About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
Hey all. CBS changed the time Amazing Race is on. Now, Tuesday is just Garbage Day. Not Amazing Race & Garbage Day.
Anyway a couple things in preparation for tonight’s installment.
There’s some other Amazing Race bloggers:
Phil’s got a blog too. Just no RSS feed. I’m sorry Phil. Your blog’s been eliminated.
Fellow local me-dia mogul Chuck Olsen got some nice press in the Sunday Strib this week.
A nice write up, and I’m glad Chuck got the press – he deserves it. Afterwards though, I had the distinct feeling that the Strib, in their haste to cover every base, actually missed the interesting bits (that you can and should do this too). I’ve had this feeling (completely missing the story) frequently as of late with traditional media (their-dia?). Enough that Jen’s tired of me commenting on it.
Thankfully, Jeff Jarvis is more articulate in describing this emptiness than I. Here’s some choice quotes from his latest must-read post, Not Quite, Times;
“The problem is that [traditional media publishers] still think the internet is something the powerful use to affect the rest of us. Wrong. It’s what the rest of us use to affect the powerful.”
“…politicians never owned politics and the businesses never owned the market and journalists never owned the news. The people do.”
The Strib delivers readers to advertisers in exchange for a printing and distribution. There are no ads on this site (either that, or it’s full of ads). This post is as much ‘note to self’ as ‘something interesting to share’.
Existing media outlets, like the Strib and the Utne, are in the same business I am – filtering and aggregation. I aggregate my filters and redistribute, my filters aggregate theirs and redistribute. Same for them. How about you?
Stowe Boyd’s running a reader survey. I’ve followed Stowe from Get Real to /Message and thought I’d check out the survey.
Standard demographic stuff; age, gender, household income, zip code, employment status, profession, internet usage, etc. Those common questions attempting to build an anonymous picture of people without actually getting involved with them.
Reading through the questions, the myth of blogs-as-conversation fell away. Stowe doesn’t know who I am – or you are – at all.
If he did, he wouldn’t need to ask these questions – because we’ve already answered them. All of us. Somewhere – if only at the BackBeat Media survey, or in our My.Yahoo.com.
I’d don’t mind giving this info. It’s just annoying to answer the same question twice. I’d much rather just point a URL at the survey.
In the same way I’d prefer to point a URL at my current photo than upload it _again_ to another website (43things, Stikipad, Eventful, or Amazon, Technorati etc).
I’m wondering if there’s an XML specification (or something like it) for the basic identity info all these surveys (read marketers) want. For example:
<BirthYear>1974</BirthYear>
<Gender>M</Gender>
<ZIP>55418</ZIP>
<ChildrenCount>1</ChildrenCount>
I could spin a file with this info, host it, maintain it, and provide brief glimpses into for the right price (so could you).
Yes, this is the Customer as Silo idea, feels like there’s some intention economy connection as well. No, I didn’t complete the survey.
It’s been a rough week for podcast-network overlords.
First, Keith and the Girl dug into the Podshow Contract then Eric Rice responds with a smack down.
Then, Graeme and Frosty in It Radio break the news that I’ve been making quietly acquiring podcasts for my own evil podcast network.
No, it’s not safe for work and not, and no, it’s not serious. Though, I do look forward to owning you soon.
(Note to self; watch less Ask a Ninja)
BJ and Tyler are the greatest team, if only because they’re giving tribute – via their t-shirts – to previous Race teams; “Bowling” / “Moms”. Rad.
Detour – Foundry or Laundry
Uh. Laundry. No Question.
“We Choose Not to Yield”
Exactly it’s way too early to yield. The teams in the lead are too even at this point, there’s no common enemy. Well, the Dentist couple is shaking out to be the common enemy, but they’re so far back it doesn’t make sense to yield them. Unbelievable – Dani & Danelle were yielded by the Dentist. WTF.
Roadblock: Venus Jigsaw
Looks like I’m doing it. Two extra pieces – interesting. Which 2? Hmmm. Looks straight forward enough. Jen predicts the extra pieces will freak out the Dentist.
There’s some pretty cool looking cars in this episode. Spacious, yet tiny.
Garrick’s Favorites
J Wynia ran some numbers concluding retiring at 65 will probably happen less and less.
I grabbed a Gyro and a Lamb Kabob from Holy Land Deli this evening and notice this advertisement for a local surveillance company.
The first blob of red text says that the City of Minneapolis requires any grocery, tobacco, or liquor store to have a functioning surveillance system up and running as of January 2006.
I’m not sure where their cameras were (I suspect back by the meats and cheeses). I just knew there was one in my pocket and probably in the pockets of 75% of the other customers.
What’s the point of capturing the images if no one else sees them?
A while back I pondered RSS feeds replacing Compact Discs as the primary way to receive music from your favorite artists.
As I mentioned in that post:
“With a podcast, musicians can release whatever they’d like, whenever they’d like; demo tracks, rough tracks, experiments, final edits, interviews, conversations about the song writing process, anything their fans would enjoy. All of it delivered automatically to their biggest fans.”
So, yes, I’m excited to see Jonathan Coulton – one of my favorite artists – experiment with a Thing-a-Week Subscription. Every week I get a new song from Jonathan Coulton and he gets a $1 from me (minus Paypal transaction fees, plus lots of word-of-mouth publicity).
I hope to see more more experiments with this model.
This morning, Jen and I were playing with MyHeritage.com‘s facial recognition system.
Here you can see the MyHeritage system found Jen’s face and someone lurking in the bushes.
Who could it be hiding in the Belgian forest?
Perhaps British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer Alan Turing?
Maybe, star of television’s Baywatch and Knight Rider, David Hasselhoff (I’ve heard he’s big in Germany)?
Or prehaps German-born author Anne Frank?
