connecting*the*dots

Look, I want the iPhone (more accurately, I want to give up my Treo 650), but there’s no way I can justify spending $500 on this beauty until these three features — in the very least — are added in a next generation:

• A tactile qwerty keyboard: I cannot go backwards in text messaging functionality, which is the definition of touchscreen qwerty. No way, Jose.
• Real battery life: My iPod battery died after less than a year and it never played for more than a few hours in the first place. The Treo 650 specs show 6hrs talk time and 300 hours standby (both are accurate from my experience); the iPhone specs are up to 5hrs talk, browse or video and up to 6hrs audio. If I’m buying this for its multi-functionality — essentially giving up my other gadgets — then those figures are completely unacceptable.
• More Gigs: Again, if this is to replace my iPod, 4gig and 8gig models are pretty weak options. Direct market me once you pass the 20gig threshold.

See you in a few years, baby.

(originally uploaded by axb500)

My iPod battery died years ago; it now lives permanently attached to the cigarette lighter in my truck as if on life support.

Until DRM is dead, and I can use the music I’ve bought at the iTunes Music store on a player other than an iPod, screw ‘em both.

Thanks to the good folks at plasq, my screen will now be saved by surreal urban environments splashed with graffiti and textures, all at the discount price of nothing.

Now if I could only have my RSS Visualizer appear within the environment itself…

(via FactoryCity)

A working piece of art using a 1988 Mac SE, a 1923 Underwood typewriter and a Fresnel lens. Such a beautiful ode to Brazil — my all-time favorite movie.

(via Neatorama)

Just who are these fuckin’ guys anyway?

vnunet.com
RIAA aims to ban CD ripping
by Iain Thomson

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has reversed its position on CD ripping and now wants the practice outlawed.

In a filing to the US government concerning digital rights management the RIAA and other copyright industry associations said the fact that CD ripping is widespread does not make it legal.

“Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization,” the filing stated.

“In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.”

This is a complete reversal of the RIAA’s previous policy. In last year’s Supreme Court MGM v. Grokster case a representative of the RIAA described ripping a CD and putting it on an iPod as “perfectly lawful”.

“It is no secret that the entertainment ‘oligopolists’ are not happy about space-shifting and format-shifting,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a statement. “But surely ripping your own CDs to your own iPod passes muster.”

Unbelievable. The RIAA is Exhibit A as to why I financially support the EFF. Didn’t we get past this litigious moment in time when we were passing mix tapes between friends in the early 80’s?

Unchanneled, unbundled, uncontrolled music distribution can tremendously benefit three out of the four constituents in the music industry — the fans, artists and labels — if the technology is enabled and monetized properly. Citizen media and file sharing software has already provided the inroads to extrapolating the concept of personal mix tapes by exponential factors, but since the RIAA is a cabal of thug lawyers, knee-deep in the politics of the power structure of the record industry and big business — busy hawking the propaganda of “musicians starving by the thousands” due to copyright infringement — artists are left out of the conversation surrounding their own work.

From the RIAA self-descrption on their About Us page (emphasis mine ):

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality. Its members are the record companies that comprise the most vibrant national music industry in the world. RIAA members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.

In support of this mission, the RIAA works to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists; conduct consumer industry and technical research; and monitor and review - - state and federal laws, regulations and policies. The RIAA also certifies Gold®, Platinum®, Multi-Platinum™, and Diamond® sales awards, and recently launched Los Premios De Oro y Platino™, a new award celebrating Latin music sales.

The RIAA are suits providing a perceived value service for a constituency of labels. Innocuous transfers, such as cd-rom to iPod, shouldn’t even be a part of the conversation, but the legal hawks at the RIAA need to keep their battle alive, cash in their hours on the job and make further cases for battles in this war, one that is bound to fail.

Why?

When we reach the tipping point for successfully monetizing a post-modern world — where citizen media receives micro-payments for media views and not click-throughs or micro-purchases instead of bundled viewing through industry channels — this argument will simply become moot. As new technological systems for production and distribution are built, the creative talent inside and out of the development community will begin to leverage the services.

• It’s already happening at myspace.com
• Have you seen what you can do with iLife?
• Hell, even I’m a movie director in my spare time

The evolution of citizen production technologies, along with rich forms of free advertising, networking, marketing and sharing delivered by blogs, will not just simply come to a screeching halt.

And that’s why the RIAA is stepping up their “intelligently designed” game.

I tend to sit on the optimistic side of this battle. Explicit, absolute hierarchy expressed via controlled management will not survive this explosion of technological innovation. It simply can’t. For as much energy and resources it takes to create, manage and govern a structured, old-money universe with closed systems of infrastructure, it takes a fraction of such time, energy and resources to release expression into the newly networked ether.

But these facts won’t stop the lawyers of the world from doing their best from stopping it. Check out this snippet from the bio of one of their leaders:

Mitch Bainwol
Chairman And CEO
Recording Industry Association of America

Mitch Bainwol joined the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as Chairman and CEO in September 2003. As a seasoned policymaker, he is one of the Washington’s most recognized and respected strategists and possesses a unique blend of political, legislative, and communications skills.

The Washington Post recently called Bainwol a “Top D.C. Lobbyist and Man in Demand.” Several years in a row, Capitol Hill’s Roll Call newspaper hailed Bainwol as one of the 50 most influential “politicos” in Washington. He was also named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the most powerful people in show business and Campaigns and Elections magazine named him a “Mover and Shaker.”

[…]

Bainwol is a “recognized and respected strategist” in Washington DC; he’s a lobbyist. Music is reinventing itself from too many directions for him or anyone else representing this controlled system to make it last long-term.

Fuck the RIAA!

Dave Winer, who I read often and agree with a good chunk of the time, is acting pretty shady with his latest post, "Hmm, not so sure about that."

In order to write a post about the ill-conceived notion of people "defining" what the blogosphere is "all about" (I happen to agree with him, it’s all in the eye of the beholder), he quotes a provocative one-liner from Tara at HorsePigCow saying:

"The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures."

Dave then goes on to frame his position in any debate regarding the topic of blogging:

"It’s weird when someone who’s been blogging for months says what the blogosphere is all about and it doesn’t match up with what I, who have been blogging for years, thinks.

It’s one of those things where she can think what she wants and I can think what I want and the world goes on.

But anyone who thinks they know what the blogosphere is about is as right as someone who thinks they know the meaning of life, and potentially as dangerous (in a not-nice way) because maybe they’ll try to force you to see it their way."

Well, that’s a surgically chosen bait quote there, Dave. How about grabbing a quote which included a bit more context to her entire post, something akin to:

"For me, though, it comes down to power. I’m all for empowering the individual. (dot)Ben, being merely a conference participant, was able to voice his own dissension to the subject matter, but was called out by the speaker, who, had the power in that room. The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures. The ‘me’conomy is rising, folks."

I read her post and followed her good links to find out that, apparently, tension at Les Blogs conference erupted as a speaker (Mena Trott) was criticized (with a "bullshit") by a member of the audience (Ben Metcalfe) via the (publicly displayed) conference backchannel discussion. Subsequently, Mena decided to ask the mystery handler to stand up and back his/her comments and the hilarity ensued.

Tara’s post was primarily gleaned analysis via Technorati’s "Top Searches This Hour" feature, commenting that it was a signifier of the blogosphere’s affinity to the little guy (Ben, the audience member) not the empowered (Mena, the speaker).

After doing my own hyperlink chasing through Tara and Ben’s posts, I stumbled across the fact that Dave was apparently present for watched the event on vidcast afterwards and left his comments on Ben’s squash-attempting post about "the incident." So if Dave was at the event, and participated by having discourse with Ben on his post about the incident, why the fuck didn’t he attribute a more contextual quote to Tara?

Instead, following the out-of-context quote he framed within his own rhetoric, he pushes his own false-positive agenda to the forefront (emphasis mine):

"I did an interview earlier this week, talking about the relationship between blogging and professional journalism, and I reiterated my old line, that I don’t want to do away with the pros, I grew up reading them, and I think they serve a purpose. But they have to lose the arrogance and get creative if they want to have a chance in the new century.

Now I imagine from Tara’s point of view I look like as much of an obstacle to her getting what she wants as the pros may have looked to a blogger who started when I did. I heard this in North Carolina at a session where I was used as an example of what blogging was rising against, the middle-aged white male. I was horrified, because I gave up a lot, personally, so that these people would have a chance to blog. Now I’m being projected on, it’s the Chinese Cultural Revolution all over again. Grandfather is a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, even if he marched with Chairman Mao."

So is this an example of less arrogance and more creativity? Ugh.

The net effect on the majority of Dave’s readers with less time on their hands than me, is that they are now led to believe that Tara is a whiner, craving more reach, incessantly striving to get on the A-list, all based on her out-of-context quote. My conscience is forcing me to drop this post because "old school Dave" doesn’t believe in the value of comments on his own blo (blogs without comments are only partial-blogs), but did you notice that Dave will flame somebody within their own blog post comments?

And he’s the old guard netizen?

Dave finishes off his post (after waxing poetic on issues ranging from being a Boomer to Apple execs in Africa to a smart Carl Sagon reference) with this gem:

"When people get the idea that they’re on some righteous path that’s exclusive of others, that’s when I start shaking my head. It doesn’t matter who they are, who they work for, or how much (or little) money they have. Get a clue, we’re all bozos on this bus, and none of us gets out of this alive."

How very true, but how very pathetic to so blatantly step on someone to get a seat on said bus.

Those crazy kids at Mozilla (or some crazy fan) just put together the switch site of all switch sites: Kill Bill’s Browser.

If people thought Apple poked and prodded Microsoft Windows users during their switch campaign, Mozilla (or the aforementioned fan) is pimp slapping Microsoft IE. They’re even leveraging the Google AdSense program to reward bloggers for promoting (or forcing) IE users to make the move.

Pimp hand in play.

But seriously, out of the 13 reasons they list to make the move, #5 is by far the one that keeps me up at night:

I’m not in SF, but I’ve come close enough to leaping into the Hudson over this same frustration (believe me, that skank water is just as dangerous). Hopefully, heads of corporate procurement and InfoSec departments are reached by this site too as they represent the majority of IE users. Although, I don’t think a site talking frankly about porn is going to convince them. They’re in too happy a relationship with the Microsoft empire to pause for self-pleasure minus the pop-ups.

And while we’re schmoozing Microsoft, let’s end this post on a great note and pause to reflect upon why we dislike them so much.

Just where did their purple Nike’s and jugs of Kool-Aid disappear to?

I grew up across the Hudson, about 13 miles west in a town called Montclair. Our home stood on a hill on the western side of town, with my bedroom resting on the eastern side of our third floor Victorian.

In the winter months, when the leaves of the Oaks and Elms dropped throughout town, my eyes could skip over Anderson Park, past downtown Upper Montclair and over the thin tree tops in neighboring towns, catching the very tips of The City skyline.

As a young boy that daily exercise both excited and enticed, as my minds eye continued on and landed me farther, way beyond the skyline, deep into the midst of Manhattan, my perceived gateway to the world.

My parents are both artists and educators who met at Columbia University in the 60’s. As a child in the late 70’s, they’d take me and my brother to gallery openings in old Soho and to the West Village to experience (off) Broadway shows.

Our days in The City were wild, fun, provocative and inspiring.

When family or friends came to town, we’d enter tourist mode and scale the Empire State Building for a die-cast statue and snapshots of the view down or dine at Windows on the World, pretending to fit in with our fumbled, New Jersey appearances and mannerisms.

The City was as big as the world; they were one and the same to me.

Life Lessons

From an early age, my parents allowed me the freedom to explore my surroundings in our neighborhood and around my suburban town, but on their terms, making sure to teach me the basics before letting me out the door — to always look left and right before crossing the street and call home collect whenever I needed a ride.

Times in the suburbs were much simpler back then. Conversely, the late 1970’s/early 1980’s streets of The City had a different lesson in tow.

Whenever I visited, The City schooled me that a world filled of vertical cities lived above street level, while below the streets, the world was connected, full of roaming individuals whom I couldn’t engage with by conversation or by sight.

The City’s rationale (it spoke to all of us), was that in those pre-Giuliani times — the Bernard Getz era of NYC and only a few years removed from the Son of Sam and the craziness of the NYC blackout — you’d be pegged a tourist simply for looking 45 degrees higher than your line of sight and that transparency could open yourself up for a con or a mugging.

“That’s how people are taken advantage of,” the wisdom of the City would tell me, and I listened, because I trusted The City.

Why wouldn’t I?

So I learned to glance and frame the moment of people, places and things. Take it all in, but mind my own business was the lesson I learned.

These two sets of extremely bipolar rules — my parent’s light schooling of linear confrontations and the hierarchical laws of The City — represented the checklist of street smarts I owned at age 10.

Now 34, though schooled by many more life lessons of much greater complications, I continue to think, dream, plan and move about my life with these early lessons in tow.

Why?

The City gave me Don Quixote and Starlight Express and George Segal pedestrians and giant, 5-foot pencils and toothbrushes on West Broadway. It gave me the Bronx Bombers, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and hot dogs on the sidewalk. It even gave me Yellow Cabs with mini, fold-up seats facing away from the driver, which perfectly fit my smaller frame.

The City bought my complete trust with the allure of growing up to possess a soul similar to the Great Grid and all that lay in-between.

So I walked between the buildings and never looked up; I glanced at the people and never saw a face.

All Grown Up

In 1996, my first gig in The City had me commuting in from Jersey City, where I lived with my girlfriend at the time. I worked just below Canal Street in a multimedia shop set above a Futon outlet; one of the twenty Futon stores on the block. Though I had a substantial commute with the PATH schedule, my daily trek proved to be a nice contrast to my previous reverse commute deep into the Western expanses of New Jersey.

Once I landed in Manhattan at the WTC PATH station, I’d ride the packed escalators to ground level and walk the twelve blocks to my job, breathing in the fresh air of downtown Manhattan. Often, I’d stop at the same street vendor for fruit and juice to enjoy as I settled into my desk overlooking the rooftop water towers of Soho.

As the long day of animating cartoon characters and chilling in lunch meetings at spots such as Fanelli’s and Bar 89 came to a close, I looked forward to the walk back to the WTC, and the ride under the river to my affordable existence.

I was finally living my dream within the gateway.

The Turn

Just as soon as I felt my dreams of experiencing The City coming together, my daily trek began to take on a uncomfortable vibe.

I started to loathe my commute, with the crowds of suits on the PATH and our long escalator ride up into the heart of the WTC underground mall, squashed together like sardines. Innocuous moments became unbearably annoying, simple things, like passing the WTC Disney Store each morning as I approached the exit to street level.

The commercial and business epicenter of downtown Manhattan started to eat away at me; more and more, I actually became upset watching three-quarters of my fellow travelers disappear every morning like worker ants into this building, a structure that I now only used as a thousand foot-tall roof twice a day and a directional beacon while uptown.

What happened to the romance of The City?

In my 25-year old mind, the WTC — my newfound entrance and exit point of The City — began to viscerally represent home to corporate yes men, guys who would just as soon knock over a woman stepping onto the PATH as they would verbally drool over her once they landed their prime positioning in front of the opposing exit door.

I mean, the PATH was so crowded at times, I actually witnessed smaller people get lifted off their feet in the shifting and shoving and cramming of bodies to get to work — or more directly to the point, to get to a pay day.

It was around this time that I was struck by a profound realization; not only had I broken one of the golden rules of The City by gawking at a vertical city, I’d been gawking at the epitome, the archetype of a vertical city.

For months on end, I’d been staring straight up into the WTC’s belly, observing its mechanisms and deconstructing its inhabitants, changing my behavior to match it’s very, particular pace and heartbeat. As I began to consciously ponder this realization, The City reacted in it’s best Don Pardo voice and reached out to quell my new found sensibilities the only way it could:

“Hey Sean, forget why you thought you loved me. Classic Yellow Cabs are gone, Soho is an outdoor mall, the eighties are done. Try on these duds for size!”

This time, I wasn’t buying.

Now that my eyes were truly open, prolonged, daily glances into the eyes of the people that surrounded me provided me with nothing but negative vibes in return. The pang of repetition, the exhaustion and the real-life scheming of men and women, desperate to keep up with the Jones’, made my shift in perspective clearer each day.

Now when I walked through the grid of The City, each of the vertical cities above ground began to take on a new representation to me. Hierarchy, wealth and confliction loomed over the masses of citizens, who were either explicitly or implicitly schooled to not look into the eyes of the beast as well.

I came to the conclusion that by not looking all these years, really looking at what was happening in those corner office expanses, we were each complicit in allowing these vertical cities to intimidate our lives with dangled carrots and unattainable conclusions of never ending pursuits.

At that time in my life, such a revelation was way too much for me to unravel and digest — let alone express — so I quickly jotted down a sketch (left) and moved on psychologically and physically. I shut out the very existence of what I had learned to be true, and let the representational presence of buildings disappear.

I left town.

Once clear of a visceral connection to these expansive, white collar, networked resources, only a matrix of interlocking paths of human relationships remained. See, back in the day, when my 10 year-old mind’s eye pictured the essence of The City, it romanced the Great Grid, but not the grid of city blocks and the office towers; it romanced the unknown personalities, diversity and creativity of the people of New York themselves.

It was criminal how long it took me to recognize that notion.

Moving On

Tonight marks the fourth day of the second week of my new life in Greensboro, North Carolina. The last time I left The City it ended up as a brief respite in the Birkshires — essentially serving as a pit-stop before heading back to reconnect with, and take on the vertical cities from within.

I doubt I’ll take the same path this time.

Maybe I’ve lost the passion, or maybe, just maybe, I’ve come to realize that seeing my passion to fruition can’t occur within a representation of the confrontational juxtaposition itself. Maybe I’m better off planning, expressing, and implementing from a room on the eastern side of an old wooden home, with a window overlooking the thin, slumbering Oaks and Elms of a quaint town, while the far off tips of a skyline glistens in the early morning sky.

Maybe now I’ll look directly into the eyes of my fellow travelers and explore relationships with the people underground and above, walking proudly with the roaming individuals themselves.

Today marks the four-year anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11. Bless the souls that were lost that day, as well as the ones that became lost as a result, but damn those souls to hell who haven’t learned a thing since.

I want a satellite radio product that meets *my* needs.

I want true convergence, not the usual business of multiple brands, releasing redundant products, creating sustainable profitability and not sustainable satisfaction.

It’s 2005 people; we deserve sustainable product offerings that meet our needs in any environmental scenario.

So what does the current portable, streaming, satellite landscape look like? Forgive the brand choices, but it seems to look something along the lines of…

Aside from the obvious competitive redundancies of the middle products, the feature overlap of any two products is pretty interesting to note:

• Portability (car, home, walking, etc.)
• Song ratings
• Random play
• Library of music to draw upon (satellite, jukebox, server, etc.)

When I see these overlapping product attributes, I also see opportunities for elegant simplicity, for product convergence, and most importantly, for happy consumers. I start to see…

Yahoo! Music plays audio files off a server, leveraging personalization settings, such as ratings of songs, artists, albums, genres, etc. What’s stopping them from striking up a deal with a Sirius or XM to create a completely personalized satellite/internet station?

A biz-dev deal here, a little bit of industrial and interface design changes there, a chunk of engineering and voila!; the physical satellite products could have input devices for rating these same music attributes. So the next time you’re on the beach, in your car, etc., you’re now continuously participating in updating your station to reflect your current passions and interests. Tie these setting into an Amazon or iTunes shopping experience and the collaborative filtering possibilities are endless.

Speaking of Apple, what about the iPod?

MP3 players bring the “tangible” nature of accessing a personal library of ripped and downloaded music. Bring this into the conversation and you now have a device that not only syncs personalization between devices via server/satellite communication, but also allows a consumer to archive a library of music/content for consumption in a more linear fashion (i.e. playing entire albums, setting up playlists, dj-ing, etc.).

Of course that also could be managed via satellite — providing the user a search and play capability — but that’s a bit more tricky regarding music rights and costs. It would also cannibalize owning CD’s and downloading music, although Napster and Rhapsody are already heading down the monthly cost for leasing music.

Once Sirius and XM start a partnership, splitting redundancies in content and sharing technology at a cost (like satellites), maybe, just maybe, we could see a sexy product, with beauty found on levels deeper than it’s original vision…

And yes, I too would rather have Apple lead the industrial design of this fantasy product than myself, but for visualization purposes (and because I’m long on Sirius, remember) I think my rendering will suffice for this conversation.

I smell a Dire Straits song in the works.