Month: January 2008

A very simple yet accurate guide on what Video Game System is right for you.

A great video was posted on the evolution of Techmeme over time.

 

We were talking in the studio the other day about the difficulty in archiving the history of Techmeme in a meaningful way for this very reason. When you click on a particular time on Techmeme, it’s not nearly as dynamic as the video portrays.

Well that got me thinking about something that I have never really been able to wrap my brain around and thats OPML. I “get” what OPML is, but I just couldn’t for the life of me ever think of a good enough application for its use, for my life.

I can totally see an Aristotelian using it, trying to keep track of the classifications of things. I’ve played around with Dave’s OPML Blog (here is mine) and found that pretty fun (in the same way that using Pine for mail is kinda fun). I’ve exported my Bloglines subscriptions to an OPML file to share with others who then used it to import the file into their own readers.

Maybe OPML would be the perfect solution for archiving Techmeme. Once you input all of the stories, you could resort the trees based on time ranges, number of supporting links, most popular – all kinds of specialized relationships.

The interesting thing about this, if what I’m saying here makes any sense is the visualization factor of the OPML tree structures may just work across all of the relationships. 

Perhaps most important is that the expanding subclasses laid out visually in outline form could provide the regular archive hunter an efficient way to drill down into more in-depth information.

Techmeme is actually the kind of website we’ll be seeing more and more of in all kinds of areas. I remember my first entry point into the world of this kind of thinking when I discovered Marlow’s Blogdex. (I really should be getting bonus points here for mentioning Blogdex!)

A big discussion on the adoption of the new Blu Ray Disc format is happening with Time Warner now on board with the format.

This is the kind of technology that I think is important and I’m glad someone is worrying about it, but it doesn’t interest me at all. It’s very clear that very soon after the adoption of Blu Ray, Blu Ray will become obsolete. Its a hang-me-tight technology that is useful only as a short-term, expendable storage solution. 

For me the interesting question leads to the unresolved problem of long-term data storage. What medium can we store our data on that will last securely without rotting or becoming demagnetized for more than 10 years? How many people have listened to Abbey Road on Vinyl, tapes, disks and chips?

2008: The Year of Decentralization or a change in Terms for Profile Data?

Robert Scoble brings up a good point but people need to use more street smarts when dealing with business online. My favorite big sites are YouTube and Flickr. I store *my* content on *their* sites. If YouTube or Flickr shut down my account, I will not be erased. Thats because, ladies and gentlemen, I keep a master copy of my data myself.

‘Not sure why that sounds like a crazy idea but it’s the same thing with all of my Gmail. I consider my email history to be very important to me and I keep a copy on my computer and another on a backup harddrive in a storage unit. 

So you have a lot of data on Facebook that you want? Better make sure you keep a copy yourself. ‘Might want to make a backup too.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gave away an album online for free and asked that people pay $5 for a higher quality version of the music.

28,322 (18.3%) of the 154,449 total downloads were $5 sales. Thats a total of $141,610 in gross for the album.

Reznor and others are able to conclude that it sounds kinda bad or uncertain, but don’t say much in terms of inferences.

I’ll bet Reznor could do a a super album on the cheap but all in all, for a musician with his resources and experience, I find this to be extremely weak in sum for him, personally. But at 18% buy-in which sounds very positive to me by percentage points alone, what if by contrast, say, 1 Million were downloaded? Shouldn’t the internet not only provide Reznor with an updated infrastructure for promoting and distributing his art, but also provide the potential to substantially increase his reach? 

Since the investment would stay almost the same, had he sold 200,000 albums as opposed to just 28,000, the revenue would be so much more substantial.

Apparently Reznor did nothing to promote the album (i.e. had his fans and the general public gotten word of the release, the d/l’s and thus sales would of likely been much greater). This would of also allowed us to reasonably infer that the number of sales NIN reached is possibly attainable by a much smaller band who is actually working hard to get the word out to their fans.

My conclusion is thus that this is a success and a potentially positive indication for a sustainable approach.  28% buy-in for most things is pretty good isnt it?

http://rocketboom.tumblr.com