this is sippey.com

There’s an interesting AP story today about a new service from eMusic Live, which will put kiosks into clubs and enable club goers to buy MP3s of the show they’ve just seen and download them onto USB keyfobs. A couple of thoughts…

First, I wonder if they’ve worked through the distribution and management issues with the kiosks. This was one of the biggest challenges with eCast, who I worked with when I was at Viant. Bars and nightclubs typically have single-source relationships for anything that makes money that’s even remotely “machine” related. Jukeboxes, cigarette machines, pool tables, pinball machines…they’re typically owned and operated by a local distributor (the guy with the keys); the bar owner gets a cut. These distributor / operator types aren’t very keen on having a new device in “their” clubs, especially if the marketer of that device is trying to sell directly to the club owner. From what I remember of our research, you do not want to piss these guys off.

Second, why a physical device at all? Why not enable bands to sell network-based access to the MP3s? Just like they sell CDs at the gig, they could also sell MP3s. You give them $5 and your email address, they send you an URL the next day. Or you give them just your email address, and they pitch you with a single track teaser the next day, and push the sell of the full gig. I’m not sure the incremental sales from alcohol-induced buying will overcome the incremental support costs of dealing with drunk people jabbing away at a kiosk.

Third, speaking of drunk people, I hope they’re spending a significant amount of time thinking through the kiosk interface design. Number one use case for us when we were working on eCast’s machines was “drunk guy trying to program some REO Speedwagon to impress the woman across the room.” How do we make sure he understands how to swipe his credit card? How much more are we willing to spend on dollar bill readers that accept bills in any direction? How big are our buttons in the UI? What kind of tolerance does the touchscreen have for misdirected fingers? And, most importantly, where does he rest his beer while his hands are busy fumbling for his credit card?

Finally, is this really a good deal for the artists or the clubs? I’m all for creative ways for musicians to hawk their wares. But I’m not sure this will be in their best interest… A user spends $20 on a USB fob, and $10 for the recording. Given that eMusic has to grease the palms of the bar owner, the network operator and the kiosk distributor, just how much is going to end up back in the artist’s hands? Wouldn’t the club and the band be better off buying six or eight high-speed CD burners, rack mounting them near the sound board, ripping discs on demand and selling them directly?

Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso will be staged in Philadelphia by Theatre Exile from May 5 through May 23.

Valparaiso tracks the physical and spiritual journey of Michael Majeski who sets out on a routine business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana only to become the center of a media frenzy after he gets on a wrong plane and winds up in Valparaiso, Chile.

Via the fantastic Don DeLillo’s America. You know, if you’re into him.

I wish I had been tracking and charting this along the way. On December 12, 2003 a Google search for the phrase “google ipo” pulled about 16,700 results. Today, the same search yields about 52,500. Note to meme watchers and keyword speculators: imagine the wave of schadenfreude that’ll be unleashed if the Google IPO doesn’t perform spectacularly…

(Somewhat relatedly, someone should scrape and syndicate the weekly zeitgeist results -- top 10 gainers, top 10 losers. Top two declining queries for the week of 4/19? “Lindows” and “easter bunny.” Wouldn’t Michael Robertson look great in a bunny suit?)

Don’t ask why, but I spent a good part of my weekend crunching a fairly large data set (a couple of million rows, about 20 attributes per row of varying sizes / types). As my laptop whirred and paged and paged and whirred, I sat at my desk staring at the other two machines sitting on the LAN – both of which had plenty of spare processing cycles and RAM – in frustration. Why can’t this task leverage those resources?

Think about it from a user’s perspective. It’s dead simple for me to join a network. Once I’m on that network, it’s dead simple for me to access shared files or shared devices like printers, scanners, burners, etc. Why can’t I share processor cycles? Whether I’m doing a left outer join on tables with a couple million rows, or rendering fly-over titles for the grandparents’ DVD, machine 1 should be able to reach out and commandeer cycles of machines 2 through N in the workgroup.

I’m sure there are dozens of reasons why this is impractical or impossible from a computer science perspective. (For example, making sure that the benefit of using machines 2 through N actually outweighs the overhead of task coordination.) But conceptually it makes sense: bring clustering technology out of the data center and on to the LAN, and enhance applications that live between personal computing and supercomputing.

The FeedBurner team announced SmartFeed today:

SmartFeed creates a subscriber-aware version of your feed that intelligently deploys the right version of your feed to the appropriate subscribers. Today, SmartFeed understands the capabilities and limitations of syndication readers/aggregators and on-the-fly transforms your source feed to function in all of the readers and aggregators we know about.

Publishers can push out one feed flavor (like, say, Atom), point the reader to their FeedBurner feed, and have it automatically tuned for their reader’s aggregator. And as Dick Costolo writes in his post, the “possibilities for subscriber-tuned versions of your feed via SmartFeed (based on parameters that you, the publisher, make available) aren’t lost on us either.”

(Previous post on FeedBurner.)

A quick note about Gmail and spam filtering. Their filters out of the gate are pretty tight, but not perfect. They’re not catching everything, and there have been quite a few false positives – not on personal mail, but on things like the New York Times daily news headlines. I assume that the “report as spam” feature (which moves messages to your spam list) feeds back into Gmail’s spam filtering tools; and I also assume that the converse is true – if you mark a mis-classified email as “not spam,” that action will contribute to their rulesets. It’s only a week into the beta, but a week of consistently telling the system that the New York Times is not spamming me hasn’t had an impact on their filters. But hey, I’m just one guy.

That said, there’s a “yet to be documented” feature of Gmail to help work around these issues. If you add the sender of the message to your contacts list, Gmail will consider those messages “not spam.” Which means they already have the basics in place for a more robust whitelist filtering system. And, of course, it’s a no-brainer to imagine layering in your Orkut’s social network to further extend your whitelist. (A no-brainer to imagine. Not a no-brainer to implement in a seamless and elegant way.)

Bravely pioneering the study of bystander usability, Jakob Nielsen discovers that – wait for it – mobile phones are annoying!

Bystanders rated mobile-phone conversations as dramatically more noticeable, intrusive, and annoying than conversations conducted face-to-face. While volume was an issue, hearing only half a discussion also seemed to up the irritation factor.

Be sure to tune in two weeks from now, when Jakob releases the definitive study of “over the shoulder” usability, which finds that office snoops prefer their colleagues to view sites with large, legibile fonts and avoid use of those snap-on glare filters that make it impossible to catch a walk-by glimpse of the latest BoingBoing fetish thing.

Caterina advises the following:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

OK. Nearest book is What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. No, really. I’m fascinated by the way he can go on Charlie Rose and talk for a full hour and only mention the particulars of a building (like it’s use or structure or design) once. The thing is, page 23 is an image. So I skipped ahead to 25, and I had to count the chapter title as a sentence in order to have a fifth sentence on the page. And it damn near encapsulates the whole book…

That is not because it is difficult to build or because architecture has failed to escape from the clutches of the fashion cycle, but because the accomplishment of any task in our society, whether it is writing a piece of criticism or selling a product or organising a large corporate entity, is dependent not so much on production as it is on the mixture of branding, signature, sound-bite and image that creates the memorable moments of comprehension in an increasingly abstract economic and social system.

In other words, sizzle sells the steak.

Here’s a Gmail idea: a bookmarklet to “send this page to my Gmail account.” This could enable searchable storage of pages of interest – not blogging links, but providing a way to keep pages that you need to store (transaction confirmations) or search personally. Optionally the user should be able to (a) pre-assign a label and (b) skip the inbox for pages you’re sending into your Gmail account.

Here’s something to watch on Gmail. When the masses come streaming in with visions of 1gb of storage, will they “get” the display of messages by conversation? Or will Google need to add a “traditional” list view where each individual message is iterated? I’m still getting used to the Gmail approach; the expanding / collapsing message cards are useful (they put individual messages in contest, and they help you catch up on new mailing list traffic quickly), but collapsing all the messages of a thread into a single item in the “all mail” view isn’t entirely intuitive at first.

(And of course, I’m imagining Google leveraging this UI into Groups and potentially the RSS aggregation space. Groups makes sense – conversations can be expanded / collapsed like email. RSS aggregation would be intriguing; they could combine conversation threads across feeds based on content analysis. “Here are all the posts in chron order from the feeds you subscribe to about Janet Jackson’s impersonation of Condi Rice.”)

I’ve reached some sort of threshold. In the last two days I’ve received more comment spam than email spam. (Of course the tools that have been deployed on my behalf to manage email spam are much more robust than those on the weblog. But still.)

This just in, from the land of one to one…

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood - their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

Even the editor’s note is customized…

In his editor’s note describing the magazine’s database package, Mr. Gillispie left open three spots - commuting time, educational attainment and percentage of children living with grandparents - so he could adapt his message to individual readers. Mr. Gillespie said that the parlor trick could have profound implications as database and printing capabilities grow.

The cover article’s written by Declan McCullagh, of course.

Because I’m just a bit obsessive about email, a few notes on the screenshots of Gmail posted by Kevin Fox.

• Primary button for managing messages? Archive. Not delete, archive. I’m sure there’s a delete action in the “more actions…” dropdown. Reinforces the two key value props of the service: a gig of storage, and email search.* This also signals to me that they must be fairly confident in their spam filtering…
• The conversation threading is interesting; especially the toggle for “show quoted text.” The rules around that must be interesting.
• Assume that clicking on the little blue star is the equivalent of flagging a message in Outlook. I’m not gonna file this, but I need to be able to find it quickly for action.
• Assume that multiple labels can be assigned to each message. Voila, virtual folders.
• Does the proximity of the “Create a Filter” action to the search box mean that any search term can be turned into a filter?
• What’s that textarea doing at the bottom of the message? Quick reply?
• Did Jason and Kevin hardcode their links to shellen.com and fury.com? Or is Gmail parsing those and linking them automagically?
• Check out those hotkey shortcuts. Nice.

According to Kevin’s post, the related pages aren’t ads, they’re related pages. Speaking of ads… Even looking at the related pages on the screenshots, the targeting to the message content is a bit…foreign. But Jarvis put a fine point on the whole issue today: if you’re using a webmail service, they’re already scanning the content of every single one of your messages – for spam filtering purposes. (And then again for security purposes, stripping out HTML tags/scripting that will conflict with their UI or introduce vulnerabilities.)

* The Gmail archive button is the interface equivalent of the big yellow pause button on the Tivo remote. They both live at the intersection of interaction design and marketing.

I think I need to get a copy of GarageBand, if only to produce a remix of Intercall’s Reservationless Plus hold music. Look out, Dangermouse.