DISQUS

When I had an office in the Meatpacking district (W14th) in the nineties I used to gaze up at this amazing crazy leftover train track and wonder what was up there. Now I know - can't wait to visit.

Such a great post. I am a huge pickle fan and I've long wanted to a pickle tour of the world. But a Pickle Day - brilliant. Wish I was there.

Josh, I pay for Typepad. It's not a free product. So I have to go on paying year on year on year or lose my blog?

Your friend at TypePad might say they provide an easy import/export format - but apart from anything else, it doesn't export images. In fact there is no way to just export images. You can go through and download them one by one, which isn't exporting them and doesn't help reconstruct the blog. You also can't actually save down their own Photo album format. They suggest you back up your blog, but don't provide the tools to do it. To suggest otherwise is stupid. This from support yesterday: "Using the export utility will save your weblog content (text) but not the resources such as images and other files." So yes, I have an axe to grind with them - which is that after four years of art blogging with hundreds of images I am trapped - no data portability there then. And I have to pay year on year to remain trapped. Thanks Typepad.

I have an N95, I'm interested ivan.pope@gmail.com
Thanks,
Ivan

Fred, you know full well that if it comes to this it won't be a 'download fee' but a tax on the ISP industry for the benefit of the music/movie industry. Personally I've never downloaded any music and sod it if I'm going to pay a tax for others to do so, just because the music industry can't get their act together.
You seem a bit slap happy. To say that "All of that is well and good" so long as the music industry sort out the availabilty of their content is wrong. If the music industry sort out the availability of their content, then they have a commercial product that I can choose to subscribe to. If they don' then that is their right, but I'm not paying for their failure thank you very much!

I invented the internet cafe (Cybercafe) because I believed that the combination of online and offline would work in a cafe setting, i.e. that it's not aobut online or offline, but a combination of both. Of course, since those days (at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, always watch the artists, eh?) internet cafes have become something totally different. So do we want to be in an online or an offline cafe? These days I think we are in both most of the time - that's where we live.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Sir, you are ...

I think there is a long tail of email overload. There won't be that many people in the head of it, most of us are in the tail, i.e. our overload comes nowhere near the scale of Arrington or Fred. They have a professional and chosen interest in high exposure and lots of attention, so they get too much email. Myself - I get enough, but it's manageable I think. So how many people in the head of email overload and how many in the long tail?

everybody except Eric here (hi eric) is stating their position - I don't get it, I won't use it, I can't see how it fits in with things. But the point surely of everything since the start of mass online use is that it's not up to individual arbiters whether things work or not. Some do, some don't. Now, Seesmic is at a very early stage and is little more at this stage than an experiment to see what works, what doesn't. And something works. It's not podcasting (whatever that is). It's not Twitter (whatever use that is). It's not blogging (thank god). It's not video by appointment. It's not realtime video. It's not video conferencing. It's something all of its own, and for a lot of people it works. For me it just works. It's just pleasurable. I haven't really stopped to work out how it fits in to my life - but hey, sometimes you just need to roll with it. So, anyone who tries it and doesn't like it - it won't miss you. And anyone who thinks they won't like it - give it a try.

Aha, I have it - Google will buy the NYT to aquire Wordpress who NYT have just invested in :-)

and?
from the phone?
automatically?

Well, I was there at the start, but didn't hang around very long, for reasons that will seem obvious in retrospect. I even kept Sam's previous blog, Vecosys, going while Sam was setting up Blognation. Never saw a bean. Never saw a contract. What I never understood was a)why Sam offered such unrealistic amounts of money to bloggers, when there were no other buyers to compete with. Most bloggers would have come on board for peanuts or future value, we did think it was a good project and b)how Sam thought he could manage such a complex project, when he never actually showed any ability to play the role of publisher or even editor to his rapidly multiplying blogosphere. I guess there was an assumption it would all pan out in the end while he raised money by force majeure. The worst thing he did was not simply lie to people about funding, but let them spend their own money on expenses, turn down jobs and put themselves out on a limb on the back of his promises - promises which he now admits were total lies. So Sam bears responsibility for potentially screwing up people's lives bigtime, but he casts all the blame off onto Mike Arrington. I mean, Mike's no saint, but really, phew, words fail me.

Chris Kennedy - it's not as simple at that. Obviously, if you don't bid to get impressions you won't get clicks. But Fred (and me) get the impressions, just no clicks to speak of. I've had a campaign running for a couple of weeks. It is wildly variable in how many impressions it gets, but I've only had eight clicks out of a a huge number of impressions. Utter rubbish. I guess it then boils down to the advert content - what do you advertise that works and what sort of rate do you get?

Matthew,
You write "Right now, the mobile sphere is where the Internet was back in the early 1990s — it’s a morass of proprietary standards and walled-garden content, combined with the most usurious fees since the department-store credit card was invented."
But the internet never was this. Maybe online was, with a lot of proprietary databases and online systems. But the internet never had proprietary standards and walled-garden content. That was and is the glory of it. Unless I missed something? Ivan

1. Do you think someone can procure polonium and travel around the west to kill someone with it without the security services knowing about it?
2. If they don't know, how come?
3. If the Russian constitution says no extraditions, then there is no point in the UK demanding extradition
4. I don't really think any court in the UK is going to 'hand over' Berezovsky
5. Who knows why the UK just deported someone it later claimed was here to murder Berezovsky
6. It is true that a lot of dissident and opposition figures in Russia get killed without any prosecutions for murder

I'ts messy. Games are played on both sides. Sure, Russia can show that the rule of law pertains and that the courts are more powerful than the executive. But I don't see it happening. Unlike the UK where it happens all the time.