vobios.blog

The album of the month for July 2006:
Beirut – Gulag Orkestar

Rock without guitars. Wacky and refreshing.

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (May 9, 2006)
Label: Ba Da Bing
Sales Rank: #1,216 in Music

New day, new argument for why everyone must blog. Blog or die. For some reason the blogosphere is constantly trying to justify its existence. From The next Web is the human Web:

Quick, do a little project with me. Visit the home pages of Nestle and Quixtar.

Without clicking anywhere find me a real human being. Not one made out of a stock photo agency.

You don’t need to look. There aren’t any. Not to mention that you can’t talk to a real human being. And I don’t see anything on those two pages that I’d like to link to. Which means they won’t get high search engine rankings no matter how many SEO firms they pay.

Why should Nestle care about search engine rankings in the first place? Why should Nestle care about Internet at all? And who goes to the Nestle home page in the first place?

The album of the month for June 2006:
AFI - Decemberunderground

Should pick something before it’s way too late. Must keep the tradition going.

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (June 6, 2006)
Label: Interscope Records
Sales Rank: #71 in Music
Yesterday: #62 in Music

The Official Google Blog put up a story on Alex Chiles. “She just completed 6th grade in the Seattle area. And she wrote this essay for her class. If we made Alex up, you wouldn’t believe us, so take a moment to read her report yourself.”

A selection from Google Is The Center OF My Internet World, the essay in question:

Now you know how important Google is to me when I’m online or using my computer! Whether I’m finding a friend’s phone number or just checking my email, Google covers it all. Google has a product for everything and they’re so easy to use! I’m not sure if I could survive without Google and all of its products, they are just way to useful!

This is from a school essay.

Kids these days.

On Sunday, The New York Times runs an article about how employers are looking at job applicants’ profiles on social networking sites. From For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume:

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

Nothing groundbreaking here. Hardly a day goes by that the media fails to warn me that MySpace will steal my soul and eat my firstborn. The response is MySpace Careers. As stated in the official press release:

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—June 12, 2006—MySpace, the premier lifestyle portal, today announced the launch of MySpace Jobs, a new search feature to be powered by Simply Hired, the world’s largest search engine for jobs. The new feature—available at http://careers.myspace.com—provides MySpace members access to more than 5 million listings aggregated by the Simply Hired search engine.

After being hit with a major article stressing how crucial it is to separate your personal and professional life online, MySpace decides to bring them closer together.

The album of the month for May 2006:
Tapes ‘n Tapes – The Loon

I am not particularly excited about this one, but I have to pick something despite May being a slow music month for me.

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (April 4, 2006)
Label: (label name not provided)
Sales Rank: #734 in Music
Yesterday: #714 in Music

As mentioned over at ZDNet:

The most interesting data in the Hitwise analysis though is undoubtedly the comparison of verticals between Google, Yahoo and MSN. In web email services, despite my post at the end of last week about Gmail being the best webmail service – when it comes to cold hard stats Gmail is a distant last:

1. Yahoo Mail 42.4%
2. MSN Hotmail 22.9%
3. MySpace mail 19.5%
4. Gmail 2.54%

Less than 3% for Gmail? I am not sure how exactly these statistics are compiled, but that is surprising. At a time when it seems like everyone you know is switching to Gmail, it turns out hardly anyone is using it at all. Something just does not seem right. Then again, MySpace is on this list and that is not an email service.

As previously mentioned, I really need to start doing this feature in a more timely manner.

The album of the month for April 2006:
Wolfmother – Wolfmother

I normally dislike classic rock, avoiding it whenever possible. This reincarnation of 70s rock I am crazy about. Odd.

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (May 2, 2006)
Label: Interscope Records
Sales Rank: #45 in Music
Yesterday: #37 in Music

I really need to start doing this feature in a more timely manner. Maybe have some other posts too. Yeah, that would be nice.

The album of the month for March 2006:
Band of Horses – Everything All the Time

Band of Horses is a Seattle band that seems to have been compared to My Morning Jacket by every reviewer around. The Shins have also been suggested. Then again, people tend to throw names around to make a statement. Another possible explanation is Pitchfork, which happened to rate Everything All the Time at 8.8 while drawing those comparisons. If they like it, it cant be that bad. Oh wait, TI’s King got 8.4.

This is why I don’t do reviews. Worthless pursuit.

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (March 21, 2006)
Label: Sub Pop
Sales Rank: #222 in Music
Yesterday: #152 in Music

For years Apple explicitly stated there would be no video iPod. Many saw it coming, but the company denied it time and time again. In the end, the video iPod was released.

Today, Apple went back on its words again by introducing Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. From the press release:

“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch.”

It will be interesting to see how long this promise lasts.

To keep this whole album of the month going, the February winner is:
Lorenzo’s Music – Solamente Tres Palabras

According to their own web site (which now also has all of their songs for free):

Lorenzo’s Music is Tom Ray (vocals), Mark Whitcomb (guitar), Scott Beardsley (drums), Bryan Elliott (saxophone), and Chris Boeger (bass). They are not a punk band experimenting with 30’s-style swing, an indie rock band trying their hands at Chicago-style blues, or a hardcore band exploring their love of latin rhythms. They are simply a group of talented guys who obviously see no reason why they can’t just do all of the above.

I am not sure what exactly that means, but they certainly captured my interest. It would be nice to see this group gain some popularity considering their latest album is not listed on Amazon.com and all of their shows are in Madison, Wisconsin.

On a related note January’s album of the month (The Subways – Young for Eternity) really took off.
Amazon.com statistics for February 3, 2006:
Sales Rank: #38,460 in Music
Yesterday: #20,164 in Music
Today’s statistics:
Sales Rank: #410 in Music
Yesterday: #340 in Music

If only it was this easy to track Lorenzo’s Music.

For the new year I decided to publicly keep track of my music tastes. The result is a featured album to be highlighted here at the turn of each month. Since there are plenty of albums reviews online, that is not something to be found here. Plus, I do not believe you can truly understand music through text. Maybe that explains why I don’t listen to lyrics.

The first album of the month for January 2006:
The Subways – Young for Eternity

Product Details (from Amazon.com):
Audio CD (February 14, 2006)
Label: Sire / London/Rhino
Sales Rank: #38,460 in Music
Yesterday: #20,164 in Music

Should be interesting to see the numbers fluctuate as time goes by.

I remember the day when you could not use the word blog in public due to an excessive amount of blank stares that would surely result. Fast forward a few years and now it’s almost a requirement in certain circles to have one. You know things have gone too far when someone decides to create a Business Blogging Index. From The Long Tail:

Earlier this year I was at a dinner with Doc Searls and we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don’t. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn’t. Sun blogs and Intel doesn’t. GM blogs and Toyota doesn’t. And so on.

Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction. So companies on the way up don’t want to mess with their success by introducing a new lens on the enterprise that isn’t controlled by the PR department. But companies on the way down are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers.

Hmm, I thought. That’s testable. Let’s look at which of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging and compare their past twelve month share performance with those that aren’t. If this theory stands up, the blogging members of the F500 will have underperformed the nonblogging members. And then we can also see if blogging makes a difference going forward, by continuing to follow the two cohorts.

What grew out of this is the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. I’ll be checking it frequently to make sure I do not miss these exciting new blogs:
Bed Bath & Beyond – pillow news
Exxon Mobil – more reasons to get that SUV
Heinz – ketchup ain’t just for hot dogs anymore
Walgreen – you have to fill your prescriptions somewhere
Wendy’s – square burgers are better

This is my favorite section, though:

Over time, as the list gets more robust, we’ll add the share price performance back in and turn it into a Business Blogging Index so you can see if blogging is indeed correlated to company performance (and who knows, maybe someday some smart mutual fund will actually turn it into a fund you can buy).

The unfortunate part is that some people would actually buy that fund. Forget the management, the cash flow, the product lineup, or the industry. Blogging is what drives the corporations of tomorrow. Amazon.com and Microsoft are more likely to blog than Berkshire Hathaway or Dollar General because they simply “are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers”. Everything is so clear to me now.

Upon reading this piece by David Pogue, I just had to fire an email to the author.

Hello David,

I just read your 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year article. For the most part, I thought it was a good lineup. Unfortunately, not all of them are new or entirely accurate.

“THE FREE DOMAIN NAME A domain name is what comes before the “.com” in a Web address – like NYTimes.com, verizonwireless.com or MarryMeBritney.com. Getting your own personal dot-com name has its privileges – for example, your e-mail address can be You@YourNameHere.com – but it costs money and requires some expertise. It took Microsoft, of all companies, to make getting your own dot-com name free. Its new Office Live online software suite for small businesses, now in testing, will offer a domain name, Web site and e-mail accounts free. Yes, you’ll see ads on the screen (unless you pay for the adless version) – but plenty of people won’t mind viewing them in exchange for a free, professional-looking Web presence.”

It was not Microsoft that came up with the idea of a free domain name. Around 1999-2001, during the final days of the tech bubble, there were several free domain name registrars. They have long since changed their business models, but their place in history cannot be ignored.

Also, since Microsoft’s free domain comes with Office Live, a relatively expensive product, is the domain really free? What about all the companies that offer free domains with their hosting packages?

As I said before, you produced a good lineup. However, some parts were somewhat fudged. I really would like to expect more from a publication like The New York Times. This is more than just a local paper. If I find errors in the information I am familiar with, how can I trust anything else in your publication?

I hope such reporting is avoided in the future.

I wonder if I will at least be honored with a response.

The Wikipedia saga continues. The Register had a beautiful article today:

For CNN viewers, and for NPR listeners again the following day, Wales repeated his wish to unmask the perp, but could only offer some hand-wringing excuse about the difficulty of finding anonymous users, and the complexity of serving internet service providers with subpoenas. However, we now learn that the libeler wasn’t very hard to find, and has now stepped forward to confess to making the edit with an apology.

Brian Chase, a 38 year old employee of Rush Delivery in Seigenthaler’s home town of Nashville, Tennessee, admitted to making the edit and has apologized to Seigenthaler. The reason he gave to the New York Times was most revealing.

Chase thought Wikipedia was a joke site and he made the edit to amuse a colleague. From which we conclude that the spoof site Uncyclopedia, which consists entirely of fictional entries, is doing far better than expected, and that Wikipedia has a long way to go to rid itself of the image that it’s a massive, multiplayer shoot-em-up game, or MMORPG.

Chase has lost his job, and Seigenthaler joined the pleas to reinstate him.

But the unusual aspect of this – and this is an irony on a par with Sony using ‘DVD’ Jon Johansen’s anti-DRM code in its DRM CD software – is what compelled Chase to step forward. The libeller was outed not by Wikipedia guardians, by a prominent critic of the site who has been earned himself a lifetime Wikipedia ban – researcher Daniel Brandt.

Chase left a fingerprint behind, in the form of an IP address, and Brandt discovered that the machine was active, traced it to Nashville, and discovered it was hosting a web server. The web server revealed the name of a company: ‘Rush Delivery’. Brandt fired off a fax to Rush Delivery in Nashville and confirmed the connection.

Then the article offers a quick summary of the entire debate and hits the nail right on the head:

Two great cries have rung around the internet since the Seigenthaler scandal broke.

One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself, and the other is that no source of authority can be trusted “definitively”. That’s a deliciously weaselly phrase we’ll examine in a moment.

But both excuses seek, in the classic tradition of bad engineers blaming users for their own shoddy handiwork, to pass the responsibility onto Wikipedia’s users.

The blame goes here, the blame goes there – the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there’s a problem – well, the user must be stupid!

It continues:

If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public “internet” ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world’s greatest “knowledge” was just around the corner. This hasn’t happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile.

Everything you read is suspect! You’d better duck!

Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative “encyclopedia” making such a statement is odd, to say the least.

This defense firmly puts the blame on the reader, for being so stupid as to take the words at face value. Silly you, for believing us, they say.

I could not have said it better myself.

Kanye West finally admitted how he dropped out of college. From MTV:

“It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have,” West said backstage. “I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn’t successful and Columbia said, ‘We’ll call you,’ I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that’s how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities.”

... “I think it’s just dope to help kids with money and school,” the rapper said. “That’s the main problem. When I was a college student I was broke, and I really like clothes. When I was in college it would have been better if I could have afforded more clothes!”

On a related note, John Smallwood had an interesting comment:

I get e-mails all the time questioning my blackness because I work for the Daily News, because I sometimes criticize black athletes, because I don’t always say what some black people want or expect me to say.

So is growing up impoverished in the inner city an absolute must to be considered “truly” black?

I grew up in a school district that was only 6 percent black and was called a “nigger.” Would it have been more accurate had they called me “little kind-of-a-black boy lost in suburbia?”

Damn, it sure hurt like I was being called “nigger.”

If I don’t subscribe to the “thug life,” does that mean I don’t subscribe to the black life?

Ever since I first heard “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas, I could not find the right words to describe what I felt about. Slate overcame that obstacle:

As a piece of music, “My Humps” is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas. The song’s playful pogo and coke-thin, ring-tone synth line interpolate Sexual Harassment’s 1982 left-field electro hit, “I Need A Freak”. But where the original trafficked in something icky, sinister, and darkly sexual, the Peas’ call-and-response courtship fails to titillate—in fact, it’s enough to convince one to never, ever ogle again. The “humps” in question belong to Fergie, who brandishes her “lovely lady lumps” for the purpose of procuring various gifts from men who, one would assume, find the prospect of “lumps” very exciting—one lump begetting another lump, if you will.

“What you gon’ do with all that ass/ All that ass inside them jeans? … What you gon’ do wit all that breast?/ All that breast inside that shirt?” rapper Will.I.Am teases in response, rendering literal what had heretofore been pretty much literal. It’s a song that tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-butts and bloodies the target instead. It isolates sectors of the female anatomy that obsessive young men have been inventing language for since their skulls fused, and yet it emerges only with “humps” and “lumps”—at least “Milkshake” sounded delicious.

After the recent media blitz criticizing Wikipedia, the web service responded:

Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.

I am sure the new policy will go a long way, especially considering that almost every imaginable page has already been created. True, the measures will help with the spam, but that is not what all the discussion has been about. Talk about a gimmick.

Additionally, this was in a different article:

“That’s an interesting philosophical issue,” Wales said. “Because on the one hand, particularly with things like podcasting, the people involved are people who know a lot about it, and on the other hand, when people are editing something they’ve been personally involved in, it can be hard for them to be neutral.”

He added that traditionally, Wikipedia has discouraged users from participating in such entries and asks them to be mature and serious when they do.

Luckily, the Internet is a great place to expect maturity and seriousness from complete strangers protected by anonymity.

Breaking news from The New York Times. Turns out the mighty Wikipedia cannot be trusted. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, “The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources.”

I have been dubious of Wikipedia for a long time. After all the praise it has been receiving lately, it is nice to see someone try to open up everyones eyes. I just wonder why it took years for this to end up in a major publication.

And just for the record, as Wikipedia continues to become more mainstream, the number of submissions will eventually completely overwhelm the small group of people willing to actually edit the content. How long this experiment will last is an interesting question though.

In their quest to reach to a broader range of students, colleges are trying a number of techniques. The New York Times reports:

Across the country, colleges are trying to reposition themselves to attract more high-quality students and raise their national profiles. But perhaps nowhere is this more challenging than in the South, where university officials often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors determined to uphold their heritage.

It continues:

Some alumni were also angered by a report commissioned by the university last year by a marketing firm from Chicago that said that the word “South” often had negative connotations for students around the country; the weaker the connection between the South and the university’s name, the better, the consultants said.

That set off a fierce debate over the unofficial logo that the university has been using for at least a decade on stationery, business cards, campus maps and now its Web site: Sewanee: the University of the South. Often the word “Sewanee” is in large type, with the rest of the name in small type underneath.

What the marketing firm failed to notice is that Sewanee is in Tennessee. If you are uncomfortable with the South, why you would consider applying to a college in Tennessee is beyond me.

You had to have seen it coming. Even The Onion wrote about it. Then it finally happened. Gillette announced it will soon start selling a five-blade razor called Fusion. And, according to BusinessWeek, “Gillette managed to develop Fusion and Fusion Power for slightly less than the $680 million it spent on Mach3 seven years ago”. Sure it takes money to develop a brand new shaving system. You have to add the extra blades, adjust the angles, play with the spacing, and finally test the product. It boggles my mind how inefficient a company has to be to dump hundreds of millions into this process.

Money aside, the quest for innovation and development of new products is turning into a deadly spiral. You can keep adding more blades for a while, but there must be some sanity line that cannot be crossed. You can’t just add them forever. You’ll end up with some sort of a sandpaper-like device. Perhaps that is the final solution.

The MTV Video Music Awards aired the other day. I happened to see a decent amount of the show.

The Best New Artist award went to The Killers. Something didn’t feel right. One of their singles was all over the radio more than year ago. Their latest album, Hot Fuss, came out in June 2004, well before the 2004 VMAs. Then I remembered who got Best New Artist back then. It was Maroon 5, whose Songs About Jane came out in June 2002. That is over two years beforehand. The category is clearly meaningless. Its mere existence is just a way for MTV to say they have the authority to declare any artist new at any time.

Today Thefacebook unveiled a new layout and a new domain name (facebook.com). In addition, now it refers to itself as just Facebook, so on some level it also got a new name. The confusion that resulted from having an incredibly awkward name is over. The masses may now rejoice. In honor of this occasion, below is the text of my post from June 17, 2004. This was taken from my previous blog that is no longer active.

As the blanket of snow covering the New England hills was facing its final days, no one could foresee an epidemic that would soon be unleashed upon the world. Spawned in the cellars of Harvard University, Thefacebook has been invading college campuses nationwide since its February launch. Cornell became one of the first petri dishes for this virus, along with other elite schools like Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Thousands of Cornellians rushed to create Thefacebook accounts when the campus was added to its network in March. The Cornell section of the web site already has over 9,000 members, which is incredible given the fact that there are less than 14,000 undergraduates at the university. Besides AOL Instant Messenger, it is impossible to name any other online service that has penetrated the student body to such an extent.

According to Thefacebook, the service is “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges and universities”. It is easy to make comparisons to Friendster and Orkut. When you join, you are asked to create a profile. All fields except for your name and email are optional, but of course the vast majority of students fill out most of them. A key part of Thefacebook experience is adding other members to your list of friends. It is absolutely delightful to browse your network to see who your buddies know and how you are connected to numerous other students. You may then proceed to look up random people to see where they are from, what classes they are taking, their birthday, and so forth. It is no wonder many call it an excellent stalking tool.

The way Thefacebook works is simple. The part that has continued to puzzle me is why people have joined it in droves, especially considering all of the privacy concerns. I decided to run a simple experiment. On April 15, a new account was created by Andy Connors. He became the 4588th person (determined from the profile’s URL) to join Thefacebook. Andy was a just like any other Cornell student, except for the fact that he did not exist prior to that moment. Despite having a simple name, he could not be mistaken for someone else. According to the Cornell directory, there was no one on campus with that name.

Just like many other brand new members, Andy left his profile on Thefacebook unfilled. He then started generating random user IDs and going to the profiles corresponding to those users. The first 20 people that already had friends (indicating they were active users) were sent a friend invitation. Three days later, Andy had nine friends. He was no longer someone existing solely within the digital realm. He had real friends. It was time to add some information to his profile. He then selected three people from each of his friends’ lists of friends (assuming they had at least three of them). These 24 individuals were sent requests to be added to Andy’s network. In the next four days, 15 of them would approve them. During this time, two more of his original invitations were accepted. In his first week of existence, Andy acquired 26 friends. After another week passed, this number grew to 29.

In the first two weeks, nearly two-thirds (29/44) of Andy’s friend requests were confirmed. The sample size in this study is far from sufficient, but it goes a long way in helping to illustrate an important point. When asked why they joined Thefacebook, most people fail to give a coherent response. Andy helped me find the secret that fueled the explosion of this phenomenon. Perhaps people see it as a way determine their self worth with a discrete number. A small network could only mean one that you are an antisocial loser, so it is imperative that you try to expand it. This means if there are people you know who still have not signed up, you must pressure them to do so. Your honor rests on it.

It is absurd to think Thefacebook is not about counting friends. It is about counting every person you ever met. It does not matter if you only saw them once in one of your classes. It does not matter if you have not talked to them in two years. It does not even matter if they are not a real person.

Bob Woodward, the journalist most known for uncovering the Watergate scandal, has made some new revelations. According to Woodward, it will be Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton facing off in 2008 elections. I suppose the sooner you start the hype, the more likely it will come true.

For some reason, though, something about this sounds familiar. There was some discussion about Hillary Clinton in 2000. That was just crazy talk. Happened again in 2004. That time, the Democrats found an incredible candidate in John Kerry. Can’t wait for the excuse in 2008. I should get ahead of the curve and become the first to announce Clinton for President in 2012. In case that one is already taken, I might as well claim 2016 as well. Take that America!

As far as Cheney is concerned, he was supposed to be the guy who hurt Bush’s reelection chances. All his tremendous accomplishments in the last year must have launched him to the top. Yes, that’s it.

TIME just came out with a story on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. There were comparisons between the current Administration’s policies in the Middle East and the Marshall Plan along with other topics of such pseudo-uplifting nature. However, there was one particular part that really struck me:

Rice’s forward-leaning approach leaves little space for formalities. She doesn’t e-mail because it is impersonal and indelible, communicating mainly through person-to-person calls.

Impersonal or not, this is 2005. You can’t just completely ignore one of the most important communication mediums.

As far as indelible goes, perhaps she has a point there. With all of the recent exposed email leaks in Washington, it might be a good idea to avoid anything that may to come back to haunt you.