ZEITGEIST

A painter at Kensington Market's pedestrian Sunday.

Sexy People via Death From Below

This has been what could best be described as an interesting few days of us all here in the United States, and particularly those of us in the tech sector and early adopter crowd. Between the official presidential debates (and the online commentary), the online debates, the and the debate on the hill over what we should do with 700 billion, there are a lot of “expert opinions,” and not a lot hard answers. I’ve spoken to a few experts, and done a good deal of thinking, and while I don’t have all the answers, I think I’m closer to understanding everything than I was.

Yesterday, Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere’s ’thought leaders’ to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked), and today all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion. The problem, I think, is that he’s searching for information in all the wrong places. I too went through the substance withdrawal he’s going through now a while back, and documented it here at Mashable.

Lookin’ for Expert Love in All The Wrong Places…
The grand take-a-way here is that the philosophical model for Wisdom of the Crowds breaks down very easily when it’s subjected to, as James Surowiecki put it, a crowd that is too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, or too emotional.  In the case of FriendFeed and Twitter (where Scoble is primarily searching), the crowd fits three of those failure criteria: homogeneous, imitative and emotional.

The tech blogosphere is just that: a homogeneous group of thinkers, coders, executives and writers who on microformat social media platforms imitate each other in a state of emotional pandemoneum. This isn’t a slam - it’s hard not to be emotional when faced with the prospect of economic obliteration (and I for one enjoy the many daily imitative memes started by various members of the community).

Steven Hodson said earlier today that “the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous.” While it’s a true statement, it misses the point a little on the crowd wisdom theory. The limited space requires the reduction of complex ideas to a succinct shortform, that in turns encourages rapid back and forth discussion. Compile the factor of hundreds and thousands of users in close quarters communicating on the same topic, and you’ve got an environment at which truth can be distilled quite rapidly under optimal circumstances.

The problem is that we’re all very clearly divorced from normal circumstances, and the vast majority are all trying to get a handle on topics and lingo that we’d have a hard time understanding in the best of circumstances. I’ve probably been researching the whole economic fiasco more than most, and while I pride myself on understanding macroeconomics better than the average bear, my head is swimming as badly as those who just get the cable news drive-by explanation.

So How do We Make Sense of This?
This is a situation where the standard Internet research techniques don’t really apply. Wikipedia doesn’t really cover breaking news that well, and most of the experts in this game have a chip in this game. Thus, it’s hard to find an idea or interpretation of the situation that’s balanced and reasonable, let alone completely umbiased.

To try an circumvent the punditry and get to a set of opinions I could easily decipher, I started reading the opinions from the various think tanks. The Heritage Institute, the CATO Institute and the Club for Growth. They all had varying ideas about the passage of the bailout bill (and whether it was the best thing for the country), which is no different than asking the various financial publications, politicians and Wall St. pundits.

The difference here is that they are organizations that I’m familiar with, I know each of their guiding principals, and thus know the underlying reasons they make the recommendations they make. I can’t say the same about every politician or Wall Street pundit. They all have biases tied to their jobs, their staffers and all sorts of unknowns that to track down turns into a rabbit hunt. This makes an already complicated task of finding out what’s going on nigh-impossible.

Here’s What I Found Out
That’s why today I decided to go ahead and consult some folks who’s job it is to folow these sorts of things. Back in March, I served on a panel on online privacy with a resident scholar for the CATO Institute by the name of Jim Harper. I gave him a ring and invited him on the program to help put this all in laymens terms.

We’ll be posting the video of that tomorrow morning, but the parameters of the conversation are what’s most germane to this particular piece.  We tried to stay away from worst case scenarios as show openers, and talk about what’s actually going on right now in his and his fellow scholars’ experience. We tried to connect the dots in terms of what the various potential scenarios mean for our industry and the general economic health of the nation.

One thing in particular that he said which puts these thoughts in perspective is that a lot of the media is centered in New York City, so the spin we see is heavily colored by the investment bank failure - which is very real, and not by Main Street banks, which as of now seem to be dealing with the crisis in stride. Because the New York City news desks only see what is around them, the calm and unemotional perspective is considerably lacking from most of the coverage.

In our discussion, though, we tried to stay away from blame-casting. It’s not important which party or individuals created this mess. the circumstances that created it are important, because they need to be addressed to prevent a repeat performance. More important, though, is how we weather the storm and what immediate steps are needed to prevent a disaster of catastrophic proportions.

If you want the audio track to our discussion, feel free to subscribe to our audio podcast feed, or come back tomorrow morning and watch the video. In the mean time, I encourage you to not take the pundits words at face value.

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Filed under: Desktops, Home Entertainment

Here's another mouth-watering concept on display at CEATEC today: Toshiba's Media Server -- not to be confused with some kind of nefarious explosive device from an early episode of Doctor Who. It uses NFC to download files from your cell phone, which in turn can be displayed on a TV via WirelessHD. But best of all, it's shiny and looks nothing like some of the mundane media servers we've seen in the past, which is reason enough for us to want one, or perhaps a pair to make 2d12. Here's hoping it gets past the concept stage.

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Filed under: Cellphones

We got the low-down (well, at much of a low-down as one can get from thematic designers) on KDDI's latest au concept phones here at CEATEC, and the themes are -- are you sitting down? -- space and soup atomic elements. No, we didn't make that up. If you're still with us, hit the break for some pictures and explanations.

Continue reading KDDI au concept phones explained and pictured

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- Last week Washington Mutual ran this colorful little ad on its homepage.

Christofer Marley was playwright and poet and lover.

"Play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice." It's a seductive enough proposition after years of iffy prequels and a tropical rain forest's worth of shared-world fiction slowly devouring the rest of large bookseller fiction sections.

I wanted to ask Michael Cassutt to clarify some of his premise for his (admittedly great) Delta Quotient ("DQ") for evaluating sci-fi.

Online market guides have revolutionized the submission process for writers, providing information that is often more timely and more accurate than even the most frequently updated print guides can manage.

Michael Cassutt's column [last] week ("DQ") had some interesting ideas.

Onion Radio News - with Doyle Redland

Onion Radio News - with Doyle Redland

Filed under: Digital Cameras

While JVC Victor hasn't promised us a review unit just yet (cmon, we're still begging here), we did get a chance to get up close with its SDHC concept camcorder today at CEATEC. Designed for the more sophisticated user (as opposed to family users, they tell us), the camera will shoot both high-quality HD video and stills, something they say has yet to be done in a device. The upcoming Everio is slated for release in the first half of 2009 at an undisclosed price, but JVC promises the unit is, indeed, coming. In the meantime, we'll have to make do with these new shots in the gallery below.

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Ars takes a look at the question that all mobile users have asked at one point or another: what's up with the number of "bars" of signal that we're getting on our cell phones, and why does that number so often seem to lie?

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By taking action this week, both the House and Senate gave webcasters and music labels a few more months to work out a royalty rate everyone can live with. Without legislation, Pandora and others might soon have been forced out of business.

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"The Fly in the Eye" follows in the tradition of old-school psychological horror cinema.

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Microsoft couldn't let the gory, highly-anticipated launch of Gears of War 2 (chainsaw duels! Rhhhahaararggg!) pass without bloodying a Zune or three in the process, Halo 3-style. Specifically, Microsoft has laser-etched that pesky little "Crimson Omen" onto a glossy black Zune 120, pre-loaded the device with 244 pieces of "Gears of War" media -- the soundtrack, concept art, behind-the-scenes vids and so forth, nothing you won't be able to find elsewhere -- and squeezed it all into some "collectible" Gears packaging, featuring our testosterone-addled protagonist pondering the meaning of life. The whole kit will run you $280, with pre-orders at Walmart.com and Amazon.com (and a whole mess of Canadian shops) starting at midnight tonight. It'll start shipping on November 7th. And still can't sync to your Xbox. Close-ups after the break.

Continue reading Gears of War 2 canvasses special-edition Zune

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The music business has to be one of the most contentious online businesses with so many players involved. On one side you have the record labels who are facing an ever increasing devaluation of their physical media business. You have the trade organizations for the music industry trying to maintain their power base and millions of dollars of income. Then there are all the online providers of downloadable content trying to eek out marginal profit margins; if you can count millions of dollars as marginal. The last two players though of this complex game of power and money are the musicians themselves and us - the fans, the listeners, the purchasers of all that music.

In the last year record companies saw their CD sales fall by 20% to $7.4 Billion while Apple and its online service iTunes is estimated to sell 2.4 billion songs this year giving it about 85% of the online market. Given that it forks over 70 cents of every dollar it collects per song to the record companies Apple’s profit margin is incredibly slim but according to Eddy Cue; iTunes vice president, in a recent CNN Money interview Apple doesn’t believe that the market will bear an increase of the price per song - regardless of what the recording industry might think.

However depending on what happens this coming Thursday when the Copyright Royalty Board set the royalty rates for the next five years; the first possible increase since the online explosion, Apple may have no choice. The record industry is asking that the fixed per song payment be scraped in favour of 8% of the wholesalers revenues. In contrast the Digital Media Association who represent online music services like Apple is seeking to get an even lower rate of 4.8 cents per song; or 6% of revenues.

There has been a rumbling that Apple would shutter the iTunes service if the record label succeed in getting their increase. Their argument being that they are making so little money under the current structure and given that they don’t believe the consumer would accept a price increase and they are in the business of losing money. So at this point where itunes is costing they would have no alternative but to close the service:

“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all,” Cue wrote. “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.”

Apple close iTunes?

Ya .. right .. and if you believe that I have some excellent bridges for sale. They would increase the price, consumers would bitch for a little while and then it would be back to business as usual. 

Have you noticed though who isn’t being included in this decision making process of royalties. That’s right - the musicians. Instead they will have to once more depend on whatever the record labels and trade associations decide to dole out after they have taken their cut of whatever ever agreements are reached. In a business that is rife with cooked books and missing royalty payments to the musicians the idea that they would see any of the possible increase in income is farcical.

Then there is us - the fans, the listeners, the purchasers.

Guess what?

We once more have the pleasure of paying more for no other reason that people like the record labels and RIAA want to shore up their power and money streams. We lose - they win.

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imc2 made a site where you can put your likeness on M&Ms. I've always wanted to eat my own face off, so I clicked through to The Candy Lab with premature glee.

Inverge Interactive Conference

Portland Sept. 4

Scattered notable pithiness

Renny Gleason/W+K:

Humans will always come out from behind the technology. No matter the newest invention, we will find a way to hack it to make it human.

There is a new job now in marketing: community manager. More than merely managing social media, they must understand the social contract/behavior associated with each form of social media – they must understand the dance of each.

Viral activity should not happen in isolation, it must be an ongoing and sustained conversation. It requires courage and effort to have real conversation/dialogue and authentic relationship.

Karl Long/Nokia

The hierarchy of custom interaction

Trust (predictable behavior) > Usability (functioning correctly) > Autonomy (put people in control) > Co-creativity (better together)

Andy Mooney/Disney

The online piece alone is not enough to make a product compelling. There must be security and responsiveness > all emails should be answered.

  

With this posting, our blog is changing – it will be a place where we at Opus Creative talk to each other and the world can listen in. A place for unmoderated conversation that could go anywhere…

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Here's an interesting one. That red / black Xbox 360 controller that was showcased back in July is now available to any ole consumer in the US, Canada, Latin America New Zealand and Asia, and it comes bundled with a Play & Charge Kit and red rechargeable battery for $64.99. For whatever reason, Microsoft's totally missing a golden opportunity to cash in on the holiday shopping season by reserving the green counterpart as some "promotional item." C'mon guys, is it really that hard to understand how irresistible a red and green gamepad tandem would be in late December?

[Via IGN]

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A federal judge has turned aside the Oregon State Attorney General's effort to halt the RIAA's attempt at discovering the identities of 17 students accused of sharing music over Gnutella.

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That was fun.

There was a certain amount of confusion backstage, things we've learned (I hope) for the rest of the reading tour events, and I managed to complicate things by forgetting to eat lunch, and I signed 750 books and then went into a sort of a flatlined bloodsugar grumpy meltdown during the soundcheck. But Cat ran out and got me some food, and I ate just enough to get me cheerful again, and I don't think many of the technical issues we were frantically trying to solve remained unsolved, and I think the audience was happy and didn't know about the tech problems anyway, and I hope the experience was probably much more fun than me doing a signing for the people who were there.

And Bill Hader's special introduction went down like a dream, which made me really happy. If you come to one of the readings you'll hear it. If not, you won't.

Thanks to Barnes and Noble College, to Columbia Teachers College, to Harper Collins, to the CBLDF, and to all my friends who showed up and then didn't actually get to talk to me.

A few people wrote to say that they couldn't get The Graveyard Book at their local bookshop, or that their bookshop had told them it wasn't out. It's definitely out. It's live on Amazon. It's out there on indiebound.


I just downloaded your newest to listen to on my next business trip. And it made me wonder, does purchasing the audio book version of your new release (e.g. "The Graveyard Book") contribute to book sales calculations? Or, by purchasing the audio version am I depriving you of a sale to be counted by the NYT Best Sellers List? I hope this didn't hurt... Thanks, Tricia

I don't know, but I really don't care -- I'm really proud of the audio version of The Graveyard Book, and I love it that you downloaded it, so please do not worry. Buy it in any format you like, and do not give it a second thought.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiobook?id=292061896&s=143441 is the US iTunes link. It probably won't work if you are outside of the US.

(And http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/search?entity=audiobook&media=all&submit=seeAllLockups&term=gaiman is all the audiobooks by me on iTunes including a German one.)

Hi Neil,

My daughter would like us to create a Queen of Shadows costume for her this Halloween. We watched Mirrormask again (and again) to gather ideas. But it is hard to make out the fine details. Do you know of any online resources for sketches, designs, behind the scenes photos of the Queen's wardrobe?

Thanks!

Not really -- the Art of Mirrormask book that Dave McKean did should have all of that stuff in it, though.

Dear Mr.Gaiman:

I was amused by the fact that the new version of the Mouse Circus website has been designed by "Sandman Studios".
Was this a conscious decision on behalf of the people responsible for the site (HarperCollins?) or just plain coincidence? Either way, it is amusing.

I really like the new site (as a user and as a web designer myself), not only does it really look good, but (most important) it's useful and well organized.
Still, I will miss the Stephin Merritt background looping bit of music for the old-flash Coraline part of the site. Maybe you could get Sandman Studio (wink wink) to include it as an mp3 or something.

Cheers,
Santiago Mendez

P.S: If Mr.Neil posts this, Sandman Studio will owe him (and me) one for the plug. You're welcome Sandman Studio.
P.S.2: I swear I'm not a Sandman Studio employee.

It is a coincidence, I'm afraid. (Or is it?) (Yes, it is.) (Ah... but is it?) (Yes, actually.)

You're right on the Stephin Merritt loop, though. We should put it up somewhere...

...

I just stopped blogging and had a bath. And now I go to bed. Tomorrow morning to Philadelphia... And I'll put up a link to the reading tonight as soon as it goes up on the web. Or as soon as they send me the link, anyway.

And finally, I thought doing a signing tour with a broken finger was foolish, until I learned that Amanda Palmer was now going to be singing and dancing her way across the world with a broken foot. I think the dancing may have to be curtailed but was happy to see that the singing is as good as ever. Here's a shout out to me from Belfast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hDlkMbf7uc

Mzinga has been around for over eight years so they’re by no means a startup. They’ve been building white label social networks for companies such as ABC, ESPN, Amex and other big time players without much fanfare or media coverage. They’ve enabled businesses to add the social media tools that we use every day inside their protective firewall.

If you go to mzinga’s site you’ll see the numbers behind their success which are staggering. They have over 14,000 communities, more than 1 billion page requests every month from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. All impressive stats but the real measure of success is the quality of their clientele. They have a list of who’s who that continue to use their services internally as well as externally. However, because they rebrand most of these solutions to customize projects for their customers, the general public never knows who really did the fancy work. Fortunately, though, word of mouth spreads quickly from insiders so they generate the bulk of their work that way.

One of mzinga’s most popular solutions for companies is adding social media tools such as message forums and chat rooms that allow employees to brainshare and exchange ideas that are wasted otherwise. Most of the time, businesses without these tools never harvest this goldmine of information and lose out on some excellent data that could have lead the way to greater success. Mzinga prides itself on providing social tools that enable companies to communicate better internally amongst themselves as well as externally with their customers and partners.

We sat down and spoke with mzinga at the SummerMash event in Boston. You can check it out via the embed below, or grab the MP4.

Never Miss an Episode!
 Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here (video feed).

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Filed under: Cellphones

Ah yes, the natural progression of a release. First comes the hands-on at the introduction, then comes the leaked user manual, then comes the pre-order fiasco -- now, it's time for those always titillating in the wild shots. The box and handset are nothing out of the ordinary / surprising (respectively), but at least you now know that bona fide unboxing images are just around the bend.

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Cable may be faster than the DSL offerings from telecoms, but poor customer satisfaction is making users "highly vulnerable" to competition, according to a new report from CFI Group. Lousy customer service and rising rates are to blame for cable customers looking elsewhere.

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Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

Now that pico projectors are actually headed to end users, we're seeing a number of companies hop in the fast lane to production. Take Microvision for instance -- these guys were taking their sweet time by introducing the PicoP beamer back at CES, and now we're looking at a freshly revamped version that has already begun shipping to OEMs for "evaluation and end-user testing." Reportedly, the device shown at CEATEC featured a "thinner, smaller and brighter PicoP engine and several image quality enhancements" over the unit displayed at CES, and it officially boasted a WVGA resolution that could be blown up to 100-inches in size. Unfortunately, we're still waiting to hear how long it'll be before this one slips into consumers' hands, but we've a feeling it'll be sooner rather than later.

[Via AboutProjectors]

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We just recieved word from multiple sources that Netflix is planning on rolling out an API tomorrow that allows access to the company’s database of over 100,000 movies. This is to include the ratings data (which is, apparently, up to over two billion ratings on file increasing at the rate of two million movie ratings per day).

The API will be free and open to commercial use, so if you decided to make an Android or iPhone app, you’re more than welcome to sell it. The API will come in three flavors: RESTful, Javascript and ATOM, with standard OAuth security.

The developer site currently requires authentication, but is going to be live tomorrow morning. All API specs and documentation should be available there. Once the specs are live, we’ll take a look at them in depth and report back any interesting details and opportunities we see.

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"NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds."

G’night.

* I don't fully understand a lot of the new sites about comics that pop up, and I don't understand this one beyond the fact that seems like it would be an expensive URL. I did get the usual e-mail from someone at the site talking about how I should be assisting them to do whatever, and how it will benefit me to do so.

* the latest iteration of the Legion of Superheroes will end at issue #50. That's the cover image from #49, by the way. Anyway, not that DC canceling stuff or a Legion title biting the dust is ever news, but I had to wonder: how many times out in official fashion is that for this series? Six? Seven? Eight?

* the publisher Del Rey has announced two manga series from a newly-formed partnership with Cartoon Network: Bakugan Battle Brawlers and Ben 10 Alien Force. The first book will be December's Bakugan Battle Brawlers: The Battle Begins, and will employ stills from the animated shows. The Ben 10 Alien Force series will begin in April. Original works in both series will start the next season: Summer 2009 (BBB) and Fall 2009 (B10AF).

* this seems like a pretty ambitious on-line endeavor man-hours wise for a promotional thing. Hadn't heard of the book before now, so I guess the announcement part worked.

* finally, if you're ever really, really bored you can always look at a bunch of forthcoming (mostly) small-press work by going to a blog search engine and typing in the phrase "my graphic novel." Here are some from the first page that pops up today: <a href="http://rimibchatterjee.net/livelikeaflame/?p=426" title="Kalpa">Kalpa, <a href="http://www.clockcrew.cc/talk/showthread.php?t=79639" title="Sharks and Butterflies">Sharks and Butterflies, Untitled by Dave Wagner, Untitled from Chris Harrison, Untitled by Megan Baehr.

Filed under: Laptops, Wireless

Laptops with built-in WWAN modems aren't anything new, but there's a hodgepodge of hardware and services available -- a situaton the GSM Association is trying to simplify with the new Mobile Broadband standardization initiative. Sure, it's mostly an excuse to get another sticker on your gear, but companies like Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Toshiba, Qualcomm and a bunch of carriers are on board to ensure that Mobile Broadband-certified machines will be ready and able to connect in some 91 countries around the world -- and what's more, they're committed to spending a cool billion dollars in the next year promoting MB as a "compelling alternative" to WiFi and WiMAX. That should be an interesting dilemma for the carriers that also run hotspot networks, but we've got a feeling everyone's happy as long as the sub fees keep rolling in.

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P2P traffic is still growing, but it's being eclipsed streaming video and direct download link from services like RapidShare. As content owners lean hard on P2P, Internet video is going both legit and further underground.

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In the secret, back-room Singularitarian mailing lists and discussion venues, we often ask: “More publicity good? Or more publicity bad? How much publicity is optimal?”

There’s no question that our cause (building safe seed AI) has more exposure now than ever. While it can be hard, if not impossible, to distinguish references to Singularity a la Kurzweil from Singularity a la von Neumann, the two concepts are meshed together and people really do get exposure to both, even if they come away thinking that Singularity means “transhumanism” instead of “recursively self-improving superintelligence”. And the people who are really in the know can actually tell the difference. For instance, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED, recently wrote about our version of the Singularity at his blog, the Technium. When the Intel CTO mentioned the Singularity coming by 2060, he was talking about Kurzweil’s Singularity, so in my mind that