Disqus - Latest Comments for Lucas Gonze

Re: Ian Roger's Aspen Music Talk

Lucas Gonze — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:59:55 -0000

Fred, I think you'll dig the player. If you want more precise control over the player than with the default view, check out: http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/How_To_Link

This is very much a first release and there are still bugs big enough to matter. For example the play state sometimes gets out of sync and you end up with two songs going at once.

Also, we're eating too much screen real estate in the default layout. In the next rev we'll have the same footprint as PlayTagger.

BTW, I am both the product lead for this player (I report to Ian) and Sylvia's peer at Xiph. The business and standards issues are aligned.

Re: Yahoo! Gets Behind Rhapsody

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:22:28 -0000

Hi Fred,

FYI, the new build of the music player with the improvements I mentioned is now up. See http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/0... for details.

thanks.

-Lucas Gonze

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Lucas Gonze — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:53:48 -0000

Fred, I love that the auto-playlisting feature of the player is what led you to this song. It totally validates our idea that all the media in the page would be analogous to a webcast stream or long-form podcast.

Re: Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We're Doing

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:10:16 -0000

comparing YMP approach

Re: Can You Build A Business On Browser Extensions?

Lucas Gonze — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:58:54 -0000

It's not really a question of whether extensions are a business but of how the mechanics of extensions fit your business objectives.

Client-side software has fewer users but more engagement and stickiness. The users you do have either spend a lot more time with your software or are much more committed to it. So if you're a business living in a web site, you can grow your (average but not median) engagement and lower your churn by growing features on the client side.

Or at least that's how it should work. There are obviously would-be businesses with client-side products that have low time spent and high churn.

Re: How To Make Your Own Music Site in 10 Minutes - Joe Lazarus

Lucas Gonze — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:22:08 -0000

Added to the list of YMP mashups here: http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com/wiki/Mashups_...

Re: Dembot - Voeh Blocks International Users

Lucas Gonze — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:55:08 -0000

For all that licensed content they probably don't have international deals, and even if they did the ads they could sell would probably only cover the domestic market. Given that the royalties must be brutal, I'm not surprised.

Re: The most import thing to understand about new products and startups

Lucas Gonze — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:02:36 -0000

I strongly agree with this perspective. It's good to see you articulating and documenting it.

Sometimes the users just don't know what they want, and they need the product design to steer them in directions they didn't even know existed. But aside from that one exception, the rule is that developers have to be humble and view their job as watching and reacting to real-world usage.

The killer usecase for Webjay.org, for example, turned out to be exporting XSPF for third party XSPF widgets to render. This was very different from what I expected when I started on either Webjay or XSPF.

Re: The RSS soap opera (updated)

Lucas Gonze — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:02:37 -0000

It's a bummer because it's such a betrayal of Rogers Cadenhead, who has been incredibly loyal to Dave. I don't want to talk too highly of Rogers, who is a sycophant, but instead to say that I can't believe Dave would have so little sense of reciprocity.

Re: Ars Technica snapped up by Conde Nast

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:07:19 -0000

$36 CPM is very very rich. Even if they get that on some page views, they don't have 100% sell through at that rate.

Re: Amores Perros

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:43:04 -0000

Q'd up on Netflix.

Thanks for the reco.

Re: More on that ad-sup discussion

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:35:12 -0000

It is mind boggling how passive that is. "The train isn't coming towards me that fast, so why should I get off the track if it might still stop?"

Re: Everyone else is arguing about HTML 5's video codecs. Why can't I?

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:57:12 -0000

I don't buy the patent argument. That's meaningless fear, uncertainty and doubt as far as I know.

Re: Everyone else is arguing about HTML 5's video codecs. Why can't I?

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:32:45 -0000

More comments here:
http://gonze.com/blog/2009/07/07/a-plan-for-cod...

Re: What we know and what we don’t know about Facebook’s finances

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:54:09 -0000

Servers just aren't that expensive. There's no way they would account for costs at the level TC is speculating about.

Re: Wilco in Chicago [Testing Y! Media player]

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:43:42 -0000

Working fine for me with FF 2.0.12 on OS X.

Re: Bringing the blog back to life

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:47:45 -0000

You walk it like you talk it, Mark. Good shit.

I just set up a dreamhost account to migrate my blog over from wordpress.com, cause I can't have goose at toni's site.

Re: The real Sparky Collier

Lucas Gonze — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:35:01 -0000

I still miss my dog Elvis. That handle seems to be always taken, though.

Re: Eye-fi: instant photo uploads for a Benjamin

Lucas Gonze — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:11:59 -0000

What an insanely great piece of work. The simplicity is really clever.

Re: The Power of Ignorance

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:02:49 -0000

I wonder about the direction of causation. To some extent I think that people who wanted the Iraq war found ways to believe whatever was necessary to justify it.

In fact, I'll bet that plenty of people who read your post don't agree that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda has not been found, weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq, and that world public opinion didn't favor the US going to war with Iraq. They'll think that you're either lying or willfully mistaken.

Among people who liked the Iraq war and are too literate to fake their own reality, I think a lot of them privately disbelieve in the facts.

Re: Happy in Paris

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:53:07 -0000

bon appetit.

Re: LA’s best pizza is Joe’s Pizza | youarekillingme.net

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:42:56 -0000

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Steve, I'm blowing off Thanksgiving dinner and heading over for the slice.

Re: Meatless Mondays | youarekillingme.net

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:07:07 -0000

So, for example, no salad bowls made out of bacon on Mondays?

Seriously, "Supersize Me" had a definite impact on my eating fast food, and I know that that Robert Pollan's writing has a comparable effect for a lot of people WRT meat. He seems to have a common sense way of making the case for eating habits that are otherwise a bit new agey. Haven't read him yet myself, though.

Re: Twitter Etiquette | youarekillingme.net

Lucas Gonze — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:42:21 -0000

Right on, Steve. It's easy to unfollow the overposters, so why complain?

I kind of like emayoh's Hype Machine bot posts, actually. I check out the songs pretty often.

Re: Digital Signals: Blog knowledge - The power of the internal link

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:19:27 -0000

For my own blogs (blog.gonze.com, soupgreens.com) I have no good way for people to return to old posts, so writing is completely transient. This can't be the right thing, I know. The blockker is that common widgets like a calendar-oriented browser for the archives don't fix the problem.

Maybe the Wordle approach is a good tool. I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences implementing it.

Re: Exchangeable Shares - a Better Way for Angel Investors

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:38:02 -0000

Speaking as an entrepreneur, I don't see that this would harm my own interests, and it might help raise seed money. On the other hand it might make it harder to raise followup rounds.

Any thoughts on how series A investors would react? What's your experience so far?

Re: 2006/01/10/webjay-playlist-community-i-just-dont-get-it/

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:47:44 -0000

Pete, I love this post.

When you say it's like delicious, that's correct in the sense that it's a link sharing community, but it misses the key point. The insight behind Webjay is that the mainstream browser web is a really good way to do internet media, a way which is often better than filesharing, BitTorrent, or DRM pay per download stores.

So, that's the thing driving all my hackery. Webjay is indeed rough around the edges, as akaraff says, and that's ok because it doesn't get in the way of the main value, which is about all the new stuff you can do with internet media if you stick to the mainstream web.

Re: 2006/01/10/webjay-playlist-community-i-just-dont-get-it/

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:21:49 -0000

Thanks, Pete!

About the issues with copyrighted material in music, photos, and videos, my feeling is that there's absolutely no difference between the legal status of a song file and the legal status of a typical web page. This is counter-intuitive for a lot of different reasons, but this is just an issue of expectations -- you aren't going to get free and legal links to huge pop classics, so it seems like free and legal links aren't worth much. That's not so!

Re: 2006/01/10/webjay-playlist-community-i-just-dont-get-it/

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:40:23 -0000

Christopher, when you say that what you see on Webjay is 99% illegal, you're simply wrong. You're thinking that commercial music must be unauthorized, when in fact the labels frequently host it. To know what's the story on any one item, check the host. This is the web, not filesharing, and different ways of doing things apply.

Re: 2006/02/02/dabble-delicious-for-video/

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 23:03:47 -0000

There's a lot of value in specialized communities of human-to-human sharing. Plus, vertical tools to manage notoriously gnarly and uncooperative file types like video are probably out of range for generalist sites like delicious.

Re: 2006/07/17/bliptv-gets-funding-for-youtube-rival/

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:59:27 -0000

I can see from your writing here that you just discovered Blip and are perceiving it as a me-too, but in fact Blip precedes YouTube, and is a massive favorite in the videoblogging community.

Re: Yahoo’s New Artist Pages Aggregate Online Music From Across the Web

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:15:24 -0000

Ben: yup, it started as Foxytunes Planet.

Re: In a post-scarcity publishing world, the key is to own the most relevant copy

Lucas Gonze — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:58:31 -0000

Yup.

Someday the labels will learn that all they have to do is own the canonical URL, and then they can insert ads as needed.

See also:
http://gonze.com/weblog/story/7-11-4
http://gonze.com/weblog/story/7-12-4

Re: What you all are missing about Google

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:02:42 -0000

What makes you think that webmail isn't profitable, Robert? That doesn't make sense. It has rock bottom content costs and sky high engagement.

The only overhead is for coders, hosting and storage, which are a non-negotiable part of almost all web apps.

Re: Digital Music Royalties Grow; YouTube Becoming A Big Money-Spinner

Lucas Gonze — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:30:23 -0000

Did the data include the gross of pay-per-download (iTMS) vs streaming royalties (YouTube), Robert?

Re: Streaming Ads Driving Users Away From Content: Report

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:24:31 -0000

The premise of this survey is a little whacky. What all that video content is doing there in the first place is creating video ad inventory. It's extremely expensive to host video, however it's doable if you can sell in-stream spots, which have a high CPM. The two are joined at the hip. No ads, no content.

Because the premise is whacky the questions don't make a lot of sense. For example, "more than three-quarters (78.4 percent) of respondents said in-stream ads are intrusive" means exactly nothing. What value does this sentence impart? Users are watching video, and they are watching video ads regardless of whether the ads are intrusive.

Re: Digital Music Royalties Grow; YouTube Becoming A Big Money-Spinner

Lucas Gonze — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:41:12 -0000

Tonsotunez, streams are normally compensated on a per-stream basis, so the direct revenues are strictly proportional to plays, not listeners.

Re: Earnings: Napster Q2 Revs Fall; Paid Subs Drop Sharply

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:51:25 -0000

It means that their churn rate and customer acquisition costs are out of whack. They spend more on marketing to generate a subscriber than they earn on the lifetime value of a subscriber, and they've already burned through the upfront investment capital allocated to getting started.

Re: __lucas — Progressive enhancement of hAudio using the Amie...

Lucas Gonze — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:27:25 -0000

How does the ecommerce part work, __lucas? I'm wondering about what the user flow would be when there needs to be an interruption to make a purchase.

Re: __lucas — Progressive enhancement of hAudio using the Amie...

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:41:00 -0000

Comments at http://gonze.com/blog/2009/10/20/ecommerce-cont...