Rob Curley's Google visit

Was very lucky to host Rob Curley at Google this past Tuesday where he lunched with a small group of Googlers and then gave a larger talk/Q&A. Rob is currently VP Product for Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive and known within the news community as the "hyper-local hero" for his successful efforts to increase newspaper relevance at the local level.

Rob was great - enthusiastic and candid. Had several good lines including this one about how his industry needs to focus more on the value they create and less on how it's delivered. Paraphrasing:

Do you think we're in the business of selling paper? Ask a newspaper reporter about how 'paper' is made and no one will be able to tell you. But ask them about how 'news' is made and that's something we know.

I wish there existed a personal stock market so i could invest in those whom i'm sure are going to be superstars. I'd go long on Rob Curley.

NYTimes: Too busy to notice you're too busy

Nice summary article in the NYTimes today about the busy-rut that we get ourselves into for psychological, physiological and practical reasons. Technology has definitely amped up the flow of information at a pace faster than we've understood how to be efficient with it.

“You can feel like a tin can surrounded by a circle of a hundred powerful magnets”

Interview with 1984 Obama ad creator

I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords

From USA Today:

"Chimpanzees have surprised a research team by making wooden spears for hunting. It's the first known example of weaponmaking by a non-human."

Magic Numbers

Yesterday saw two personally relevant numerical milestones crossed:

1000 playbacks: My first YouTube video to cross the 1000 playback line -- some weird superhero stuff i shot at Wonder-con in San Francisco. Ok, so it's not exactly qualifying for most watched, but considering the majority of my previous uploads were strange test videos of cats, kinda exciting to see hundreds of people watching my content.

5 million: Second Life passed five million registered users. Yes I know only a portion of these are active and an even smaller percentage are directly paying Linden Lab for the service, but when you launched to a number orders of magnitude smaller than this a few years back, it still feels pretty good.

Farewell Simply Audiobooks

Dumped my monthly Simply Audiobooks subscription this week. Multiple reasons:

1) Podcasts: In November got an iPod adapter installed in my car so now i can listen to my NPR podcasts with great clarity and no annoying FM interference.

2) Quality of public library: Although their selection isn't quite as current, the San Francisco library system stocks a reasonable variety of audiobooks for borrowing.

3) Shipping delays: It felt like 10-14 days would routinely pass between when i sent in my last rental and when the new audiobook would arrive. Of course I could have mitigated this by upgrading to the "two out at a time" plan but didn't want to spend the additional bucks. Obviously some delay is expected but this was more than tolerable, especially since the shipping center is in Las Vegas (relatively close).

What would i like to see? How about a "shipped back my last selection" button on their website where my next selection would be mailed to me while my previous one is already on its way back. I know this would lead to more inventory turn (and potentially the need for them to stock more copies of items), but seems like a possible solution for someone to at least model out.

Business card best practice: scan or type?

So I've got this ever expanding box of business cards I've collected from people along the way. I'd like to merge these into my address book. Do I...

a) buy a card scanner? (problem is, i've never seen one that really works well - OCR ain't perfect and there's lots of "non-standard" business cards)

b) hire a temp for a few hours to enter them into a xls?

Although (b) can only be performed every few months I'm tempted to select it as the more effective input manner.

Man beats machine?

Google Gear: It's all around you

"360" was the theme to Sales Conference 2006. I spent more time giving Google Video demos than listening to speakers. The shirt is pretty soft. And red.

Most fun turing test ever

HotCaptcha is very amusing -- they scrape pictures from Hot or Not -- six low-rated, three high-rated. You need to pick the hotties in order to prove you're human. Love it.

("captcha" definition for those who need context)

When is NBA Jam like a venture blog?

Aficionados of old school video games will remember NBA Jam where a hot shooter could literally go "on fire" if he hit three buckets in a row. My friend Jeremy Liew, ex of IAC and AOL; now at Lightspeed, is in his zone with these big time blog posts:

1. Time rich or time poor?
2. Building an online media business to $50m in revenue
3. Building an ecommerce business to $5oom in revenue

Google Gear: I like to watch

Two of the Google Video t-shirts. These always irked me because they lacked our URL, which you'd think might be google.com/video but is actually video.google.com. T-shirts like this should always have a URL visible. Okay, rant over, return to watch video clips.

Seeking Alpha: Now 100% LESS useful

Seeking Alpha, a collection of finance blogs, seems to have decided to stop publishing a full text RSS feed. I understand the challenges in feed monetization are significant so will respect their right to force readers to decide whether or not we want to become regular site visitors. My answer is "no" so will spend a few minutes poking around their tools to see if there's some other way of having info pushed to me. Otherwise, it's been nice but we need to break up.

Are corporations starting to understand Second Life?

The relationship between Second Life populations and real life corporations was kinda tense in 2006, largely because the companies were pretty clumsy in their approach to the world. Their entry looked something like:

a) Create a build
b) Issue press release about being "first (something) in SL"
c) Neglect the build

Not the way to earn goodwill, eh?

However in 2007, perhaps with the help of increasingly savvy interactive design firms, i'm actually starting to see participation that's interesting.

For example this past week H&R Block got involved - sure they did the usual "build an office" but they also created cool items on brand with their Tango product launch. Namely shoes that allow you to dance the tango.

Next the filmmakers behind the movie "300" held an in-world Q&A including the great Frank Miller. I even think someone took of their pants. Yee ha! Author Dean Koontz also did a reading (at a separate event).

And lastly, Diageo did a really neat bar build and pub crawl. Wow, that's totally on-brand and interesting.

Bravo!

Forget the kids, I get nightmares

I know, I know, posts that start off "I'm a liberal guy BUT..." can usually be dismissed BUT...

there are some ridiculously graphic billboards for this upcoming movie Captivity (not yet online but here's a more restrained poster). They freak me out. Can you imagine what they do to a six year old?

It's well documented that horror films serve as excellent reflections of the era's zeitgeist. What do you think this increase in brutality snuff-type flicks can be tied to? Has anyone written the Guantanamo Bay = Saw III article yet?

Update 3/19: Apparently i'm not the only one who noticed this -- folks have complained and the billboards are coming down.

MySpace Icon becomes Second Life Avatar

Tila Tequila (the name means nothing to you if you're not a MySpacer) is becoming a Second Life avatar.

1) I thought she already was an avatar - i mean isn't a MySpace page pretty avatar-ish in the classic definition of the word?

2) In the face of GAIA, Habbo Hotel, etc when will MySpace venture into the 3rd Dimension?

The eye knows what the heart wants

Via Traffick, this is going around the blogosphere today but it's too good not to repeat here.

Results of an eyetracker study that shows what men and women really think about when they watch baseball. Good god, we're just a bunch of apes hardwired to look at groins.

Google Gear: My first shirt

It's looks like a plain black t-shirt, but oh it's so much more. This was the first piece of clothing Google ever gave me, and I wasn't even an employee yet.

I think it was early 2001 and there was some event at Stanford. It was nuclear winter for internet and my wardrobe was suffering because of it (no free t's). But Google was just starting to gain steam and it had 100% cotton for me.

Information wants to be unlocked

Information wants to be unlocked. Whether information can be free is a separate topic.

From a seriously long article on digitization of data in today's NYTimes:

But the reality remains that a new generation of researchers prefers to seek information online, a trend made all too clear to Mr. Hastings of the National Archives last year, after Google, in an experiment of sorts, digitized 101 of the National Archives' films — including World War II newsreels and NASA footage — and put them up on its site, at video.google.com/nara.html.

"Before that happened, we had 200 requests total for the whole year in our research room," Mr. Hastings said. "The first month the films were available on Google, there were about 200,000 hits on them — a thousandfold increase."

Zero Sum Game: More Twitter, less ???

We can multi-task but we can't bend time. Thus there are still 24 hrs in a day. If Twitter is tipping, and i think it is, what will it cause us to spend LESS time doing? For me all of these one:many or many:many communication tools reduce the amount of time i spend on the phone. Basically for two reasons:

1) I can communicate more quickly with a wider range of people online

2) My "need for people" is (unsatisfyingly?) periodically satiated by email/IM/twitter and i feel less interested in speaking at length on the phone.

Les(s) Technology? Not a chance.

Is your business model aimed at your generation, the current generation or the people after them? At Second Life i was excited by the fact that our target customer is kinda the next generation - that is to say, we're riding some pretty exceptional trends about how kids use technology. Each year the average 20 year old becomes more technically adept, less interested in being fed content they can't interact with, etc.

Contrast this with comments like:

“People who grow up with tech don’t tend to value content.” - Les Moonves, CEO CBS

Geez, if that's true then Les and others are in a pretty tough business since i wouldn't bet future generations are likely to have LESS exposure to technology. So do you try to teach/legislate "respect" for content, or do you change the model to capitalize on what they DO value?

Richard Brandt says Yahoo and Microsoft have the same challenge:

The only thing that keeps them [YHOO and MSFT] afloat is the fact that some people have been using Yahoo so long they find it hard to switch, and Microsoft software automatically sends people to MSN by default. Younger people will not settle for Yahoo unless its products improve vastly (such as ceasing to charge for a decent email system) and will not settle for MSN because they will know how to reset the default home page.

So while I don't think this is truly all Yahoo has going for them (c'mon people, they have several very good products), I'd imagine there are groups in their company that do rely solely upon this fragile notion of lock-in.

Related, I was happy to see Matt Cutts' post this week about how Google tries to ensure you can always take your data AWAY from our services if you're not satisfied. We're far from perfect but we're trying. It's not just good customer orientation - it's smart business - lock-in tries to retard Darwinism by not forcing your product to compete in an open environment. And you know what happens? Sooner or later you find that you haven't evolved, you're genetically unsuited for the new environment and you're extinct.

Build for the next generation and minimize lock-in = healthier products

Google Gear: What?

"Did you hear they're giving out a t-shirt at TGIF?"
"No, for what?"
"Some Codelab thing"
"What's that?"
"I have no idea, but let's get one"
"Okay"

I voted against patents before I voted for them

Okay, this isn't entirely fair but still amusing. From TLF:

Then and Now

Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, 2007: “Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO, 1991: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”

Google Gear: All together now

Before we were 11,000+ employees, the entire sales organization used to come together every January for a conference in San Francisco. 2005's theme was "base camp" because although things were going well, we had clearly only begun the climb to the summit. While I'm usually dismissive of corporate metaphor this was a reasonable picture to paint and indicative of what you hear from all corners of Google -- we've got a big project and it's a long journey.

Given the theme I had to chuckle a bit when Opus One started flowing at a dinner one evening (paid for personally by some folks, not the company dime). I don't think you usually have $125 bottles of wine at base camp, but hey, i guess a little celebration isn't out of the question.

Good thing they didn't have THAT problem

Okay, it's hard to rag on MSFT with regards to online console gaming decisions given that Xbox Live is kicking ass, but i loved this quotation from an article on Sony's new Second Life-like Home:

Microsoft considered doing a virtual world a few years ago. A source familiar with the matter said Microsoft decided not to because it didn't want to pull players out of the games they were playing. Microsoft partners, the game publishers, might have been angered if the virtual world was so interesting players stopped playing games altogether.

Virtual channel conflict?

Tuesday Night TED

TED Conference is this week and I stole away to Monterrey last night for a Google sponsored dinner. As Shellen notes, it was a great affair. I don't have any particularly juicy stories - saw a few celebs, met a few luminaries, debated merits of 80 proof tea liquor with Steve and Chad.

There was one disconcerting catering moment about serving sushi and an ample raw bar in an aquarium (where the event was held). When encountering this fact i believe there are two types of people - those who feel guilty and those who walk up to the fish tanks and make jokes like "i'll take that one."

Matt White: Rock On!

Okay, so it turns out that he's likely not worth ten figures (because there's significant excavation costs involved), but have you seen the story of Matt White?

• Minor league baseball player with dreams of making majors
• Buys some land in Massachusetts from aunt before she dies
• Turns out there's $2+ billion of fancy stone on the land

Folks are joking he should buy a team and name himself starting pitcher.

Google Gear: Stealth Mobile

A lowkey mobile team shirt that was distributed summer 2006. See the Google balls on the phone screen. Subtle, eh? Maybe there's something on the back of the t, but i don't recall. This is a nice one because it's a ringer shirt w/o following the normal "white t, dark rings" format.

Best new expression: Barn Queen

On NPR the other day a float maker was describing his entrant to the Chinese New Year parade. "I just hope it's not a barn queen," he noted.

A 'barn queen' is a float which looks great in theory and is really beautiful when it's being designed but once you get it out into the parade it just doesn't live up to expectations. Either it doesn't wow the crowd as hoped or some aspect can't stand up to the rigors of actual use.

Hands down this is my favorite new expression. Can't wait to apply it to projects and people.

Wondercon glory

Channeled my inner-geek yesterday and stopped by the Wondercon comic convention here in SF.

Some additional photos are here

Videos are here

Indexed got a book deal

Whew, fun evening at Wondercon (i'll post some pics and video tomorrow). Indexed, which is a great site where this midwestern copywriter make fun little graphs and charts, just got a book deal! Ahh, bottoms-up fame.

This week's notes

It's been a pretty crazy week at YouTube so didn't have the chance to blog much. Here's some random stuff:

• The EFF is helping a Second Life employee defend a copyright suit against the alleged owner of The Electric Slide dance
• My friend Mitch sold his company Insider Pages to IAC
• I'll be speaking at OMMA Hollywood on March 19 in LA re: the future of video portals

The Five Things meme, a little late

okay, i recently got tagged with this "five things you don't know about someone" meme. I'll play along but not pass along. Thanks though to Rahul for thinking of me.

1. I'm very competitive at Monopoly
2. My wife and I were both in the same class at Vassar but didn't know one another
3. I'm related to Woody Allen [correction: per comments, i am related to George Burns. The Woody Allen connection is detailed below]
4. I've got a parrot tattoo on my ankle
5. My middle name is Everett

My friend Dina gets asked to pose topless

Imagine my surprise when i found my old vassar friend Dina had made YouTube's most viewed clips because she was awkwardly asked to pose topless.