Thrillist! Hiro Ballroom! Stacks of fake money!
I suppose it was appropriate that the first song I heard as I walked into Thrillist’s Internet Week party was Nada Surf’s “Popular“… Place was packed, cash was flying. Nick has more pictures over on RandomNightOut.com
Coolest video/cg I’ve seen this week. With a combination of science and 3d Animation, Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory made this nifty movie which brings to life complex magnetic fields. Take a look and read the back story.
Finally, make sure to turn the sound up. In addition to the trippy visuals, the crackle and pop of the animations is worth a listen, and consideration of minimalist sound design. (as is Cloverfield – a whole other blog post in the works…)
The new Weezer music video for Pork and Beans off their forthcoming album (the red album), due out June 3rd, 2008 is quite the mirror. In one foul swoop, they managed to distill down most of the major “viral videos” from the last couple of years, including some older classics, namely All Your Base (Zero Wing). It”s interesting to note how quickly internet video and viral video has become a mainstay of our culture and online life – enough so that it’s worked it’s way into popular music.
I don’t know if this is good or bad, or what this says about me but…. yeah, I knew instantly pretty much every single clip or parody in the video – amazing.
Here’s the video, and a list of all the source clips I could identify – disturbingly easily.
**Update….. looks like Weezer ended up disabling embedding of their video.. use the above link to check it out.
Weezer Pork and Beans video original video clips:
Numa Numa
(Brookers has a good one too – Crazed Numa Fan)
Dramatic Gopher
Japanese Gameshows from TV in Japan
Starwars Kid
Angry German Kid
Ms. Teen USA South Carolina
Tay Zonday
Liam Sullivan – Shoes
Will it Blend?
Chris Crocker
Stupid Ninja
Diet Coke and Mentos
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Evolution of Dance
K-Fed
GI Joe
T-Shirts
Soulja Boy (yeah… I still need to be cool and learn this dance..)
Did I miss anything?
London-based artist Miltos Manetas just threw up his latest web creation, JacksonPollock.org. Simple and cool – move your mouse around to draw, click to change colors. Read about the whole thing on DazedDigital.
Google just announced, and will launch tomorrow, Friend Connect. Will this be another building block in the road to the ultimate ubiquitous social network? With any website being able to add a social networking component, and all of those components being able to network together via Open Social, we’re about to be one step closer to all being on the same social network, always. Additionally, OpenID integration will allow us to have just one login name/password to remember for everything. From the press release:
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
Read more on Techcrunch, and watch Google’s Campfire One tonight.
Morpheus Media, where I work on the SEO and Emerging Technologies team, was just listed the number 20 fastest growing small business by Entrepreneur Magazine. This is up from #40 last year. Nice!
I’m the proud owner of a Slim Devices Squeezebox. It’s a nifty networked audio streamer, which connects to my stereo, and can play music from almost anywhere – off my computer with iTunes integration, internet radio, Pandora, Real Rhapsody, Live365, RadioIO, and MP3Tunes. The local music playing and internet radio are free services. Local music is served via a server running on my computer, which works very well. The other services, however are paid services. I use my Pandora on the Squeezebox and it works great – all of my pandora stations on my Squeezebox. 
The latest service I just tried is MP3Tunes – this service lets you upload all of your music to their online service, and then be able to listen to your own music from anywhere with web access – or any compatible device that uses their open API. Problem is, the SqueezeCenter advertises “unlimited online storage”, but when I went to sign up, it’s giving me 25gb of space, with the maximum, expensive upgrade being only 200gb. With cheap online storage services like Amazon’s S3 storage cloud, and unlimited, cheap online backup services like Carbonite, MP3 tunes should be able to offer an truly unlimited storage option. I felt a little deceived when I was told unlimited storage but only given 25gb, so I wrote a letter to support asking about it. Here’s the letter, let’s see what happens.
MP3Tunes Support – I just signed up for an mp3 tunes account to use with my squeezebox. The squeeze network dialogue box advertised unlimited storage for my music, which sounds great. However, when I signed up for my account, the maximum storage i could find was 200gb, which was extremely expensive too, especially considering how cheap online storage is nowadays – even cloud storage. I have over 500gb of music, and growing every day. Is there any way for me to get an unlimited account, as advertised? That’s the only way I can see any use for mp3 tunes. If I’m going to go through the trouble of uploading music to the web, I don’t want to be forced to pick and choose. I save that for picking music to sync to my iPod nano. Thanks for your support! -Jeffrey
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I’m a huge fan of RSS, and preach it to my clients continuously. Additionally, I’m hooked on Google Reader for checking out RSS feeds for all the sites I track – Check out this page of my “shared” headlines, or subscribe to my headlines feed.
Like this blog? Subscribe to the Jeffzilla RSS feed, powered by Feedburner!
I just read over on Gizmodo, by way of Macrumors that the AT&T/Starbucks wifi access deal is starting up offering free Wifi internet access to iPhone customers. Sounds great to me – IF I actually had an iPhone. I do, however, have a Macbook Pro, with the latest version of Safari, Apple’s speedy fast web browser.
Can I get leverage the iPhone deal to get free wifi on my Macbook Pro?
One little known feature of Safari is the “Develop” menu bar. You can use this option to change the User Agent Safari presents. I think that by changing the User Agent of Safari to “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone”, I could trick the Starbucks router into giving me free wifi. What do you think?
To enable the “Develop” menu, go into Safari’s preferences, then advanced, then check the box next to “show Develop in menu bar”. Then, when you go back to using safari, you’ll see a Develop menu in the menu bar. Open that menu, and under the “User Agent”, select “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone”.
I haven’t directly tested this yet, but it would be great if it actually worked! Anyone had a go at this yet?
**Update Update**….
The timestamp doesnt lie. I reported it first. Just saw over on Engadget and and Macrumors Forums they are also reporting the same hack for starbucks wifi access with safari by switching the user agent. Did they get it from me? Who knows.. but look at the timestamps.. I put it up first! Wheee…
Could Last.fm be used by the music industry lawyers to find, track, and nail music piraters?
Here’s my thinking: a user downloads a pirated copy of a new, unreleased album from Bit Torrent, or any other file sharing site, puts it in their iTunes, and then starts listening. While they are listening, naturally, their Last.fm plugin is reporting back the track/artist/album names to Last.fm, to be posted in real time, time stamped, on their personal profile. If that album is unreleased, then how would the user be listening to it already? They must be stealing music. And those timestamps on each track are good evidence.
What’s the privacy like on Last.fm? Would they ever allow music industry lawyers access to their user/track database? With full access to that information, it seems it would be fairly easy to cross reference track names and listening times, then compare that information to release dates and narrow down a list of, for example, users who listened to tracks from Madonna’s new album before the release date. Then they just need to cross-reference those usernames with their real contact info/email address/other personal profile info, and bam.
Instant Messaging while on the go – It’s increasingly more essential, yet with many current software/hardware offerings, increasingly more frustrating.
I carry a Blackberry Curve 8300, which has its strengths and weaknesses. The hardware is actually decent, well built, good screen etc. The software, however, is absolutely worthless. It honestly feels like a 1st try beta version. There are random menu items where they’re not needed (example: “call voice mail” option in the camera options menu – why?!?!), and the UI is so un-optimized that despite reasonably powerful hardware, the thing still crawls doing the most basic tasks. One of those basic tasks, which you’d think the curve would be able to do easily is instant messaging. The Blackberry Messenger does work well, but not everybody has a Blackberry – probably for the better. I use AIM and gChat mostly. While there are decent clients for both of these networks, when running either one of them, it causes the rest of the phone to grind to a halt – text takes 5 seconds to come up after you’ve typed it, and it takes till the 4th ring for the os to catch up and allow you to actually take a call. Amazing how they could actually sell a product like this.
Pushing forward on the viral, social, apparel front, CNN is now printing one-off headline T-shirts. Now, if you go to the homepage, you can click the little mini t-shirt icon next to a headline, and poof, get a black, white or grey T-shirt made with that headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it. Absolutely amazing.
The best part about it is it’s hackable. You can put your own headline on custom CNN headline t-shirts simply by changing the text in the url. Imagine the possibilities here – put any headline or phrase you want into a CNN-branded tshirt.
Shirts are $15, plus $4.99 for shipping. They’re luckily printed on ultra comfy American Apparel shirts, which is very welcome – screw those crappy “beefy-t’s”. Looks like they’ve partnered with Spreadshirt for printing and distribution. More info on CNN’s FAQ.
Additionally, this is purely an impulse item. The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section – as soon as it’s old news, the shirt is history. Finally, CNN is fixing to go ultra viral on this. They’re including links to post your shirt to facebook, and since they are strictly time limited, the buzz factor is set to be huge.
Kroosh also posted on this at nearly the same time. We were competing to see who could get it up first/get the most crawl etc. Who won?
The latest album from M83, Saturdays = Youth is out as of April 14th, and it’s purely wonderful. A slight departure from the sounds of the previous albums, especially digital shades, but great in its own way. This album holds its own among Anthony Gonzalez‘s repertoire of M83 sounds, but fits perfectly within it. The 80’s, song driven style is solid and makes the album listenable from beginning to end. M83 is one of those sounds that I very frequently put on when I need to buckle down to some serious work, focus, or just walk around and get lost in thought.
Additionally, offering it on iTunes as iTunes Plus (DRM free) makes it actually worth going for the instant gratification iTunes route. I’m a little sad to not have the full album artwork, and feel bad for contributing to the downfall of physical packaging artwork, but love the idea of not cluttering my bookshelf with more physical jewel cases. The higher quality and DRM freeness of iTunes Plus makes it a viable music purchasing channel.
Here’s the first single from the new album: Graveyard Girl by M83
My blog runs on the WordPress platform, which works great. Lately, I’ve been trying to open up as many avenues for posting as possible. I want to make is as easy as I possibly can to publish – including what I’m reading, viewing, notes from my office, from home, from out and about in the city, all the way to remote regions I hope to explore soon. Being able to post from anywhere also ties into this story I read today about a kid who used Twitter via SMS to alert his friends of his arrest.
Here’s a list of my current and future posting methods:
Thanks to a link from Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer, I’m now fearing for my life. The New York Times just ran a piece on the blogger culture, where bloggers are paid by the post. They stress to the max to stay on top of the latest trends, churn out posts, and make their blog rise, or stay at the top. So much stress, in fact, that in recent history, bloggers Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant have both died – most likely at least partially from conditions brought on by the stress of the blogosphere. While my blog isn’t anywhere near the top, I’m still getting a little tinge of this stress. Throughout the day thinking about what the next story will be, who will read it, what else it will tie into etc. It’s great to have my own platform to discuss whats interesting – but a big responsibility too.
Wired’s “Death by Blogging” story also ties into an article published in the April 2008 Wired about the bitter rivalry between tech-gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo, and what it’s taken their editors Brian Lam and Ryan Block to stay on top. This includes competitive trade show sniping, year in advance hotel bookings, and two week long abstenence rituals, like Thai Boxing trainers. The stakes, and stress are ultra high for these guys – but so is the payoff.
Read about Death by Blogging
Read about Tradeshow Sniping
Recently at the Beet.TV Executive Summit in Washington, Wall Street Journal writer Walt Mossberg spoke on the convergence of computer and TV entertainment, internet bandwidth, and the importance regulation/deregulation from the top.
I’m with Walt on this. The critical step for converging TV and computer content/entertainment, and allowing us to take the next step in rich content delivery, communication, and integration is bandwidth. Insuring that access to network bandwidth does not become more metered, restricted and taxed, and that it becomes increasingly more plentiful and open is critical.
Also in this talk, Walt foreshadows the release of the 3G iPhone in the next 60 days – I’ll be the first in line when it does come out! As for bandwidth and 3G – I think that when the 3G iPhone does launch, AT&T seriously needs to get their act together with the 3G data network throughput – having all those users able to browse the web, directly download/stream media, and use other data intensive applications (iChat AV?) is going to put a serious strain on the network.
Here’s the video of Walt Mossberg speaking on Beet.TV about broadband speed, rich media, and the iPhone.
It’s finally out, and I’m running on it – WordPress 2.5. This is first major overhaul to the WordPress blog software in recent memory, and so far it looks great. I’m liking the more simplified interface, and it seems snappier too. For the complete rundown, take a look at the official WordPress blog post.
Some first impressions:
So far, I’m happy with WordPress 2.5. It’s updated look is pleasing, and the new functionality is welcomed.
The annual NYC pillow fight was this past Saturday, March 22nd in Union Square. My buddy Chris and I walked over to check it out. Although I’m not sure you could call this thing a “flashmob”, there were definitely a bunch of bystanders who were totally confused by the whole situation. By the end of it, there were piles and piles of feathers strewn all over Union Square. The event was put on by NewMindSpace and was also discussed on Rocketboom, CNET News, and Gothamist, although my video is much better….
Last week was then annual Search Engine Strategies New York conference. It’s billed as “the intersection of search, marketing & commerce”, and includes talks, panels and discussion on many aspects of the online search world – both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I work in SEO, and attended most of the SEO-focused talks on Thursday, March 20th.
I sat in on the Images & Search Engines talk. The talk description was:
Regular search engines can’t understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.
It was moderated by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, and the speakers were Liana Evans from KeyRelevance, Chase Norlin from Pixsy Corporation, and R.J. Pittman from Google.
During the Q&A session, I asked R.J. Pittman of Google about assigning SEO-relevancy to images hosted off-site and served dynamically to e-commerce platforms. I mainly had in mind Adobe’s Scene7, which integrates into ecommerce platforms, and will automatically resize and re-serve product images, based on what section the site and conversion process the user is in. I personally think this is a cool technology – and I’ve even bought from a site that uses it – eBags. Take a look over at eBags, and you’ll notice for many of their product images, you can click and zoom in to a super high res image. This high res image is the same that’s being shown in thumbnails – but it’s being resized to the appropriate size dynamically by Scene7.
I also sat in the “Meet the Crawlers” talk, which featured Sean Suchter from Yahoo, Evan Roseman from Google and Nathan Buggia from Microsoft. At the Q&A, I asked Sean and Evan about the specialized news indexes of the major search engines, and what the criteria/process is for getting content indexed and shown on sites such as Google News and Yahoo Finance. Here’s the audio.
Two interesting pieces of “News from the Moon” lately.
First, European Space Agency scientists, at a conference in Strasbourg last week, discussed the possibilities of building a “Lunar Doomsday Ark” on the moon. The concept is to have a repository of all the necessary information needed to rebuild civilization on earth, should a catastrophic event ever happen. Something like another asteroid hitting, Skynet going online, or mass viral outbreak. The ark would house data banks of information and a self sustaining broadcast faculty. The broadcast faculty would continuously broadcast the ark’s information back to earth. If anything happens, surviving humans could find one of the fortified receiving stations, and start rebuilding civilization. Sounds like a plan to me.
Second, the Bad Astronomy Blog is reporting that the Mythbusters are doing a special episode on the Apollo landing myths – figuring out if we actually really did land on the moon, and checking out all those “mysterious angles and shadows” in the pics. I’m interested to see how they tear apart the skeptics claims on this one.
Speaking of which – I just uncovered this from the archives – the cuff checklist (pdf download)the Apollo 12 astronauts wore during their moon walks. The booklet contained all the timings and procedures for their time on the moon, as well as a few “bonuses”, slipped in secretly at the last moment. Nobody knew the surprises until those pages were flipped to while walking around out on the Moon.
Surfing the web a few minutes ago, I accidentally typed in a URL incorrectly. Instead of a normal 404-not found error page, lo and behold, I got this Road Runner Internet “Website Suggestions” page. What’s going on here? Is Road Runner really snooping my web traffic that aggressively? This is the first time I’ve seen this on my own internet connection, although I’ve heard of it before. Anyone else gotten this? How much information are they collecting on me? Also, here’s links to their FAQ page linked from the “suggestions” page. Finally, after reading a few forums on the issues, I found OpenDNS – a DNS server service alternative to your ISP’s DNS server (Road Runner, in my case). Looks nifty. (Click screenshot for bigger)
It’s great that the industry is finally getting on board with the Apple+Nike tech partnership, and starting to work the technology into gym equipment. I’ve been using the Nike+ situation since day one, and it’s motivating to have as much data as possible available to me when I run.. both at the gym, and out on the street.
One thing I would like to see them start integrating is a heartrate monitor. Currently when I run, I use the Nike+ kit, with a Marware pouch to hold the transmitter on my Saucony shoes, and a slightly older Nike heart rate monitor strap. Wearing the heartrate monitor is useful, because it allows me to guage how hard I’m working. Also, with some of these newer iPod and usb enabled Life Fitness treadmills at the gym, they will automatically adjust the incline and speed to keep my HR in check. Cool. It would be even better, though, if the Nike+ reciever attached to my iPod could listen to my heart rate monitor strap, and give me not only info on my speed, but also heart rate info along side it. I think being able to compare those two metrics would give me some interesting training insite.
Integration of incline data would really boost the usefulness of the system. It’s already able to be recorded by the treadmill, so why not add it to the tracked information for Nike+? Speed+HR+Incline would be killer. Pushing it one farther, how about using the Google Maps integration on the Nike+ site to extract terrain elevation data, make an elevation profile for any particular run, and sync that up along side all the other run data? With Google adding more and more terrain data to it’s maps, this could become possible very soon.
What about official course pace data integration? I wore my Nike+ kit during the most recent 2007 NYC Marathon, and it was great to be able to see my splits throughout the race. What would be even more valuable, though, would be if i could get a chart of the pacesetters splits, and then compare myself to that – I’d be able to see where i was slacking, and where i was pushing it unnecessarily. Combine that with overlays of the course terrain, speed and heart rate, and you’d had a complete view of how things went.
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Update*** Just heard that Samsung and Adidas are pairing up to compete with Nike+Apple. Pshaw, yeah, right…. not even going to stand a chance. How can Nike+Apple beat this? Simple – enable the Nike+ kit on the iPhone. Plus, with the new iPhone SDK freshly out of the gates, imagine the possibilities of developers being able to write their iPhone sports apps which utilize real-time feedback from the Nike+ shoe sensor, iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, light meter, cell tower-based GPS, wifi localization, and cellular data connection. Throw in a 3G iPhone with true GPS and broadband data in June, and you can start to see the possibilities. “Tune Your Run”? For now maybe. but next up will be “Broadcast Your Run”
Update 2008-09-16 – Isn’t is kind of scary that they may begin building in RFID chips into clothing, so you can’t use products such as Nike+ with non-approved garmets? Wearing that Nike+ sensor in a pouch on your shoelaces, like I do, may become a thing of the past. Now they can even control your wardrobe….check out this post, with patent diagrams.
