Saturday, July 10, 2004

Every US presidential TV ad from 1952 to present [bOing bOing] 6:08:52 AM    comment []

Heeeeere, bloggy bloggy!. Here are some blogs that are relatively new to me, but have become daily reading: A Blog Doesn’t Need a Clever Name and Dangerousmeta point to so much good stuff it makes me wonder, “Why the hell should I read the paper myself, when I can have these guys do it for me?” John Robb’s Weblog: you load the page and you hear this “beep beep beep” sound? That’s because the information truck is backing up toward you at high speed. [Learning The Lessons of Nixon] Aw, shucks. Thanks, Lisa, I regard that as real praise. (And right back atcha, btw.) 6:08:46 AM    comment []

Ronald McDonald imposter stuns diners [Salon.com] 6:07:23 AM    comment []

Scripting News: Yahoo has acquired Oddpost. Oddpost turned the idea of what you could do with a browser upside down, by producing a clone of Microsoft Outlook in JavaScript and DHTML running in MSIE. Since then, they have labored in relative obscurity, growing a customer base, raising VC money, adding people, and staying out of the way. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:07:22 AM    comment []

Federal Judge Rejects Process for Approval of Mining. A judge in West Virginia struck down a procedure that gives a blanket pre-clearance to Appalachian mining operations that dynamite away mountaintops and dump some of the refuse into streams. By By FELICITY BARRINGER. [The New York Times > Science] 6:02:56 AM    comment []

"Free Culture" Wikipedia. Cory Doctorow sounds the call: Creative Commons is creating a Wikipedia of Free Culture with links and annotation for every bit of open-licensed material in the universe. You're invited to help. (snagged from Boing Boing) [Smart Mobs] 5:58:52 AM    comment []

Post: Of Unix Command Lines and Pianos. In this week's comic we have an example of an interface which probably shouldn't be made easier to use. Although HCI folks will rarely admit it, there are quite a few situations where improved usability is uneeded and unwanted. One that comes to mind for me is the Piano. I've played piano for quite some time and to me the interface feels perfect. The weight of the keys, the spacing between them, everything about it seems effortless and right. In reality though, if the goal is to help a person play music the piano interface leaves much to be desired.... [OK/Cancel] 5:58:19 AM    comment []

I'm just getting around to Scott's piece from earlier this week, one of the only things I've seen about "lossy" digitial music formats that struck me as insightful. He says, in part: The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn't believe in online distribution: It still doesn't trust us, even when we're paying for the music. The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers -- like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week -- want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It's what we've always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today. 2:39:58 AM    comment []