The Sphinx's Acre

This afternoon, I went out on Commencement Bay to train in the use of a spinnaker sail, something I've both awaited and dreaded.

The spinnaker, named so by a sort of decayed, simplified version of "Sphinx's Acre", referring to the first ship to fly one, The Sphinx, and its impressive size, is a large, light sail that balloons out in front of the boat, propelling it by both lift and drag forces. In this picture, it is the diversity-aware-pink colorful sail that's taking up 2/3 of the frame.

It is also the most ungainly, picky, finnicky, temperamental son of a bitch piece of equipment I've ever had to work on a boat, and I'm really trying to be nice, here.

Compare and contrast, as they say in school: to work the mainsail, really only one line needs to lead back to the cockpit; with a tiller (or wheel if you're rich and lazy) and a mainsheet, you can steer a boat and keep her in fair winds.

With a spinnaker, there are four lines. Four lines, and they're not even near each other most of the time. It's spaghetti everywhere, all over the deck, like someone had just lost their $9.99 all-you-can eat Italian dinner at Fabrizio's. Sorry about your tie, slick; hospitaliano!

And doing it yourself? Forget it, it takes at least three people to work the thing, another one if you actually want to change your tack and jibe the sail, and by the way, I'd never recommend doing that. I'd recommend you just don't change tack with a spinnaker. Ever. If you want to use the spinnaker, just go in one direction and pray your gods the wind shifts when you want it to.

When you jibe over, you gotta take the pole that runs the spinnaker out of the mast, see, and then while you're holding it and the wind is trying to rip it away from you, you go fishing for one of the lines on the opposite end of the boat, while everybody yells at you and the spinnaker starts deflating like it's date night and it used the generic brand Viagra without checking the expiration date, and then if you do manage to snag the line without losing the pole, you have to do a switcherooski and clip the opposite end of the pole back onto the mast before the spinnaker does a complete Orrin Hatch and all the ladies get bored.

It's a demon, is what I'm telling you, a demon! And it's gonna get us all killed.

With the massive deposits required to charter companies and the special certifications required to fly one of these things and all of the nasty stories I've heard, it's a wonder that anyone that values their life pops one of these things up without alerting the President and NORAD first. But this is part of racing, and racing is just, well, one of those things that people sometimes do when they're bored, or when life's just not edgy enough.

And I'm right there with them, and scared to death. Today's spinnaker class was on a 24' Martin. When we're doing it for real, in Swiftsure 2006, it's going to be on a 43' Beneteau, where the forces are increased by an order of magnitude. Watch that pole, they say; they're still talking about the guy that took a pole to the head when unclipping it and never fully recovered.

But they are very colorful, and that's nice.

Related Tags: sailing, spinnaker, sailboat racing, regatta, swiftsure

In-Game Ads

Good news for digital distribution, bad news for people that just want to be left alone, Massive, the company responsible for the first wave of in-game ads (made famous by SWAT 4) is being bought by Microsoft.

Considering something had to fill in the gap where publishers were previously forking out the bucks, digital ads are probably as innocuous as you could get. Turns out I wasn't too far off the money with my prediction about a month and a half ago.

In this case, though, the thrill of getting it right is staved off a bit by the reality that we're looking at a grim prospect as oil prices continue to rise. The reality is, what can be shipped electronically will need to go that route soon - it's pure waste shoveling digital content in boxes if we can get wired up and shove it through fiber instead. And that decision is being made now, by several companies - the list of games on Steam continues to grow.

As exposure rises, you can expect game distributors and retailers to attempt a fortress maneuver, even though, as I mentioned before, publishers lost out to developers in Round 1 in the court battle for digital distribution rights. I expect to see something higher-profile, possibly related to violent videogame legislation, which is mostly targeted at retailers.

As a matter of fact, I could see it going like this.

Senate: "Retailers, you have not done your part to keep kids from buying violent video games."
Retailers: "But what about those evil DIGITALLY DISTRIBUTED GAMES? Anybody can just log on to the Internet and buy them! Why aren't you cracking down on them?"

And just like that, the retailers' fortress is the whole of the legislative hoorah about "saving kids" from violence in video games, with digital distributors like Steam playing the evil Gary Oldman part.

Well, it won't last, even if there'll be some pain in there. Digital distribution is lower cost of goods, faster to market, almost zero manufacturing errors. At least on the PC side we're saying goodbye to boxed games, and soon. Retailers aren't gonna like this.

Related Tags: digital distribution, advertising, violent video games, microsoft, in-game ads

BVI: The Movie!

Well, maybe it's been a while, but thanks to JumpCut via TechCrunch, I've finally gotten my British Virgin Islands sailing trip masterpiece out on the web.

http://www.jumpcut.com/view?id=85CD21BED55C11DA963E4A6427899F31

It's a 5-minute opus spanning 130 nautical miles in one of the most beautiful places in all the world. Get on it, and leave some comments!

Related Tags: sailing, vacation, bvi, movie, jumpcut

The Value of Royalty: Sealand

Get a Lordship Today, they say.

Wow. 67% off Sealand royal noble titles. The little principality that could is holding a blowout sale; probably because that crap with HavenCo didn't turn out quite the way they wanted. See the "Mea Culpa" Defcon 11 briefing from a former HavenCo employee.

Turns out Prince Michael was too busy harvesting sea ferns, and the business of hosting server racks on broadcast fiber from an old WW2 floating defense platform tanked. Big surprise. It's great fiction - Stephenson apparently took a page from the HavenCo book for Cryptonomicon - but business-wise, I guess it's not making sense to try to run a country - or a data haven - from anywhere where its residents arrive by winch.

Never heard of Sealand? Neither did I, until today. It's been more or less off and on, with respect to modern times; its image only recently revitalized with offshore web hosting getting the usual seasonal boost ala Christmas Island domains. Its last claim to fame was being one of the handful of pirate radio stations operating in Maunsell Forts in the 60's, probably just spewing out endless loops of "Ferry Cross The Mersey" (think of Moby on endless repeat, you'll see how old it'd get) - I guess you can thank Rotten.com for providing me the initial link.

Sealand's Official Site - oh look, they couldn't get a .gov domain. Be sure to read Wikipedia's article on Sealand if nothing else. Pirate radio, dragooning of the British government, hostage taking and air assaults, all on the two-legged sunken fort sitting on a sandbar just off Felixstowe. And I thought happy slapping was the most action the UK ever saw.

Anyway, lordship's cheap - only about $35.18 if you act now.

Tags: datahaven sealand uk merseybeat offshore hosting

Thermite Thermite Thermite

YES.

This beats the crap out of Beakman's World. And Bill Nye. Sorry guys; I know, liability and all, but we're big kids now. We want thermite.

Digital Music Fortresses, The Sum of The Parts

From the New York Post, via Techdirt.

Jobs isn't budging on the price of songs. And why should he? Oh, the execs bitch: "Where in life does the retailer set the price of the content?"

Right here, pal. In the future. I remember a similar argument coming up when Sega Sports broke the seal on the scalp-tastic pricing arrangements for console games, pricing ESPN 2K5 at $20, instead of the usual $50.

Did EA respond in kind? No. At least, not immediately. They didn't lower their price to what the market would pay. Instead, they tried to build a fortress. They circled the wagons and cut a deal with the NFL for a five-year exclusive contract, cutting Sega out of the loop entirely.

The record companies don't have this potential. In this case, their competition is their distributor - they're having problems rallying enough power to really ramrod a variable pricing plan through Jobs. But I know they're thinking it. I know it's on every mind. When the attacker attacks, the reaction is the same. Defend. They want to build a fortress.

When they say "variable pricing", they mean driving up the cost of popular songs and (maybe) lowering the cost of unpopular ones. They're hoping to maintain solvency by cutting into the new song-based market to get out the same price as before.

If Jobs has put more atomic control of consumer choice in the hands of said consumers, and there isn't a supply-side shortage of music, perhaps variable pricing does make sense. But for now, at least, until the record companies are settled enough to realize the true value of music isn't some variant of $14.99 to $17.99, Jobs would do well to keep his hand on the lever.


Related Tags: music, ipod, apple, digital distribution

Drowning In Music, We May Turn To Ambient

An essay in Wired magazine via SmartMobs sets the tone of the battle.

" . . . America is drowning in sanctioned music -- an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space."

The success of the iPod has to be seen against this backdrop. There's good news and bad news: IPods are both adding to the flood of music, and protecting us from it. Having an iPod means you can mask the assault of other people's bad music by playing your own good music over it, privately.

We've been exposed to it for years. Shopping music, elevator music, airport music...they probably play the "Bad Boys" theme from Cops when you're sitting in a jail cell, they just play it over and over again.

I'm not honestly sure what scientist came up with the idea that music would be good for the gestalt of the in-crowd consumption experience; certainly for stores to begin playing music there had to have been at least the scent of some distant profit. And, of course, there were certain public safety concerns, such as in the case of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, played at New York's LaGuardia Airport.

Now look at these liner notes.

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak.

The 50's. And we've been using it as the reliable butt for all of our Music and The Establishment jokes ever since. But this was the beginning of the music-as-environment push, and it's been getting louder and uglier ever since. We're awash in it, and silence is becoming more and more of a commodity.

People like myself and VBRWE (well, one of them anyway) are seeing ambient for what it could be. A substitute for silence. I'm not joking around. Could it be that environmental, ambient music of the much-ridiculed Muzak variety will simply become the new aural negative-space?

You heard me. Muzak started off laughed at, and now it may well be the only thing that's got the chutzpah to fill in where silence is so utterly failing.

Could it be history is coming around in an ironic twist? Don't say it hasn't happened before.

The catch is - this stuff was meant to be played at a low volume. With Pete Townshend already warning us to turn our iPods down, we're risking life and limb to get ambient music up to the volume we need it to be to block out all the other crappy music that's around us.

Not only is it ruining the original meaning of ambient to play it that loud, but ambient is so normally filled with silence and non-disruptive sounds, that it still loses against anything from System of A Down or Evanescence if they're within 20 yards.

But, it beats out silence and room tone, which die by definition when sound is introduced. In fact, I see a particular scenario occuring when you're in an apartment next to a guy who has his music just loud enough so you can hear it. Ambient will come to the rescue, replacing the anguish-filled silence waiting for the next bolt-action guitar twang to come creeping through the drywall, with pleasing environmental sound, almost reminding you what silence used to be like.

And that's good, because you're not going to remember what silence sounds like. As the circles of available silence begin to close tighter, with living spaces shoring up closer and always-on broadcast music players cranking out loads of high-dB guitar and drums, silence will be the first thing to go. In its wake, Muzak may well rise again.

Do yourself a favor, get acquainted early. Here's Music for Airports.

Filed in: ambient, muzak, music, ipod

Blog Ad Revenues

"A thing is worth whatever the buyer will pay for it."
- Pubilius Syrus, First Century, BC

In following up on the conversation of TV ad revenues dropping a bit, I figured we might as well look at what advertisers are willing to pay for ad revenue on blogs, since that's going to be a good lead onto what the hot topics are in blogs.

Where are people going to get seen, and what are they paying for the privilege? Here are the top ten groups from BlogAds.com (numbers have changed a bit since I made this table), ordered by ad cost:

Blog Group Name	Category	Ad Cost	Page Views
PhD Pontificators (26)	Science	$10,245.00	6485686
Liberal Blog Advertising Network (74)	Politics	$8,606.00	12247666
Gossip Blogs (41)	Gossip	$3,596.00	13815760
Political Insider Ad Network (41)	Politics	$2,922.50	3322795
Conservative Blog Advertising Network (76)	Politics	$2,888.00	3049545
Hollywood Blog Ads (39)	Gossip	$2,876.00	11476662
Beltway Bloggers (12)	Politics	$2,467.50	2503320
Gothamist blogs (10)	New York	$2,314.00	841962
BlogAds Gadget Network (43)	Technology	$2,130.00	2429198
TVblogs Ad Network (18)	TV	$1,809.00	4453076
New York City blogs (41)	New York	$1,691.00	3047090
Baseball Blogosphere (43)	Sports	$1,685.00	2186334
Gay Blogads (46)	Gay	$1,559.99	4398774
The Philly Ad Network (26)	Philadelphia	$1,480.00	1225270
Environment and Sustainability (22)	Technology	$1,469.00	1632726
Music Blog Network (24)	Music	$1,310.00	1334023
Foodblog Ad Network (24)	Food	$1,200.00	392866

So, you want the money? You want the page views? Gossip and Politics. Being in New York doesn't hurt, either.

What's at the bottom?

Business Blogs (1)	Business	$25.00	11256

At least for the business side, I guess that goes a way toward WP's recent Blogging Is Dead expose.

Filed in: advertising blogs marketing popularity demographics

Customer Service Trends and Eliza

Companies have phone customer service covered. They're outsourcing it, coupling it with sales pitches, doing everything they can to seal that hole. It's a money sink and companies are guilted into providing it.

There's a move for "Live Chat" services but the most expensive part of the process is the human on the other end. They may be cutting and pasting from canned responses to try to speed the chat, but ultimately they still want $12/hour. You want as few of those people around as possible.

So, while listening to Live Chat at Cingular, I started to wonder, what about Eliza? Remember that old AI conversation engine? If you did a quick Pareto on your biggest customer service issues couldn't you come up with two or three common canons that are similar?

Using more sophisticated versions of Eliza (I mean, obviously, Eliza was a '66 Rogerian psychotherapist joke), I thought, you could essentially train AI to respond to common requests, like RMA numbers, cell phone minutes checks, and so on, and then you'd train it to respond to growing customer frustration. Repeated questions, number of exclamation marks used by the customer, whatever. Heuristics all over the place.

And when the frustration reaches a peak, the system throws a flag, an actual person is routed to the chat, given a quick recap, and steps into assist until the chat can end or be re-handed to the AI.

Avatars could be used with text-to-speech to drive the thing's "personable" meter up, like these, if they weren't so creepy.

And then, I saw this. BOTizen. Customer service in a box. Read the Live Chat features. Canned responses. Typing indicators. Keyword storage. Now it's not AI-handoff but it's close. It's on the way. Customer service out, AI in.

And check out the candy striper rave chick avatar; that's what we all want, some ecstacy-popping GHB freak handling my return claim. But that's the amazing thing about the Internet, it's all make believe, with your money.

Filed in: ai customer service service eliza chat

Semiotics, Celebrities Eating, and Thomas Dolby (Again!)

Today's Greatest Hits:

From Metafilter, two excellent web essays from Thomas Streeter and Co. at the University of Vermont on the use of semiotic concepts in advertising and their interactions with human psychology (forgive the graphics): Semiotics and Ads and The Male Gaze.

Then, see Celebrities Eating. Two months from now, just 60 days, there'll be porn about this. I don't know how, I don't know who, and seriously, I don't know why. But this is too much of a cultural-fusion-phobic-cesspool; it'll be almost as inevitable as Potter/Buffy/Star Trek/West Wing slash fanfiction was.

Finally, and though I hesitate to put him right after a porn bullet point, one of my favorite artists has returned! Thomas Dolby, after 15 years hiatus, is back with a new album. And, if you can peep this, he's got a blog. A blog, by Thomas Dolby. Are you receiving me?

I'll have more substance later.

Filed in: music celebrities marketing advertising

Political Packets - Capturing Marginal Votes

From Risk Markets and Politics:

Harold Ickes' plans to create a database of (potential) Democratic voters, replete with details that will allow for targeted messages to marginal voters, a practice in which the GOP had taken the lead. There is some controversy among Democrats about the project, as Ickes, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, is forming a private company (backed by George Soros) to develop the database.

From conversations I've had with Geli and Mike recently along these same lines, I continue to see further shaving down of political interest lines into market "segments". Much like sorting mail into slots for sending, these segments will further refine individual interest groups for targeted political advocacy.

And why not? Discrimination along interest lines allows the biggest bang for the buck. Why send high-color glossy expensive mass mailings to everyone when only 2% will respond? Nail the 2% and nail them hard.

Concerning the increasing waves of slacktivism present in the common man's brush with politics (see Snopes article on Internet Petitions), I see the continuation and further removal of the individual from the political process as more and more targeted political "products", such as worthless e-petitions, gain ground.

Automated letter-writing to congresspeople through MoveOn.org and other sites is a little taste of the future; consume this service, instead of actually participating, get the same warm fuzzy, a special interest gets your advocacy. Further obfuscation into political products that either tie you to or co-opt your vote is not far behind. We're not talking doomsday here, we're just talking synthesis of politics and markets.

Filed in: politics votes slacktivism marketing demographics

Retirement Feelings and Retirement Realities Clash

Two articles from MSNBC stood out today.

"Workers have retirement ‘overconfidence’", said one. The other, said "More Americans worry about retirement".

The poll results from each squared off the conflicting feelings Americans have about retirement:

Article 1:

"90% of Americans say they worry how well prepared they are for retirement..."

Article 2:

"About 68% of workers are confident about having adequate funds for a comfortable retirement..."

Wait a minute. 90% are worried, and yet 68% are confident? Sample size and push/pull logic aside, this is one confused nation. Are you confident, or are you worried? Do you have the money, or don't you have the money?

So let's take a look. Do they have the money?

More than half of all workers say they’ve saved less than $25,000 toward retirement, according to the Washington, D.C., based research group. Even among workers 55 and older, more than four in 10 have retirement savings under $25,000.

No, they don't have the money.

If you're retiring when you're 65, and you have $25,000 saved, assuming you'll live another ten years, that gives you $2500 of income per year. Yes, interest will bump that figure up a bit, but not by any order of magnitude.

Do you think you can live on $200 a month? If you manage to hit the trendline and live the current average of 78 years instead of 75, it's even worse: A little over $1900 a year, that's $160 a month. That's not gonna buy you much of that jello whipped cream dessert stuff at the local JJ North's, even on senior discount night.

What a massive hole we have to plug here. When this current 55-and-over crowd decides to cash in their chips there'll have to be a tremendous public outpouring from the already overtaxed social security system to keep them solvent, leaving the next wave hurting even more for public funding of their trips to the coast, RVs, and lunches at Old Country Buffet. When is this going to change?

...people would save more if they took the time to project what their costs in retirement are likely to be. But just 42 percent of workers say they’ve done such a calculation.

Not any time soon, apparently.

Filed in: retirement polls investment economy pension saving

Excellent Counter-Terrorist/Spec Ops Artwork

You gotta see this.

http://nico5608.skyblog.com/

This guy is talented. Holy crap. Browse through and see his drawings, from sketch to shading. Featured are pencil drawings of US Marines, GIGN, SWAT, RAID officers - this guy is the next Dick Kramer.

Sidenote: "Good Cover" from Dick Kramer features an Oldsmobile Intrigue - that's my car! Weird.

Filed in: art military drawing police swat tactical

TV, Sunny Side Down

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison

Okay, format of TV. Gone, right? Everyone's buying The Sopranos on DVD, serialized formats stuffed onto disc are kicking the crap out of broadcast TV. Still, the decline may well be a wash - the major upfront indicator we have announced only a moderate downtick: according to 360 View channeling WSJ:

After years of increases, major advertisers bought approximately $9.3 billion in 2005 vs. $9.5 in 2004’s upfront market.

But, we've also got mobile TV operators, Google selling TV episodes, iTunes selling TV, now whether these things come with the same grandfathered advertising that was shown in the original broadcast versions, I don't know. But it stands to reason that the sovereignty of advertisers in episodes isn't for sure - I mean, the advertisers cut the deals with the networks, not the individual shows, right? It's not like you see an episode of CSI on NBC in Seattle and get an advertisement for Carl's Jr. in Texas.

Still, it's a question I wonder about. Who gets advertising rights to rehashed TV episodes on Google and otherwise? Okay, I digress.

So I'm seeing this in my mind's eye. No longer is the experience of TV "push" technology the standardbearer for digital entertainment. Did you ever get that feeling? Fewer people are going to theaters. Advertising money in TV is beginning to drop. Nobody's sitting still long enough to let the message get injected into their brainstems. They aren't going to wait until 8PM/7PM Eastern to see PrimeTimeRehashedCrimeDramaWithThatOneGuy(tm) anymore.

They are plugging in as "pull" technology consumers. When they want it, they'll download it, they'll watch it, thank you very much.

How do I see this impacting programs? More independent studios, lower-budget "thirty-second" pilots, consolidation of franchises into few "super-genres", now currently dominated by the Crime genre, CSI/NCIS/Law And Order.

It wouldn't surprise me at all for pilot episodes to be arranged in five-to-fifteen-minute blocks (hey, sounds like the five-minute space again) to be downloaded and voted on by mobile watchers, and continued only on implicit vote of the downloading populace. Shows will come and go even faster than before. One hit wonders, no-hit blunders, and the Next Big Show will all go through the same trial by fire on the "pull" circuit, all vying for a slice of that little tiny screen on your video iPod.

It'll be like Survivor, only for real, with the big networks farming pilots out to little studios since they won't take the big risk on themselves with their big talent when they could farm it out to desperate drama graduate students for peanuts and tell them, "well, that's the business".

And you can kiss Nielsen ratings goodbye. Thank God for the future.

Filed in: television ratings ipod on-demand mobile