply, no one had ever extended credit under such situations before (i.e. NINA loans, No Income, No Asset) so they assumed an overly optimistic rate of default and dealers let the computer models talk them into taking on loans that just didn’t make sense.
