Earlier today, Michael Gartenberg, my boss from when we both worked at JupiterResearch, retweeted Pete Bernard’s “development goodness,” which linked to Sam Jarawan post “Why I love Windows Phone 7 Development.” Somebody has got to save the world from all this goodness.
Apple’s social music discovery service isn’t even a week old and Fortune blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt asks: “Can Ping be saved?” Oh yeah? One million signups in 48 hours is such a failure. There are thousands of CEOs or product line managers who would say: “Gimme that problem. I’ll suffer through the failure of gaining 1 million customers in just two days.”
Have you ever heard of a “test” store? I hadn’t until yesterday (Aug. 25, 2010). Abercrombie & Fitch supposedly has one in downtown San Diego. Shopping there meant spending 20 percent more on a pair of sweatpants for my daughter than at another store a few miles away.
Some people—heck, some organizations—have no sense of humor. Humorless perhaps best describes Associated Press, which apparently didn’t get Woot’s joke about owing money for a blog excerpt. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler put AP in its place today, that’s assuming there isn’t yet a nasty takedown-notice response coming.
Some quick background: About two years ago, AP decided that no one should excerpt its content without paying for it. The policy defies decades of journalist practices and fair-use laws. I could understand AP going after blocks of text, but no, it’s the little excerpts, too. Excerpt up to 50 words and AP expects you to pay $17.50; 100 bucks for 251 words or more. The approach is controversial, as it should be.
Say, does anyone remember that the Census Bureau was supposed to use HTC handsets running Windows Mobile 5 this year? I briefly blogged about the strange deal on April 6, 2006: “When New Technology is Old Again.”
HTC handsets running Windows Mobile used for the 2010 Census go oddly together—or they did four years ago. The Census Bureau had reportedly planned to buy a half-million handsets for this year’s count.
While shaving this morning, I heard someone outside talking to his dog: “Hey, buddy, you can’t poop there”. Yeah, like the dog understands what the guy is saying. Owners’ actions—letting a dog do its business anywhere it pleases and then cleaning up the dodo with a baggie—reinforce the animal’s poop-anywhere behavior. Dogs are responsive to humans. This owner, and the many others I see here in California, train their animals to behave a certain way: Poop anytime, anywhere they want. Outside the residence, of course. 🙂
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s] Comedian Conan O`Brien’s 45-minute @Google visit is simply amazing. He’s funny, yet reflective, also identifying how the Internet and social sharing disrupts decisions the suits at old media companies like NBC make. […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JpmvtPXQR4] Brandon Hardesty has appropriately answered YouTube yanking (or disabling) dozens of “Downfall” parodies. Brandon recreated the “Hitler Bunker” scene for all those people looking to make their own “Downfall” parody. You can laugh at […]
Do you pay Rupert Murdoch 18 bucks a month for a Wall Street Journal iPad subscription? I dare you to confess. Today, during News Corporation’s earnings call, CEO Murdoch claims that the Journal has 64,000 active users on iPad. Presumably one of them is you.
I ask because I see the Journal as having gone too far with its paywall approach. I’m testing iPhone 3GS again, and I downloaded the WSJ app last week. I logged in with my web subscription account, and the Journal let me read for a couple days. Then came the demand for more cash. Not much, just a buck a week. But I already pay for the web subscription, for which the Journal charges about $150 a year. So Murdoch wants another 52 bucks a year for iPhone and about another $215 for iPad, which I also am testing? OK, it’s only $207 a year for iPad if taking advantage of the $3.99-a-week promotion.
My thoughts on this: Apple fans can be annoying when they’re on their own. The thought of them breeding and creating little Apple fans, a whole family of hard core hipster Apple lovers, is just not a good thing. On the other hand, making sure that Apple fans only date other Apple fans is a good way of stopping them from spreading their Apple fan genes to the general population, I guess. So maybe this site isn’t all bad.
Michael Arrington
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/11086952]
If you can view the video clip above, Vimeo has not been compelled to take it down. Gulp, yet. The clip, using new subtitles, is from “Der Untergang“—”The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich”. I rented the captivating German film from Nextflix in August 2005. In the original scene, Hilter learns that he has lost the war. Its revision is one of the most successful and visible Internet memes of the last half decade. The scene has been repeatedly parodied, replacing the subtitles so that Hitler rages about something else.
Earlier this week, I set up a Google Alert for “Joe Wilcox”. Hey, I’m not being egotistical. The alert is to see where my posts are being aggregated. I’m deeply conflicted about aggregation, but that’s a separate blog topic. The very second alert contained post “Too Stupid to Own an iPad” from the Fake Steve Jobs blog. It was pure nastiness.