The long tail in action

I recently finished reaching Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which has caused me to look at some things a little differently.

The most recent examples were radio channels on XM Radio. Last week I stumbled across Channel 51, all Coldplay all the time, at least through August 15. (I also discovered Channel 18, Kenny Chesney all the time.)

My nephew wondered aloud how such channels could possibly make money. Fortunately, I had the answer and even looked smart. Because there's no real incremental cost of changing a channel's format, the Coldplay and Kenny Chesney ideas are brilliant ones. I was particularly taken by the Coldplay channel which coincides with their tour and is a great way to increase exposure for the band as well as XM.

Getting others to do the work

Steve Hamm, a senior writer for BusinessWeek, is writing a book and he wants your help. Much has been written about collaboration so it's nice to see it in action.

The book, The Race for Perfect, is about the quest to design the perfect portable computer. Steve has put Chapters 2 and 10 online for others to help with.

Here's Steve's overview of the book:

My book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, is in part a popular history of portable computing. (The other element is a blow-by-blow chronicle of designers, engineers, and marketers at Lenovo conceiving and designing the ThinkPad X300 and bringing it to market.) The saga begins with Alan Kay's original concept of portable computing, in the fall of 1968, and continues through the luggables, the laptops, the handhelds, the smartphones, and the latest concepts for mobile computing devices in mid-2008, when the book will be published by McGraw-Hill. I interviewed dozens of portable computing pioneers when I was researching the book, and I packed many of their stories into its pages. But there were many people who played roles in this history that I didn't speak to and many threads of the story that I didn't have time to explore. With this wiki I aim to do two things. First, I'm offering up two of the key chapters of the book for people to read. Hopefully, you'll find them entertaining or instructive, or both. Second, I want to invite others to submit their own recollections and observations. Hopefully, if others participate, this can become a living word organism. So, please, if you want to comment, start a thread. If you want to submit pieces of history (or photos) please send me an e-mail (to stevehamm31@hotmail.com) and I'll post your contributions. Please tell me who you are, and how you know what you know, and make sure I get a working e-mail address.

(Click here to access the chapters. You will need to request permission to edit.)

What I don't understand about cell phone laws

California is about to join a number of other states in requiring drivers to use hands-free devices (aka a headset) when talking on a cell phone while driving.

As the resident of a state that requires such behavior -- and will fine you $100 for not doing so -- I've never understood the logic of this.

First off, yesterday's Wall Street Journal (story is accessible to subscribers only) casts doubt on whether this law it really makes drivers safer.

An excerpt from the article:

The study, from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, predicts that the state's hands-free requirement, which goes into effect July 1, will reduce traffic deaths in the state by 300 a year. But the institute -- which reached its conclusion by studying state-by-state traffic-fatality data, including data from a handful of states that already restrict cellphones on the road -- found a decrease in deaths only when people drove in adverse conditions, such as in rain, or on wet or icy roads.

But here's the real flaw in this law: The real distraction of a cell phone isn't the act of holding it to your ear. Instead, it's the dialing of the number and simply talking. The latter requires a fair degree of concentration and takes away from what you're supposed to be doing while driving which is paying attention. I can't tell you how many times I've been on calls and been in near accidents or driven past my exit simply because I wasn't paying attention.

So pass all the laws you want. It still won't make the roads safer until people focus on the task at hand.

When machines take over

There's been a lot of discussion about the diminishing roles of newspapers and magazines. Let's not forget the journalist.

The latest is from Charles Cooper of CNet.

Charles points out how many PR people are bypassing news outlets to distribute news directly to the Web and news aggregators. Charles also noted that press releases sometimes rank higher on news aggregation pages (Techmeme, for example) than articles written by journalists. (Full post here.)

Here's an excerpt:

"The truth is that there are fewer and fewer of you guys," said a veteran PR-meister I know who works for one of the bigger technology companies. "You can't call the same reporter and expect him to do five stories on your company in the same month. So we have to have other ways to get out that information."

"Search engine optimization and other tools we have are better than they used to be and we're just taking advantage of the technology," this person continued. "We can go direct to audiences and bypass the filters--like the media--and have it picked up."

At some point journalists need to think hard about what their real role is. Companies bypassing journalists is not news. What's new is that users/readers seem to find value in the material. That's when you really need to rethink things.

Who owns the content and its comments?

There is something deliciously ironic about the current discussion over Shyftr, a new content aggregator.

The issue -- who owns the content on various blogs. The way Shyftr works is that the content on many blogs resides on Shyftr as do the comments about that blog. Other readers, instead, only publish a portion of a blog posting and refer to the entire post on its original platform.

At issue are two matters -- the original posting; the comments surrounding them.

Tony Hung goes on a bit of rant about how unfair this is:

Anyway, its not the conversations being hosted somewhere else that bothers me, its that there are a new crop of services which would not otherwise exist without republishing someone else’s content without the original author’s explicit permission. Well, lots of people’s content. And you can dress it up and all kinds of clothing and all kinds of nifty wrappers, but ultimately that’s what this is about. (Click here for full post.)

There must be a few folks in mainstream media chuckling at all this. After all, the knock on many blogs is that they don't spend any resources on original content instead feeding off of others. (Where would Drudge be without The New York Times, Wall Street Journal etc.?) Now some bloggers are upset their original content is being taken over by others.

I do understand the concern over the first issue. Taking over the content is wrong, even if it doesn't involve money. However, the issue over where the comments belong is, in my view, not worth fighting. As bloggers should know, it's really hard to control comments and where they live and in many cases the users of the content, not the content creators, determine its value.

Louis Gray points out:

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online. (Click here for full post.)

Update (4/14): Since I posted this, Shyftr has changed its position a bit. (Louis Gray talks about it here.)

Why Facebook thinks I'm a spammer

So I send a Facebook message to another Facebook user. He's with MySpace. After I send it I get the ominous message you see here. I've never received this before and I send about three messages a week.

I can only conclude that whatever software they use, it's a bit too sensitive to MySpace. Or management is a bit too sensitive about MySpace. Either way, not a good thing.

Counting by hand

This just came across from AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) The Census Bureau is abandoning plans for the first high-tech census in 2010 and returning to using paper and pencil to count the nation's 300 million residents.

How is it that the United States, one of the technically advanced countries in the world, can't figure out a way to use technology to ensure our census is more accurate?

Update (4/4/08): From today's NY Times more details. It's worse than I thought. So now the federal government will hire 600,000 people to help with the count. The cost of conducting the census will now be $14 billion, $3 billion more than expected. Here's the money quotes with references to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez:

Mr. Gutierrez, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, said many of the problems were a result of “a lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors.”

Congressional testimony and government reports indicate that the agency was unprepared to manage the contract for the computers. Census officials have been faulted for poorly spelling out technical requirements to the contractor, the Harris Corporation, based in Florida.

John Murrell of All Things Digital agrees.

The weakest link in data security

There's lots of discussion these days on the security of data. And most people think that hackers, poking their way into corporate systems, are the primary culprits. I haven't seen any stats but my sense is that the weakest link are individuals who lose their laptops.

Here's the latest incident from FierceCIO: (Click here for full story.)

Another week, yet another data theft. This time a laptop PC was stolen containing unencrypted, confidential data on March 4 and the event was disclosed after the company began notifying employees that their data had been snatched. Agilent Technologies, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of test and measurement equipment, sent letters to 51,000 current and former employees telling then that some of their personal and financial data had been stolen. The breach occurred when a laptop was stolen from the car of a Stock & Option Solutions employee, a stock-plan management services firm that works for Agilent as a third-party contractor.

The simple joys of simple technology, part II

Stumbled across Flightstats this week (in a roundup in the Wall Street Journal). It was ranked one of the best ways to track flight status. So I experimented with my Atlanta-New York flight, plugging in information two days ahead of time.

I can't complain much about it, other than all three alerts (two about slight delays leaving, one about arriving a few minutes late) were sent while I was in the air and thus unable to retrieve them. I suppose this is good for someone at home waiting for the flight to arrive (or a limo driver) but not necessarily for the passenger.

I did like the fact that it distinguishes between departure time (leaving the gate) and takeoff time (wheels up.) That's the first time I've seen that.

Overall, it's a pretty clever tool that I am going to try

The simple joys of simple technology

The purpose of technology (as I understand it) is to simply our lives and allows us to enjoy it more. As we all know, that's sadly not true.

However, I've discovered a new email reminder that lets me know when the wind is up near where I sail. It's from Sailflow and you can set it for certain wind levels. I set mine for 10 knots. I only started subscribing a few weeks ago so the opportunities to react have been few, until today. Around 1 p.m. I was resigned to watching college football and Notre Dame get their butts kicked yet again on a gorgeous late summer day with hardly a cloud in the sky. Then I got the alert shown above. Winds from the NNE at 12 knots. Perfect. I jumped out and out the door I went with my daughter. What a day, what a sail. And I am thankful for technology's role.