ATHENS (Reuters) - Danish mountain biker Mette Andersen had to pull out of the women's Olympic cross country race Friday after being attacked by a bee.Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com
Anderson was stung on the second lap of the five-lap race and had a bad reaction, the whole of the left side of her chest swelling up.
She was receiving medical attention at the course on Mount Parnitha, just north of Athens.
United Parcel Services (UPS) yesterday deployed three fuel cell-powered Dodge Sprinters for service in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Ann Arbor, MI. This launch marks the first use of medium-duty delivery vehicles powered by fuel cells in the U.S., made possible by an alliance between UPS, DaimlerChrysler AG, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).From UPS?s Brown Turns Green, Thanks to Fuel Cells
I'm pleased to report that everybody behaved gracefully and with restraint. While we did routinely run red lights - YOU try to get 5000 bicycles to stop suddenly - the police were chill and even, it seemed, mildly supportive.
Observers on the sidewalks cheered and clapped as we rode past, though there was the very occasional taunt. (My favorite cultural assertion was the guy who yelled at us, 'Get a car, you fukkin' tree-huggin' fucks.') The bikers yelled, whooped, and whistled a lot. One guy even had a kind of drum kit on his handlebars that he whacked away on throughout the ride. Occasionally we broke into various chants, most commonly a refrain where some folks would shout, 'Bush Sucks,' and the larger mass would reply, 'FUCK BUSH!' Not terribly intelligent, I admit, but shouted with apparent heartfelt conviction. I couldn't get the grin off my face, and neither, it seemed, could anyone else, biker or spectator.
There appeared to be no planned route. We turned an arbitrary new direction whenever we encountered resistance, giving the route a very fractal quality. We ended up riding south to Houston, up 6th to 30th or so, over to Madison and north, across to Broadway on some street in the 50's, and back down Broadway through Times Square, down 7th past Madison Square Garden and then over to the East Village.
Finally, after about two hours, the police decided that it was time to put a stop to it, which they did with efficiency and dispassion. Mobilizing suddenly and in force around St. Mark's Place, they created a box canyon of blue, let it fill with about 250 bicyclists and then methodically, if arbitrarily, arrested them all and hauled them off. They were doing their jobs just as, in a sense, we we were doing ours. When one engages in civil disobedience, arrest is a natural consequence that he should expect. I'm just glad they didn't trap me in their noose.
And, even if they had, it would have been worth the moment when we cascaded down the long slope of Broadway into the incandescent canyon of Times Square. We felt like an irresistible river of anarchic order. The air was cool and perfect. For a moment, all things seemed possible. It occurred to me that a Bike to The Polls movement would be a useful thing to start...
Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush fame (previously posted about on mmeiser blog) was arrested for defacement of property over the weekend in New York while demonstrating his bicycle for a news interview. His bicycle, cell phone, computer and other equipment were confiscated and are being held until his trial. Ironically he had just used his invention to print "America is a free-speech zone" in water soluble chalk on the sidewalk as a demonstration for MSNBC reporter Ron Regan.
Bikes Against Bush will utilize a water-soluble chalk mixture. It is the same material used for marking athletic fields. It is environmentally safe and removes easily with water, or naturally biodegrades within 15-30 days. Thus, while the messages may have the appearance of graffiti, this is certainly not an attempt to damage or deface property.Always check your legal facts and document them before hand, that way when the NYPD arrest you on fraudulent charges in order to sensor you you'll have a great case. It is highly unlikely that Joshua Kinberg will get his equipment back until after the convention. I will definitely be following this closely and will be making further posts when I find out more about his legal representation. He seems like a very smart guy, I hope that in addition to getting legal advice on his invention, that he also had retained legal counsel prior to participation and demonstration at the RNC.
from Bikes Against Bush — FAQ
Beautiful, simple, design. It's nice to be able to post something whose face value is obvious ater that last post.
Bea Arthur sparked a security scare at Logan Airport in Boston this week when she tried to board a Cape Air flight with a pocketknife in her handbag.The Details — How bad news propagates.
The "Golden Girls" star, now 81, was flagged by a Transportation Security Administration agent, who discovered the knife - a strict no-no following 9/11.
"She started yelling that it wasn't hers and said 'The terrorists put it there,' " a fellow passenger said. "She kept yelling about the 'terrorists, the terrorists, the terrorists.' "From Philadelphia Daily News | 08/26/2004 | Howard Gensler | Could terrorists really Bea after her?
Bea Arthur's fight against the Transport Security AgencyNow, as you know I love the BoingBoing blog, but Cory Doctorow reports that she screamed "We're all doomed!" and cites only the Philadelphia Daily News article which I posted the corresponding quote from above. At no point in the Philly article does it state that Bea SCREAMED "We're all doomed!", nor does the Philly use an exclamation point, nor are the quotes Cory used a series used in rapid progression or even in that order, nor are these exact quotes from Bea's mouth. These are actually in fact quotes different people have attributed to Bea at different times including a random lady near where security stopped her and TSA officials when she got on the plan.
Bea Arthur forgot to take her pocketknife out of her purse last week at Logan airport and when the TSA found it, she ran around screaming, "The terrorists! The terrorists put a knife in my purse! We're all doomed!" She was being funny -- it's what she does. She's the funniest of all the Golden Girls, that's for sure.
The TSA didn't take it well.From Boing Boing: Bea Arthur's fight against the Transport Security Agency
'Golden Girls' Star's Comments Don't Get a Laugh at AirportI believe it would not be out of order for me to call their coverage downright pathetic. While they have not included few detailed facts that could be wrong they're whole transcript is full of assumptions. Notice how the pocket knife is listed as a pen-knife. Notice how they shorten the article by making rapid generalizations and summarization. Notice the poor grammar and sentence structure. It's almost as bad as mine and I don't have an editor nor a budget. Bad news? "Sure it happens," it did with WABC-TV. ; )
(NEW YORK - WABC, August 26, 2004) A security scare at the Boston airport involving a heretofore unknown terror threat: namely 'Golden Girl' Bea Arthur.
The 81-year-old actress reportedly left a pen-knife in her handbag, while boarding a 'Cape Air' flight.
Sure it happens, but where she went wrong was to tell security that she didn't put it there, a terrorist did.
Joking about such matters is illegal. But the TSA let the emmy-winning star board the plane anyway."
From 7Online.com: "Golden Girls" Star's Comments Don't Get a Laugh at Airport
I love it, but how to describe it. It's public art, it's fun, it's a benh, maybee a sofa, sculpture, functional. It's a public nest bench!
Very promising new engine runs on compressed air. It's practicle application is still undetermined.A garden buggy is the first commercially operated vehicle in Australia to use air as a fuel instead of petrol. But a critic says the air motor would be no use in cars.
The vehicle, which is used to pick up garden material, will maintain the lawns of Melbourne's Fiztroy Gardens after its launch today.
— News in Science - Green buggy runs on hot air - 25/08/2004
The Di Pietro engine is a rotary design with two moving parts and, given air in sufficient quantity and pressure, is capable of producing about the same amount of power as a 5-litre V8 petrol engine. It weighs only 13 kilograms, compared with about 90 kilograms for conventional designsThere is an excellent Real Audio video clip showing its internal workings at ABC News Australia: New Inventors: Rotary Piston Engine.
— from ...or even run on air? - National - www.theage.com.au(free registration required)
WIRED: What is craigslist's greatest contribution to society?It's all about the good overall experience: good people, good vision, good site, good culture, a culture of good. The primary value that differentiates Craigslist from it's competitors is in simply being good. Amazing how one can build a business by simply offering a better experience than the next guy.
NEWMARK: Just by being good guys, we've created a culture of trust and fairness. The site makes it easier for people to get everyday stuff done, like selling things and finding an apartment.
I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world.Craig is a hactivist through and through.
Really, the only thing I'm missing in terms of quality of life is a permanent parking space.Glad to see he's keeping it simple, success hasn't gone to his head.
I bet Jeff Bezos has a parking space. How would you compare yourself to Amazon's CEO?So Craig doesn't want Craigslist to be a "business" in the true sense of the word, I wonder how he would describe it? I wouldn't go expecting him to call it a "community" either. I'm sure he has a much more highly developed concept of what it is, and I'd really love to know. The Wired interviewer really missed out on following though on this question. In fact it occurs to me this interview is a "boxed" interview, definitely not done via email, but obviously very short. I wonder.
Amazon is great. But Jeff decided he wanted to make a business. Craigslist was a happy accident.
What could Bezos learn from craigslist?
I'd like Jeff to listen to customers a little more. I'm a sucker for mystery series, but I still can't get a straightforward list of my favorite stuff. Ninety percent of the function of our site is based on suggestions from users.
Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?Ha, simple, sweet and to the point. More reiteration on the common themes I cite of providing good experience and building on social capital.
Give people a break.
A break from what?
A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.
What poses the major threat to that survival?We're well beyond such ridiculous generalizations as "anti-corporate". Kleptocracy and sociopathy are two primary problems facing modern corporate institutions most obviously seen in the fallout from the Enron and Worldcom scandals as well as Google's attempt to become a public corporation and maintain their policy of "not being evil".
Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.
Are you saying that capitalism is flawed?
We've seen that people in corporations often make moral compromise - what I like to call the Halliburton crime syndicate. They're the epitome of being unfair.
When are you going to run for office?Very interesting, as a developer he sees his ability to use technology to engineer social change as being far more effective than effecting change through politics. This is something not openly addressed, but I'm sure if there was a study done you'd find that it's quite common among programers and tech people. I believe it to be a core value of hactivism, a lack of faith in other political models and an embracing and creation of new mean and models. It's a core element of our current rapid evolution in the technological world.
My focus is on restoring democracy to America. We have to restore the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. That said, I have no interest in running for office. That kind of job sucks.
You're also a cyberpunk buff. How has, say, William Gibson's Neuromancer influenced the way you've run craigslist?No real explanation needed, he believes in small organizations, giving people a better voice and that the two directly relate.
Those books talk about a future that's exciting technologically but darker, where everyday people have less of a voice and are increasingly controlled by big organizations. I figure we can be a counter-example.
At the end of Neuromancer, the hacker cowboy hero gets a huge payday. When's yours?Not sure what he means by "until the singularity" it has too many possible meanings. Of course that's part of the reason why he said it.
I'm not in a hurry. Our planning horizon is 200 years, or until the singularity.
"In a recent interview, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) discussed the possibility of a 'new economic system' born of 'unconscious cooperation' embodied by such technologies as Google links and Amazon lists, Wikipedia, wireless devices using unlicensed spectrum, Web logs, and open-source software. Rheingold speculates that 'the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices...may make some new economic system possible....We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.' However, Rheingold is worried that established companies with business models that are threatened by these new technologies could 'quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world.'
Q: If so, it's a good bet not all companies will be happy with the changes.Full Article: MSNBC -
A: New digital technologies are creating a crisis in the business models of the companies that depend on having a monopoly on distribution. Look at MP3 blogs: We're now seeing bands that are saying, "Please pirate my material. Here it is." They make money from that. They get bookings from that. They build an audience on that.
Q: Are there more such conflicts and opportunities to come?
A: Assigning frequencies to license holders...is an old-fashioned scheme...based on technologies of the 1920s. We now have technologies that make it possible to use the spectrum the way packets use the Internet. Instead of having a circuit-switched analog system in which you have to have an end-to-end connection, you just send your packets out with their addresses through this network and they find their way. It's much more efficient. It makes for millions more broadcasters in the Internet space. This is all pointing to a kind of voluntary sharing of your property.
Q: Does the pushback by companies threatened by these trends, such as the record and movie companies, threaten innovation?
A: Yes. Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they're doing it by manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile. But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents.
Q: What might keep these powerful incumbents from holding back this tide?
A: You've got to have some huge force outside of the United States, where it's getting locked down. What if China says, "The FCC doesn't rule us. We're going to stop assigning frequencies within our borders. We're going to regulate devices so that they play fair with each other, and we're going to open up spectrum." That's going to make the U.S. an economic and technological backwater.
Then there's always the idea that maybe we're just beginning to see disruptive technologies. Maybe something is just going to blow it away. Certainly we've seen that over and over again in recent decades."
Motordyke I dedicate this post to you. I hope your leg is feeling better.
"White girls with big asses, man. There goes another one, a J. Crew cardigan riding up atop a buttock so big, so out of place, it makes you wonder if Serena Williams woke up this morning wondering where her ass went. Temperatures are going up, taking hemlines with them, and the trendy white ass is hanging out there like a couple of upside-down Tasty-D scoops. They're taking over this city. They're everywhere I turn: in dressing rooms, in store windows, in that pond with the little boats - anywhere I can look down and see my own reflection.From The Village Voice: Butt Seriously by Sloane Crosley. It's a great read wether you're you like the subject matter or not.
Sloane Crosley is a writer living in New York. She likes to keep her ass out of trouble as much as possible."
'Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don't have something that assures fair use, then you don't have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.'Barlow quotes from Reason: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics via Lawrence Lessig's Blog.
'I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.'
'Trying to own intellectual products and creating an economy of scarcity around them as we do with physical objects is very harmful to the development of culture and the ability to speak freely, and a very important principle not talked about much, which is the right to know.'
'The motion picture industry should realize in an information economy that when you've got a lot of free access to commercial goods it does not necessarily reduce their value, because there is a relationship between value and familiarity in informational goods.'
'I get pilloried for saying this -- 'Oh, Barlow thinks the Grateful Dead model ought to extend to the world' -- but I don't see any reason why it can't. It worked for us and it has worked for everyone else I've ever seen try it. I think that what we stumbled into was a real deep -- we didn't know it at the time -- a deep quality of how an information economy works. We really did just stumble into it. We just decided it was morally shaky to toss people out of concerts just because they had tape recorders. It's bad for your karma to be mean to a Deadhead. And we thought we'd take a hit on it.'
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.It is very interesting to note that even when this was written 8 full years ago that John Barlow and those who undoubtedly helped craft this declaration had already been grappling with the tremendous conflict inherent in the "intellectual property" issue. It very well may be an impossibility to separate through law the evils from the goods that come out of a free and open society. However base social engineering like the wiki may one day very well prove that the the answer to law and order on the internet is not in law at all not in the code at all, but in self governance of the masses through the study, faith and encouragement of the mythical inherent good in mankind. What I've called that magical quality that happens when you trust people. Could it really come down to simple faith in the inherent good of mankind and if so will our governing institutions be able to make that leap of faith? Will our industries be good enough to weather it? Most importantly will we as individuals be bold enough, smart enough, motivated and active enough to architect and to develop the necessary mechanisms of change or will we continue to build and use p2p systems that exploit the internet to bad ends rather than build upon it to enable great new beginnings?
... You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
I just stumbled upon the scans of two whole issues of Wet Magazine. It is a spactacular L.A. based new wave magazine from 1978. In it are some great jems. A couple of my favorites are; some old KROQ ads (1 and 2), a Tom Petty ad, an exceptional Devo ad, and several interviews such as that of Timothy Leary.
Wet was a graphically innovative magazine that predated zines. I remember seeing some copies in the early 80s and liking the design a lot. The guys who made Wet later went on to write the Graphic Design Cookbook, which I used as inspiration for the print edition of bOING bOING. Designer Jennifer Sharpe (daughter of famed street prankster Mal Sharpe) has uploaded two complete issues to her site.
Researchers at the BBC have been studying how to put the Corporation's archive online after chairman Michael Grade labelled it public property and said that it should, as far as possible, be made freely available.
There are formidable obstacles to placing the entire archive online, which amounts to a national memory bank involving copyright, repeat fees and partnership deals. But engineers now know what would be required to do so.
...
The BBC is doing some other navel gazing as its Charter comes up for review, and radical ideas are being thrown about.
It is developing an open source video codec, called Dirac, to replace the Real Networks software currently used to stream video from the BBC site. This could challenge other commercial formats, including Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9.
BBC researchers are also grappling with other implications of the convergence of computing with consumer electronics, including the possibility that easy TV recording on cheap portable devices could see consumers start to view programmes in chunks, rather like reading a book.
Why?
They're getting more bad press than the Olsen twins, and worse reviews than the latest Spike Lee flick. Olympic mascots Phevos and Athena, siblings named for a pair of Greek deities, are catching an ungodly amount of abuse around Athens.Article: Calgary Herald - canada.com network
The pair were derided in various news articles, described as animated condoms and mutants from a nuclear meltdown. Their names were co-opted by anti-Olympic activists, who promptly firebombed two government vehicles in February.
ATHENS 2004 Organising Commitee for the Olympic Games -Website Hyperlink Policy
For your protection and ours we have established a procedure for parties wishing to introduce a link to the ATHENS 2004 website on their site. By introducing a link to the ATHENS 2004 official Website on your site you are agreeing to comply with the ATHENS 2004 Website General Terms and Conditions. In order to place a link embedded in copy interested parties should:
a) Use the term ATHENS 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent
b) Not associate the link with any image, esp. the ATHENS 2004 Emblem (see paragraph below)
c) Send a request letter to the Internet Department stating:
· Short description of site
· Reason for linking
· Unique URL containing the link (if no unique URL than just the main URL)
· Publishing period
· Contact point (e-mail address)
The Summer Olympics, which began Friday in Athens, is the first Olympic Games to be broadcast from a collection of websites. The BBC and other European networks are offering live, on-demand Internet video streaming of Olympic events to broadband viewers. But the BBC and fellow members of the European Broadcasting Union are required by their Olympic broadcast contracts to block U.S. Internet users and others from outside their home counties.Why the fascist media control?
NBC paid $793 million for the exclusive U.S. Summer Olympic broadcast rights, and NBCOlympics.com is the only U.S. website licensed by the International Olympic Committee to broadcast video coverage of the games.
Some Australian broadcast outlets have been forced to shut down their Internet radio broadcasting streams to avoid breaching the International Olympic Committee's strict rules governing use of games material.
"NBC can't afford for this event to not be what it has been, and better,' said Dean Bonham, chief executive of the Bonham Group in Denver, a sports and entertainment marketing consultant. NBC paid $793 million for the television rights to the Games, and an additional $3.7 billion for rights to the Summer and Winter Olympics through 2012."The color commentary...
I'd like to personally commend NBC for screwing up yet another of the Olympics opening ceremonies. NBC is the world's gold medal champion in providing sucktacular coverage of one of humanities better events. Surely we can do much, much better than this.— via Airbag - Sour Gyros.
Nike If you're planning on swimming in the Olympics, you've got to be prepared to go the extra mile to shave off a few hundredths of a second off your time. It's not enough to have laser remove all your body hair and wear rubber band underwear anymore, now Nike wants you to use their latest drag-killing device, the strapless water goggles. How does it work? Two independent goggle lenses get afixed to your eye sockets with medical-grade adhesive (read: superglue). Say, while you're at it, why don't you just get your toes and fingers sewn together like a duck?Security, Security, Security
New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and "scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity." The software's developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.Poor attendance?— via Boing Boing: Big Brother goes to the Olympics
— complete article: Colossal surveillance network shields Olympics, New Scientist
'We will not be giving away tickets,' said Michalis Zacharatos, chief spokesman for organisers Athoc.A spectacular opening ceremony? Of course it's the Greek press doing the praise but I like it none the less.
Latest figures from the Games organisers showed that less than 50% of tickets had been sold in 27 out of 54 events on Sunday."
On Saturday, the first full day of competition, weightlifter Nurcan Taylan became the first Turkish woman to win an Olympic gold medal but her feat was achieved in a near empty stadium.
The Greek press is in raptures on Saturday after the opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics.Olympic butts are a big hit
Seven out of the current top twenty most popular photos on Yahoo! News are of female Olympian asses— via kottke.org
To be fare this one is technically of breasts, and let's not forget these two Greek divers hugging.
"Forrester's WholeView 2TM research is the foundation of all of our offerings. Unlimited Inquiry to analysts, regular teleconferences about research ideas, and a seat at a Forum are included for Member-level clients."So, I'm going to at this point skip an analysis of the about page. I think you get the drift, and we're going to go straight into Forrester's Articles of interest which they call "Browse Research". It is essentially an extensive blog format. It consists of reverse chronological posts, but the sheer number of people involved and the categories makes this a highly developed blog. It is quite unique and appears to be a very good way of creating customer dialogue, marketing, and building consensus and direction. Very bottom up and very democratic for such a company. In fact they take a big and positive step in a new direction away from the traditional marketing spiel and if it's any indicator at all of what type of company they are then I want to work for them.
1) organize and find digital music files; 2) rip songs from CDs with great sound quality; 3) make playlists; 4) burn CDs and DVDs; 5) copy files to Apple's iPod portable players; and 6) buy music from Apple's iTunes store. The strength here is in the integration...US Anti-piracy Bill Won't Stop File Sharing
PIRACY CAN BE SLOWED, BUT IT CAN'T BE LEGISLATED AWAYTV Ads Hit The Web -- And Stop
...
File-sharing will survive the IICA. With 44 million Americans sharing files, stamping out file-sharing services is like killing bacteria with antibiotics ? it causes resistant strains to emerge.
...
Paid download services are the answer. Services like Kazaa already operate in the shadows; the IICA would further that trend. By contrast, industry-backed, profit-seeking services like iTunes and Napster keep improving with better connections to portables and more flexible packaging, including subscriptions. The best weapon in the antipiracy war is to stimulate competition among legitimate services, which we estimate will reap $300 million in US revenues this year alone."
Six advertisers and 15 media properties have signed up for the six-week beta test starting today, including AT&T, ESPN, iVillage, Honda, MSN, Pepsi, and Tribune Interactive.However the model is dead
But TV ads online don't make sense for consumers. Television ads are designed for that medium's entertainment-focused environment and consumers' passive mindset. Online, consumers are more actively engaged in the content"The new model is "quality of attention", better translated to quality of the experience
Media companies will want to charge based on the size of the audience, but advertisers will want to pay only for consumers who viewed the ad.My predicted outcome. Go look up "honda cog" on google. This is what the future of advertising is about. It's word of mouth, it rewards quality, creativity and ingenuity. In short you pay the people who create it and the people who promote it. You can't buy the eyeballs online. BTW, and if you like that one I've got a million more.
Hard media is in jeopardy: By 2008, revenues from CDs will be off 19%, while DVDs and tapes will drop 8%. Piracy and its cure -- streaming and paid downloads -- will drive people to connect to entertainment, not own it.I don't necessarily agree with all their stats or summaries but one thing is important here and is clear. We need new marketplaces for getting video and other media on demand.
Analysis
» File sharing has lopped $700 million off of music sales.
» Proliferating on-demand media services will overtake piracy.
» In five years, 33% of music sales will come from downloads.
» CD sales will be down 30% from their 1999 peak.
» Various forms of video on-demand will gross $4.2 billion
What it means
Portals and cable win the on-demand media sweepstakes.
Action
TV networks: Get those DVDs of popular series out quickly.
Kudos to Microsoft for: 1) integrating the platform with download services like Movielink and Napster, and 2) bringing pause and rewind, TiVo-style, to live streamed radio. But we remain skeptical that Media Center Edition will sell.You heard it, the Windows XP interface was created for sitting at a desk not a couch. As such it is on the whole a little to tedious. Then again so is the experience with most digital cable TV. ;)
...
The PC experience doesn't belong in the living room. We've said it before and we'll say it again: The complex interface, unparalleled user control, and open standards make the PC the ideal device for checking email, getting news, and editing and managing content. But when it comes time to passively listen to music or watch video, consumers don't want to wait for a PC to boot, worry about it crashing, or have to navigate through numerous menus.
The Democratic National Convention recently admitted 30 bloggers as credentialed press. While they provided amusing and insightful anecdotes to traditional media, these new-age reporters missed the chance to be the public's eyes and ears where the real action took place: in the more than 200 sideshow events. Blogging serves its best role when it produces stories that the mainstream press cannot cover.
Consumers feel overwhelmed by intrusive, irrelevant ads. The result: a backlash against advertising ? manifesting itself in the growing popularity of do-not-call lists, spam filters, online ad blockers, and ad skipping on digital video recorders (DVRs). Marketing campaigns of the future must facilitate consumers' cross-channel search for information, going beyond the brand promises made in traditional advertising.Travelers' Mobile Device Ownership Will Spur Wi-Fi
Mobile technology device ownership is pervasive among both business and leisure travelers. Nearly all own a mobile phone, three in 10 leisure travelers own a laptop computer, and PDA ownership among business and leisure travelers is substantially higher than the US average. The real news is the bear-hug embrace travelers have given Wi-Fi connectivity, primarily via their laptops, and for which most bear the cost personally. Hotels, airports, and establishments that serve travelers must focus on installing Wi-Fi to satisfy wired travelers' need, or passion, to remain connected. Wi-Fi will become the next value-added marketing amenity, starting with hotels, which will use it to as an incentive to attract Bookers to their sites from Web travel agencies."Portable Media Players (paid)
Apple's iPod has garnered huge amounts of press coverage and propelled hard-disk-based portable audio players into the limelight. But what's next? Microsoft is pinning its hopes on the growth of a fledgling category of new devices: portable media players. Why just have sound when you can have video as well! But this is not just an added feature ? video presents a whole new set of barriers, including the different nature of consumer consumption, lower-cost alternative devices, and, currently, a lack of content services for these new devices. Nonetheless, aggressive pricing by device manufacturers will get these devices into consumers' hands and pockets ? but don't expect meteoric sales in the next two years.All Roads Lead To Customer Experience
The Digital Home Reshapes The Value Chain
1. Everyone is (rightly) nervous.Point five is what primarily interests me. This goes all the way back to Marshal McLuhan. "Experiences > business models > meduiums > messages". That and every conceivable combination and order.
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2. Dollars are moving away from content creators.
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3. The hardware business ain't so rosy, either.
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4. Dollars are flowing to the application layer.
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5. Experiences will mean more than any piece of the chain. Is there one place in the value chain that is best? No. For companies pondering where they should be, the question to ask is: What is the best place in the chain for a particular experience? For video search or a local directory, distribution players will exert the most leverage. For long-form entertainment, content owners will win out. For business information or communication experiences, apps will harvest the most value. Devices will control experiences that are intimately tied to the device, like photos or games.
The Register has a superbly written mocking article on the team of four that is setting out to Segway across America. Here's a bit of the intro.Back in the good old days, strong men such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey went screaming across the great American highways with heads hopped full of sour mash and benzedrine. They performed lewd acts, taunted the police, harassed the stiffs and produced great art. These days we're left with four twenty-something geeks traveling country roads at 10 mph with their Segways, iPods and blogs.I did not know The Register was capable of such fine writing and fine sarcasm. Thank you Ashlee Vance of The Register for this superbly written article.
Is the American Dream dead? It may well be.
This Thursday four white-toast yuppies will set out on a 4,300 mile trek from Seattle to Boston. One of the four - Josh Caldwell - will be riding a Segway scooter for this entire journey backed up by Hunter Weeks, Pat Armstrong and J. Fred Keough in a support vehicle. The fearsome foursome plan to make an online documentary of the Segway journey, interviewing people along the road and blogging about the rigors of going up mountains on an upright, glorified wheelchair.
'My american dream is to be an individual and to be the best person I can be with the talents that I have [Such as standing - Ed],' Armstrong says in a video promoting the Segway stunt. 'And so that's part of what I like about this expedition is that I am just going to go out there and find out for myself and learn about it and hopefully come back and be able to make some sense of it.'
Right . . ."
Since the big broadcast networks no longer deliver the mass audience the company needs, Coca-Cola cut its network ad spending last year by 10 percent. 'Where are we going?' Coke's then-president, Steven Heyer, asked rhetorically at an Advertising Age conference in 2003. 'Away from broadcast TV as the anchor medium.' Acknowledging that many in the ad industry are afraid to follow, he added bluntly, 'Fear will subside, or the fearful will lose their jobs. And if a new model isn't developed, the old one will simply collapse.'"The music industry needs to learn from Steven Heyer. He is a wise man. I was beginning to think no incumbent corporations got the new bottom-up media paradigm. At least Steven Heyer is willing to listen. I'll give a heads up the old models for business and advertising DO NOT WORK, perhaps they never did. We just traded a pound of physical flesh for a pound of mental flesh where the damage was not nearly so visible... ADHD and anxiety disorders galore. What we need is simple, we need to embrace people power. People will celebrate great products and people will participate in the marketing and even creation and development of new products if they feel the companies give half a shit about them. Example: Open Source Software
"Used to be, TV was the answer," proclaimed the president of GM North America. "The only problem is that it stopped working sometime around 1987." The broadcast networks have been losing audience share for years, thanks to the remote control, TiVo, and all the new channels on cable and satellite. But when Nielsen Media Research announced last fall that young males - the hardest-to-reach and most intensely targeted subset of humans in North America - were watching 12 percent less prime-time network TV than the year before, Madison Avenue went on orange alert. True, the falloff was only 26 minutes a week - but in the ad business, a few lost minutes can add up to major trauma
In the five years that Jeffrey Cole has been running the UCLA Internet Project, he's found that Net users consistently watch less TV than other people - in 2003, more than five hours less per week. This pattern has held for every age group, for both sexes, and in every country he's studied, from Hungary to South Korea. Young men are simply the advance guard.Amen to that. However the difference is that advertisers are acting as intermediaries to change business models.
. . . "The business model of television, which is to deliver viewers to advertisers," he declares, "is as troubled as that of the music industry."
"People don't have to listen to you anymore, and they won't," declares Tim Harris, the 30-year-old co-chief of Starcom's new video-game operation. "I mean, I resent commercials - they make me push three buttons on my TiVo."Correct-a-mundo! People don't hate ads. However the average male has probably seen over a thousand feminine product ads by the time they're 18 years old. The average male could probably name the top five brands, but they will NEVER make the decision as to what brand to buy. This is simply put, "metal pollution" and what we need is a little "mental environmentalism".
"I feel manipulated and angry," says Lee, a 33-year-old musician. "Having these things forced down my throat all the time - especially with network television, it's loud, it's brash."
"Now that I have TiVo, I realize how much of TV is actually commercials," says Nick, a 25-year-old marine biologist. "I can watch two shows in almost the time it took me to watch one. Then if I see a commercial I like, I'll go back to it."
"I don't think they hate ads," concludes the session's moderator, Jane Buckingham, who heads CAA's Youth Intelligence unit. "They hate bad ads. If it's a cool ad, they're going to watch it."
Take the Quiznos Spongmonkeys. Created by Joel Veitch, a London-based Web and TV producer who specializes in hilariously asinine Flash animations, the Spongmonkeys are almost certainly the first cartoon rodents to be enlisted in a fast-food campaign. The spots - which show one of the razor-toothed, demented-looking furballs strumming a guitar while the other screeches a paean to Quiznos ("We love the subs! 'Cuz they are good to us.") - became an instant sensation when they debuted in February. Viewers either loved them or thought they were the most revolting thing they'd seen since, well, since the last batch from Quiznos, one of which showed a guy in a business suit sucking a wolf's teat.What in the hell do some freaky little spongemonkeys have to do with Quizno's Subs? Nothing, but we thank you Quiznos for making us laugh. You're advertisers understand the new bottom up business paradigm. In fact before Quizno's Joel Veitch was just a one man publishing company with merely some Flash animations and a website, but his animated creations are hilarious and he's had a cult following for as many as five years.
"With this generation," says Bogusky, "it's, I know you're marketing something to me, and you know I know, so if you want me to try a new chicken sandwich, that's cool - just give me some crazy chicken to boss around.Now we get to the heart of the matter. This new generation is less sarcastic, less bitter, less ironic, less cynical, and has less angst. Translation: When you're not being force fed your culture and your life and actually feel like you have control over it, have input on the external world, and that your opinions and ideas outside of your profession have a value within the open market and other people and corporations actually listen you in turn have a higher capacity for and greater understanding and respect for the differences between bullshit and good fun. Tuning out of 120, 30 second commercials doesn't just equal saving an hour, it equals having mental capacity to stop on the street and actually have a conversation with a stranger and be able to listen to them. It equals having time to think and explore and discover and create and to have an increase capacity and positive impact on society. If you want your captive audience you'll find it in a jail cell with and inmate and a TV, but not even that for long.
Strictly speaking, of course, this isn't a generation at all. The 18-to-34 demo actually straddles the tail end of Generation X and the leading edge of what demographers are calling the Millennials. "The younger group is a lot more positive," says Bogusky. "They're not so angst-ridden, not quite as ironic and cynical. They wanna have fun." There's also more of them - some 70 million, compared with 76 million baby boomers and the 41 million in Gen X. Millennials tend to be less suspicious than their predecessors, but they're still too smart for most marketers. "The hardest job is surprising them," Bogusky adds. "Usually they know what you're going to do before you do it."
"This younger generation has a filter mechanism," observes Jim Lentz, group VP of marketing at Toyota Motor Sales USA. Lentz has his own focus group at home: two sons, ages 17 and 21. "They can be doing their homework, listening to music, watching TV, on the PC, and on the phone, all at the same time. It drives my wife crazy. You assume they're just screwing around - but they're not." This ability to focus is governed by a complex neural network called the reticular activating system, which filters sensory input to keep the brain from being overwhelmed. When you grow up in an always-on world this system may adjust to cope. "They have a total ability to block out anything they don't want to get through," Lentz marvels. "From an advertising standpoint, that's what makes this animal so scary."Ha, Jim Lentz, group VP of marketing at Toyota Motor Sales USA just referred to his target audience as animals. Let me return the favor: "Referring to people as animals is just something those monsters in advertising do." They don't see anyone as human beings which is half their problem.
To promote a new line of phone-cams, Sony Ericsson hired actors to pose as tourists and ask people to photograph them with the phones. The catch-all term for such campaigns is "experiential," because the point is to create an experience memorable enough to break through the filter mechanism and generate buzz - something far more likely to register with media-saturated guys than advertising.It's all about experience? Definitely.
"Well, wouldn't you know it! All this time, we've been saying that Henson should put out Fraggle Rock DVD's, and all this time, they've been acting like putting out Fraggle Rock DVD's was just the hardest thing in the world. Oh, we couldn't possibly! they'd say, putting up their feet on the desk. In this weather? Don't be a fool. We'd have to go up to the attic and dig through all the boxes just to find the things, and then we'd have to drag them downstairs, dust them off, digitize them, rejigger the video transfer and cross-fade the mono tracks. Then we'd have to put them on DVD's, and after all that work, who'd buy them? You, and your six sad little friends, that's who. It's hardly even worth getting up for, they'd sigh, and then they'd put their heads down for a long nap. Poor dears, we really worked them to the bone, didn't we? No wonder they looked so tired all the time.
"This bicycle is an attempt to make large numbers of people reconsider the ways that they move around their cites. Our SUV is the opposite of modern consumer culture, an anti-commercial. We want people to think independently of the corporations who program their televisions. We want people to see our pedal-powered, life-size Green Hummer cruise around a real city, and think about the contrast between advertising and the real world.A simple, friendly, healthy and cleaner today.
In advertising, cities are lifeless, cars are safe, drivers are happy, gas is clean, and you are not responsible whatsoever for traffic, pollution, your weight, the marring of our landscapes, or war.
Our SUV is for the real world.
— via James Wagner's blog
"Our SUV is healthy, friendly, non-polluting, simple, inexpensive, fun, and socially responsible.
There are no black tinted windows to hide us from view. No air conditioning to further isolate us from the outside. No gas tank to fill and fill and fill. No greenhouse gasses pouring from the exhaust pipe. No frustration, no yelling, no honking, no road rage. No clocks to set, no alarm to annoy, no menus to scroll through. No video game system, dvd player, or GPS system. No 'we own the road', 'get out of our way', 'don't slow us down' mentality."
— via J-Walk Blog
"Green Hummer Busted!"
"...Mr. Haverland has designed for himself a modernist home with soaring interiors, a loft in the woods modeled after the Maison de Verre, a house designed in 1932 by Pierre Chareau that has a cultlike following. (In 1946, Mr. Chareau built a house for Robert Motherwell in East Hampton incorporating two Quonset huts. It was demolished in 1985.) The Maison de Verre, with walls made of hundreds of glass blocks, has an enduring modern elegance, like a Barcelona chair or a Florence Knoll sofa. Its industrial candor, with perforated metal screens and exposed girders has acquired a graceful patina with time."Slide Show
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