April 30, 2003
Juicy Mullet

Sometime in the last year I had a birthday, and my dear wife purchased the exact digital camera that I wanted, a Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Elph. It's a sweet, sweet camera. She is a genius type mindreader for buying it, given they I honestly gave her no hints beyond "I would like a digital camera for my birthday". The S400 is a 4 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, but it's only slightly larger than a deck of playing cards.

Our dear friends Michael and Nell also gave me a most excellent b-day gift - Juicy Mullet artificially flavored cinnamon gum.

Here for your viewing pleasure are pictures of the front and side of the box. The photos are about double the actual size of the package.

Yum, yum! Who wouldn't love an extruded concotion of Sugar, Dextrose, Gum Base, Corn Syrup, Natural and Artifical Flavors, Softeners (like fabric softeners?), Glycerine, Soy Lecithin, Citric Acid, Tapioca Dextrin, Aspartame (as if 3 of the first 4 ingredients being forms of sugar wasn't enough), Acesulfame Potassium, Artificial Color, Red 40 Lake, Red 40, Carnauba Wax (as opposed to Aruban car wax), Resinous Glaze (used to similar good effect by Tammy Faye), BHT (to maintain freshness - as if the embalming fluids already listed wouldn't do the trick) , and everyone's favorite toxin - PHENYLALANINE. Actually, it's an essential amino acid that looks really cool.

In case, you can't read the names of the hip homeboy styles, they're KY Waterfall, Mudflap, Beaver Pelt, and Rat-tail. I was once the owner of a fine lookin' peroxided rat-tail, but fortunately there are no known incriminating photos in existence.

Update - July 22, 2003: I finally dared to crack open the packaging. The gum pieces were shaped like chiclets. The package contained 8 pieces, as advertised. The cinnamon flavor was strong and spicy as my teeth cracked through the red carapace of the first piece. The spiciness backed off after a few seconds. One piece wasn't enough, so I tossed another piece in my mouth. The gum really wasn't too bad, although after about 45 minutes, it had the consistency of a wadded up rubber band. The inside packaging appears to contain the image of a Trans Amaro, the ultimate mullet boy car.

If the gum isn't enough for you, you should definitely try the shampoo from the same manufacturer. "For a healthy, shiny mullet."

Posted by Robert at 11:02 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 24, 2003
Presence Info and Open Source Speech Reco Sun tackles privacy, speech recognition | CNET News.com

Both parts of this announcement are very interesting. While presence awareness software from Sun is not that surprising (they already have an instant messaging server and an identity management server), I'm surprised to see them getting involved in speech recognition.

Although the article doesn't mention it, I assume Virsona is built on JXTA. This is an interesting approach to giving people more control over their presence info, as opposed to having it tracked on a server over which they have no control. I hinted at a blog-based approach in my notes from a recent Weblog panel at Cal. I think a combination of these two approaches would be very powerful.

I'm very excited to hear that Sun is getting serious about working with the CMU Sphinx project to create a high quality open source speech recognition engine in Java. Currently, it has only a 1,000 word vocabulary and will be speaker dependent, i.e, each speaker will have to go through a training period before the recognition level will be acceptable. However, this should be sufficient for at least a first stage of auto-transcription for PhoneBlogger.

First, I want to add support for simple titles to audio posts. Right now, the title and text for an audio post is exactly the same. Unless you later go back and edit the post once you have Internet connectivity from a text entry device, a reader of your blog can't tell what the post is about without listening to it.

Of course, it wouldn't hurt if I stopped reading news and blogging until past midnight and got working on at least adding support for Movable Type categories.

Posted by Robert at 11:51 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 23, 2003
Six News Six Log: Six Apart Milestones

Great news from Six Apart, the company that develops Movable Type. I'm really happy to hear that Neoteny has invested in them. I think that will prove to be a very smart move on Joi Ito's part.

Movable Type is without question the tool of choice for blogging power users. The only other tool I would consider is one of the Blosxom variants (Blosxom being the Wiki web of blogging tools), like PyBlosxom.

Posted by Robert at 11:39 PM | link | comments (1) | trackback (0)
April 16, 2003
Copyright Disclaimer Sufficient? Freedom to Tinker: Will the RIAA Sue Google?

Ed Felten comments on Jacques Distler's post about the similarity of a search engine such as Google to the tools developed by the four college students who are being pursued by the RIAA's Uruk Hai legal team.

Another interesting comparison might be to image searching via Google. If you click on one of the images from a search, you will be taken to a page that says, among other things, "This image may be subject to copyright." Google does not attempt to determine which images may be copyrighted and/or freely used, just as most file searching services wouldn't attempt to determine the copyright status of an MP3 file. For image files as well as music files, many of the copyright owners may actually be willing to grant permission to others to freely use their creations. Without explicit instructions, such as those provided by a Creative Commons license, it is virtually impossible to automate this.

A search on Tasmanian Devil brings up images of the real animals, as well as images of the Warner Brothers cartoon character. None of the cartoon images were from a Warner Brothers owned website. While Warner Brothers may have more of an issue with the owners of the websites that are displaying images copyrighted by Warner, one might wonder why they don't take issue with Google for facilitating the spread of these copyrighted images. Google's role here seems to be very similar to that of at least some of the four college students who were indexing audio and other files via SMB based services.

For the technically curious, the Samba history of SMB indicates that the protocol originated in IBM's first definition of NetBIOS. The May 2001 issue of Linux Magazine has an excellent article on SMB and Samba.

While Google will cache HTML pages, they don't seem to cache other things, like MP3 files or the actual images from an image search. Although Google will automatically convert PDF files to HTML, you can't grab the original PDF file out of the Google cache, at least not as far as I know.

Now, if those students had made their service do something similar, i.e., place a copright disclaimer next to the link to download an MP3 file, then they could argue that they are providing an audio search service similar to Google's image search service.

Posted by Robert at 12:47 PM | link | comments (4) | trackback (0)
April 14, 2003
Interview in Nikkei IT Professionals

Norri Kageki, a staff writer for Nikkei IT Professionals interviewed me on Monday on how I use weblogs as an engineer. She asked a lot of great questions about how I use blogs personally as news sources and how I use them at work. The interview should appear in the May 27 issue. Hopefully, the editor will include the photo of me holding an MLS soccer ball and standing next to my Korea/Japan World Cup 2002 poster.

I gave her a quick tour of this blog and a demo of Movable Type, and I did my best to explain RSS and News Aggregators. Since I've mostly been using SharpReader lately, I used it for the demo.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for providing the connection.

Posted by Robert at 11:52 AM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 11, 2003
Weblogs, Information and Society Notes

Last night's weblog panel at the Cal Journalism School was very cool. I talked very briefly before the session with Dan Gillmor about PhoneBlogger.

Unfortunately, Donna Wentworth and Ed Felten couldn't be there in person, so they had to join by teleconference (keeping them up until midnight on the East Coast!). If anyone in the room made the slightest noise while Ed or Donna were talking, the feedback through the phone and the sound system was overwhelming.

Ross Mayfield gave a very interesting presentation on Social Software. The challenge he sees is getting people in organizations to participate as editors. He thinks you can do that by deploying tools that are easy to use, provide a sense of ownership, promote social engagement, and are socially rewarding to use. He also talked about how social connections form an emergent network, turning people into editors. He also talked a lot about the Social Capital of Blogspace. Great stuff.

John Battelle, Director of Business Reporting at the Journalism School, moderated the panel. After introductions, he asked the panelists how blogging had most changed their careers. I probably didn't do them justice in these brief notes, but I got behind in my notes quickly.

  • Donna - others perceived a greater separation of identity of her as a person from her as an employee
  • Ed - blogging gave him a new set of people with very different perspectives to communicate with and get feedback from
  • Scott - precipitated a move from being a writer to more of an editor
  • Ernie - fellows of the Information Society Project at Yale Law typically did academic research. LawMeme and blogging allowed him to take the more informal role there that he wanted
  • Dan - the more voices and info, the better. He has participated in many great conversations that he thinks he would not have had without his blog.
  • Ross - no need for a PR agency at his current company

John also asked some of the panelists whether they communicate with co-workers via blogs. Ed said co-workers at Princeton tend to use his blogs less often than in-person communication. He also mentioned that his blog readers/commenters come from a much more diverse background and have a wider perspective.

Several panelists agreed that reading blogs can give you a huge advantage in your career. Colleagues who don't read blogs miss out on the extra conversations you are having.

In case you were there or watched the webcast, I was the guy at the end of the session who asked the panelists what they thought about the future of blogs as a person's interface to companies with respect to communication preferences. One aspect of this would be the blogger's ability to own the rules by which she wants companies with which she does business to contact her (e.g., you can email at me this address 9-5 on weekdays, use this other address on weekends, you can IM me if I am online on this network, and you can call me at this phone number between 7:30 and 9 pm on weekdays) as well as exposing presence info. I'll elaborate on this idea in a future post.

Posted by Robert at 10:37 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 08, 2003
Weblogs Information and Society

The University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is organizing another weblog panel at North Gate Hall Library on Thursday, April 10. I plan to be there, but I probably won't try to blog it live. I will probably post some notes afterwards, though.

The list of esteemed panelists includes:

Posted by Robert at 11:52 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 07, 2003
SharpReader News Aggregator

SharpReader is my new favorite 3-pane news aggregator for Windows. NewsDesk and Syndirella just have too many undesirable quirks. SharpReader has a cleaner UI and significantly better usability.

Too bad it is a .NET app, as I would like to use it on Linux, as well. However, this is the first .NET app that makes me think the Mono project is a worthwhile effort.

Update 7/29/03: While SharpReader remains a very nice news aggregator, the newest release of NewsDesk is also quite good. I'm currently using NewsDesk primarily on my work laptop and NewsMonster on my home machine, both under Linux and Windows.

Posted by Robert at 11:10 AM | link | comments (2) | trackback (0)
April 06, 2003
Viability of Internet Radio

Saturday morning I attended the Viability of Internet Radio session that was part of a University of California Radio Network conference organized this quarter by KALX, the radio station at Cal that my wife runs. The four panelists were:

This excellent session was moderated by Lee Montgomery, KALX DJ and co-host of the Amandla show.

Important note: I tried to take notes accurately. However, it's obviously possible I made a mistake in my notes. Anything that sounds stupid or incorrect is almost certainly my fault.

All four panelists were very informative and obviously extremely knowledgeable about Internet radio. They worked very well together as a panel, despite the fact that I don't think any of them had ever met in person. By the end of the session, they were finishing each other's sentences.

The session started with a little history. Elizabeth explained that many of the copyright issues started with the passing of the Digital Performance Rights Act in 1995, which was targeted mostly at digital radio stations delivered through a cable TV box. This act was later expanded to non-subscription services. Brian believes that the FCC stayed out of the action at that time because their charter was to manage a "scarce" resource - spectrum. He contended that the spectrum scarcity is an artificial scarcity caused by the fact that existing radios aren't good enough. If they were better at isolating narrow broadcast frequencies, spectrum wouldn't be scarce.

While I think he is right about the FCC's and the large corporate radio station owners' exaggeration of the scarcity of radio spectrum, we do have to live with the reality of Information Theory, as originally explained by Claude Shannon. Only so much information can be crammed into a signal transmitted in a given frequency range, and the economic realities of the transmitters as well as the receivers and the physical complications of terrain and other large obstacles will always limit how many radio signals can be broadcast in a legislated frequency band.

Elizabeth stated that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) withdrew from the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP). But, they struck a confidential side deal with the RIAA that covers all NPR stations. The deal is rumored to be a very liberal agreement with a flat fee. One significant difference for NPR stations, though, is they mostly produce their own content, which would not be subject to copyright payments anyway. Rusty added that CPB wants to protect their stations and he thinks they feel very threatened by low power FM stations.

After being asked to explain the history and purpose of Live365, David amusingly said that Live365 is operating as a profit-seeking corporation. Ad revenue is not sufficient, so they are shifting to a subscription focus. They originally did not charge to broadcast. Now they are charging everyone - $10 or $20 a month for basic plans. They also have a pro option where their relationship changes to being a wholesaler. For listeners, they offer the option to not hear ads for $5/month. One of the biggest benefits they provide to a small webcaster is that Live365 takes care of reporting and the payment of royalty fees. If you look at the reporting requirements for webcasters, you will realize that this is a major benefit.

If you broadcast via uploaded MP3 files that have been tagged appropriately, it's very easy for Live365 to provide your reports. However, they have other ways of generating the reports if the tags aren't available. Rusty pointed out that a lot of the music fingerprinting services (most of these work by pattern matching a digital fingerprint of a brief portion of a song with a large number of samples in a database) primarily include only music by major artists and current releases. If reports generated by these services are used to compensate artists, there is a risk that small artists will receive no compensation.

Elizabeth added that the reporting data the RIAA wants to collect is potentially far more valuable than the royalties they are charging. If they are able to sell this information, that could generate a very large revenue stream.

Rusty was asked about how Soma FM gets listeners. He said branding was a much bigger factor than he had even anticipated. He said their non-branded channels were ignored over time, but the channels they strongly branded grew quickly in popularity.

Someone asked why webcasters seemed so surprised by the royalty rates established by the CARP. Elizabeth said that the meter started running in 1998 with the passing of the DMCA and that people were supposed to know they were liable, although it wasn't widely understood until the last year or two. Rusty said that in Europe people are paying about 5% of revenue. Some people in the US expected similar rates. When asked about who represents the small guy, Rusty said no one. You need a lawyer and you need a lobbyist.

Rusty said that Soma FM went offline partly as a protest of the CARP royalty decision. David added, "By the way, that was great marketing!" Rusty smiled and said they probably would have been okay financially if they had had to immediately start making payments, although it's hard to know. He waited about a month after the payment deadline to send in his first check to the RIAA. It took them two weeks to mail him back to say they received it. One month later, they still haven't cashed the check.

Brian then switched to the topic of the RIAA's recent pursuit of four college students for operating file sharing services. By demanding $150,000 per copyrighted work (as allowed by law) for a claimed combined total of over 2 million shared music files, the RIAA is seeking over $325 billion from the four college students. Brian said he has read that these students weren't the ones necessarily sharing the most files, but were the people who wrote software front ends that made it easier to share files on the networks.

Below are some more interesting comments that I have prefixed with the initial of the speaker:

  • B - BMI evolved because the other copyright company wouldn't collect fees for R&B artists because they didn't consider it to be music.
  • E - Colleges are on the back of the line for settlement. The RIAA doesn't want to establish a small settlement that could be used against them later by large companies. Small webcasters have until the end of May, although the Copyright Office says that everything should have been settled by the end of March.
  • B – The RIAA won't sue Canadian companies because Canada doesn't have a contributory copyright infringement law. The RIAA doesn't want to establish a precedent where they would almost certainly lose.
  • D - 25 % of Live365 listeners are overseas.
  • E – The RIAA spent about $12 million to create the infrastructure for CARP.
  • B – The RIAA see themselves as the pitbulls for the record industry, with the role of deflecting criticism from record companies.
  • R- If you want to get into webcasting, make sure you are willing to do it for the long term. However, he's optimistic about this for the small guy. He recommended that people at least start out with Live365 before committing a lot of money to an independent effort.
  • E - Don't give up yet. Still have appeal in the US Circuit Court of Appeals. Will keep pressing appeal. Excited about writing a brief. They may throw out CARP. Also, CARP reform efforts are underway.
Posted by Robert at 08:20 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
April 03, 2003
Do Not Call List Do Not Call List - California Dept. of Justice - Office of the Attorney General

For fellow Californians only,

The Office of the Attorney General has set up a page where you can pre-register for the nationwide telemarketing Do Not Call list. You can use this form to register up to four phone numbers. Enforcement of the "no call" ban is scheduled to begin in October.

Posted by Robert at 11:27 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
TellMe Extensions Is No More

Bad news for my free, public SoccerPhone service, which ran as a TellMe Extension. I received the following email from TellMe today:

VoiceXML Developer,
Tellme has made many investments in VoiceXML over the past four years. One of these investments was in the Extensions program, with the goal of making VoiceXML a more utilized public standard. Now with VoiceXML well on its way to standardization in the W3C and with hundreds of thousands of VoiceXML applications in production, it is clear that investment has paid off. It is time for us to retire the Extensions program and invest in other areas. As of Wednesday, April 9th we will no longer host Extensions on 1-800-555-TELL or http://studio.tellme.com. Developers can continue to build VoiceXML applications on Tellme Studio.
Thank you for your individual contribution in making VoiceXML the most widely-used and successful voice standard in the world.
The Tellme Development Team

Fortunately, it looks like TellMe will still support developer level access (i.e., you need the admin password) to a VoiceXML application, which should be sufficient for most deployments of PhoneBlogger. I'll now have to look into BeVocal and HeyAnita, although a quick scan of their websites doesn't suggest that they provide a service similar to TellMe Extensions.

Although I will miss it, this was one of the last remaining relics of the dotcom era. While Extensions got TellMe a decent amount of good PR, I imagine it cost them quite a bit of money to host it, especially when you consider the time that employees were putting into administering a free, hosted service as opposed to one of their services that generates revenue.

I just wish they would have kept it, but without a toll-free number. A lot of people with cellphones have nationwide long distance included in their plan, so TellMe was paying toll charges for nothing. Or, at least I think most people choose the long distance plans. If they don't, they should. I very rarely make a long distance call from my house anymore.

Eric Snowdeal indicates on his ex machina that he has run into the same problem.

Posted by Robert at 09:26 PM | link | comments (5) | trackback (0)
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