Audio recording

Dave says::

This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

Dave, you should have asked, instead of searching. Here's some free code to record audio using QuickTime from any Windows device. The code dates back to 1992, and was working on Windows in 1997.
This is what AOL use to do the Audio/Video chat in the latest AIM releases (that iteroperates with iChat).

Value destroyed is not owned

Tim Oren writes on DRM as a warning sign:

Copy protection DRM always destroys end user value, in both convenience and robustness. When you see DRM in a business plan or analysis, it is always there to benefit someone other than the end user. Find out who, it will indicate where power lies in a content value chain.

The mere presence of DRM indicates a failure to deliver end user value. If the information object were to lose value when extracted from the bundle or service from it was derived, DRM would not be felt necessary. Therefore the presence of DRM suggests a vendor that is behind the curve, failing to find a new value to deliver as their chokepoint disappears in the digital world.

Tim is correct that DRM destroys value, but he is mistaken in his implication that it can just be Customer value that is destroyed. The 0th law of economics is that a trade only happens when both parties see themselves as gaining from it. If the Customers see less value, they pay less for the product, and its value is thereby reduced. This kind of short-sightedness is foolish enough with conventional goods, but is especially stupid with digital media, when you have no measurable marginal cost of goods and can carry over Customers' excitement into other goods.

How about mass video editing?

Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took something like the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which bits of action people as a whole found interesting.

Losing language sales

This weekend we attended the Home School Geography Club, which was about Viet Nam, and enjoyed it immensely. Our friends the Hamiltons hosted it and, among many other fascinating things, taught us as few words in Vietnamese, and fed us Phô .
However when writing out the Vietnamese sheets, Bich was adding the accents by hand on the printout. It turns out that the Vietnamese keyboard inclued with OS X is far too hidden for anyone but experts to find(System Preferences, International, Input Menu Tab, and check the ones you want in a scrolling list).

This reminded me of an idea I had for an Apple ad campaign to highlight OS X's language support.

What I suggest is a poster campaign, showing a localised Mac screen running Mail with large type saying

Macintosh speaks your languages

Except that you do it as a teaser.

Start with the least common (in the US) languages Apple localises to, eg Korean, and work your way up the demographic to English, changing posters once a week or more often

매킨토시는 너의 언어를 말한다
マッキントッシュは言語を話す
Macintosh говорит ваши языки
Macintosh fala suas línguas
Macintosh spricht Ihre Sprachen
Macintosh parle vos langages
Macintosh habla sus lenguajes
Macintosh speaks your languages

Each time you change a poster and add a language, you switch the outer UI (menus etc) to that language. You deliberately place the posters in non-ethnic areas, so they are cryptic to most.
(Obviously, you get native speakers to translate the slogan instead of using Sherlock like I did).

47 million Americans speak a non-English language, according to the 2000 Census. 26 million also speak English well, 21 million are less proficient. Millions more learn a foreign language in school.

Imagine the media buzz these cryptic posters would generate, and the feeling of pride the bilingual people would have when they see an ad in their language, out in public.
In other countries, you do the same thing with a different language order.

Heckling the debate in irc

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it.
I combined the two:

You can call this audioblogging with comments or maybe it is something else.Note that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords like 'flu' or 'bin Laden'.

Direct link: http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

Hackaton at Technorati next Wednesday

As we'll have a huge concentration of web geeks just up the road at Web 2.0 next week, we decided to have a hackathon at Technorati on Wednesday night.

Bring your laptops and brains, and hack on our API and other web code.

RSVP promptly

Getting semantic with Tantek

Tomorrow night, Tantek and I are talking at SDForum about Semantic XHTML:

Can your website be your API? - Using semantic XHTML to make your structures clear

XML formats gained popularity as a backlash against the messiness of HTML mixing structure and presentation, and leniency for sloppy markup. With XHTML+CSS now widely supported in mainstream browsers, and gaining converts even amongst those most focused on representation, these objections lose their force, and the resistance to more and more ad-hoc specialized schemas grows. How far can we get specifying structure in pure XHTML -valid XML - styling it with CSS for presentation, and making it parsable for meaning?

4 million served

Technorati just passed the 4 million blogs indexed point. We get about the same number of posts a week.

Sharks in a tank

We went to Monterey Bay Aquarium on Sunday and saw the baby Great White shark they have in the tank there - video below:

They say this is the only Great White to eat in captivity, and that the longest any lasted previously was 16 days. How annoying for the Bond villains with the shark tanks to have to restock every couple of weeks, and then to have the sharks refuse to eat when they drop victims in.

The tip if you go to see it is to go in the Members' entrance (membership is a good deal if you go even twice a year) and go straight to the 'Endangered Wildlife' section, which leads to the bottom of the Outer Bay tank, where the shark spends its time. If you go upstairs to the auditorium seating part of the Outer Bay tank upstairs you are very unlikely to see the shark clearly past the crowds.

Audio misunderstandings

IEEE Spectrum has an article on audio compression that manages to combine some useful info with sloppy misconceptions and questionable assertions. I annotated it to point these out. Do join me in correcting it for them.

Can't give money away

I'm told by James and Jim of VoteOrNot that the chances of winning $100,000 are good as their sign-up rate is lower than they expected.

Vote early and vote often.

Unacknlowedged legislators

I'm guest-blogging over at Many2Many; this is my first effort.

Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and this dream lies behind a lot of blogging, though the literary archetype is perhaps Peter Wiggin rather than Byron.

The challenge for social software is to construct frameworks for people. Suw and Adina have recently discussed the analogies with architectural spaces; Joel about how having lots of people involved changes design.

I spent the holiday weekend building sandcastles, watching waves closely to decide which one to jump into, and reading Churchill's description of how political organisation evolved in the UK.

What I hope to do while guest-blogging here is to talk about how we build enduring frameworks that enable people to grow new, surprising institutions together.

Dewey dubiety

David Weinberger partially defends the Dewey decimal system. I see his point, but a system that gives Phrenology a top-level number (139) but sues people promoting it is doomed to an early death when there is a free and open alternative to refer to topics easily.

Dive Into Python

Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python is now available in book form . Reading it in print reminded me how good it was, and it has grown a few chapters since I first read it online.

If an aversion to reading online has kept you back, go buy it now. It is a very impressive piece of work - it manages to explain the Python language, and, more importantly the idioms and customs of Python programming, through a series of well-chosen and interesting examples. The chapter on test-driven development shows why this makes sense, how Python supports it, and how it leads to better code.

Mark writes as he does - look at his excellent Universal Feed Parser, with its thousands of test cases for a concrete example of the power of test-driven development.

Python is my favorite programming language. Mark does a great job of explaining why. Try it, you'll like it.

Call Off the Search

Explaining Technorati and blogging to people has been tricky. Once I explain we keep track of what people are saying and linking to in weblogs, their first reaction is to say 'Oh you're a search engine' (silent subtext: Google will eat you for breakfast).
This is where it gets tricky, because search is a task, not a goal.
Jeff Bezos and John Battelle help explain this better:

[Bezos uses] "discovery" as an umbrella term which incorporates search. I think in the end when I use the word "search" I really mean "discovery" as Jeff uses it. What's discovery? Well, much more in the book, but in the end, it's search plus what happens when the network finds things for *you* - based on what it knows of you, your actions, and your inferred intent.

Last week I watched Steve Jobs explain Technorati's advantage over Google - he was talking about Safari's RSS search, but Technorati searches millions of blogs for you within minutes of them updating, not just the RSS feeds you have already subscribed to.

But again, searching for keywords is missing the point.

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation,
The continuity of viewpoint within a blog is key - you can see more about them than just the one comment, and you can keep discovering and growing with them. Conversely, being aware that what you are writing is 'on your permanent record' means that you write more carefully for a blog than for an email.

Blogcritics sent me a CD to review - Call Off the Search by Katie Melua. Rosie loved it, but the title song sums up what I'm getting at here: "Now that I've found you I'll call off the search."

Blogging is about what you discover, not about what you search for.
How you can follow the conversations and make new discoveries is what I'm working on. [updated 2014 - original Steve Jobs link was broken 5 times over by Apple: it linked to homepage.mac.com (Which they killed) hosting a Quicktime reference movie (which they killed) to a streaming Quicktime movie (which they killed) of a Steve Jobs keynote (which is now offline) explaining Safari RSS search (Which they killed).