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Promote the Carnival: DIGG THIS!

The way I see it, February is the perfect carnival month. Even in Los Angeles, the weather is cold and rainy, and Global Warming doesn’t seem so scary as the wind whips your plastic-thin parka from side to side and you shove hot-dogs into your mouth.

The best part though, is that the warm beer you bought twenty minutes ago is now crisp and chilled.

Seeing as how the Carnival has now reached the unbelievably late legal age of 21,* it can now drink in the United States, as well as everywhere else in the world.

But who reads the intro anyway? Links! Where are the links?

King Lord Almighty Carnival Creator The Buttonmasher has the perfect starting post: A look back at 2006. What rocked the 360, why the DS rocked, and…wtf happened to the PC?

A mysterious LJ: blueshinra - we find someone who disagrees with breaking game ratings down into tiny, bite-size, confusing chunks.

On the other side of life, Brinstar juts in with a touching tale of newfound gaming love: World of Warcraft has begun it’s slow infection of her workplace, reaching out like a gentler version of the new Zelda’s twilight to suck new gamers into it’s realms…

Game philosophy wizz-kid Corvus Elrod weighs in about a subject near and dear: What happens to the WoW endgame when you add 10 levels? And more importantly, what should happen to it? See what he has to say.

Have you ever sat back and enjoyed a good history lesson, and then wondered why the hell the Incans in CivII develop nuclear technology in the stone age? I know I have. Apparently so has someone else at Flash of Steel.

In case you were wondering what you wanted, Pocket Change has come to the rescue. Succinctly titled: I want that.

Have you ever wanted to know everything about the PS3 (including pictures) from someone who actually bought it? Look no further: ARogan did it in style.

Do you have a natural tendency to disbelieve numbers? I know I do. That sneaky little 7 isn’t really all that lucky. And 6 is far from perfect. Some Rampant Coyote has a bone to pick with the PC Gaming industry numbers.

Cirque de Zale. What is it? Who is it? How is it? And…should you play it? These and more questions, especially with regard to the “hero archetype” can be found at I Eat Games. (Also: ten extra points for populating MyBlogLog pre-carnival!)

To Dell or not to Dell? Often, this is the question. Corey seems to think that respectable gamers should steer clear of the Dellmonster. Personally, I’ve use an XPS sans-error for the past four years, so I dunno what he’s talking about ;)

Since I’ve already posted a link to everything PS3, it’s only fair that I give the same love to Nintendo’s Wii — fortunately, The Outboard Brain of a Geek has been kind enough to provide a few bazillion words on the topic. If, for some reason, you don’t know anything about the Wii yet, you will.

The MMO - it’s a fledgling format. In fact, VirginWorlds would argue, everything you find right now is 1st generation. Personally, I thought The Realm of Angmar was 1st generation, but maybe I’m just dating myself.

And to cap it off (hey, I had to stop somewhere), The Fanboys (specifically Mike), reveals a troubling trend in his gaming habits: less play, more talk. He does, however, list some good ‘casts.

That’s all folks. Thanks for stopping by.

There were about a bazillion entries this time around, so not all of them made it in. I picked a fair smattering, and some sites submitted more than once, so…none of this nonsense, please…and everything else will be diligently forwarded to the next carnival.
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* I know that technically last month’s didn’t happen, but this is still #21 in the COG HQ!

I just finished reading the book Empire, by Orson Scott Card. The book itself is good fiction and entertaining, well written and fairly political. If that’s up your alley, then I saw drop the $25 immediately and get yourself a copy.

But what really grabbed me was the Afterword. The book itself is based around a fictional near-future American civil war. It’s creepy in its plausibility, and Card knows it. This is not State of Fear.

Although his argument presumes some information not presented, and his analogies are not always the best he could have chosen, Card absolutely nails the biggest problem in modern America: political divisiveness. He makes the claim–and here is an instance where I would be interested to see evidence–that this is the most politically nasty our country has been since the 1850s.

As I grow older and find myself more discouraged with politics in general, I’ve become less of an idealist. I’m realizing that my political views fall all over the map - I agree with libertarians here, democrats there, and republicans somewhere else. But, like your job, your political leanings put you in a category, they brand you one way or another. And it’s all or nothing - you’re one of the team or you’re an imbecile.

I’m guilty of this too. I can’t count the number of times I’ve called someone an idiot–mostly in private–for disagreeing with me. It’s human nature to think you’re right and the other guy is wrong.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people, dare I even say the majority of people in the United States have pretty rational reasons for their beliefs. And before you ask, yes, I’m counting religious belief as a “rational reason.” Because like it or not, people are religious. We’re like that. And in terms of human psychology and actions, a religious belief is just as compelling (or more so) than cold hard unemotional petri dishes.

It just so happens (and Card says this too) that the most successful civilizations in history have been ones that allowed some freedom to a persons individual beliefs. Hell, the United States is supposed to be founded on tolerance. But I’ll be the first to say that none of use are really that tolerant. Tolerant people (that’s me) are usually just intolerant of intolerant people.

In short, the whole thing’s a mess because everyone is too busy blaming “the other side” for things that everyone is equally guilty of: being idiots.

Card is far more eloquent than I am, but I suggest you pick up the book in the store and read the whole essay:

Because we haven’t had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can’t have one now. where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-sate division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered “blue” centers and such centerless “red” populations ever act in concert?

But any rational observer has to see that the Left and Right in America are screaming the most vile accusations at each other all the time. We are fully polarized–if you accept one idea that sounds like it belongs to either the blue or the red, you are assumed–nay, required–to espouse the entire rest of the package, even though there is no reason why supporting the war against terrorism should imply you’re in favor of banning all abortions and against restricting the availability of firearms; no reason why being in favor of keeping government-imposed limits on the free market should imply you are also in favor if giving legal status to homosexual couples and against building nuclear reactors.

Card’s essay is about how we are all doing this. I remember some statistic a while back about how there are actually more “independent” voters now than there ever have been before, so I’m tempted to disagree with Card’s assertion that “we live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists” may not be quite the truth. It may just be that the most vocal proponents of either cause seem to over-represent the division.

But regardless, it’s important to remember that everyone, even your political opponent, is a person. And just because they might disagree with you doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your respect and friendship.

And just for the record, I don’t expect people to get all warm and fuzzy and hold everyone else’s hand. It’s really impossible for everyone to share one opinion, and I’d be damn worried if that happened. I just think it’s time we all stopped stereotyping and pointing fingers and started respecting each others opinions and beliefs. We can live together.

The internet is really just a big jumble of information, and the only way things are really tied together is with search.

Yahoo! was the first to do it and Google was the first to make it cool, but searching online is nowhere near as good as it needs to be if it’s really the only way to get around.

More and more the internet has become a place where we expect that everything exists - generally speaking, if there’s a question, someone, somewhere, at some point, has posted the answer in little digital bits. The problem is finding it.

Blogs are the next step in making things discoverable. Little, personal funnels of information and opinion that, if carefully surfed, can get you practically anywhere.

But the problem is that blogs don’t have a good discovery mechanism themselves. The vast majority of the blogs that I read turned up in my feedreader (or rather, my bookmark toolbar, since I’ve stopped using a feedreader) because someone told me about them.

I’m all for personal recommendations, but how sad is it that the number one discovery method for things online is offline?

What is there besides search?

Directories. Portals. High profile pages (blogs or news sites). But the internet isn’t like music, where you have a (reasonably) manageable category - anyone can throw up a new site anytime (and people frequently do).

Yahoo! tried to keep the web directoried for ages. They still have a directory, but it’s not their main vehicle anymore. There’s the DMOZ, but they’ve got some werid restrictions and copyright issues that keep some sites off the list. And anyway who wants to browse the web by directories? Not me.

So what we probably need is a massively huge Amazon.com for web sites, where each site has their own little spot in the database, complete with “people who liked this site also liked this one”, a little summary and screenshot, and mini-reviews from like-minded sojourners.

Think that’s the next step in search?

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson divides most of what we consume into “hits” and, for lack of a better term, “misses,” and spends a long time explaining how thoroughly our culture is set into the “hit” mentality.

Everything has, since capitalism began, been tied inexorably to the physical world and therefore to the economic limits that go with it (in other words, the “long tail” gets chopped off in favor of the hits).

What’s fascinating is how digital goods (via the internet) have all but eliminated the restrictions held on goods in the physical world, so that the “virtual” inventory of a retailer can extend into infinity, covering the entirety of demand instead of merely the hits.

That’s the light version. Read the book for the full one.

But the basic idea that comes across is that, for some businessess the era of hits is over. Hits are selling less in movies, music, books (ironically, I think The Long Tail is selling extremely well), and office chairs.

In the book, Anderson relays the success story of the Lonely Island crew (from hollywood failure to internet video to SNL Chronicles of Narnia rap) as an example of how the long tail of media production (millions of people producing content that they think is cool) is actually a powerful force.

This is really a fascinating concept - almost like a million monkeys writing shakespeare, except that we can see it at work. The problem is that while it’s an amazing social phenomenon, I don’t see how it works to kill the hit in media (or journalism - or basically any field where people are paid for their time).

To play fast and loose with Marx: where is the money? In a capitalistic society, understanding anything starts with following the transactions.

The Long Tail works by reducing the cost of offering something to practically (or literally) zero. For retailers, this is an obvious thing - if you can offer each person in the world a chance to buy a product, and it costs you absolutely nothing to do so, then if it sells just once, ever, then it’s worth carrying.

For something like a movie or a comedy sketch or a newspaper, even if it costs next to nothing to offer it to someone (floating around a P2P network on the internet), it still costs money to make. The one commodity that is not dropping to zero with new technology is talent. I hope it never will.

The Lonely Island Crew is a success story because they went from the fringe to the tip, from a miss to a hit, from a freebie to something that could be monetized.

From a business standpoint, the long tail is useless unless it can pay itself back. In the long tail, producing a short film is never going to pay for itself. Producing a shitload of long tail shot films is just going to not pay for itself on a larger scale.

Only when a short film crosses over into the territory of the hit will it begin to pay for itself. So it looks like we’re still trapped in the same system we started with (as far as business is concerned) until we can make the long tail pay for the time people put into it.

Instead of spending so much time thinking about these things, I should probably go out a buy a few books on marketing, since I’ll wager this has all been thunk through several times over.

Marketing a small blog like Flicker seems to boil down to two things:

Have something that makes people want to come back to the site

This has to be something that happens on a regular schedule, and it’s going to have to happen somewhat frequently. For some reason “regular content” doesn’t do the trick for acquiring new eyeballs. For people who already visit regularly, this is probably enough…what you need is a gimmick to get one-time visitors to check back a few times and realize there’s content worth looking at, and the site is worth bookmarking.

Do something that makes people want to share

I get e-mails from friends and family all the time that include links to something cool online. People share these things because they want to be a part of it - if I recommend a good book to you, then I get credit, even though I had nothing to do with writing the book. Do something on your site that’s so cool that people want to be part of it, and they’ll share it. (Also, duh: make it easy for people to share).

People launch their browsers for basically two reasons: either to look something up, or to engage themselves. I think that the more people that get involved in something, the more value people get from participation, and if something is based around a group of active participants, then everyone wins.

I think that creating community is still one of the things that Livejournal has done far better than any other portion of the blogosphere, and that’s the main reason why it will continue to thrive in the face of a very difficult image (immature teenagers writing about cats and stories about the barber shop).

One of the things that we’ve tried to emphasize with Flicker Gaming from the very beginning is how it bridges the world of classic publishing (you read a newspaper without much input) and the world of user-only content (many forums have moderators, but nobody who’s really responsible for regular content).

One of the coolest user-oriented services that has sprung up on the internet recently is Digg, a social bookmarking/folksonomy that uses voting as a mechanism to sift through internet content, finding the most popular links available.

What we decided to do was build that functionality into our Blog’s sidebar. That’s what the Flicker Linkbox is - it’s a place for anyone and everyone to participate on the front page of our site. If you’ve written something cool or found some amazing news on the ‘net, drop it in the Linkbox and it gets thrown up just to the right of our “official” content.

What if the New York Times put letters to the editor on their front page?

Yeah. I think it’s that cool. Because nobody has really tried to integrate good professional writing with active participation of readership in this way.

Although building a community is probably what I’m most excited about doing with Flicker, I should also point out that authenticity makes a difference. Blogs are in the unique position of being very personal and very authentic at the moment.

The informal style of writing, the community engagement, and the flat nature of the internet in general help to make Flicker be a group of people more than just some company. Each post has the name of the blogger attached. We’re all available by e-mail.

I’d much rather be out there as individual gamers writing about cool gaming stuff and linking to neat shit we find all over the place than some Hearst-style monolith of six gazillion people and things.

In other words, I want to be accessible. If someone wants to shoot an e-mail to Flicker, I want them to be able to say “hey, I think I’ll e-mail Jason (or Ethan or Corvus or Ben) and tell them about this really cool thing I saw.”

When we’re part of the community instead of just catering to it, it gives us the extra weight of authenticity, and I think it makes us more likeable. Likeable is always a good thing.

Last but not least in my big list of why Flicker is so awesome is that Video Games are cool and brand new. Well, not brand new, but the video game space on the web is nascent at best.

I’ve watched year after year as PC Gamer, a magazine I’ve subscribed to since 1995, has continued to neglect their website. There are some other major publications who have done better.

But the most active space on the internet that has to do with video games is still Forums. If you look at the numbers on big forums, you’ll see that the IGN boards are the second largest forums being tracked online.

Forums are amazing (and I post at Evil Avatar myself), but they’re not the culmination of internet technology. There’s a big wide open space on the net right now (there are only two other major gaming blogs that I’m aware of - Joystiq and Kotaku), and neither of them really corners the space the Flicker is trying to take.

I think that with a lot of enthusiasm, a little bit of luck, and some dedicated fun, Flicker Gaming has a lot of places to go.

I do a lot of thinking about what Flicker Gaming is, what we’re trying to do with it, and why it’s so damn cool.

But for all that, I don’t spend much time articulating it. It would probably be good for me to spell out exactly what makes Flicker Gaming worth everyone’s time. Let’s start with the premise.

The media business is changing. If there’s one thing that should be crystal clear to anyone paying attention to the internet, technology, and media, it’s that the old rules of publishing are changing.

The internet has empowered people in ways that no other publishing technology has ever done, and media is more than ever a business of aggregation, not distribution.

RSS is the single most important indicator of this change - news, opinions, update, and commentary all make their way into people’s inboxes and feed readers with relative ease. It used to be that there was a press wire, and certain people had access to the news, and the rest of us, for most practical purposes, couldn’t get at the big pulsing pipeline of everything.

Now, that has changed - big news portals like Google and Yahoo!, coupled with millions of blogs and untold thousands of specialized newsfeeds from sites like the New York Times have put practically everything at the fingertips of the average browser. The problem is that there’s so much stuff to go through on an everyday basis that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to slog through it just for the few choice gems. So the average user doesn’t.

And news becomes a business of aggregation. This is why sites like BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Engadget do so well. They collect the most interesting bits of news and content they can find, and they funnel it into a high quality channel.

And yes, channels make sense. I’ve heard several people talk about how, with our increasing tendency to purchase music and shows a-la-cart, channels are going the way of the dinosaur. In some sense, this is true - I certainly like to buy my music in single tracks and I don’t always appreciate how restrictive TV scheduling is.

But while I like to purchase my music by track, I really really enjoy radio. I’ve only recently realized how much I enjoy the convenience of not putting together a playlist myself. It’s convenient to have someone else pick out a song list for you, especially if they’re mostly the type of thing you’d listen to anyway - and that applies to things I read as well.

Blogs are perfect platforms for the future of “channels” because each site is basically a continuous collection of someone’s (or some people’s) favorite picks. Whenever I’m short on inspiration, I tend to go looking around the blogs on my blogroll or the feeds in my reader, because there’s almost always someone who’s talking about something that interests me.

What Flicker Gaming does is in many ways analogous to programming a gaming “channel.” Anyone can tune in to our RSS feed and keep up, on a daily basis, with the coolest gaming news, opinions, and commentary that we can lay our hands on. It can be seen as a convenience service.

I want to be careful, though, to emphasize that this is not Flicker’s main service. If the fast-growing social networking craze is anything to go by, it seems to be that community matters online. Personally, I think that a sense of community is one of the most important things in driving practically any internet venture.

Continued reading…

I’ve seen a few posts recently (notably this one, and this one) that have had me thinking about global warming and how it’s becoming an increasingly big issue in our daily lives.

Every time I think about a debate in general, I tend to assume that there are two sides to an issue for a reason. In other words, I don’t automatically discount the arguments of my opposition. It’s a good habit to get into because I think it makes you both more aware of the flaws in your own arguments, and better able to, well, present a targeted argument.

It surprises me, then, that we are so collectively misdirected in the debate about Global Warming.

It seems like everyone wants to argue about whether or not Global Warming (or, to be more accurage, Global Climate Change) is occurring. It’s occurring. Every reputable source I can come up with says that the Earth’s Climate, by region, is changing. Probably even Michael Chrichton would agree.

In my mind the “debate” boils down to a confrontation between those who are unwilling to admit that the changes occurring in our environment are a problem, and those who are trying to point out that changes are happenening.

Of course, the vast majority on both sides are too lazy or too comfortable to actually want to do anything to accomodate, so it’s largely academic anyway.

But it can’t be for long. Whether you think it’s a natural phenomenon or something that we’ve somehow exacerbated as a species, changes are happening. What we need to start arguing about is how to go about adapting to the changes, or a lot of problems are going to crop up.

I think I agree with Fred - this solution is going to have to come from economics, not politics.

I’ve been so busy recently between Flicker, getting back into the swing of my (real) job for the summer, and catching up with people that time for posting in general has been pretty hard to come by. Hopefully I’ll start to settle into a routine soon and get back to posting regularly, but in the meantime I’m going to grab the opportunity to talk about some ads.

These “I’m a Mac” ads have been around for a few weeks now, and if you haven’t heard of them, you can watch them all at the apple web site here.

Since I tend to use PCs for most of what I do (and many of my friends don’t), these ads have been pointed out to me several times since they came out - so I thought I’d go ahead and post my thoughts on them.

On the whole, the ads are cute enough, funny enough, and made very professionally. They’re kind of disarming and kind of alienating at the same time, but above all, they’re advertisements.

There are six different shorts that compare Macs and PCs on a number of issues. The ads are titled Viruses, Restarting, Better, iLife, Network, and WSJ. You can kind of tell from the titles, but they all deal with specific features or aspects of a computer, and most of them boil down to the Mac guy going “did you know I can do this?” and the PC guy going “I can’t do that.”

This is misleading. I think the best example of this is the “iLife” ad, which basically runs down the whole iLife set and asks the PC “what do you come with?”

And, strictly speaking, a lot of PCs don’t come with comprable applications. Sure, there are plenty of programs that do everything iLife does that are easy to get hold of, and a good portion of them are probably free to download on the web — but they’re not pre-loaded.

So what the mac really does is skip the part where you go find them.* To go with a traditionally horrible analogy - a Mac is more like a hotel room that comes with certain furniture and appliances “pre-loaded,” where a PC is more like an apartment that you must furnish yourself. (So long as you don’t take that analogy past its surface, I think it works).

Next they have the type of ad where it compares the “reliablility” of computers. This is trickier, but still misleading in my mind. (Take the viruses short, where the PC has viruses and the Mac quotes a statistic about there being comparatively fewer viruses for Macs).

There are of course differences between Macs and PCs with regards to security and viruses - mostly to do with the way access is given to critical system files, etc. But I’ve found over the past 10 years or so that most virus problems come from careless use. Macs are little bit more idiot-proof because they don’t let you have the same kind of access to base configuration files.

Also, there are technically fewer viruses out there for Macs to catch, but there are also technically fewer Macs for viruses to infect.

In the end, one of the things I find myself asking is “what is their target audience?” I generally credit the Apple marketing crew with being one of the most savvy groups in the world, and so it puzzles me that these ads seem aimed at people who already use Macs.

I’m guessing this because they’re all vaguely insulting to people who use PCs. It’s something about the way the PC and Mac are embodied - the “nerd” and the “cool kid” seem to say “you use a PC? You are this nerdy, unsociable idiot, and this guy here? He’s much cooler than you.”

But it doesn’t come off like you want to be the Mac guy. You just think he has a superiority complex.

On the other hand, someone who really loves Macs will probably go “yeah! that’s right! we are better like that!”

So who knows what they were trying to do. Anyways, those are my thoughts.

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* incidentally, I’m curious about how Apple works with monopoly issues - it seems to me like embedding so much of their own software into the OS and their computers puts them in a very monopolistic position. It’s basically what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer. Is it because they only have a small part of the personal computing market that they’re allowed to monopolize that share? I know nothing about this kind of law, but I’m curious to know.

I’ve been doing a lot of web design, maintenance, and coding recently. If you had asked me two or three years ago what kind of stuff I’d be doing for work or fun (in this case, lucky for me, they mostly coincide) I would not have guessed correctly.

I’ve always been interested in technology, but until last year my experience making web sites has been essentially limited to basic html tags and Microsoft FrontPage (which is just Word, but for making web pages). One of these days I’m going to put up some images of this site’s history, since it’s pretty interesting. But I digress.

In the past few months, I’ve taught myself a crapload of html, php, server-side shit that I never really thought I’d understand. In the massive process of building and re-building Flicker Gaming until it looked like it does now, I had to dump and upload MySql databases, install and fix various scripts and blog engines, run an e-mail list program, and hack through the CSS necessary to style the site.

I’ve learned a lot. And not all of it is about code.

My next fun little project is going to be helping Ben set up his new site. I’m not going to presume to design it myself since he’s far better at anything concerning visual layout than I am. Hell, he’s better at picking colors than I am, and he’s the one who’s colorblind!

But from throwing various sites together in the past year (and when I think about it, it’s been a slow lesson with jason-preston.com over the past five), there’s one rule of thumb that sticks out in my mind: choose your content before your design.

I’m sure anyone who has spent time doing layout on any sort of publication or anyone who has ever worked professionally in web design could have told me this ages ago. But for me it’s a new idea.

I’ve tried many times to build a site and then fill it up with content. It’s always fun to come up with new site layouts, but it works far better if you get your content first (or at least know what the content will be) before you hack out a frame for it. I spent years designing and re-designing jason-preston.com and then, once I had a whole new network of pages up, I tried to fill it up with anything interesting I could find.

The site that’s worked the best so far? This one. It’s based around the content I put up every day, and the site itslef is designed around the content. I’ll write that down as a good lesson learned.

The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is probably one of the most interesting places to visit, not only because of the beautiful (and erroneous*) ceiling, but also because of the way people act as they walk through the inside.

When you visit, you are ushered in one end of the chapel, the exit on the opposite side is pointed out to you, and then you are allowed to stand around and stare at the art as much as you would like. But there are no pictures allowed, and no talking allowed.

Naturally this doesn’t stop many people - every few seconds a telltale flash will light up one or another of the corners as an adventerous tourist forgets to turn it off. And the noise comes in cycles. Every few minutes, one of the rotating guards will yell at everyone to be quiet (in Italian and English), and the room will become almost eerily silent, and everyone will try to act as inconspicuous as possible.

But then there are a few whispers, and then people need to talk slightly louder to be heard over the whispers, and then they need to talk louder still until suddenly the room is a cacophony of noise, cameras, shouting, laughter, and everyone is trying to be noticed again. Then the guards shout.

This happens about every five to ten minutes, and it’s really fascinating.

I once mumbled to myself that “the world is a shouting match,” and at the time I was just being irritable, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. In fact, the whole world is kind of like any given ten minutes in the Sistine Chapel: a slowly escalating cacophony as everyone tries to shout a little louder than everyone else.

Things really happen based on how many people you can reach. The point of media is really just to give you a bigger megaphone than the next guy down the block; this is why every company ever is obsessed with reaching “scale.” The way I understand it, “scale” means that a company reaches so many people that it’s basically impossible for them to be ignored. Think McDonalds.

People have said that blogging changes the rules, that individuals can publish now, and the power is no longer in the hands of big media. But that’s not true — I love blogging and I’m sure I’ll keep blogging for a long time, but only a few bloggers actually have a large enough audience to count as much of an influence.

According to Fred Wilson, the New York Times leads the world news outlets with 74 Million unique visitors per month. That’s a BIG megaphone. My guess is that anything I say will get pretty easily drowned out by the NY Times. Probably anything Fred says will, too. And it’s just amazing what you can do by just being loud.

I think that’s part of what fascinates me about media and publishing. It might explain why I’ve always wanted to be part of a magazine, why I’m starting a gaming blog and e-zine, and why I keep a personal blog on top of that.

Maybe someday I’ll get a big megaphone. For now, I’ll take the one I’ve got.

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*Michaelangelo actually mixed up the chronological order of panels 3 and 4, although nobody notices.

I’ve learned pretty much one thing from my three courses in economics and countless classes in world history, politics, and culture: economics trumps human rights.

I thought about this while I was listening to the music of Fela Kuti in my music of Africa and the Middle East class. Fela was essentially a revolutionary and a musician in Nigeria. I believe that in his lifetime he had about 6 million wives, promoted anarchy, and founded his own nation within Nigeria.

It goes without saying that the government hated him. The police abused him all his life. He was arrested numerous times. But he got away with a lot of things because he was famous.

He was famous for being a good musician. But someone had to record and distribute his music. My bet is that some of those same people who did the recording and the distributing had a lot of interest in the Nigerian government, or at least in maintaining the power structure that lets them be record executives.

But they recorded his music anyway. They made him famous and more powerful as a political figure. Why? Because they could make money. Thus, economics helps in the fight against human rights abuse. “They” (whoever they are) would rather make the money from his music than preserve their power structure.
Of course, this is a double-edged sword. The much more obvious and depressing examples are those of sweat-shops, wal-marts, and monopolies. All over the world, developing economies have the powers to crush the individual worker and their human rights.

Thing is I’m really an optomist at heart, and I think that if anything the developmental path of the US is proof enough that there’s an upward push when you mix two parts bald-faced capitalism with one part semi-corrupted democracy.

Go mixed drinks.

It’s amazing how many things I wish I’d never written. Or that I at least wish I hadn’t posted online. I’m not going to link to any of them because they’re annoyingly bad, but I’ll give you a hint: they’re all the bad posts.

I think this problem is because I’m a Halfway Man.

I do everything halfway. I learn sports halfway. I get halfway done with my student films. I take the time to learn half of a language. I write halfway posts.

The problem is that I’m good enough at writing to pass off all of my first drafts as more than unreadable blather. If I sucked a little bit more, I’d be forced to go through my writing once or twice and work out the kinks, grammatical errors, and jokes that fall flat. Or if I was a little bit better, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about tweaking since it would probably all come out right the first time.

But I find myself smack in the middle - I’ve got enough talent to tantalize myself with the occasional well-formed sentence or short essay, but I haven’t got the patience to really take my writing where I want it to go.

So I end up writing half-assed essays and pseudo-meaningful little stories online that seem like good ideas at the time (and I’m still convinced that most of my ideas are really pretty good - I just suck at explaining them) but that will probably come back to haunt my dreams in later in life. But of course that’s not enough incentive to do the proof reading.

All because I’m a Halfway Man. One of these days I’d like to get all the way through something. Maybe I’ll put that on my 101 list.

After all, it’s only halfway done.

Last July, Fred Wilson wrote a post about tracking and advertising that made me think about what exactly drew the line between content and ads.

When I drive around in my car listening to the radio, I find the ads annoying. Unless they are about something I care about. Then I listen intently.

When I watch TV, I experience the same thing. For the most part, I fast forward through the ads on the Tivo. But if it’s an ad for something I care about, I slow down the Tivo and watch the ad.

I remember when TiVo first let people download and watch upcoming movie trailers, studios were surprised at how many people voluntarily requested to watch trailers–essentially ads–that they paid who knows how much to put in front of movies at the theater.

This is because if the product is right and the ad is informative, it can become content.

I experienced this today when I went to the mall to get my watch repaired. They said there was a pretty simple fix if I wanted to wait around for about 20 minutes, so I said sure and went to browse the rest of the mall.

I wandered into the Bose store, which is usually pretty fun because it’s basically a collection of cool high-end stereo equipment. It turns out that this one also had a little home theater demo room setup, with a little fifteen minute presentation that is, essentially, a big advertisement for Bose speakers.

But I enjoyed it. Because it told me a lot about their new GSX Home Theater system and gave me an awesome demo of cool music and sound. Apparently Bose is getting into the market for all-in-one home entertainment as well. They have some options for putting music on a centralized system (as far as I could tell, it had to be a Bose music server) that would let you play different channels of music all over the house, depending on where you had speakers (these didn’t have to be Bose).

Anyway, the point is that because the Bose presentation was tailored to my interest, was well put together, and entertaining, it was basically content.

I’m not sure I agree with Fred that tracking consumer behavior in what I see as increasingly invasive ways is the best way to target advertisments, but I do think that making ads relevant would be the ideal arrangement between advertisers and consumers. I’d like my ads to be content.