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Creative Commons licensing the Katherina movie teaser trailer

Posted by Unknown Sabtu, 14 Mei 2005 0 komentar

An old friend of mine in the UK is making a movie, Katherina, which I am looking forward to seeing. It's a big-budget 35mm production, using British and American talent both in front of and behind the camera about Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was famously martyred by being broken on a wheel for challenging church authorities in 329AD.

He's put together a great teaser trailer based on what's been shot so far, and he asked me how to get it up on the net, as I know this online video stuff.

A few years ago the answer would involve complicated hosting and mirroring, and an upfront guess on how many people downloaded it, but it struck me that this was a chance to show how things are different now.

I convinced him to use a Creative Commons license on the trailer, and I've put up a high-quality Bittorrent of the Katherina trailer.

So, download it, tell your friends, and tag any comments with spikedwheel.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, creative commons, katherina, movie, spikedwheel

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What are they saying about me?

Posted by Unknown Jumat, 13 Mei 2005 0 komentar

A very natural human question, and one Technorati can help you answer.
The lastest group of people we're helping directly are the Salon journalists. That page shows which of their stories are getting the most attention from bloggers in the form of links in the last 48 hours.
Richard has a more detailed explanation, with screenshots.

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JAH - Ajax without XML

Posted by Unknown Kamis, 12 Mei 2005 0 komentar

With all the AJAX excitement, it's worth pointing out a simple technique I call JAH - which can be Just Async HTML, or Javascript Async HTML to taste.

This works on the microformat principle that XHTML is XML, but with the added advantage that Javascript already knows how to handle XHTML DOM's so no xml parsing is required.

You just include <script language="javascript1.3" src="jah.js" ></script> in the <head> and then link to dynamic pages with <a href="javascript:jah('kevin.html','target');">kevin</a> where target is the id of the HTML element you want to replace.

Here's a very simple static example.

If you want an elaborate dynamic example, go see Kottke, he gets paid for this kind of thing.

Technorati Tags: ajax, jah

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Long Tails, Big Heads and Feet of Clay

Posted by Unknown Rabu, 11 Mei 2005 0 komentar

One thing that struck me after talking with Chris Anderson about The Long Tail was that his formulation is in some ways only a small step towards the end of the tail; his focus is mainly on how to exploit niche markets for products like books or movies.

There's an old joke that seems apposite here:
Q. How do you get to run a small newspaper business?
A. Start with a large newspaper business and wait a bit.

A true long tail business is one that copes with the ultimate niches - where there are just one, or even zero customers. You need to be sure that your submission model can cope with these limiting cases and not choke, especially as you do not know a priori which ones are going to garner customers.

So, what businesses fit this model? The obvious one is eBay. Omidyar's model of a perfect marketplace is tuned so that it is stable if you don't find a buyer (eBay takes a small listing fee), but works better if you do (eBay takes a percentage). Most auctions only have a single successful buyer, but they expanded the model to allow multiple identical goods to be sold too.

Another example is cafepress. They don't even set a listing fee, working on the assumption that the effort to build a product list is enough of a hurdle, and have prices set so that a production run of one item is cost effective for them (they aggregate sales and pay monthly). They also have a higher payback rate if you do gather more orders and let economies of scale kick in on their back end.

Longer standing examples are the venerable photo-processing by mail business (now undermined by digital cameras) and the newer videotape to DVD service offered by YesVideo. In a similar field, there is CustomFlix, which does on-demand DVD distribution, though with a setup fee that puts breakeven above a single copy (and expects you to make the DVD yourself first).

Perhaps the purest of all these businesses is PayPal, which gives away free small transactions, and makes it up in volume from bigger retailers.

If you plan your business to cope with this end of the tail, you'll be perfectly placed to reap economies of scale as you attack from below both the niche seekers and those still mesmerised by the Big Head.

Technorati Tags: long tail

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Hoist on her petard?

Posted by Unknown Selasa, 10 Mei 2005 0 komentar

Hilary Rosen still doesn't get it. Her iPod can play several kinds of open music formats, as can all MP3 players. But she blames it for DRM's Value destruction.
Remember this, Hilary?:

"Building a legitimate business model from scratch -- one that involves literally hundreds of millions of copyrights and interlocking creative rights, navigating incompatible DRM's and players and building customer service and ease of use that music fans have always enjoyed -- isn't quite as easy as people might think," she said.
Zooko, a software engineer at Mojo Nation, asked Rosen if she truly understood the physical impossibility of effective Digital Copyright Protection.
Rosen nodded. "I get it," she said. "It's going to be very hard."
"Not hard: Impossible!" Zooko and the entire crowd exclaimed.
"I get it! I get it!" she insisted.

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Google's Singularity machine

Posted by Unknown Senin, 09 Mei 2005 0 komentar

Last Thursday I was invited to Google's Open House night by a friend who works there. I'd have blogged it sooner, but I think my bout of food poisoning at the weekend could have been due to my over-enthusiastic consumption of the rather tasty ceviche there.

A lot of what came through from the speeches is (naturally) already public knowledge - the engineer-led culture, the 'index all human knowledge' mission, the 'no scarcity of computing power' mantra.

Taken together, however, some aspects of this struck me as interesting. Sergey's talk of the 'founders awards' bonus grants as meaning Google employees didn't need to create a startup to make it big, were an interesting indicator of where he sees their competition, and the vagueness of their terms certainly implied a continuing role for founders fiat in running the company.

Larry's talk of 'brute force AI', combined with the triple emphasis on their highly redundant and parallel platform design, and two talks including one by Rob Pike on the Map/Reduce processing model gave a strong indication that they are building a platform designed to do the kinds of parallel, layered computation that modern neural computation models use, and they are planning to feed in all that they can digitize of human knowledge.

So while they didn't say 'we want to build the AI that transcends humanity', I suspect that somewhere in their dreams perhaps Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Mountain View to be born?

Lets hope it resists corruption better than their shrimp.

Technorati Tags: singularity

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