Chris

Nevermind… Lives!

Uh, yeah, back from my blog-free stupor.

Google OS… Lives!

Some fairly big news today!

Google has announced that it’s going to compete with Microsoft in the OS wars. Their long-denied Linux-based Google OS is due to be released next year.

Is 2010 the year of the Linux desktop?

TechCrunch has an analysis here and, as usual, quality work from Ars.Technica.

Some interesting tidbits:

Google says the software architecture will basically be the current Chrome browser running inside “a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS.

You may not remember… but Microsoft actually tried this with Active Desktop and IE4. You don’t need to be told that it failed miserably, but if anybody can make it work I think it’s Google. Also interesting to note that this is the way that Palm has gone with their WebOS based smartphone, the Palm Pre. The proof will be in the pudding.

I think what’s going to make all this possible is the standardisation of HTML5. HTML5 has fairly extensive provisions for offline work in web applications (Web Storage) which Google also has in Gears. They also say that any application developed for the new Chrome OS will work on any standards-compliant browser. Microsoft seriously better pull finger with their HTML5 support or they will run the very real risk of being left behind…

All and all, a great development. Lets see where it goes.

New Server

Moved Nevermind to a new server in the US – because it’s cheaper, of course! Basic VPS so I can run some Rails apps I’ve been hacking on.Also has a decent control panel and DNS manager.

Some weirdness… hopefully not too much, let me know if you find anything strange…

Next step: Setting up automatic installs for the wordpress upgrade and plugins!

Oprah, The New Religion?

Just a quick post but this is definitely worth a read.

Should people with this much influence be more careful about what they’re pushing? Reading a bad book she pushed is one thing, ruining your life with hormone therapy is another… Kudos to Newsweek for this one.

Newsweek: Live your best life ever

Auto-tune the News

With all this doom and gloom on the news today, isn’t it much nicer when the anchors and bobble-heads sing?

Isn’t this great? And wouldn’t you like Katie Couric to carry a tune?

And while we’re laughing at Auto-tune, here’s Baby T-Pain:

What’s Stealing?

An interesting little tale has come up today, starting with Lance Wiggs complaining that a site is syndicating his blog headlines. He labels it stealing and discussion ensues.

My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here…

Firstly, in my defense, I left Stuff because of it’s content. Now the stories I want to read are aggregated with Google News. I still visit Stuffs site regularly to read the stories I want.

I would also argue that Jobs.org.nz (and by extention Google News, digg, techmeme and any other aggregator) are not stealing content. They’re using a headline and a small excerpt of the post (permitted under copyright “fair dealing”), and giving a perma-link to the content hosted on his blog. If they were using his entire post as content, referenced or not, I’d understand his anger and would agree that was “stealing content” because that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Jobs.org.nz is obviously a questionable looking site, and I’m not saying that Lance is beyond his rights to ask his feed to be removed. I probably would as well – I wouldn’t want to be associated with that site as it has potential to damage your brand.

Dylan said:

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

I don’t understand how he came to this conclusion. Google uses a headline and sometimes a 20 character excerpt. If you want to read the story you have to link out to the publishers site (except for AP content which Google pays for syndication).

Dylan Said:

In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.

I would agree that Google News takes eyeballs away from publishers front pages, but that’s simply because Google do a better job at providing a portal for content the user wants to see.

And of course publishers are nervous. So were the other industries when they realised that they had to change.

We’re entering a stage in our society where consumers want to pick and choose what they consume. The music industry is realising that some people don’t want to pay for an album for a few good songs (iTunes, other digital services). The television industry is realising some don’t want want to watch the endless river of shitty reality TV shows to get to the good stuff (TVNZ on demand, Hulu). The print industry must realise that some won’t want to wade through their quagmire of crap to get to the stories which are important to them.

Media in New Zealand

Media’s a funny thing.

I recently started looking into a very swish little application called Boxee. Boxee is based of XBMC with a very significant social component to it. Boxee is very popular, especially in the USA because it provides access to legal media streaming services from both content providers (e.g. The Daily Show) and 3rd parties that license content (Hulu, Joost etc…).

Having an idle Media PC I’ve been trying to set it up to interact with TV3′s live streaming and TVNZ On Demand with varying levels of success. After a while I got to asking myself why this is so damned difficult. After all, I’m willing to watch ad-supported content at lo-fidelity, I just don’t want to watch it on my computer.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, the old-time media companies are change adverse. I came across this article, written last year, about how popular TV shows are being screened a lot sooner in NZ due to illegal downloading. It certainly seems like they’re starting to see the bright side of less restricted content distribution, but they’re still tying it to the “you’ll watch what we want, when we want” mentality that TV and radio have imbued.

The question: Would they have improved their service if their customers hadn’t hit them in the wallet? Would they have listened to feedback from their customers telling them they didn’t like waiting for shows that are 2-3 seasons behind? This is a market, and it’s working.

However, this is the part that makes me laugh: after all the conditioning of the consumer by the advertisers that cheap is good, convenience is king and the I WANT IT NOW generation it’s spawned, they’re now grumbling that people can find what they provide faster, cheaper and easier.

It must be more cost effective, too. People only watch what they want, ads can be more accurately targeted. An example: Sky costs $80/month, between all our flatmates we only watch sport, a few shows on Discovery and a very occasional movie. If we could get a decent sports line-up (cricket, rugby and league) anywhere else we’d drop Sky in a heartbeat. The amount of advertising we’re subjected to compared to the amount we’re paying and the amount we utilise is simply staggering. Not to mention, due to their proprietary encryption system means I can’t shift the content where I want it i.e. my iPod or my PC for later. I have to use their platform.

But of course there are also technical barriers to my content freedom utopia.

Broadband quality in New Zealand is, as we all know, poor. Things are improving though, but caps and expensive overseas bandwidth still pose a problem to internet media in NZ.

Lack of support for IP Multicast means that bandwidth costs for the provider may be prohibitively expensive, also. You can think of internet connections as a phone call, one entity communicating with another. This means that to serve content your bandwidth costs would be (Size of Content) x (Number of viewers). Multicast works more like Radio, or terrestrial television. One broadcast and many people “tuning” in.

Of course, if these technical hurdles were overcome, one would wonder if you would even need a broadcaster. Clipping the ticket between advertising and content providers. That’s a question for another day, or another person

Five to One is a Brodeo

I was going to post this a little while ago when the Flight of the Conchords song “Too many dicks on the dancefloor” song first came out, but I didn’t. I figured most people would have seen it anyway…

However, I’ve just watched it again and it’s so great! If you haven’t seen it, here it is…

Also, here are the lyrics – great reading as it can be hard to make out some of the lines from the song
Continue reading »

Epic Beer

photo credit: epicbeer

Great indy New Zealand brew Epic Beer was featured on Campbell Live earlier this week.

You can stream the video from TV3′s website or from here if TV3 sucks, as it often does.

The story mostly concentrated on the “little guy succeeding where the big guys are falling” angle, but looking further into the way Epic conducts business makes for some very interesting and exciting discoveries.

Epic Beer not only is a great tasting brew with a pile or hops crammed into each bottle, but the Chief Brewer, Luke Nicholas is a rather savvy chap. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to compete directly with the huge breweries in the media, he built up a grassroots fan base from the ground. By utilising new media and other internet-based technologies (such as blogging, Twitter, Digg and more) and frequenting craft beer festivals Epic can keep costs down, but the fan-base together, in contact and mobile.

Not to mention, it’s an absolutely fantastic tasting beer. It’s even inspired me to start brewing my own (soon…). If you want to give it a try, Luke’s put together a handy mashup with Google Maps showing where you can grab it. You can also find it at most NZ beer festivals (and now in the UK, too!).

Also from Luke: realbeer.co.nz – a site about brewing and Hot Chilli Sauce New Zealand.

This Could Get Ugly

Over the coming weeks you may notice some changes around here.

I’ve decided to do a few “new” things…

• Take a new look at the design. Although I like the look of Nevermind, it’s quite rigid and inflexible. With some newly-flexed coding muscle I hope to either improve or replace the look & feel of Nevermind to something better. Of course, I have no idea what better is – hence the title of this post
• Integrate some new technology. There are lots of great things out there in the Blogosphere just waiting to be taken advantage of. I’ve been testing some plugins that will let me play with some new toys and hopefully make things better for my readers and commenter. OpenID, Facebook Connect and Action Stream are all on my list.
• Take a new direction. Excepting a few things, I find it hard to get excited these days about what our government is up to and the tedium of political “debate”. I hope to make Nevermind a more personal place with a wider spread of content including technology and life.

So bear with me, if you do/don’t like something feel free to shut speak up