Category: General

“The US copyright office will permit mobile phone subscribers to unlock their phones, allowing them to be used by rival network providers.” – Andrew Orlowski, The Register

“The exemptions become effective on 27 November 2006 and will only remain in effect for three years.” – Tim Finn

“This is really only applicable to Cingular and T-Mobile customers” – Alex Zaltsman

This is really good news for handset makers and the geek set. Opens up a new world of higher-end handset options (the choices today are pretty bad).

If any of you Apple-geeks missed it, the rumored iPhone is rumored to be unlocked. Just as you supplied the keyboard, mouse, and monitor with the Mac Mini, this means you’ll bring your own mobile phone service provider for the iPhone.

Seems like a smart, customer-centric decision. Since not all providers have decent coverage where there are Apple Stores (US or worldwide) not tying the handset to a provider means Apple (or any other handset maker) can sell to the greatest number of customers.

UPDATE:

“An Apple phone wouldn’t do more than a Treo or a BlackBerry or a Razr — it would do less, and what it would do, it would do really well.” – John Gruber

Exactly. Today those are the options for decent voice + internet handset. As I wrote last April – we don’t need more of the same – we need the opposite. While my previous write up is pretty geeky – the underlying principle is valid – phone as peripheral. Not stand-alone device.

We caught the “Heretics” episode of the This American Life last week on the drive back from Wisconsin. A superb listen – about Reverend Carlton Pearson and his New Dimensions church – best I’ve heard from public radio in quite a while (not that I’ve been able to stand listening that much). Pearson’s philosophy of inclusion is the closest I’ve heard something sounding like a Post-Scarcity Christianity.

I don’t remember a church service where the offering plate wasn’t passed around. Donations – dare I say – commerce – is baked into religious gatherings. Same goes for street performers and hat passing.

Outside of those two contexts, I’m drawing a blank on where same gather-entertain-donate model has been successful – especially not in the online realm. Hmmm – what would a successful model look like?

While commerce is baked into religion – the inverse can also be true:

“You see, the customers (and I am one) who make Apple what it is don’t purchase products. They (we) accept and enter a myth — a cult.” – Rex Hammock

Reminds me of my favorite L Ron Hubbard quote:

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.”

Keep on eye Pearson – he’s out to prove joy can be as financially lucrative as fear.

Oh, and I think there is a distinction between building a religion and building a cathedral.

While Darren’s post is specific the challenges of high-profile, pro-bike racing, the messed up relationship he describes is evident in so many other industries, the major entertainment publishers come to mind immediately (music, books, etc).

While I admittedly don’t know the specifics of the issues within bike racing (Darren’s the expert here, and I could scare up a couple more if you’d like) – seems to me walking into the sport there’s some degree of acceptance that’s ‘this is the way the game is played’.

Of course, “The Man” has more incentive to keep things status quo than do the “the little guys”. All around me, I’m seeing similar hierarchies bypassed. RSS, podcasting, Tivo, YouTube, email, BarCamps, open-source software, and weblogs – all bypass existing gatekeepers, syndicators, and publishing structures, and organizational structures.

“You’ve got to build bypasses” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

These bypasses changes the game at a fundamental, un-ignorable way. The best bypasses promise sustainability without threat of holding your breath underwater.

What would it look like if the same thing that happened to stock brokers and real estate agents happened to professional sports leagues?

Related:

“Meanwhile, top reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers.” – Michael Hirschorn

Friend of the podcast Sam Buchanan reminded me the First Crack Podcast got a mention in George Colombo‘s Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting.

Screenshot too. In the section on the benefits of using a weblog engine for handling listener comments and such.

Thanks again George.

“The bottom line is that good transit is frequent, affordable, easy to use and takes you where you want to go.” – Sam Newberg

Sam really likes Denver. Unlike some other friends of mine.

Personally, I’ve never been. Just around. Airport, Boulder, Broomfield. Though I’m always happy to hear when public transit works. I’m optimistic, but walking or bikes always seem to make more sense.

(disclosure: Sam’s a friend/client)

“‘Go forth and make media,’ I told the group. ‘You want to be a journalist, be one! There’s no badge that makes you one, no degree, no license (thank God and the founding fathers), no credentials and no special anointing from the New York Times. So just do it.’ This again drew a few moans and rolled eyes.” – Terry Heaton

Maybe there was a time when Bachelor-level studies prepped people to lead a profession. I’m not confident. For me, it was 4 years of understanding background, history, and gaining basic skills like critical thinking and taking criticism. A few years back I explored going back to school to get a better foundation for some of the things I’m doing today. In the end, I decided that 2 years doing in the “real world” would better serve me.

To those rolling their eyes – I didn’t graduate that long ago, and what I’m doing today didn’t exist then. The profession I thought I wanted to get into turned out to be really, really boring and not as cool as I thought it would be.

😉

“So why did YouTube catch on? Simple — free storage.” – Dave Winer

Exactly. In YouTube’s case, I’d also throw in format conversion. Converting video into a format that is small and viewable by anyone with a Flash player is a opaque and geeky process. The reason they clicked – they did the conversion and spit back the html code.

This reminds me of this Help Needed Here checklist. Right now, it’s a list of 5 areas where our current tools aren’t that helpful. While it will rarely make sense for any single tool to provide answers to all 5, the more the better.

• Aggregation (everything that’s interesting to me in one spot)
• Bandwidth (so we won’t need to worry about becoming popular)
• Conversion (video formats, presentation formats, bandwidth, and devices)
• Filtering (Spam, news, etc)
• Storage (video, audio, games, backups, sharing)

I’ve explicitly left off ‘community’ because these 5 attributes are pre-requisites for an online community.

We’ve got a European vacation in the works and by coincidence, the Marginal Revolution has a nice U.S. vs. Europe comparison thread running.

“Further, a recent study has shown that Germans and Americans spend the same amount of time working, but the proportion of taxable market time vs. nontaxable home work time is different. In other words, Germans work just as much, but more of their work is not captured in the taxable market.” – Edward Prescott

Huh.

I’ve been wondering if increased transparency of tax spending would make higher rates ‘worth it’. This quote hints that the answer is no. Hmmmm.

The last few weeks have been a roller coaster of family emotions and get-togethers – from the passing of Grandma Hannah to Cooper’s first birthday. Add to that, all the family photos and stories and trees (back to 1751) my dad sent down. So, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about yesterday, and those places and times that don’t exist anymore.

Then, while doing tech support with my dad via Skype this morning, I caught this in my feedreader:

“She doesn’t know about blogs, bittorrent, streaming video, social media, or any of the stuff of which I write, nor does she care. She smiles when I tell her what I do, but the smile is more a courtesy than anything else, and that’s okay.” – Terry Heaton

Choked me up.

Yes, this is the explanation behind both the Unincorporated and Wrong Side of the Family mini-series over at the First Crack Podcast.

One of the reasons I’ve always been skeptical, cynical, and generally a wet-blanket on browser-only software is unreliable networks. Everywhere I go – there isn’t a network connection.

So, any browser-only information I might need (email, documents, photos, etc) are completely inaccessible on my fully wifi-enable, ethernet-ready laptop.

“I’ve got draft posts on Google Docs — and I can’t access them! So here I am opening up MS Word.” – Scott Karp

I see two trends:

1. Cheaper laptops and more powerful pocket-computer devices
2. Wireless internet access available in more places

Of the two, I see the former moving much, much faster than the latter.

While there are huge strengths in developing browser-only software – namely:

1. Considerably lower development and support costs than platform-specific desktop apps
2. Ease of pushing out bug-fixes and updates

– not having the information I want because the network is down or unavailable is unacceptable. For those keeping track, yes, I’ve talked about this before