Maybe it’s just me and too many bitch sessions in the Synop back room, but I’m still amazed at the support RSS gets from people in the industry, particularly A-list bloggers, as a method for control of the content pipeline. I understand the excitement about RSS as a simple unstructured publishing mechanism or “data tap”, I really do, but not as a method of controlling the publishing pipeline.

Jon Udel for example (whose writing I enjoy and usually find insightful) implied today that with RSS, he had control of the channel. Jon was referring to the ability to opt in to a feed, which is arguably having some control of what he sees, but this is not actually having control of the channel from a publishing of content perspective.

RSS is like buying a hardcopy edition of InfoWorld. I have control over whether I buy it, but I don’t have any control over the content, the opinion, the focus, or the emotional or financial interests of InfoWorld, the authors, the editor or the publisher. I can turn the page if I want, but only when I see content I’m trying to filter out, such as adverts etc. Keeping the InfoWorld analogy, with RSS, I can only buy the last few issues, and if I miss an issue, well, I miss an issue. And yes, aggregator clients are starting to allow filtering and searching across feeds, as well as archiving, which alleviates some of these problems, but really they’re just making up for RSS’ inability to give us what we really want, better control of content.

Without reiterating this earlier post too much, we’re still consuming what the publisher has decided to push to us. I agree that the push vs. pull argument depends mostly on perspective, but when faced with a choice between media companies pushing me their selective content vs. my pulling from them the content that I’ve decided I’m interested in, there’s really no choice in the matter.

With Reuters and other big players now publishing RSS feeds, the big question is whether the big media outlets will let go of their traditional audience as product to advertisers business model, of which an RSS feed changes little except consumer perception, or whether they can finally embrace a business model where the actual content is the product, not people. Some will resist, because they know no other way, but the smart ones will make the shift, and consumers will speak out with their cheque books.

In the meantime, RSS is a safe bet. It protects the big media companies from having to change a thing. A couple of buzzword compliant data streams, push some advertising content down the pipe to compensate and invalidate the consumer’s move from the web to a reader client, and they’ll be safe for another few years. Safe as houses, so to speak.

However, give us access to their entire content database, with a good content focused business model, and then we’ll start to see the control people are talking about.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

I have this rant that I pull out my backside every so often — well I have a lot of them actually, but this one in particular is a favourite — about how surely by now they would have invented the indefinitely sharp razor blade. The point of course is that the spare parts trade, the selling of disposable blades, would collapse over night.

The Gillette Company for example claim that they have 1.2 billion consumers each day, a fair majority I’m guessing are purchasing razor blades. They’re the guys who invented the 3 blade disposable razor by the way, which I’m sick and tired of telling people is a degree of magnitude more efficient than double blade razors. Are you listening Andrew? Gillette, in case you didn’t know, also own the Duracell battery brand.

Wilkinson Sword on the other hand, actually do make swords. But they also make razor blades and gardening equipment (under the brand Fiskars, which we don’t have in Australia, maybe because it sounds like fisters), and together with Schick, managed to nab the www.shaving.com domain name before anyone else did. Wilkinson Sword, Schick (named after Colonel Schick) and Fiskars are all brands of the Eveready Battery Company, who no longer make Eveready batteries, but serve as an umberalla company for these brands as well as their famous Energizer battery brand. Schick, by the way, are now bragging about inventing the first four blade disposable razor. Bit I digress…

So the rant goes like this, surely someone has patented the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and there’s a conspiracy amongst the blade manufacturers to keep it quiet and out of other companies’ hands, so they can keep on selling us disposable blades into eternity. You can take the conspiracy one step further if you like and suggest that they’re in cahoots with the cosmetics companies, who surely by now have invented the indefinitely dilapidating cream, but I’ll leave that one up to you to explore. So I went looking for razor blade patents, and boy was that… fun.

The first disposable safety razor was patented in 1904, by King C. Gillette (for his American Safety Razor Company, which was soon after renamed as Gillete), so they’ve had more than enough time to invent and forget. Anyway, there’s 257 U.S. patents with razor and blade in the title, so that doesn’t include patents pending, other countries, or where the title isn’t exactly indicative of its use. But the interesting thing is that this is only patents registered after 1976. Modern razor blade engineers have been busy!

Several months ago I spent a weekend reading pretty much every patent I could find on razor blades, and while there’s many thousands of ways to design and manufacture the head mounting and handle, there’s surprisingly few patents on a breakthrough chemical or metalurgical reconstruction of the actual blade. There’s a fair amount of blade patents, but nothing that gets close to the covetted holy grail of disposable blade shaving, the uber blade, the blade that will render the phrase “disposable razor” completely redundant.

Perhaps it is just too hard to construct the perfect blade? Now there’s a challenge for Gillette and Eveready. The perfect blade. Think of all the waste that would be saved. We tend to think that computers and technology will make the biggest change to the way we live, but friends, think of the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and a utopian world without unsightly body hair.

spangled drongo, a blog by my friend Nigel, instant expert, every-sport-which-involves-a-wheel-a-rope-or-something-very-high-up extremist, and currently U.N. W.F.P. dude, blogging about technology we like and used to like. (I was going to ask what the fuck is T r a n s p a r o n i c s, but that would violate guideline d. of my blogging manifesto, and anyway we’ve all moved on from that boom bonding experiment)

The ever wonderful (yeah yeah, you get the picture) Gizmodo has a follow up on the recording and selling of live shows at the gig. See, I told you it was a revolution! 😉 Personally, I can’t wait until you can get a scratch and sniff of the gig, but I’m apparently a bit weird.

I’ve talked before about the copyright revolution and how the big record companies are in their death throws. Most file sharers would say “oh der, obviously!”, but there’s more to it than just them vanishing from the earth and the rest of us just carrying on regardless. (For starters, who get’s the Ferraris?)

The wonderful Gizmodo points to an AP story New Device Allows Recording at Concerts. Apart from looking like another cool fad or an attempt to cash in on the MP3 revolution (there’s that word again), this is actually an important indicator that things are changing.

The record companies do in fact provide a valuable service for artists: publicity. The millions of marketing and publicity dollars traditionally spent on artists gets them in the faces of the people who’d most likely buy them, and this tends to convert into filthy lucre. As an artist, you need to make the call, independance and high percentage of small profits, or sell out and miniscule percentage of a huge profit. Of course in the case of the big corporates, you then need throw in the millions of dollars that you owe back to them, as the costs are passed on to the artist. But if you do it right, there’s money in them there hills.

So when the majors have gone, what will be left? Well, for starters we’ll have more artists, because more of them will be getting airtime. But more importantly, artists will derive their income from a whole range of sources, including concert tickets, merchandise, and of course CD sales. But we’ll also see new and innovative ways for artists to produce income, and technology like eMusic’s eMusicLive vending machine is one of these. After the show, you can purchase a copy of the gig in MP3, copied to your own flash drive, or if you don’t own one, you can buy one from the same machine

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

* Ever wondered why every credit I give to another site is fabulous, fantastic, or wonderful? Me neither.

I’ve been struggling these last few weeks over whether I should let fly at a well known market research organisation who have recently yet prematurely embraced blogging. Several of their management staff have blogs, yet seem to have no idea what to use them for, and more often than not simply throw mud at other bloggers they disagree with. I’m still reading one of their blogs, having cast the rest aside, and if it weren’t for the collection of material I’ve been saving for my uber anti-blog post, I’d have dumped them from my reader months ago.

Yet I haven’t yet written about them, and I don’t know if I will. I have no problem correcting other writers when they are wrong, but slamming an entire company for stupidity? When I was younger, in those torrid 1980s BBS days, I wouldn’t have bat an eyelid, abusive verbage would have streamed from my keyboard. In those days, it was give as good as you get.

But wouldn’t that just be doing what they’ve been doing? Where do you draw the line between correcting inaccuracies, and highlighting stupidity?

I’m still thinking it through, but it made me want to finally put together a manifesto for my blogging. I’ll have it up over the next few days, but for would be bloggers, jumping into this very public space without much thought, insist upon writing up your own guidelines/manifesto. Why are you blogging? What do you hope to gain from it, and what if anything do you hope to give to your readers?

Meanwhile, perhaps check out this piece (from my work blog) on the privacy issues of blogging. The golden rule, if ever there was one, is know why you’re writing, what you’re writing, and for whom you’re writing. Oh, and don’t forget to have fun!

One of the most popular search queries that used to bring people to this site, until of course I accidentally told Google that I had nothing interesting to say, was ugg australia. Perhaps, some would argue, that Google is only now getting it right.

Anyway, what was once a shining beacon in the dark and torrid sea of sheepskin boot results, is once again but a mere single blog entry on Richard BF’s web site.

In other words, I used to rank fairly high on the first page, between two popular ugg boot sites, before you’d scroll off into page after page after page of ugg boot sellers.

I’m looking forward to once again fighting the good fight, where good old Aussie bludgeoning know how makes the Australian ugg boot once again a world commodity. But before I go and stick my foot in a freshly skinned merino, here’s a sheep wearing glasses. I can’t believe we’re now killing academics for footwear!

I was amazed back in the 1980s, as IBM and other companies were inventing Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM), the manipulation and display of individual atoms. I remember when IBM researchers were able to write the word IBM, atom by atom. But I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope until this recent post on Gizmodo. It looks like an old Capsella kit, which surprisingly, you can still buy.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen any STM images, you should start at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. And to think that atoms were once the smallest elements in the universe, and actually seeing them was only something we dreamed about.

I know, not another damn post about Google. Well, not really Google, but A9, Amazon‘s new search engine. I spent a few hours playing with it today, and was amused that of all my blog entries, Dancing with the Google, about how I’m starting to question whether I should place so much dependance on Google, is the highest ranked.

Due to the fabulous technology available to us in this modern age, I regularly synchronise information between home and work via the habitat that is email (I’d hyperlink link the research paper, but I’ve lost it). I just love trawling through those extra emails I get from myself each day, letting them clog my inbox, and forcing me to disconnect and reconnect my thought patterns while in a completely disparate environment and usage context. Well, I don’t really, but an ex-girlfriend once told me that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, supposedly paraphrasing Shakespeare, so who am I to deprive her of a degree of satisfaction. Although, I couldn’t find any trace of him ever saying it, and she’s the one with a masters in English lit. It would be ironic if irony weren’t supposedly the highest form of wit, which would of course render her claim rather useless. I prefer witless, but I digress…

So I’m trawling through my emails, and get to this one from a few days ago titled: BITCH ABOUT U.S. ENGLISH IN WORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1. Not sure where the “1” came from, but considering the mood I was in, I probably have a good idea.

OK, so all that just so that I can bitch about U.S. English in Word. Well, U.S. based readers wouldn’t have the problem that we have, in that Australian English is different to U.S. English. Not only is our spelling correct different, like colour, analyse and arsewipe, but so is the use and interpretation of the language.

In Word 2003, at least in the Windows version anyway as the Mac version doesn’t seem to have a problem, any document you write, will have “English (U.S.)” in the status bar. You can click this to change it to the default “English (Aus)” but it typically changes back to U.S. when you least expect it. Sure, you can set it in the Options… dialog, but again, intermittently it will revert back while editing a document. The closest you can get is by selecting all in the current document, and then changing the default to Australian. This will give you at least 15 minutes of writing before Word again starts suggesting U.S. spellings for words.

Now typically we’d write this off as a simple bug, but it has been in every version of Word that I can remember since different language dictionaries were available. You’d think their test team would have picked it up by now.

But not only does Word think that U.S. English is the only English, but I’ve posted here before about how our only Australian dictionary, the Macquarie (which I’m so frustrated with that I refuse to inline hyperlink it), is now pay only.

I guess with Microsoft having analyzed the situation, and the Macquarie sniffing the color of our money, we’re all destined to end up speaking U.S. English. Asswipes.

Updated 17^th June 2004: Due to guilt and high Google traffic, I’ve now provided a solution. Enjoy.