It’s Like Being Friends…with Audio

Sometimes you come across an interesting service that seems useful, but you aren’t exactly sure what to do with it.

Well, that’s the situation that I’m in with AudioPal.com. My previous post (if you linked here from somewhere, you can go to the main page at www.techeap.com to see both posts) shows you what this service is.

You go to AudioPal.com, call a toll-free line, enter a personalized code, and record a message. You give them an e-mail address to send the code to link it to your website. It also offers integration with many blogging services, including this one at WordPress.com. This makes it pretty convenient to add it to your site.

The drawback is that it only offer :60 of recording time. That really isn’t very much to do anything that amazing. I could see doing a contest or giveaway using a system like this. However, if you had a decent microphone at home, you could probably record something with better quality by yourself.

The site is very easy to use, and I’m impressed that they are offering this for free. This is serving as a way to market their other site at Sitepal.com. There you can get speaking avatars to talk to people logging in to a web site at a variety of different price points.

Now I’m left with an interesting service with which I can’t figure out any useful things to do.

Do you have any ideas? Let me know in the comments.

The Redbox of Doom

It’s the cheapest legal way I know of to see one new DVD release and this, if you take their word on the subject, means doom for the movie industry.

In my area, it’s called Redbox, but other similar companies include DVDPlay, Moviecube and DVDXpress. The idea is that you pick a movie from the machine, put in your credit card and out pops a DVD. You are charged a low amount (usually $1) each day that you have it out. If you lose it, you are charged $25 for not returning it and that’s the end of the transaction.

These machines usually pop out around grocery stores and pharmacies, which are very happy to have people coming back to them every day with a chance of picking up a few extra items.

The machines make money because there is very little overhead and increasingly they are able to get DVDs at wholesale cost, so it takes very few rentals to make a profit. Finally, some of the owners of the machines sell the DVDs as used after they’ve been rented out for a while, so they make money on both ends of the arrangement. Consumers pay much less for renting the DVDs than they would from a rental store and much less for buying a used DVD then they would pay for it as new.

Of course, as the New York Times reports, not everyone is happy with this arrangement. 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Brothers are refusing to sell DVDs to Redbox until 28 days after a DVD has been released. The thinking goes that who will pay full price to buy a DVD or rent it from the cable company with the markup that they charge when they can get it from Redbox for a dollar.

Sony, who is one of the companies that has signed a deal with Redbox, got them to agree not to sell their DVDs as used and instead the destroy the DVDs after they left the boxes. This is probably one of the best solutions for both sides, as DVD rentals can still happen at a reasonable rate, but the movie companies won’t cannibalize sales of their DVDs.

It will be interesting to see the development of this market as Blockbuster plans to enter the market with their own line of kiosks.

Have you used these kiosks? Are they in your area? Let me know in the comments.

Yale and Berkeley at a Techeap Price

I loved getting my college education, however, I did not love (and still don’t love) paying the bills for it. So what’s a good way to get some of the benefits of a college education without cashing out for thousands of dollars?

On-line lecture series. (Isn’t it interesting that the plural of series is series? No? OK, then.)

There are a variety of sources to get on-line lectures, with the most obvious being at Youtube. My favorite, however, is AcademicEarth.org. The site is very well-designed and easy to navigate. You can search for a particular topic you are interested in, or browse through a series of different subject areas, schools, or professors.

The most impressive part of the site is the quality of the instruction. Professors from Yale, Berkeley, MIT and more have entire courses available for you to listen to or watch.

This is where another great design move pays off. They have RSS feeds of the lectures in both video and audio format. You can just pop them into your everyday RSS reader and just pull off the next lecture as you finish the previous one. The organization is stellar and I found a breeze to get through the technical part of using the site to the actual content.

I listened to the class on economic game theory from Yale’s Benjamin Polak, and was very impressed. How much you get out of the class. of course, depends on what you put in. I did not, however, buy the books or do any out of lecture reading assignments. I basically just listened to the lectures and thought about them during the day.

I found an amazing amount of applicability to this particular class in my every day life, though. For example, there was a leak in the ceiling of my apartment.  I would call the superintendent every couple of days to see that it would get fixed. For weeks this went on and nothing happened. It was only when I started calling and visiting his family every day, or to use the economic terms, when I added costs to the delay of fixing my ceiling and improved his payoffs, that he actually came to fix it.

While this is a pretty simple example, if you decided to listen to this particular course,  I think you’ll find a lot of application in your life like I did. It is pretty friendly to people who are uncomfortable with math. There isn’t a lot of it in the course, and in the lectures, you can safely ignore or skip over the sections that deal with the theory behind the examples.

So for a college experience that may not be so different from what many graduates actually did in college, check out AcademicEarth.org.

If you have any great sites for learning or education, just throw them in the comments.

Write Rightly

I’ve been thinking about my writing on this blog lately and wondering if I’ve been writing on appropriate level. My goal is to write clearly that a person not into technology in general can get something out of any given post if the topic is of interest to them. However, I also want those who follow the field, who I suspect are at least a good portion of readers here, to not be bored.

I wondered if there is any (free, of course) way to objectify some of these goals. At about that time, I found an interesting list of writing tools for bloggers and other writers at a publication I wasn’t familiar with, Smashing Magazine.

One that seemed of particular interest to me was Advanced Text analysis. Back when I used Windows ‘95 (Yikes!) and Microsoft Works (Double Yikes!), one of the features that I liked was a readability grade. It gave you an idea of how complicated a text was by analyzing how many long and multi-syllabic words were used in your document.

The folks at UsingEnglish.com are giving you that tool and many others, but most of them require that you be registered.

Here are some of the results of the analysis of my last 10 blog posts.

Readability:

	Overall	Sampled	Calculated Grading
Hard Words:	538	13
Long Words:	1,046	21
Lexical Density:	26.56 %	68.91 %
Gunning Fog Index:	12.38	12.30	Hard
Coleman-Liau Grade:	17.85	9.29	9th Grade
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level:	9.40	8.31	8th Grade (3 years)
Flesch Reading Ease:	64.06	70.82	Fairly Easy: 6th Grade
ARI (Automated Readability Index):	15.69	8.55	8th Grade
SMOG:	11.03	11.06	11 Years (Some high school)
LIX (Laesbarhedsindex):	40.91	37.48	Standard

In some ways, I’m happy to see that my writing is not too complicated, but it seems that I might consider upping the bar a little bit. As a point of reference this article describes the writing level of various publications.

The thing that really struck me though were the values of different words used.

General:

	Overall	Sampled
Characters (all):	29,174	641
Characters (words only):	22,988	507
Words:	5,106	119
Different Words:	1,356	82

With over 5,000 words generated, I had only used 1,356 total words. That’s a pretty staggering figure to me. It may mean I need to vary my word choice a little more, or that I should talk about some different topics.

This is really only the beginning of the analysis on the site, and you can find lots of interesting and frankly not so interesting pieces of data about your writing.

Hopefully, you won’t find this analysis too self-indulgent, but if you are fellow or blogger or doing writing somewhere else in your life, it might be worthwhile to put your text through the analyzer and see what you get.

If you find some interesting results, let me know in the comments.

Grammar Rules for Twitter (Eventually)

Since it’s been almost two months since I’ve talked about microblogging site Twitter, I suppose it is time to go to the old war horse again. This time I want to discuss the language and grammar of Twitter and how with the help of a new non-profit could actually become codified.

On the Get Satisfaction message boards for Twitter I had posted a call for a Twitter grammar guide, or at least some official guidelines from the company. After a couple of bumps to get the subject noticed a friendly fellow user added what she had done as a presentation for work to get her company on board with Twitter. While it was a nice gesture and I agree with her conclusions, it lacked the official response for which I was hoping.

To quote her response here:

“I made this for a presentation at work:

Twitter = Platform
Twit = One who Tweets
Tweet = What the Twit is doing
Tweeps = Your favorite Twits
Tweeted = What the Twit did

“A twit is one who tweets on Twitter with their Tweeps” “

While I’m not very keen on Twit being someone who Tweets, the logical alternatives I’ve come up with aren’t very good either. (Twitterer? Tweeter? Twitter user?)

It is worth mentioning that this is not merely a semantic exercise as you can see how the grammar of Twitter can lead to embarrassment in this Stephen Colbert appearance on Today.

So what will save us from this grammatical abyss? A wiki, of course. The Microsyntax organization is hoping to solve these issues with their new wiki at http://microsyntax.pbworks.com/.  This wiki is a bit different from something like Wikipedia in that they are hoping that discussion will take place in the background before edits of people’s pages are done. I fear that this model may stifle the growth of the page, as I wonder how many people are going to be interested in doing the work necessary to succeed in “identifying, researching and finding consensus on information syntax.”

I do wish them luck, though and since they did get a posting about the effort on TechCrunch that may go a long way in getting them the attention they need to make this a success.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments and if you want to follow me, I’m @dustin_gervais on the site.

Some of the Surprising Results of Content Piracy

Content piracy is a very controversial topic, and as a blogger focused on getting stuff on the cheap, it seem like an appropriate area to look at and discuss. As I suspect most people are deep down, I am generally anti-piracy. I feel that intellectual property is a meaningful term, and that content creators should be able to market their wares for some value in order to create additional content. I do acknowledge that industry forces put a stranglehold on some content and put it at prices that are not sustainable in the marketplace.

My solution to that problem thus far has been to simply ignore that content, but there are many out there who fell justified to in a Robin-Hood-like mentality of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Of course, there are other who simply feel that digital content should be free to sample and if you want to support a creator than you simply give them money directly in various ways.

I see value in both arguments, and I’m clearly not here to solve this issue today. Today, I want to talk about a couple of the interesting results of piracy and what effect it has a content creation and consumption. (I discuss torrents below, which are one of the most popular methods of content piracy) to find out more about this technology, check out this About.com tutorial.)

Slashdot had a very interesting post by a former indie-music producer who argues that The Pirate Bay (the most popular torrent tracker) hosting actually strengthens  the hegemony of the music industry. That is to say, piracy actually keep big industry content popular. I have heard arguments that content piracy is the best thing for independent artists because it gets more people to consume their content, but do these statistics prove the contrary. It is a difficult question, and I hope you check out the argument for more details.

One other interesting aspect of this discussion is the use of language by each side to describe its habits. Those who are using unauthorized content first called themselves file-sharers, casting themselves in a benevolent light. Then, the content industry labeled these people as pirates evoking greedy thieves, but this move backfired in the sense that these users took back the term to cast it in the positive ‘Disney-fied’ pirates as romantic, swashbuckling heroes. Things like The Pirate Bay and torrents (by definition, a turbulent, swift-flowing stream) evoke this romantic sense of the terminology. I look forward to seeing what the next volley in the language war will be.

As always, feel free to leave your thoughts on the topic in the comments.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note. Since one of my most popular stories last year was on the announcement by Apple of their by a computer get an iPod deal for students and educators, I wanted to mention that it has begun again this year. You can check out the details here.

Wikipedia Is Not a Valid Source (Except When I Have To Look Something Up)

Wikipedia is a cluster of contradictions. It’s a site that nobody takes seriously, but everyone refers to. It’s a compendium of knowledge of the world, but has more information about Star Trek than particle physics. It’s written in most part by non-experts (at least in the academic sense of the word) but is understood to have significant content.

A couple of events in recent days has brought this resource to mind. The first is the story of French composer Maurice Jarre. After dying in late March, inevitably the obituaries by newspapers around the world came out. During the interim, according to a report from the Irish Times and substantiated by other news sources, a senior at University College Dublin named Shane Fitzgerald fabricated a quote for Jarre and inserted it into his Wikipedia profile.

In Wikipedia’s defense, the quote was removed after no source was attributed to it. However, Fitzgerald kept simply reinserting it until it remained up there for over 24 hours. At this point, several newspapers including The Guardian and the Daily Mail used the inaccurate quote. The Guardian subsequently issued a correction when Fitzgerald alerted them to the fact that he had fabricated the quotation.

One of the interesting facts about this case is that it demonstrates that Wikipedia is a source of biographical information for many journalists. While many outlets might be in a position to check that information before publication, some clearly do not, or just do not do it every time.

However, one of the more interesting things to take away from this is that under more normal circumstances (i.e. this hoax hadn’t been revealed) this quote would have a verifiable source and would then be worthy of inclusion into Wikipedia. For each hoax that has been revealed, it would be fascinating to know how many have not. One should note that there have been studies that indicate that Wikipedia is actually more accurate in certain areas than even the esteemed Encyclopedia Britannica, although some people, Britannica in particular, have claimed that at least one of those studies was fundamentally flawed.

Speaking of Encyclopedia Britannica as a blogger, I am given access to the content of the online site there for free. (This is actually the second reason I have encyclopedia content on my mind, since I had to renew my account this week.) However, I find myself using it exceedingly rarely. Why is that? I’m not exactly sure, but I think the primary reason is that I have to go through the trouble of logging in to the site before I can access the content. Concurrently, I also assume that its content of pop culture content is not up to snuff, so that when I want to look up something about Star Trek, as opposed to particle physics, I believe that Wikipedia will have better content. This combined with the impressive presence that Wikipedia articles have on Google searches means that I rarely ever use my Britannica account.

Another important aspect of this is that most of the Wikipedia’s work is done by people who are not paid. Volunteer who work on the site for the sheer enjoyment of it. I’m pretty confident that there are exceedingly few Britannica volunteer, so how does an online encyclopedia compete on this business model? That’s a question I’ll have to leave unanswered for now…unless it is on Wikipedia.

Newspapers and Too Little Black Ink

As the Boston Globe continues its frenzied negotiation to continue operating with the New York Times Company (Stock Symbol: NYT), the entire industry is in a state of flux. What’s the problem? As with many things in the digital age, it is too expensive to create physical objects to disseminate information, but people are very hesitant to pay for information that they can get elsewhere for free.

The most recent example of this is the folding of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Recently, there have been efforts underway by the staff of the newspaper to move the journalists to a digital format called InDenverTimes.com. After initially announcing that they wanted to obtain 50,000 premium subscribers for their venture, (note that this was at a newspaper that had a circulation at just over 200,000, so they needed a conversion rate of about 25%) they announced they were only able to obtain 3,000.

At this point the venture decided to downsize their operations, from what Poynter cited as 31 newsroom staffers and 18 contributors to a staff of 2 and no contributors. It is interesting that they have one staffer on “News/Business” and another on “Sports,” a noteworthy division of labor by itself. As the folks at Poynter point out, the previous line up was most certainly overly ambitious for what amounts to a start-up media venture. One might also notice on visiting the site is the lack of advertising. While there is an e-mail link to the advertising department at the bottom, nothing has come to fruition on the site yet.

As mentioned earlier, the industry as a whole is suffering tremendously and there are several factors, some obvious and some less so. The Internet is obviously a key component, but John C. Dvorak, a technology expert, and Marketwatch.com columnist, has an interesting argument that newspapers have become too flowery and aren’t doing enough local news. Given the pared down nature of the InDenverTimes, he might be a fan of simply having a news/business reporter and a sports reporter as the staff.

I believe that another important factor is simply a case of supply and demand. It is expensive and time-consuming to do actual reporting, while it is relatively cheap to do something like what I do. Basically, I just re-write and re-organize content that is already out there. In fact, it is so easy that there are many people (like me) who are willing to do this for free. This is where I think the enterprise of journalism is in the most trouble. There are enough people to do things that appear close enough to journalism to the average reader for free that the value derived from the customer for that information is cheapened to the point where it becomes not economically viable to create content.

I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and I acknowledge that I may, in fact, be wrong. However, I’ll leave you with one final question, how much are you willing to pay for news content today? Whatever the answer, the newspaper industry thinks it is not enough.

The Susan Boyle Phenomenon

On the off chance you’ve gotten to this website (which means you must be on the Internet) and you haven’t heard of Susan Boyle, here’s the synopsis.

47-year-old Susan Boyle of Blackburn, West Lothlian, Scotland came to a reality show called Britain’s Got Talent, a program not unlike NBC’s America’s Got Talent. Before performing she has a somewhat awkward exchange with the judges and the audience seems ready to start heckling her. Then, she begins her performance and the audience and judges are stunned by its quality.

You can watch it yourself here, as has been done over 30 million times already.

There are a couple of interesting things at work here, but I’m mainly going to focus on the viral nature of this video. I originally found out about it myself using an interesting function on Twitter’s search website. One of the elements here is trending topics. This is a list of items that have been tweeted about most. Oftentimes, the items here are not very interesting or useful, but sometimes developing news stories will become trends, and these are sometimes worth checking out.

Anyway, one of the trends was Susan Boyle, not knowing who she was I clicked on it and saw many people tweeting on the merits of her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Incorrectly in retrospect, I had assumed she was some new starlet that I didn’t particularly care about. Since I’m not a fan of reality TV performance competitions, I dismissed the whole thing and went on my way. Later, however, I saw a bit of her performance on the CBS Early Show, which led to significant discussion at my workplace, not the least of which was her considerably-not-starlet-like appearance.

At this point, I actually watched the video myself and saw what my colleagues were all talking about. It is a masterful production from a technical standpoint. The viewer is really set-up to believe that this will be a William Hung type moment, but it turns out to be something completly different. Her story has really resonated, though, as she has appeared on all of the major network morning shows and there seems to be a lot of momentum for following the rest of her competition on the program.

The interesting part of the viral nature of this video is that the inevitable result of news reports on Susan Boyle is that people who search on the Internet to see the entire video. This causes folks to end up on the Youtube version of the performance, as opposed to the inferior version on the Britain’s Got Talent website. The video has been uploaded by a user called BritainsSoTalented, so it’s hard to tell conclusively if this is an official release or an unauthorized upload. In any case, it goes to show how difficult it is to now control where content is going to go after it has been created.

So when you go to watch this video, think back to how you originally found out about, and how different that process is then even a few years ago.

Data Security and Everyone Else

This time I want to talk about the people on the other end of data security, that is, those people who want to surreptitiously get a hold of your data.

Sometimes it is the bad guys  who want to get a hold of your data, but also sometimes it is the good guys, the government. However, just because the government is trying to do their job in protecting us doesn’t mean that people necessarily have to give up the right to privacy. NetworkWorld has a very interesting entry on an effort by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It’s called Surveillance Self-Defense and it serves as a very interesting primer for understanding how and what the (American) government is allowed to do in terms of obtaining your data in a covert fashion.

Reading through the website offers a couple of very interesting revelations. {Bracketed material added by the write for clarification.}

1. The Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches whether or not you are a citizen. In particular, the exclusionary rule {which bars evidence obtained in an illegal search from being used in a court of law] applies to all criminal defendants, including non-citizens. However, the exclusionary rule does not apply in immigration hearings, meaning that the government may introduce evidence from an illegal search or seizure in those proceedings.

2. {Once the government has received a “pen/trap order,” which only requires that the material they expect to obtain would be relevant to their investigation” they have the ability to get…}All email header information other than the subject line, including the email addresses of the people to whom you send email, the email addresses of people that send to you, the time each email is sent or received, and the size of each email that is sent or received. Your IP (Internet Protocol) address and the IP address of other computers on the Internet that you exchange information with, with time stamp and size information.

These items alone are very interesting things that I didn’t know. At some points, the EFF’s arguments can border on the paranoid, especially when they start to speculate on what government agencies could be doing with the information that is gathered, but the factual material they discuss is very useful and thought provoking.

Just knowing the IP addresses of computers that your computer is communicating with contains a lot of information that in the wrong hands could be very telling. There are those that argue that if one has not done anything wrong then there is nothing to worry about, but from my perspective given human imperfections, to err on the side of protecting privacy when information can be obtained in  other ways. This is, of course, not to say that government should not use the tools at their disposal, but I think it is wise for there to be appropriate oversight on how those tools are used.

I recommend looking at the EFF’s article and picking up a few things about how surveillance works, both from government, and from a technical perspective on how the actual data collection occurs.