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The NY Times announced today that TiVo will be introducing some new features to their service, allowing people to watch content from the Internet on their TiVo. As with Apple's AirTunes & AirPort Express, Slim Devices' Squeezebox, and networked DVD players, the idea behind the new TiVo is that people should be able to play their media, independent of file format, source, or delivery mechanism, on the device or through the interface of their choosing.
Many companies seem to be heading in this general direction, generating lots of buzz about convergence or whatever it's called these days, and I guess it is exciting, but I can't help but feel that TiVo in particular is missing (and has been missing for a couple of years now) an opportunity to expand upon their core business in a more meaningful way for their customers.
First off, TiVo still does not allow you to view or modify your To-Do list over the Web. The TiVo Web Project fills this need for hardcore TiVo hackers, but a consumer-friendly version is needed. I should be able to everything I can do while sitting on the couch in front of the TiVo (short of watching programs) over the Web. And you can imagine other ways in which you could talk to your TiVo: SMS messages from your phone or IM from your computer to the TiVo message center ("hey lazyass, before you watch that six feet under, go pickup groceries for dinner") for starters.
Along with that, TiVo should provide recommendations about what I should watch, displayed both online and on the Tivo. The current recommendations suck, especially if you consider the massive amounts of data that TiVo gathers on their users' viewing habits. They can do better than a list of 50 shows that are vaguely related to ones you may have watched before. Take a page from Amazon's book. When a user views a particular show's details, offer a short list of similar shows ("people who watched this show also watched..."). Break them down by category into recommendations for sports, for movies, for whatever. Along with the collaboratively filtered recommendations, TiVo should publish lists of new and notable shows, categorized appropriately. TiVo has largely abstracted away the idea of television channels and networks and turned the TV experience into watching one big TiVo Channel. With so many shows available on this huge channel, they need to give each of their users many ways to compile their own personal channel.
Above all, television is a social experience for many people. Even if you don't watch sporting events, reality TV, game shows, or even Sesame Street with friends or family, yelling, joking, and laughing at the TV and each other, chances are you're going to talk about it at work or school the next day. Or, TiVo willing, on TiVo's Web site. TiVo needs to more effectively harness the views and opinions of their customers and push them back out to everyone. Create a community...not people interested in TiVo but people interested in watching television. Think Television Without Pity. Or, again, Amazon with their user reviews. Let people share their television watchlists with others, like Apple or Mixmatcher do with music playlists. The social software / online community space is ripe with ideas that could be applied to TiVo and their users.
I read somewhere last week a lament that no one had told the writer about the special magic of the black and white cookie. I, too, lament. Jonesing for a snack last week, I remembered this person's rave about the b&w and purchased one at the bodega on the way home. Whoa, what a dessert! The black and white cookie is, in fact, not a cookie but a flat, thinly frosted cake, like someone has sat on a cupcake. Cookie convenience, cupcake taste. I am hooked.
Being the last person in NYC to learn about this biracial delectable, I need some help in locating the best b&w; in the city. New Yorkers, where do you get your black and white cookies?
The Economist reports on using the McDonald's Big Mac as an economic indicator. By comparing the prices of burgers in different countries, you can come up with an exchange rate and compare that to conventional market exchange rates and determine if a country's currency is over- or under-valued, Mac-wise:
The Big Mac index was never intended as a precise forecasting tool. Burgers are not traded across borders as the PPP theory demands; prices are distorted by differences in the cost of non-tradable goods and services, such as rents.
Yet these very failings make the Big Mac index useful, since looked at another way it can help to measure countries' differing costs of living. That a Big Mac is cheap in China does not in fact prove that the yuan is being held massively below its fair value, as many American politicians claim. It is quite natural for average prices to be lower in poorer countries and therefore for their currencies to appear cheap.
The prices of traded goods will tend to be similar to those in developed economies. But the prices of non-tradable products, such as housing and labour-intensive services, are generally much lower. A hair-cut is, for instance, much cheaper in Beijing than in New York.
One big implication of lower prices is that converting a poor country's GDP into dollars at market exchange rates will significantly understate the true size of its economy and its living standards. If China's GDP is converted into dollars using the Big Mac PPP, it is almost two-and-a-half-times bigger than if converted at the market exchange rate. Meatier and more sophisticated estimates of PPP, such as those used by the IMF, suggest that the required adjustment is even bigger.
The two ways of determining the value of currency (and, eventually, the size of a country's economy) have different results. Using the PPP figures, economies like China and India are much larger than with market exchange rates; China is the 2nd largest world economy by PPP reckoning. As I understand it, a simple way of thinking about this is imagining a Chinese man and an American man meeting and turning out their pockets. The American man would have so much more money than his Chinese counterpart. However, the American lives in the United States and has to purchase products and services at US prices while the Chinese man lives in China and pays Chinese prices. The American may have more to spend, but the Chinese guy can stretch his yuan further.
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path will be in NYC on July 22 to teach a one-day course on The Elements of User Experience. The course will be based on his excellent book of the same name and his essay on The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams:
This presentation provides a framework for user-centered Web design with clear explanations and vivid illustrations that you can put to immediate use. During this full-day seminar, Jesse will show you how to apply his concepts to simplify the complex challenges of creating products that meet business goals while satisfying user needs. Along the way, he'll share his insights on the next wave of user experience innovation.
If you're interested in attending, kottke.org readers can register with promotional code AFT38 to get 15% off the cost of the course.
I should start out by telling you that I live downstairs from
THE MOST ANNOYING PERSON IN THE WORLD!!!!!
Every weekday morning for the last couple of weeks, the woman upstairs, who just recently moved in, has been holding some sort of ballroom dancing function in her bedroom -- which just happens to be above mine -- at 7:15 am. The clomp, clomp, clomp of high heels on hardwood floors directly above your head for 20 fucking minutes is enough to wake the dead and even a heavy sleeper like me. And even when she isn't wearing hard-soled shoes, she's a heavy walker. It sounds as though a 6'8", 350 pound man is jumping rope up there.
To make matters worse, I think she's got a 2.4GHz cordless phone. 802.11b doesn't play well with 2.4GHz cordless phones. Every so often, and only when she's home, stomping around like an elephant, the wifi signal in the apartment goes to shit, usually right when I'm in the middle of something.
SO ANNOYING!!!!
The gang over at Coudal Partners has uncovered a mystery concerning the winning word from the 2004 Scripps National Spelling Bee:
We don't often traffic in conspiracy theories around here, but considering there are upwards of 250,000 words in the English language figure the odds of this: The dictionary.com "Word of the Day" for Wednesday, June 2 (as emailed to our own Dave Reidy's inbox at 4:32 AM) was "autochthonous." Less than 36 hours later, autochthonous was also the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Did someone at the Bee leak the elite championship word list to dictionary.com? Fresh Signals calls for an immediate and thorough investigation.
Congrats to CP for uncovering this and for their restraint in not using any bee puns in the write-up. So, what's going on here? Is this 1) a coincidence; 2) someone from dictionary.com is part of the process for choosing words for the Bee, autochthonous stuck in their memory, and they made it word of the day; c) some fiendish cross-marketing scheme between the Bee and dictionary.com; or 4) a leak from the Bee to dictionary.com?
Dark Age Ahead
by Jane Jacobs
Some running notes:
What I find most useful about reading Jacobs is how well her arguments scale. They're scale-free arguments. Through her discussion of large cities in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and of entire civilizations in this book, you can see instantly how the problems and solutions she examines could be used to describe smaller entities like towns, families, large corporations, project teams, blogospheres, online communities, etc.
Dark Age Ahead is ultimately another in the this-world-is-going-to-hell genre of media, but Jacobs makes it seem OK somehow. Maybe it's because she's really concerned about it and not selling fear like everyone else?
Several mentions of Canada and Toronto (Jacobs' current place of residence) in the book so far. I wonder about generalizations being made about specific situations in Toronto; something to keep in mind.
Jane Jacobs hates cars. Absolutely can't stand them. I thought this book was about a possible coming dark age, not her dislike of automobiles.
As I'm reading, I'm flipping back to the endnotes. Many of her sources are either the Toronto Star or private conversations she's had with people. One gets the mental picture of an elderly woman sitting at her breakfast table, reading the newspaper to guests, and getting so worked up about it all that she writes a book about the coming dark age.
Best chapter is Dumbed Down Taxes, about how the collection and distribution of funds by the government has become disconnected with the needs of people. Jacobs makes the excellent point that maybe the rules and structure we came up with for governing the county 200 years ago isn't necessarily the best way to go about it now and should be reexamined. Why is New York City part of a state? Does it benefit the state or the city in any way? And what about states? Do they still make sense? (And don't even get me started on the electoral college.)
Before I bought this book, I looked it up on Amazon and read a review by Dr. J.E. Robinson called The Title and Book Jacket Do Not Match the Text Inside (you'll have to scroll for the review...Amazon annoyingly doesn't permalink individual reviews). When I first read the review (2/5 stars), I thought it unfair. Now having finished the book, I still think the review was largely unfair, but Dr. Robinson does have a point. In trying to make her points (which, when she stated them in chapter 1, I thought were excellent), Jacobs is all over the place and seldom manages to clearly support her arguments. Not that the examples she cites aren't eventually relevant (after all, a dark age pretty much affects everything in a culture), but they don't go directly to her main points. I would have loved more focus.
Doing a lot of complaining, but really, there lots of excellent stuff here. The individual stories and passages contained in the book would have made a great series of magazine articles or a fantastic weblog.
If you're logged into Amazon and visit the front page, you're presented with your Plog, or personalized blog. Basically, The Great and Powerful Amazon looks at what you've purchased, looked at, and rated and posts links to other items you might find interesting. It's the same recommendations they've always given people, only more timely (this DVD is out today, we thought you might like to know because you liked this other movie) and in easily digestable chunks. Blog as interface; the content exists and this is just another way of presenting it.
Update: Matt says that he's not seeing his Plog. Maybe they're only testing it for some people, so you may not see it when you hit Amazon's page.
Eyebeam has launched their latest project, ForwardTrack. It's a system for diseminating petitions that not only keeps track of who supports the petition, but how that support has developed. The description from the site:
ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D; designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and petitions. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of "6 degrees of separation." ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.
 It'll be interesting to see if petitions are more viral when people can see exactly how they've made a difference in spreading the message. The first project they've set up is Tom's Petition, an effort to renew the national Assault Weapons Ban which automatically expires at the end of the summer. If you'd be interested in signing this petition (or in seeing a neat map detailing how I got signed up and how many people I've signed up), you can go to my Personal Petition Page and enter your name, zip, and email address to get the petition sent to you. When you forward that email back to Tom, I'll get credit for introducing you to the petition. You can forward the petition to friends, family, etc. and, if you've got a Web site, also point people toward your Personal Petition Page.
Kurt Vonnegut is all over the place in this recent essay for In These Times, but his last two lines find the mark:
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.
In the long term, the potential of the West (and the Middle East for that matter) will be limited until we stop relying so heavily on oil. Since few in politics seem to be thinking past the next election (or even the next news cycle), this presents a problem.
On the way to work this morning, a man holding a folded subway map motioned to me and then his map. Happy to give directions when I can, I walked over to where he was standing. As I approached, he motioned to the map again and began, "excuse moi..."
Before I could even think about it, I replied, "oui, monsieur?"
That elicited a surprised look and a stream of French dialogue. I think I heard "parlez" and "francais" in there somewhere. "Non, non, non, monsieur. Un peu, un peu." My crude way of saying that I don't speak French very well.
Slightly disappointed in my unwitting deception, he cut to the chase. Rockefeller Center. Good, something easy. I pointed in the general direction, but he seemed skeptical, motioning to it on his map. Reaching back into my memories of high school French, I conjured up the approximate French version of "49th and 5th" and pointed once again in the right direction. Relived that I seemed to know where he wanted to go and that I was able to tell him so in (mangled) French, he gave me a nod, said "merci monsieur," and headed off.
"C'est rien. Au revoir monsieur," I replied after him.
He looked back at me, suspicious, as if to say, "are you sure you don't speak French?"
As I sat at my computer last night, a cry arose from outside the window. A woman, distressed about something. Figuring it was just a television, reveler from a nearby party, or someone facetiously wailing about trivial things to a friend on the phone, I ignored it and went back to my work. But they continued, the distressed cries. I began to catch snippets of her lamentations:
"Sebastian...why...don't leave me...accident...don't die...can't live without you..."
Concerned, I got up and went to the window in the living room. I could hear her more clearly here, talking to herself or maybe to God. Her dog Sebastian had had an accident of some sort. The woman was almost hysterical at this point, so it was hard to tell what had happened or if Sebastian was alive or dead.
Thinking that the dog had fallen out a window into the space between my building and the next (about an eight to ten foot distance), I opened the window and stuck my head out to investigate. No sign of Sebastian. I could hear the woman even more clearly than before, still repeating the same words over and over. I strained out the window, trying to locate her apartment; she needed some help from a calm party, someone who could call 911, 311, the emergency pet hospital, or whatever one does for critically injured pets. The sound bounces around so much between the buildings that she could have been anywhere, my building, the building across the way, even in the buildings behind ours.
I was about to put my shoes on to see if I could find the woman somewhere in our building when I heard dialing. She'd finally snapped herself out of her hysteria and was calling a friend. The conversation calmed her; after a couple sentences, her distressed voice lowered and I couldn't hear her anymore. A few minutes passed, my heartrate slowed, and I heard a buzzer (on the floor below, I think) and then running up the stairs. As the woman answered the door and let the person in (her friend? a paramedic?), I heard very little, just a "hi, where is he?"
A lot of people in NYC live alone, and all they have to keep them company sometimes are their pets. Sounds silly to some, but a person can love a pet as much as they can a person, and their death is no less shocking and painful. I hope Sebastian is alright; it sounds like that woman really cared about him. Makes me sad thinking about it. Hope he's OK.
The Frontline special on the music industry covered a lot of ground, perhaps too much for just an hour. The main theme of the show was that music hasn't fared too well as an industry. Media companies, including the big five record labels and the radio station chains, have lost touch with their customers, marketing what will sell instead of providing a good product. Big media blames the industry downturn on free music availability on the Internet, but as Michael "Blue" Williams, Outkast's manager, puts it, the labels have gotten lazy and are pushing out crap; he says if the labels "started putting out good records, quality records, the public will buy".
If you missed it, don't worry; the entire episode is available on the PBS Web site in either Windows Media or Realplayer format**. Also on the Web site are all sorts of additional interviews and information.
** Go PBS for putting episodes online. As taxpayers, the shows are ours anyway...we should be able to choose when and how we watch them. This way, we don't need to go downloading illegal copies of missed episodes of our favorite shows.
(Oh, and I tried looking for the weblog world's reaction to the show, but all three of the blog search engines I tried -- Daypop, Blogdex, & Technorati -- were down, so you'll have to dig that up on your own. Will someone make a reliable weblog search engine that doesn't suck? Hello, business opportunity!)
After not having a computer monitor at home for the past year and a half -- I've been using the laptop screen instead, which has been a little sucky for doing design -- I went out and splurged on a 20" Apple Cinema Display. Jesus, what an amazing monitor; I concur completely with Justin's Apple display lust.
The first thing I did after getting the monitor hooked up was fire up kottke.org in Safari. At this point, I'd like to apologize to those of you who visit my site with a Mac and an Apple display (or a similarly bright and crisp display). Holy burning retinas! Seeing that yellow green color at the top of the site was like staring directly into the sun. When the page first loaded, I recoiled, fliched my head to one side, clenched my eyes shut, and threw my hand up in front of my face to prevent any permanent damage to my retina. My efforts may not have been quick enough...when I closed my eyes to go to sleep that night, a bright white bar bounded by a dotted line beneath pulsed on the inside of my eyelids, delaying my slumber for quite awhile.
So, apologies.
You'll find more in the archives or you may peruse the books, movies, remaindered links, or further afield separately.
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