there are 11 posts from October 2004
tsr on naive and sentimental music
The Standing Room has a great review up of Saturdayâs SF Symphony performance of John Adamsâ 1999 piece Naive and Sentimental Music. He blames guest conductor Allen Gilbert for a lackluster performanceâŚ
The whole thing felt disjointed and lacked all forward motion. The second movement ground to a halt. The various cogs of the third movement never came together to create that wondrous Adams machine. And that poor first movement melody was shapeless and flaccid, because everyone seemed so concerned about counting. Frankly, I donât think he got the piece at all.
How disappointing. As TSR also reports, Iâve seen MTT conduct Adamsâ Harmonielehre, and Adams conduct the SF Symphony himself for the debut of El Dorado, and both times they blew the roof off the place, and had the audience rapt. That said, I saw an SF Symphony violinist acquaintance of mine Saturday afternoon (before the show), and he was not looking forward to the evening. I think his exact words were âI hate this piece.â
Midori would have been something to see, thoughâŚ
yahoo buys stata labs
Oh, man things are getting interesting in the Google v. Yahoo v. Microsoft battle. Gotta believe that Yahoo didnât pick up Stata Labs for their Windows spam assassin client, but rather for the search tech thatâs inside Bloomba. Itâs not hard to imagine them building a rich client for email and feed reading that complements the online experience that Iâm sure theyâre building with what they picked up from Oddpost.
The other interesting thing about this is that the Outlook-alternative market is once again wide open. Itâs now down to Eudora and Thunderbird, neither of which have decent email search tools, nor offer any significant âintertwinglynessâ that modern communication clients so desperately need.
talk about the weather
See that big red spirally thing hovering over Japan? Thatâs where I am. The rain is unlike anything Iâve ever seen, but supposedly this typhoon âisnât that badâ since the winds havenât picked up. But my God, the rain. Buckets and buckets; the four of us returning from dinner stopped in our tracks to marvel at an alleyway that had become a river.
(Update: I blog weather photos, âcause my SD slot is on the fritz. Mie blogs photos and videos of the actual event. She gets the prize.)
(Update 2: âisnât that badâ my a**.)
shift the store to the device
Billboardâs reporting that [Apple will ship iPods preloaded with U2âs new record.](http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=musicNews&storyID=6545086 âMusic Article | Reuters.comâ) |
Step one of the ânext gen iPodâ strategy that I mused about in July of last year. Not that anyone with half a brain couldnât have generated that strategy on their own. (And, after all, itâs all about execution.)
Anyway. Good stuff.
the jukebox has a long tail
Chris Andersonâs piece The Long Tail, already linked to shreds, brought a smile to my face with a quote from Ecastâs Robbie Vann-Adibe. Robbie and I worked together at Viant, and I was on the Ecast team when Viant put together Ecastâs original business plan, operating model and working prototype of their digital jukeboxâŚ
Meet Robbie Vann-Adibe, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks - and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: âWhat percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?â ⌠Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: Weâve been trained to think that way. ⌠But the right answer, says Vann-AdibĂŠ, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.
I canât tell you how happy that makes me. Captured in there is the whole point of Ecast: thousands of tracks, delivered transparently on demand, giving barflys access to nearly whatever theyâd want to hear at any time. And the jukebox is the perfect place for a long tailed catalog â at one point we had modeled (inebriated) people paying slightly more for tracks that they typically wouldnât find in a corner bar.
And layered on top of the âany song, anywhereâ benefit for users is the data component. Back in 1999/2000 when Ecast was blazing contractual trails with the major labels (âYouâre going to distribute digital versions of our catalogs to bars?â), the folks on the other side of the table didnât quite get the value of the data Ecast would be collecting. I have to believe thatâs changed: Ecast is sitting on geographically tagged social purchase data. As the hit business both concentrates and dissipates, being able to predict the lifetime value of a recording means more rational investments in artist development. It may not be as richly detailed as the data from Soundscan or the iTunes Music Store, but if I were in A&R or artist marketing at a major label, Iâd sure as hell want to layer jukebox stats into my forecasting models. Music spreads socially, after allâŚand whatâs more social than feeding a fiver into the jukebox?
feeddemon style
Iâve been an avid FeedDemon user since Nick Bradbury announced the 1.0 beta. One of its best (and least-exploited) features is its user-customized newspaper styles: FeedDemon uses XLST to create different views of feed data, which end up rendered in an IE control. Iâve been building a newspaper style based on the âSavvyâ style that uses a some simple JavaScript to show/hide news item details on click. Install this style, maximize the browser control (F11) and voila â a streamlined 2-paned reader instead of (IMHO) an overdesigned 3-paned âOutlook styleâ reader.
Even though about five of you will know/care what the hell Iâm talking about, I give this to you.
blowing the opt out opportunity
Youâd think by now â more than 10 months after CAN-SPAM went into effect â that companies doing legitimate business via email would have their act together about opt-out language and workflow.Â
Not so much.
That thumbnail (click for a bigger version) is a just-captured screenshot from Jet Blueâs unsubscribe page. The language readsâŚ
To unsubscribe from our mailing list, please confirm the information below and click submit.
Email address: michael@theâŚ
Unsubscribe:Â ( ) INÂ Â Â ( ) OUT
Do I choose âinâ to âopt-inâ to their unsubscribe list? Or do I choose âoutâ to opt out of their subscription list?
Now, under a strict interpretation of the law, Jet Blue is probably in compliance. Their message contained a clear and conspicuous method of unsubscribing â a link to this unsubscribe page; and the law doesnât specify any ease-of-use requirements for the web-based opt-out process.Â
That process, by the way, should be considered an opportunity to thank the customer for their business, not to confuse and obfuscate the unsbuscribe process. Companies that do it right use appropriate copy and design to (a) try to convince the customer to dial back their subscription preferences instead of unsubbing entirely, and/or (b) thank them for the privilege theyâve had of landing in their inbox, and apologize for disappointing them. Despite the millions of dollars of investment in a âfriendlyâ brand image, all Jet Blue manages to do here is further annoy an already annoyed customer.
blatant spousal promotion
Late last year Traywick Gallery morphed into Traywick Contemporary when Trina moved her business from her gallery space on Gilman in Berkeley into our house, gracefully making the shift from âretailâ to âprivateâ dealer. We installed flat files, turned a massive closet into art storage, buffed up the home officeâŚand now sheâs doing just what she did before â representing her artists and connecting them with collectors â in a different environment.Â
While sheâs been doing a few private events and artist talk type things at the house, itâs not all wine and brie. Back in March she took over the basement space of Crown Point Press (formerly occupied by the dearly-departed Refusalon) for a month-long show of Susan Martinâs sculpture (reviewed here by Kenneth Baker). Starting this Thursday the 14th sheâll be in the 49 Geary building in downtown San Francisco for five weeks with a show of Charles LaBelleâs compound photographs.Â
If you donât know LaBelleâs work, you should. He takes thousands of photos while traveling, cuts 1 inch square pieces from contact sheets, and assembles them into large (think 3 by 6 foot) tapestries. Theyâre absolutely stunning. If youâre in San Francisco Thursday night, come by: 5-7 pm, 49 Geary, 5th Floor. The show runs from Wednesday - Saturday, 11-5 from October 14 through November 20.
i had a dream
Being at this conference is a little bit like stepping back in time. Eight years ago, in one of the few pieces I wrote for Suck.com, I had a dreamâŚ
A dream of mythic proportions. A dream that began with the first kill file I ever wrote. A dream of declaring myself independent of this so-called âonline community.â I want to become one of the Freemen of the Internet.
With all the talk of personalized search results, custom-spliced RSS feeds and APIs that will give me programmatic access to just the right set of products, their prices and their reviews, the dream is just starting to come true.
web 2.0: contrarian search bet from snap
At Web 2.0⌠Bill Gross just introduced Snap, a new search site from Idealab. Iâll contribute to the blog pile on with a few quick notesâŚ
1) Snap is a big contrarian bet against Google aesthetic. Search results are presented in a very rich, reasonably heavy set of controls that enable the use to filter and sort results. Theyâre going to enable advertisers to create rich presentations for their products â bucking the âtext adâ trend that the goog pioneered.
2) Snap is a huge bet on increasing user sophistication. The current version of the UI is, shall we say, advanced. (If you like X1, youâll like Snap.) Depending on what youâre searching for, the system could return results in two panes â one where theyâre trying to be reasonably smart about what youâre looking for, the other for more ârawâ results. (Try it on a search for ânew car,â for example.) The type-ahead filtering is slick, but I donât see my Mom âgetting itâ initially.
3) The transparency thing is intriguing⌠Theyâre making public all of their user stats, including search volume, page views, number of advertisers, paid clicks, and revenue. If it works, it could provide the incentive for ad buyers to buy on Snap. If it doesnât work, it will provide a fantastic dashboard for journos and bloggers looking for a quick stat⌠Battelle brought up an interesting point, that Idealab company Overture pioneered transparency in cost per click, and people hated that for the first year of its lifeâŚ
4) Oh, and I almost forgot this one. Isnât Snap a very Web 1.0 name? Think backâŚway back.
ev leaving google
Congrats to Ev on leaving Google. I owe him a debt of gratitude for inviting me to join Pyraâs advisory board back when I thought Pyra was the killer app. Boy was I wrongâŚ.if he and Meg had listened to me, theyâd probably have ended up up on the trash heap of enterprise software ASPs. Thankfully, they were smarter than that, and helped create, shape and seed a new market and a new medium.
And hey! Now we can have lunch and not worry about talking business.