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April 29, 2004
Analyzing iTunes giveaways
Signal vs. Noise posted about the results of Pepsi's iTunes 100 million song giveaway, where only 5 million were redeemed to this point. I posted a long comment there that I feel like reposting here:
For me, I think this doesn't illustrate how little people turn in coupons/rebates but how many folks are technically proficient enough to even redeem the prize.
Think about it, [to redeem your free iTunes code] you need:
- to have an interest in music so much that you'll go through the process to get just one single
- to own a PC or Mac modern enough to run the latest iTunes reliably
- know how to install software on said computer
- know how to navigate your new software to redeem your coupon (you have to go to the music store, then click on the icon to redeem, not totally intuitive)
- learn how to use the new store interface to find the song you like
- go through the apple user signup and login process
- have a fast enough connection to download your new 2-5Mb single
- have the means to play the song on your computer
Now, think about grabbing a phonebook from any city in the US, say [in] Montana. Now imagine going to page 143, then picking a name. Call them up and ask them if they know how to do all these things. If they answer no, then go to the next name in the phonebook. I'd be surprised if you got yes 5% of the time.
When you consider just about everyone from every walk of life in the US can readily find a bottle of pepsi and buy it, I'm not at all surprised that only 5% were interested and technically aware and adept enough to go through the process.
Posted by 01:55 AM | TrackBack
April 28, 2004
New iTunes
I've been playing with the new version of iTunes for the past hour or two and the first thing that strikes me is all those annoying little arrows that link to the music store. I could perhaps see this being useful every once in a while, if I think to myself "I wonder if there's a new record by Mountain Goats?" but I can't see doing that more than once or twice a month. Why not put a "Look up in the iTunes Music Store" right-click menu option instead? The weirdest part is that my own purchased music has links to the store... so I can purchase them again? I'm turning that off asap but I still wonder why the arrows are turned on by default. Perhaps, as Tom just told me, to blur the lines between "your music" and "the store music for sale" which would certainly increase sales.
The party mix is weird looking, interface-wise, I wonder if it's using any sort of BPM analysis to arrange songs next to each other. I can't really tell the difference between that and random shuffle at this point.
Andre pointed out compilations to me, which I didn't notice before either. It appears that they're reading compilation info from ID3 tags now, and putting albums by various artists in the Artists browse list, which is kinda useful.
Posted by 10:41 AM | TrackBack
April 27, 2004
Another reason to love bluetooth
I just loaded Blue Phone Menu on my laptop and had a friend call in. Holy cow is this a cool little app. It made my entire desktop blink on each ring, with a centered popup showing who was calling and what number they were using. I keep missing calls when I'm at my desk listening to music on my headphones so this is a killer app for me.
I also like the actual percentage battery life indicator on my desktop, it's something even my phone doesn't really tell me specifically (there's just a battery icon and estimated standby time left).
Posted by 12:53 PM | TrackBack
Ten years of mapping
I'm posting this mostly as a reminder to myself to look into this: Tagging photos to GPS data tracks.
Apparently he got this working with a digital rebel like mine, a powerbook, and a $300 GPS unit. I'd love to have a map of the world at the end of my Ten Years project, populated with locations where all 3,650 images were taken.
Posted by 04:45 AM | TrackBack
April 26, 2004
Where are they now?
American born, Venezula raised, Cuban influenced Nil Lara's self-titled debut was my favorite CD in 1997. I played it several thousand times that year after I saw him open for Rusted Root and it's been critically acclaimed since its release. I was reminded by him today and figured he must have released a few more albums by now, but amazon still only lists his one label disc from '96.
Finally I stumbled upon his new site. From the looks of it, he lost his recording contract and is doing a new "indie" album only via postal mail in small quantites, starting this month. That's unfortunate, but I'll be sending my $16 in.
It's weird, he had a broad fanbase way back when and I bet he could draw in all sorts of american and latin american audiences, but here he is selling small runs from someone's apartment in 2004. Maybe he had the worst management in music or the label didn't know what to do with him.
Posted by 02:46 AM | TrackBack
April 25, 2004
D'oh!
Brad's not kidding here. Gmail as it stands is hackable. I logged in today and noticed a bunch of read mail I hadn't read and it turned out that my friend got into my account earlier today. That'll teach me to set my password reminder to something I mentioned online ages ago.
update: whoa, turns out it wasn't Andy, though he did get my login from the question trick. I went and changed my password and secret question, and I've heard that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail do something similar. Someone wrote to me to point out they can get into their friends' Hotmail accounts no problem, so this isn't limited to Google's implementation. I hope any publications pick up on this point if they're writing it up tomorrow.
Posted by 07:31 AM | TrackBack
April 24, 2004
You can't handle the V-8!
Coolest car ever. I love that they included this photo with the listing.
Posted by 12:32 PM | TrackBack
April 23, 2004
Blogs in our everyday lives
Today my Oregon State Primary voter guide arrived and totally blew me away. It's funny how these silly things have gone from a diversion for web designers into a tool to help shape elections.
Also, I love that there's a bonus "b" in the term "web blogs." Ha!
Posted by 10:38 AM | TrackBack
April 22, 2004
Gmail feature surprise
Last night I left my desktop PC's browser open to my gmail account and took my laptop to the library to do some writing. I read some new mail on the powerbook, responded to a few things, then came home and slept. Today I came back to my desk to see gmail running, with all the messages I had read and responded to shown as read and responded to.
Since gmail just refreshes the page in your browser every so often, if you read your mail at one location, other locations are updated automatically. This is something POP3 mail rarely gets right and why I used to use IMAP when I would check mail from multiple machines. It's nice to see a web app get this key feature right from the get-go. If you read email at work and at home, gmail will work perfectly fine, even if you leave your mail windows open in both places.
Posted by 10:20 AM | TrackBack
April 19, 2004
The downloads of the Christ
My new favorite blog Sellout Central points to an interesting story on Christian Piracy. Quoting:
only 10 percent of Christian teens considered music piracy to be morally wrong, according to The Dallas Morning News
I plunge the depths of the internet from time to time just to see what the scene is like and I've been surprised by the presence of things like the Passion of the Christ movie and soundtrack being traded around, bible programs being swapped, and people openly requesting pirated copies of christian-themed files. I would think if anyone considered downloading stuff online to be akin to stealing, it would be faithful followers, but apparently that's not the case.
update: Andy sends this story of Passion bootlegs being used to route around the damage of non-distribution:
But the Israeli distributors who have the sole legal right to import the movie to the Holy Land have so far declined to do so... Robbed of the chance to view the film legally, the Holy Land's Christians - foreign pilgrims and minority Palestinian Christians - are finding other ways to satisfy their curiosity.
Posted by 11:29 AM | TrackBack
The dream is over
My quest for data comes to an end as the local 7-11 is no longer giving out iTunes cups and I can't seem to find any iTunes Pepsi bottles anymore. If you've been following my progress, the final tally was 5 for 7. Only two losers in seven outings, putting my winning percentage at 71%. Given that they claimed 33% would win, I'm either really lucky (doubtful), they wanted almost everyone to win, or demand wasn't nearly as high as they thought.
Posted by 10:58 AM | TrackBack
The big gig that solves eveyrthing
I spent the weekend in Seattle, enjoying a lot of good food and fun and last night I got to see Scott's big opening gig. I took a whole mess of photos and put my favorites up here, and I'll be eeking out the best of them on my ten years site this week.
Scott's show was fantastic. Amazingly enough, he wasn't very nervous before it started, and he sounded better than ever with Michael playing violin and mandolin as backup. Michael cracked up me too, he spent all day working on his fence, then threw on a hat and we gave him a ride to the show. A couple hours later he was on stage duelling licks with Josh Kelley's kickass slide guitar player Ben Peeler. Then there was the crowd, and the people that clustered around Scott after his set to get autographed CDs. It was nuts, and great to watch others experience Scott's music for the first time.
Josh Kelley was really good, much better than his album. His voice has more range live and he can really play a guitar. Actuallly after seeing him play, his CD sounds like they engineered out all the personality and warmth in his music, which is a shame.
In the big picture, it was just an opening gig for Scott, but then I think back to the years I've known him and worked with him; I've seen him playing coffee houses and doing open mic shows, and seeing this show was like all that hard work finally paid off. Josh liked the show, the promoter liked the show, and the audience liked the show and he sold a bunch of CDs. It seems like stuff is finally falling into place for Scott and it felt like I was watching him take the first steps on a road to albums and more shows and touring and the like. All in all, I had a great time and was stoked to see a friend succeed.
Posted by 06:25 AM | TrackBack
April 15, 2004
Gmail's new promise
I can't believe how much flak Google is getting over gmail. Hotmail and Yahoo feature 5 or more obnoxious ads on every page view, plus advertising in each and every mail they send out, but Google creates a better version of web mail and we have state representitives introducing laws to ban the service before it even launches.
Has the whole world gone crazy?!
They've gone and updated their policy at gmail, and it boggles my mind that they even have to go to such great lengths to explain how their subtle ads aren't the new red menace.
They should introduce a new promise for gmail users. Every message that gets sent to a gmail account will result in a kitten getting petted one time. They could rival the old fishcam at Netscape, by having a big room with a kitten-petting robot showing everyone how much love the kittens are getting from the PetBot2000. And remember, no humans would be involved in the kitten petting.
Would that make things better finally?
Posted by 11:59 AM | TrackBack
A confession and a song
I eschew reality TV in most all forms, but that kind of ended last year when I happened to catch the first episode of American Idol and I've watched every episode since. Most of it is pap and watching a show requires fast forwarding through almost all of it, but once in a while you get some magic moments. Here's Fantasia's song from last night's show (which I got from Caroline's site). It was easily the best performance of the last two seasons. It wasn't just singing it right, the way she presented it onstage made it look like it was ripped from a Broadway show. This is what you get when you totally commit to doing something creative, it's freaking amazing.
Posted by 11:43 AM | TrackBack
April 14, 2004
New feature
Some of my posts have been getting kind of long, so I figured I might as well move the wordier pieces over to the feature section (and I could finally rid the world of Anil's mug). Pieces of the Future is a collection of thoughts I had tonight after watching Pieces of April for the first time. It was pretty good as a film, but I think it could be a milestone in filmmaking.
Posted by 12:12 PM | TrackBack
Adventures in being a bandwidthaholic
I've been sharing a remotely hosted server at Rackshack.net (which became EV1) with friends for over a year now and it's run amazingly well. The account started with 700Gb of montly bandwidth and after the unfortunate SCO license flap, we got upped to 1 terabyte of monthly bandwidth, with seemingly no network speed cap. For the past year, the server's pushed out a couple Gb of bandwidth a day, tops, from all the sites it hosts. Even when I put a bunch of music online last spring, it hardly made a dent.
This month I figured I'd see just how much a terabyte was. It started when I offered to host the Beatallica songs. After a day the bandwidth jumped to 10-15Gb and it was humming along nicely. Then it hit Pitchfork's news page, and the bandwidth skyrocketed. The box was pushing out 20Mbit/sec and after a a couple days I had to tell the gang to de-link songs as my monthly bandwidth total reached 100Gb just a few days into April.
I was pretty impressed that the box held up ok (after Chris limited the site to 1 download per user) and was amazed at the traffic a site like Pitchfork could generate from a tiny news blurb. I thought to myself "wow, aside from slashdot I couldn't imagine a blog ever generating this kind of traffic and demand for files."
Then Cory linked my 66Mb file of a Jon Stewart interview over at BoingBoing, and it completely blew away the previous bandwidth numbers. In about 12 hours of the link being directed at the box, the network throughput jumped to almost 60Mbit/sec, and it pushed out 131Gb of data in half a day. The box served up all the other sites fine but as I watched my monthly bandwidth allottment reach 40% of the total before the first half of the month was even over, I took it offline and Andy put it up on his tracker, where it is being downloaded like crazy, but off-loaded to everyone's personal connection sharing the load.
Here's a cool graph of the network utilization on a weekly, 30-minute moving average (click to see the full image):
You can see the initial rise from a bunch of blogs linking to Beatallica, then the peak is the pitchfork hit, which subsided after song links were eliminated. Then a few days of relative calm and Boingboing is the huge peak, which only lasted half a day. I grabbed this right after I started redirecting folks to the torrent.
I've learned a few things from these large bandwidth experiments:
- Ridiculous amounts of bandwidth is out there for a cheap price (the server is only $100/month, shared among people using it). If you're paying $30 a month and getting hit with bandwidth overage bills that go into the hundreds of dollars, find a friend that knows some linux server administration, get one of these leased boxes, and never worry about bandwidth again.
- A thousand gigabytes is a ton of bandwidth and it's nice to have around when you want to share large files with friends or the general public. I host my ten years site there and don't really care about the size of photos or the number of people pulling down the RSS feeds with large images embedded.
- That said, when you get hit with a huge amount of traffic, bandwidth is still going to be a problem. Most colocation hosts cap your line at 10Mbit/sec and I was surprised to see the box creeping up near 60Mbit/sec yesterday. It's still a problem to host one giant file for a ton of people, even with an absurd amount of bandwidth available to you. Bittorrent is the savior here, Andy tells me even though he seeds all the files on his server (which means the original file's still on his server being downloaded if no one else is sharing it), his bandwidth is a fraction of what it'd be if it was just a direct download. The best part is the more popular the file (like the boingboing traffic hit), the more people download it from each other instead of your server.
- Setting up your own bittorrent server still a pain in the butt. This needs to be as difficult as setting up apache on a windows desktop. I want to see a BT server exe I click, install, then seed files easily using a web or desktop front-end (yay! Andy sent this and this). Or make an apache module. Also, build BT support into Mozilla, right now. BT is a great technology that solves a fundamental problem we all face everyday, but we have to walk people through how to download the clients first. In some of the data I saw on the Lessig book downloads, only about 5% of users opted to use BT to download, the rest just got it off the server directly. We need more regular folks using BT, by having it built into browsers.
Posted by 11:16 AM | TrackBack
Another feature: bluetooth
I've been writing a review of bluetooth for the past few months and thanks to some late-night caffeine keeping me awake, I finally put it up as another new feature: All Hail Bluetooth. I loves my bluetooth phone and laptop.
Posted by 01:22 AM | TrackBack
April 13, 2004
It's official, Nickelback is the new Creed
Music fans throw rocks until Nickelback stops and leaves the stage. Heh.
Posted by 12:37 PM | TrackBack
TTY scams
This is an unfortunate story about TTY machines being used by scam artists, while at the same time they are protected by confidentiality laws. It's a tough situation...on the one hand the laws are good and just for people with disabilities trying to get through their life, but on the other these rules are being exploited to carry out crime. I don't know what solution there is to this, but it's a sad story.
Posted by 01:00 AM | TrackBack
April 12, 2004
Jon Stewart interview
If you missed Jon Stewart last week on Al Franken's radio show, here's a 66Mb zip of the segments in mp3 format.
update:I couldn't handle the bandwidth hit anymore, so Andy was kind enough to take it over on his bit torrent server. Thanks Andy!
Posted by 02:15 AM | TrackBack
Not you. Sorry. Ok, you can come in.
I never thought I'd say something like this but this is a great church commercial.
Posted by 01:54 AM | TrackBack
April 11, 2004
Gmail review
I don't know if it's due to the increased pressure on spammers or what, but since I put the post up Friday night begging for spam I've only gotten one spam email. It showed up about 5 hours after the post was up and I haven't gotten anything since. It didn't flag it as spam, which I assume is a feature Google will be developing more as time goes on (or perhaps auto-recognition of spam isn't turned on yet). A lot of friends have imported spam to see if gmail would auto-flag it and no one seems to have tripped any spam filters yet. Oh, the spam was also in Chinese, which gmail didn't do such a hot job displaying, but I'm sure they're still working the unicode bugs out in the beta.
update: apparently the spam filters are turned on and working well, because checking my empty spam folder this sunday afternoon, I found three Nigerian 419 scams, automatically filtered into the spam folder. Cool!
I can say that after using gmail for a few days I finally get what everyone is raving about. On first glance there's nothing impressive there. To see what it is capable of doing well, you have to use it: get a few email discussions going with folks and the more you use it the more obvious the benefits become. I bet you could say the same thing about blogging. Show a blog or the Blogger.com app to someone that has never seen it or heard of blogging. I'm sure they'd dismiss it as nothing special, one page being some sort of boring public diary, while the app itself is just a giant form and a button marked "post and publish", whatever that means.
Gmail is pretty incredible about tracking discussions. I've tried several email packages that offer threading and gmail's is simpler and more straightforward. It automatically trims replies and shows email threads as top-down discussions, so it's easy to keep track of where people are in a discussion. Replying to email is really easy, you just start typing in the textarea below a message and it automatically starts a response.
Gmail relies on the universal inbox with good searching and flags. A lot of email power users I know have no filters of any kind, prefering everything to drop into the inbox with custom quick searches to find stuff and generous use of the flag message command. It takes a little getting used to if you've been using filters for a long time.
Everyone's raving about the keyboard shortcuts, but I haven't gotten to use them much. I assume that's a power user feature I'll pick up eventually. So far I've been impressed by email address auto-completion. That's something I've never seen in a web app before and it's quite a time-saver. As I get more familiar with it, I hope to be able to navigate all my mail with simple keystrokes.
I think Google's really got something amazing here. It's a useful app that feels almost like desktop software, the storage means you never have to delete anything, and the simple flags and searching in a threaded inbox is both a power users and new users dream setup. As this develops along, I just might convert over to it from pop and imap based accounts.
Posted by 02:02 AM | TrackBack
April 09, 2004
This is broken
Did anyone else staying at the Hilton during SXSW notice the misleading elevator up button?
Posted by 06:55 AM | TrackBack
Spam in gmail: the test
Well, since everyone and their mother has a gmail account and is posting screenshots, I figured there's one important test left to do that no one else has done yet. I want to test out the limits of this new email app, see how long it stays spam free:
mathowie at gmail dizzot com
Let's see how long it takes until I've got some junk in the ol' inbox, and what the tools are like to deal with it. More later, whenever some spam shows up.
update: email auto-link turned off after half a dozen spams in a couple days, plus I like the account, so I might as well not further pollute it.
Posted by 05:55 AM | TrackBack
April 08, 2004
Guh?
What in the hell happened on the daily show tonight? Jason Bateman was on and his interview featured two or three odd jump cuts, leaving me to wonder what happened, then at the end Jon Stewart makes a joke about the interview that makes no sense. I hope someone leaks the full interview, just so I can know what really happened.
Posted by 10:11 AM | TrackBack
April 07, 2004
Tools for future-proofing MT
I've been thinking about future-proof ing URLs in Movable Type lately, and it seems like what is really missing is a migration tool.
Say all your MT archives are setup to use the default system, that relies on ID values, like:
http://example.com/archives/000184.html
And you want to move on to something like:
http://example.com/04/03/12/my_post_title
It'd be nice if there was a simple little perl script that could look at your MT post titles and figure out what your final urls would be, and then pull the post ID to create one giant text file listing where old pages were and what their new names are.
Basically, I want a script that can produce a .htaccess file on the fly. It can't be that hard if this plugin had access to MT IDs and titles. It's just a text file as output, which perl is perfect for. Is there already something out there like this that I've missed?
update: Brad Choate sent this as a possible fix:
<MTEntries lastn="10000">
Redirect 301 /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html /weblog/<$MTEntryDate format="%y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>
</MTEntries>
Thanks Brad! I could just make this a new template, then move my archives around and load it up as the .htaccess file. Nice.
Posted by 01:29 AM | TrackBack
April 06, 2004
John, Paul, Ringo, and Hetfield
More great illegal art, again involving the beatles. Beatallica does Beatles cover songs, but in the style of Metallica. I Wanna Choke Your Band is my current favorite.
I wonder what the legal precedent is for tribute bands selling anything featuring cover songs and these sorts of derivative works? (Beatallica doesn't sell any music though, just wondering how other tribute/cover bands do it)
Posted by 07:45 AM | TrackBack
April 05, 2004
Key to wealth in Medium Density Fiberboard, not motherboards
Whoa, that's a lot of Björäqë bookcases: IKEA founder overtakes Gates as world's richest
Posted by 11:25 AM | TrackBack
April 03, 2004
Corpses not Corsets?
This new site by a newspaper designer is fan-fucking-tastic, as he breaks down how different papers handle the news. Reminds me of what Brill's Content used to do, critique the media, and I was wondering if anyone would ever fill some of their vacuum.
Currently, the site is focused on the use of grisly images from Iraq this past week. As folks at MetaFilter pointed out, it's striking that in all the calls to curb "indecency" on our airwaves, we focus on sex and bad language, but photographs of burnt corpses hanging by ropes and being trampled on by people is just fine for the neighborhood newspaper.
Which is worse, seeing an almost bare breast or looking at photos of burnt remains of our soldiers?
Posted by 09:49 AM | TrackBack
April 02, 2004
Think globally
The only thing I think Bush is doing better than Kerry is handling the problem of outsourcing that is hitting the computing industry. Personally I've never been much of a protectionist, I never understood the trend ten years ago to only Buy American (say, whatever happened to Wal-Mart's commitment to that?), rather I've seen myself as a global citizen that doesn't care where my shoes or car gets made (though I would hope people get paid and treated fairly wherever that is). As barriers to other parts of the world continue to fall, we're only going to become more of a global community. And that ultimately means things will get better for everyone socially and economically that participate in it. I know in the short term that means things can be difficult, but in the long term it's a good thing.
Bruce Sterling's talk at SXSW hit on this well. He mentioned that a lot of people getting protectionist about American grunt jobs going India reminded him of how we used to treat the South in America. He said something to the effect of "When you hold a region down technologically and economically, it will have drastic future consequences...just look at how the US used to treat the South and how long it's taken them to catch up to the rest of the country."
Brad DeLong's a fairly liberal economist at Berkeley and he's written a long piece about offshoring worth reading. I also want to point out my new favorite topic blog BlameIndiaWatch as well.