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“Get over yourself and drop the ‘MSM’ bullshit, please”. “If you use the term ‘MSM’ in a unironic way to denote the ‘Mainstream Media’ I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.”
Taste of Chinatown 2005, April 23 from 1-6pm. Fifty restaurants are offering $1.00 tasting plates in Chinatown tomorrow afternoon. Delicious!
As promised, some more photos from my recent trip to Paris (first set):
I’ve been back in NYC for a couple of days and am still jet lagged as all get-out…I was up at 5:05 AM this morning, about an hour before the sun decided to make an appearance. Getting a lot done with all this early rising, but I’m looking forward to more sleep soon.
Oh, and for the completist, here are all of my photos from past trips to Paris:
Jun 2003
Nov 2002
May 2001
The Louvre
L’Institut du Monde Arabe
Churches and cathedrals
Eiffel Tower
Wow, there’s some bad ones in there. (And not so bad ones as well.)
Books that changed the world. Just a few of the things that have changed the world so far: cod, salt, chips, radio in Canada, sewing machines, atomic weaponry, quinine, cables, sheep, gunpower, etc. etc.
Woman goes into labor on the F train this morning. Aha! That’s why my train was so slow this morning.
Keyword Assistant plug-in fixes iPhoto’s stupid ass keyword-adding interface. Software developers, say it with me: “auto complete, auto complete, auto complete!”
On shopping cart coin replacement things. The plastic coin replacement thingie is a “perpetually reusable currency for the shopping cart leasing market.”
Ask and ye shall receive: Google Maps with the NYC subway stops on it. A little flaky in Safari, but works well in Firefox.
Street art legend Revs is back, but this time he’s (almost) legal and working with iron sculpture. I’ve seen a bunch of his work in Dumbo.
Processing, a programming environment for designers and artists, is in beta. It’s the first public release.
The Fat Duck, a UK restaurant known for its “molecular gastronomy” approach, has nabbed the top spot in Restaurant magazines best of list. El Bulli is #2, French Laundry is 3rd, Per Se is 6th, and several other London spots made the top 20.
John Gruber’s plain English version of the Adobe/Macromedia Acquisition FAQ. “Please also note that PDF is an excellent format for sending out resumes.”
Nine Inch Nails is offering a GarageBand file with the complete mix of a forthcoming song. Can’t use the remixes commerically, but still pretty cool.
Ridiculously comprehensive movie genre primers from GreenCine. If you’ve ever wanted to know what French New Wave films to watch or what “Hammer Horror” movies are, this is the resource for you.
Old (but great) Jeffrey Steingarten on learning how to eat everything.
Interview with Ludicorp’s Stewart Butterfield about Game Neverending, Flickr’s MMORPG older brother.
Bill Brown has uncovered some interesting Slashdot comments by an Apple employee about Spotlight and future Apple’s future plans. (Ed note: it’s unclear whether As Seen On TV (ASOT) is indeed an Apple employee, but even if he/she isn’t, the thoughts are still interesting.) In this comment, ASOT talks about the future direction for Spotlight, Apple’s new finder (not Finder, but it seems clear that as Spotlight matures, it will become the de-facto way people use OS X), specifically about speech-to-text capabilities:
Example: You’re doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type “meeting in San Jose” into Spotlight, and it’ll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week’s meeting in San Jose.
and “anything” relationships:
Take two files, any two files. Say it’s a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don’t, you don’t have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter’s birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
Sounds like there’s more than a little Quicksilver and Spring in there. And then here, ASOT talks about adding GPS data into the mix:
What’s next? We’re going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here’s one we’ve been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That’s on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
S/he also notes that “It’s going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks…but it’s on the drawing board.” And you thought that gestural control of applications with the Powerbook’s accelerometer was fun.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a cache of previously unreadable ancient documents discovered a century ago, are now being read using IR imaging techniques. “Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.”
Macromedia may be a bit concerned about Ajax competing with Flash’s XML socketing. “Kevin [Lynch] specifically wanted to explore the possibility of hooking into the Ajax system with Flash, via Flex.”
An update on the development of the High Line. The latest designs will be on display at the MoMA.
Microsoft recently licensed their core and web fonts (Verdana, Georgia, etc.) to Ascender. These fonts were formerly distributed free of charge on the web by Microsoft…now they only come free with MS products.
The NY Times recently posted a press release about last month’s record-breaking traffic to their web site. In the release, they cite content as the main driver for the growth (“the journalism and voice of NYTimes.com continued to attract an audience interested in a wide range of subjects…”), both month over month and year over year:
Pageviews for the National section of NYTimes.com experienced a 96% increase year over year, due to reader interest in the news surrounding Terri Schiavo. Also, pageviews for the Travel section increased 238% year over year, as a result of the site’s coverage on a number of topics of interest including Paris restaurants and Maureen Dowd’s article about visiting Cancun, Mexico, entitled “Girls Gone Mild.” The Real Estate section grew 22% year over year, with several articles on a potential real estate market bubble. College basketball, baseball’s spring training and the steroids debate fueled growth of the Sports section with pageviews up 12% year over year.
Having some experience building and running content-based web sites, I’m skeptical the specific content offered by the NY Times is the whole story here. (This is a bit like Amazon saying their sales increased mostly because the quality of the books offered went up.)
Across the board, more Americans are getting their news online (25% in 2002 up to 29% in 2004) and Internet usage in other countries is growing as well.
RSS is mentioned in the release and is a small factor, with only 1% of their traffic coming directly from RSS feeds, but the vast array of blogs acting as entry points to Times’ content has to be having an impact. By some counts, the number of blogs is doubling every few months and the NY Times, despite their content being behind a registration wall and their links expiring after a few days (unless you know the secret code), is a favorite source that bloggers link to. During the 2004 Presidental campaign, the Times was the #1 most cited media source and was cited equally by both sides of the political aisle.
Design and user experience changes to the site might also be a factor. The NY Times has not radically redesigned their site recently, but like most large media sites, they tweak little things here and there all the time. Redesigns can dramatically increase (or decrease) traffic, but those small changes can as well. A quick change in the location of the “mail this article to a friend” link could result in 30% more mailings, which may translate into 20 million more hits down the line. Making RSS feeds more widely available, even though they only account for 1% of the site’s traffic directly, puts information into the hands of bloggers and may account for more indirect traffic than direct (I visit an article once through the Times’ RSS, but if I then link to it on my site, they’ll maybe get 2000 hits). Moving headlines around or tweaking the font size of the article summaries could result in more or less clickthroughs from the front page. Etc, etc.
(And there’s also business and marketing to consider. Did they make any deals to drive traffic? Did their marketing expenditures increase over the past year? Are they advertising the site any more in the print publication than they used to?)
The Times talking about their content being the sole driving force behind the increased usage of their web site certainly bolsters the NY Times brand (and this is a press release after all and PR is typically about promotion and not information), but I would be interested to know how much other factors contributed to the rise in traffic.
Google Maps launches in the UK with London Tube stations right on the map. Google, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please do the same for the NYC subway. Please?
As you might expect from a story with design, media, and technology angles, Adobe’s impending acquisition of Macromedia has resulted in much reaction from a big chunk of the blogosphere. Here are what some technologists, designers, and pundits have had to say about the deal so far:
Mike Chambers, a Product Manager at Macromedia, had a few things to say about the acquisition on his blog. He can’t say too much because of legal constraints around the deal, but he specifically mentions Macromedia’s “culture of openness and participation” as one of the reasons that Adobe was interested in the company.
Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect for Macromedia, posted what sounds like a press release about the deal on his site. He’s very hopeful about the future of the combined company.
Macromedia MX evangelist John Dowdell notes that Macromedia is “doing a lot of hiring these days” and points to Google Video’s coverage of the deal.
(Note: if you’re keeping score, that’s three employees of Macromedia chiming in about the acquisition on their blogs. And many more MM employees keep active blogs, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from that side of the fence (although because of the legal stuff, it looks like posts about this need to be approved). On the other side, I’ve never heard of an Adobe employee that keeps a blog. Anyone?)
Marc Canter, one of the founders of the company that eventually became Macromedia, wants his name back, along with Director because MM “more or less have abandoned it”. Marc seems fairly negative about Macromedia (“Lord knows they [can] teach a class in how NOT to run a software company”) and thinks that maybe Adobe can turn things around, but only if they can shed the software-in-a-box paradigm and start making multi-user, community-based software with online components that don’t rely on patent protection.
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said in the announcement conference call that 9/11 was a bit of a catalyst for the deal: “after 9/11, we both realized that being enemies didn’t make sense”. Zuh? But the new company still has enemies worth fighting, even in a post-9/11 world…here’s what Chizen had to say in an interview a year ago: “Microsoft is the competitor, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night.”
Tim Bray, co-author of XML and Director of Web Technologies at Sun, thinks that Adobe got Macromedia for their web products. Unlike most other commentary I’ve seen, Bray feels that “Macromedia’s DreamWeaver is the single most important Web-design product” and that “Flash is a distraction” that Adobe may drop because “near as [Bray] can tell, Macromedia has never made any serious money with Flash”. What’s the alternative for web developers? Ajax.
Dave Shea, well-known and respected web designer, echoes the thoughts of many in saying that Adobe bought Macromedia for their web products and savvy…and Flash in particular. Shea also wonders “what will become of Adobe’s long-standing commitment to SVG, now that Flash is in the fold”, names Microsoft as Adobe’s main competition now (MS seems to fighting on several fronts now…the Google/Yahoo/Jeeves, Apple, and now this), but is also worried about the loss of competition in the design space: “the combined Macromedia and Adobe stable of design software is industry standard; with this buyout, Adobe essentially has a monopoly over the design world. (Quark aside. Very far aside.)” Flash/web developer Todd Dominey echoes many of Shea’s comments in his post about the deal.
Dave Winer, who has his fingers in too many pies to summarize, compares the Adobe/MM acquisition to MM’s purchase of Allaire: “Remember all the hooplah over the Allaire-Macromedia acquisition, and all the synergies that were supposed to happen. Hmmm. Did any happen? BusinessWeek didn’t think so. Will any happen here? Heh. Slightly more exciting than Microsoft’s acquisition of Groove.”
TidBITS has a good overview of the evolution and history of the relationship between Macromedia and Adobe by Glenn Fleishman.
Broadband pundit Om Malik calls it a Web 1.0 (or even a desktop publishing) merger: “They are becoming increasingly irrelevant in digital worlds where free programs like iPhoto and Picasa are setting the tone on the desktop. Don’t expect innovation as a result of this deal - this is a deal to boost the revenues and maybe profits.”
Russell Beattie, who works for Yahoo! on mobile products and services, is heartened to see Adobe’s focus on mobile cited in their reasoning for the merger and “can see a combined Flash/SVG player (Flash Lite 1.1?) from Adobe becoming a really viable platform”. But Beattie also notes that “Adobe will always be the company that had a researcher *thrown in jail* for publicly explaining flaws in their product” (see here for details). Back to mobile, a commenter on Beattie’s thread warns, “PDF is the dog that can bring a 2GhZ PC to its knees to display a text file. not the kind of attitude thats right for mobile.”
Don Makoviney is looking forward to the stabilization in the tools competition: “As a working designer and developer of enterprise applications, I am tired of the battle over tools. When a carpenter buys a hammer, he doesn’t have to change the way he builds houses based on the hammer he buys.”
From the survey of all the commentary out there, the general feeling seems to be that Photoshop will kill Fireworks, Illustrator will kill Freehand, and Dreamweaver will kill GoLive. This seems to be confirmed by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen’s thoughts in a statement about the deal.
Mark notes that this is the second time Adobe has purchased Freehand. :)
The Macromedia XML News Aggregator (time for a new name?), which is a good place to keep up with all of the news and commentary about this deal, also displays a list of recent searches. There aren’t many searches about the deal right now, but just after the deal was announced yesterday morning, the most recent search terms were “suck adobe”, “adobe rape mm”, “adobe ruin flash”, “f._.ck adobe”, “really upset”, “stop adobe”, “against adobe”, and “hate adobe”. I’m detecting a tiny bit of anti-Adobe sentiment here…
The financial markets didn’t seem to react too well to the deal. Adobe’s stock price fell 8+% while Macromedia, which was offered $41.86 per share, only saw a rise to 36.72.
BusinessWeek has excerpts of a conversation with the CEOs of Adobe and Macromedia.
Jeremy Allaire, former CTO of Macromedia, had this to say about the acquisition: “Macromedia lost the enterprise publishing race to Adobe, and Adobe lost it with the Web publishing community. So the deal combines the best of both worlds. It gives Macromedia a huge sales channel, especially on the enterprise side. This will probably make the channels as strong as say Microsoft has.”
Dressed as their favorite characters from a Wes Anderson movie.
Knowspam shutting down with little warning. I know it worked, but I never liked the “hey, you emailed so-and-so and you need to authenticate…” It’s the kind of service/software (like the hated Plaxo) that makes you dislike your friends.
Whoa! Adobe to buy Macromedia?!!?!?!. Wow! ??!!?!??!! I don’t think there’s enough room in my MT database for all the question marks and exclamation points I want to use here.
When I telephoned to see if he wanted to go, a friend warned me off Sin City. But since both Metacritic and Ebert (who has tastes similar to mine) gave it good marks, I decided to ignore his advice; I’m glad I did. Although it was violent and misogynistic as hell (as many comics and graphic novels tend to be), Sin City was a lot of fun and as beautifully shot as recent cinematographic favorites House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and Kill Bills I & II. Rodriguez and Miller (whose comics the movie is based upon) translated the style, framing, and abstractness of a comic to film better than I’ve ever seen…you can see that they really understand how both genres work and how to move between one and the other without forcing it. If you can stomach the violence (it’s one of the most violent films I’ve ever seen), I’d recommend checking it out.
And if you ever need to move the Earth, here’s how you might accomplish that. “The Earth is very big, moving very fast, and therefore very difficult to stop or even slow down.”
Forget how life will end, here’s a bunch of ways you can destroy the entire Earth. This is a really fun read: “keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilising machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.”
Ten scientists on how human life on earth might end (or be severely curtailed). Super volcanos, killer robots, viral pandemic, oh my!
Bruce Schneier on how to mitigate identity theft. “If we’re ever going to manage the risks and effects of electronic impersonation, we must concentrate on preventing and detecting fraudulent transactions.”
Both Starbucks and Nike are on the Business Ethics 100 list this year.
A brief history of Trivial Pursuit and the decline of trivia.
Acela shut down because of cracks found in brakes, perhaps for months.
A look at the terms of service for Google Video. Several potential areas of concern there.
Explicit Content Only, NWA’s Straight Outta Compton edited to contain only the swear words. The full version makes it seem like my laptop has Tourette’s and the edited version is pretty funny.
Reflecting on 10 years of ESPN.com. Starwave! There’s a blast from the past.
HTTP in tha House takes the text from a URL and constructs a rhyme out of it. Here’s what it spit out for kottke.org this morning:
vs commission
i’m in fission
been asking and
have made bland
flat out fantastic
what a drastic
purchase a movie on dvd
basically done gheesince u been
study tall slender chagrin
rates of whites go
women who had a low
lines more than
d levitt stephen plan
fake restaurant quot
plasticbag a gleeWWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG
See also old school kottke.org content Straight Outta .Compton, a collection of rhymes inspired by the dot com boom:
i’m gonna touch your audience, touch them down below
wave our space inter-face ‘til your eyeballs glow
stick my vortal in your portal and suck your paradigm
we’re a reinvented army whose gonna revolutionise
Shout out to my homie Sean for emizzailing the HTTP in tha House link.
The Gmail interface now includes a wee newsreader.
Some bacteria in Africa beat Fermi to the first stable nuclear reactor on Earth by almost 2 billion years. The bacteria enriched the uranium into a critical mass and the flow of water through the reactor kept the reaction going for millions of years.
So, I’m in Paris for a few days. It’s a pseudo-vacation of sorts, but I’m keeping up with the site while I’m here as well. I’ve had the chance to get out with my camera the last couple of days, something I always enjoy doing here. It feels like cheating in a way…it’s so easy to take good photos here. Anyway, here’s a selection from the last two days:
The above photo (larger version) is one my favorite photos from the past few months. I was walking around in the Jardin Des Tuileries, saw him reading by the fountain, and just knew I’d found a good picture. I imagine actual photographers get that feeling all the time, but it was a new one for me. Hopefully I’ll find a few more good ones for another one or two selections while I’m here.
Apparently, all umbrellas kinda suck, unless you want to pay $225 for one. Author notes it would be better to stock up on $3 Chinatown umbrellas instead.
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