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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Wednesday, November 17, 2004

When Ad-ing Equals Less

You buy a device, take it home, and the device manufacturer changes how the device operates post-purchase. WTF? This really is the objective of the media cartel - to subvert the entire concept of physical property ownership to the vagaries of intellectual property ownership. Good ole' Dan Glickman says so.

But this TiVo thing is really obnoxious. Where do you go? What do you do? Anyone up for building a FreeVo box?

On the Birth of TiVo-tising (Donna Wentworth)

Alan Wexelblat @ Blogbook IP:

Copyfight, among others, has been tracking the varied zigs and zags of TiVO as that company tries to navigate the shark-infested waters of modern electronics. OK, those are [Copyright] Cartel lawyers, not sharks, but who can tell the difference?

Now it appears that TiVo has sold out entirely, but not to the Cartel. Instead, they've climbed into bed with a coalition of 30 big advertisers to implement a "feature" (and I use that word advisedly) that takes away your ability to skip ads. Instead of a simple forward jump, you get to have your commercials overlaid with... wait for it... commercials. But they're TiVo's commercials. Soooo much better.

According to the LA Times story linked above, these "tiverts" as I think I'll call them will pop up during fast-forwards, offering contest entries, giveaways or links to other ads. And of course, this is accompanied by a vast giveaway (well, technically it's probably a sale) of your personal information to the advertisers.

Even if you don't participate in this effort to get you to mainline commercialism, you'll still be part of an intensive "market research" effort in which TiVo will examine your viewing habits on a second-by-second basis (no, I'm not making that up) and then sell THAT data.

"The message we really want to get across," says Davina Kent, TiVo's advertising and research sales manager, "is that we now have a dedicated road map for advertising." It's completely unclear to me whether they have a dedicated roadmap for customer satisfaction.

Another must-read post, on the off-chance you haven't seen it yet: TiVo Sells Your Fast-Forward Button to Advertisers [Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing]. [via CopyFight]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:45 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Copyright, Technology

Linux For Beginners

I'm looking forward to this -- a Linux magazine targeted at new users. I so need to be bi-lingual. Dead-tree version will be on newsstands in Feb.

New bird, same hand

SSC, the parent company of Linux Journal and IT Garage (among other things) is coming out with TUX, "The First and Only Magazine for the New Linux User." It will launch in February 2005. Our publisher, Carlie Fairchild, writes,

The format of TUX will include easy-to-understand tutorials, insightful hardware and software reviews, useful tips and tricks, enlightened opinion, and in-depth exploration of the tools Linux users use day. In addition, TUX will present this information in a style that is practical, hands-on, user-friendly and jargon-free so that everybody will be able to explore the world of Linux.

After all these years, I still fit the target profile. As will lots of other people, as easy-to-use Linux desktops (and, more importantly in the long run, laptops) show up in the marketplace. [via The Doc Searls Weblog]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:30 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Technology

Big Investors Watch Blogoshpere

Looks like big institutional investors konw where to turn for the hottest tips, fastest breaking news, and most accurate fact checking -- the blogoshpere.

Hedge Funds To Monitor Blogs Via RSS & PubSub

This is quite interesting. You know the hedgies would be on top of things:

NEW REAL-TIME INTERNET MONITORING SERVICE, MONITOR110 INC., GIVES INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS COMPETITIVE EDGE ON DATA

Joint Venture of Geometric Group and PubSub Leverages Powerful “Matching Engine” To Rapidly Locate, Alert Users to Relevant Data

New York, NY, November 17, 2004 - Geometric Group LLC. and PubSub Concepts Inc. today announced the creation of Monitor110 Inc.. The new company taps powerful prospective search / “matching” technology to offer institutional investors better and faster access to the data needed to make investment decisions.

Monitor110 will leverage PubSub’s proprietary “matching engine”, which is able to read millions of data sources, perform rapid complex analysis, and instantly notify users when relevant data is discovered. Monitor110 also plans to offer a variety of complementary technologies related to data visualization, web data collection and real-time linguistic contextual text analysis...

See more at Trader Mike.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 5:31 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Technology

WebDrive

While I'm thinking about tools... I've been meaning to blog this for a while. WebDrive is the most kickass FTP client for Windoze I've ever used. I've used a number of FTP clients (WS FTP, CuteFTP, CoffeeCup FTP, etc.) I've also done the manly-geek thing of logging in via SSH and executing some robust remove -r and .htaccess commands.

But WebDrive lets me treat an FTP volume just like a local drive, with all the access that entails. I can add/remove folders (including all contents), drag-n-drop files, etc. Very nice. And worth paying for. $59.95 from South River Technologies.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 5:18 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Productivity, Technology

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Blog Ads and Tracking Tools

Trader Mike tracks the trends in blogger tools a little better than I do. Here's a couple of interesting additions to the advanced blogger's toolkit:

Some Bloggy Stuff

I recently joined two great services that are very useful to bloggers -- FeedBurner and BlogSnob. I'm a little late to the party on both, but better late than never.

FeedBurner solves the problem of figuring out how many people are reading your site via RSS. It allows you to seamlessly route your RSS feed(s) through FeedBurner and provides detailed traffic reporting. (At least I hope it's been seamless for those of you who are syndicating this site. Let me know if that hasn't been the case.) And of course it's free.

BlogSnob is sort of P2P advertising for blogs. It's similar to Google's AdWords in that it allows you to create advertising campaigns specific to a topic. In BlogSnob's case the topics are categories ('Business & Finance', 'Technology'..) as opposed to AdWords' keywords. Instead of bidding for ad placement, members of the network earn credits for displaying ads from the network. The more credits you get the more often your own ad(s) get displayed on other blogs. I just signed up this morning and have already found a coupe of interesting blogs via the ads appearing on my site. [via Trader Mike]

Also noteworthy, Mike got some major props from Barron's this weekend for being a great resource for people who want to learn about trading. Mike trades his own money and shares much of what he knows and what he learns via his blog. Barron's requires a subscription but Mike has the details. Keep up the great work, Mike!

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:44 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Technology

Saturday, November 6, 2004

Collaborative Analysis

An observation: After a full day-and-a-half looking at virtual worlds, collaborative environments, weblogging, AI, etc. I have yet to see anything that supports collaborative analysis and consensus. What do I mean?

I mean a group of analysts collect some raw data, put it in a place they can all comment on it, manipulate it, detect patterns and trends, make assumptions, and reach consensus as a group on what it means. Does anything do this?

I see lots of ways to talk to each other, to communicate. But the actual data still sits in silos, we still have to ship the data files around individually, or we have to manually enter data into a central database that has a separate analytical application.

Assume a generic research project. You need to:

• collect raw data via surveys (ask people to fill out a structured list of questions)
• numerical data (collect any existing statistical data - i.e. accounting, ERP, MRP, etc.)
• interviews (talk to them about their answers to the other two.)

You want to organize all this stuff in some fashion, look at it with your research group, and reach consensus on what it means. Then you want to present this back to the subjects for validation, and to the customer for review.

Collection is pretty straightforward, so is the presentation. It's the stuff in the middle that's hard. Can Traction do this? JotSpot?

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 7:11 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Collaboration, Strategy, Technology

Interesting Sightings

Have spent an interesting day on the campus at Stanford. Lots of interesting stuff at AC2004:

interesting sightings at accerating change 2004

buddy buzz, combining mobile speed reading with posse-style recommendations. it's principal BJ Fogg has some scary ideas about persuasive technologies that he calls captology.

alicebot is the leading bot technoloy, with an open source community behind it's aiml, the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, which is the markup language for the alice bot. seems obvious to try to apply wikipedia lessons to the nurturing of it's body of knowledge.

digital space, a commons in cyberspace which tries to bootstrap old and new organizational models using the tools cyberspace offers. [via Gregor Rothfuss]

Also stepped across the mall to sit in on the Making Money session at BloggerCon. Roland took some notes.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:18 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Learning, Collaboration, Technology

Inside Psychosis

Saw some very cool stuff last night at the AC2004 Tech Night reception at SAP Labs. Lot's Lots (I hate it when my apostrophe finger gets overactive.) of interesting people, including collaborative environment pioneer Doug Engelbart and Google's Larry Page. This was cool because it meant that AC2004 Accelerating Change has matured a bit, and gotten some well-deserved recognition for being a leading-edge event.

Also saw some very interesting tech -- lots of VR, learning-enabled robotics, avatars, and human enhancement (like Buzz, a product that flashes full-text news and events on your cell phone display one-word-at-a-time in high speed. Sort of like the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Course you took in grade school.) There were a couple of virtual worlds on display -- KumaWar and Second Life.

I am not a big VR afficianado, I think because I just haven't been shown technology that's good enough or uses that are meaningful enough to get my attention. In fact, I'm even guilty of thinking most of what I've seen so far is just bullshit. I mean, I really don't care whether or not the socially disaffected can create fake economies in some simulation. But last night I came to understand that sometimes toys are the only way to create technologies that can really mean something, and it's dangerous to ignore a technology just because an initial use seems frivolous and wasteful.

KumaWar is fascinating because of its ability to simulate real world wartime conditions and emulate real-world recent events. I think if we are to ever stop warfare we must find ways to expose people to its horror -- I mean the personal horror of living with people shooting at you, trying to kill you -- in a way that means something. There is a counter argument that says such exposure just desensitizes us, and maybe that's true also true. KumaWar could just as easily be used to train soldiers as to educate civilians.

The most fascinating environment was Second Life. The demo showed all the cool technology features, the intellectual property people can create, the economies and markets that emerge, etc. For the most part it left me cold, until they began a demo of a simulation that was developed to help families of paranoid schizophrenic patients understand their problems.

This was fascinating. It was modeled after the very real delusions of a schizophrenic patient. And for the first time I could feel what it was like to have voices inside your head. It's not at all like the beautiful hallucinations of Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind". These are ugly, pounding, non-stop voices and images tearing at your mind, skewing your vision, and changing the world you see in frightful and painful ways.

This, I thought, is what VR is about -- creating insight into the mind and finding ways to undersand and help those who suffer in invisible ways. Opening the doors to the very real things that happen in our heads is far more important, IMO, than opening new worlds just so we can go play in them. But play is part of the evolutionary process, and now I know the world(s) of VR have far more applicability to our real lives than I expected.

Update: Forgot to mention that Atlanta-based tech writer Dana Blankenhorn was there, as well. Looked like he was signing copies of his book, "The Blankenhorn Effect: How to Put Moore's Law to Work for You".

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 5:48 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Technology

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