An Open Notebook
Not Watergate! It’s a gateway that converts XSPF to JSON, including JSONP. I’m hosting it on my personal account, but anybody is welcome to use it.
The purpose is to make it easier to use XSPF in AJAX hacks, which is usually blocked by restrictions on cross-domain XML requests.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… THE MONSTER:
Netflix developed great economic leverage with the rights owners — and that is the only way to force them to do deals that allow both customers to be delighted and also leave enough margin for startups to build a business.
But wait, there’s more. The deals you force the rights holders to do have to be survivable for them. Netflix needs its suppliers to stay in business.
Demand Media for music: study how much a piece of music with a given set of characteristics is likely to earn, then commission works with those characteristics at a price less than what you stand to earn.
Komar & Melamid as a CPC-driven content farm.
Andrew Baron of Rocketboom wrote a bit on TechCrunch entitled The Future Of TV Is HTML:
The world is obsessed with apps right now. An app is just software for your computer, and developers are being forced to recreate the same experience dozens of different ways. It’s a constant re-inventing of the wheel. What a waste of time. Now Microsoft is getting into the game too. While it’s easy for a consumer to ignore by just sticking to their platform of choice, developers and content distributors need to figure out WTF they must do next to make their “app” look the same on Windows or some other new platform, like yep, Apple Lion.
Yes, the diversity in platforms is also needed and welcome. It’s in the best interest of the world overall to have many choices. There are many examples of wants-and-needs not being met by just one development platform. Special tasks require alternate solutions. But for TV content, distributed to the living room, none of this really matters because the place to be is not necessarily on the phone, and its not in an app store, its on the web, via HTML.
And the future of HTML on TVs is WebKit. It’s what’s inside Google TV. Boxee switched over from Gecko. It’s optimized for embedded contexts in smart TVs like Vizio and Samsung. WebKit’s competition is Flash Lite, a version of Flash which is slimmed down for embedded platforms. Tivo has Flash Lite, not WebKit, for example. That means the best of both worlds for developers — the power and compatibility of HTML5 combined with the predictability of a single browser.
My wife Karen and I are overjoyed at the birth of our son yesterday. Noah Jackson Gonze entered the world at 11:45 AM on 10/15/10. He’s a hearty 21.5 inches and 7 lbs 15 oz.
PC and mobile apps are used by individuals. Interactive TV apps like MOG’s Roku channel are used by groups. Everybody in the living room can see a living room app at the same time. Everybody there wants the benefit of the movie or the song or the map or whatever the app does. This limits interactivity. It’s like the issue of fighting over who has the remote — everybody is watching the TV, but only one person is picking the channel. Picking the channel can’t be the main point, or it won’t be fun for anybody but the one person with the remote.
From an essay by Erik Moeller on the Creative Commons Non-commercial license:
Any market built around content which is available for free must either rely on goodwill or ignorance.
The potential to benefit financially from mere distribution is therefore quite small. Where it exists due to a predominance of old media, it is likely to disappear rapidly. The people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers.
Indeed, to make a substantial profit with your work, a company will have to provide added value beyond what is available for free.
I tried out Chompin yesterday. Really fun and inspiring. It’s a cousin of Shuffler.fm and Extension.fm.
Nearby older relations are Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Yahoo Media Player, and the Webjay “Play this page” feature.
Some ways to talk about the zeitgeist:
It takes 33 bits to identify you:
Take, for example, a database that stores a user’s ZIP code, gender, age and model of car. On their own, these things sound anonymous. But if the ZIP code has 20,000 people, gender narrows that down to 10,000. Age could cut it down to a few hundred, and once you add model of car, you could be looking at a handful of people. Add other characteristics, like specific browser type and computer operating system, and you may be describing just one individual.
How many pieces of information are needed to identify an individual? In the field of re-identification science, it’s 33 “bits,” specifically “33 bits of entropy.” (Information-science researchers refer to random pieces of information as “entropy.”)
Could you consider those bits an identifier? Could you call yourself “the 22 year old male in the 02130 zip code who drives a Ford Bronco”?
For some purposes, yes.
You could pick up messages left for that identifier as long as it didn’t matter whether somebody else read them. This identifier would be accurate enough to enable you to find messages that were intended to reach you.
Needless to say this ID scheme is decentralized. There isn’t a provider of these identities – individuals make their own by moving to a particular zip code or selecting a particular car.
But could anybody remember these identifiers? I think so. The hard part is zip codes, but I think that’s doable.