New York magazine has one of the most incredible real estate stories I think I’ve ever read: the story of 190 Bowery, a stately old brownstone bank building with six floors and 72 rooms, right at the corner of Spring Street. It looks abandoned from the outside, but not inside — photographer and artist Jay Maisel lives there with his wife and daughter. The Maisel family have been the only occupants of this 35,000 square-foot building since Jay bought it in 1966 for just $102,000. They live on several floors, cook in the old bank kitchen, and Maisel has turned several floors into a gallery for his work (he stores the rest of it in the old bank vault). The estimated value of the building now? Anywhere from $30-million to $70-million.
(hat tip to Kottke for the link)
Google Phone: A mobile Amazon music store?
Update:
An Amazon music store app on the Google Phone has been confirmed at the launch of the first phone by T-Mobile, the “G1”. The only downside that I can see is that while you can browse and listen to songs on the 3G network, you can only download them to the device over Wi-Fi. Not sure why that is, but it sounds like a real pain in the ass.
Original post:
As the speculation about the launch of the first Google Phone tomorrow continues to ramp up, one of the first reports that I’ve come across that makes me a little excited is the news from MG Siegler over at VentureBeat that the device could be equipped with a mobile client for Amazon’s music store (the other piece of interesting speculation is that T-Mobile might offer free email). Like MG, I think that an Amazon store app — although still just a rumour — makes perfect sense as something to add value to the phone and make it more competitive with the iPhone.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m interested in the Google Phone launch for other reasons, including the fact that I like the idea of the iPhone having an open-source competitor, and I’m hoping that means all kinds of cool apps developed by third parties. But in terms of features, the Sidekick-style HTC device that everyone has been showing photos of doesn’t exactly fill me with lust, if you know what I mean. I’ve used Sidekicks, and other devices with similar slide-up keyboards, and for the most part they were bricks. Useful bricks, but more or less still bricks.
Add an easy pay-and-download music app connected to the Amazon store, however, and the Google Phone becomes a lot more interesting. Amazon’s store hasn’t really gotten a lot of traction as a result of the dominance of iTunes, but a mobile interface that works would be a great way to expose more people to a store that doesn’t have any DRM on its files — which play on any device — and has a growing catalogue at relatively inexpensive prices. An iTunes-killer it might not be, but it would be good to see at least a little more competition for Apple on that front.
PlanetEye gets a makeover
I’ve been remiss in not mentioning a big event in the life of a friend — namely, my fellow mesh conference organizer and former journalistic colleague Mark Evans. Now the director of community at Web 2.0 travel site PlanetEye, Mark and the rest of the team have relaunched the site with a new design and some new (or enhanced) features. I thought the original PlanetEye was pretty nifty, and the redesign — done by the gang at Happy Cog, who also do work for WordPress — makes it even easier to navigate and create the “Travel Packs” that are the core of the PlanetEye experience, which consist of photos, maps, reviews and other content related to your trip.
I also like the featured Travel Packs, which Mark and CEO Butch Langlois and others have put together, such as the “10 Places To See Before You’re 10” pack, and the fact that many destinations have comments and reviews from experienced local writers. The only quibble I have is that when you type a location in the search bar that the site doesn’t have a page for yet — such as Thailand — all you get are listings for Thai restaurants. It might help to have a landing page with a “write your own review of Thailand” pitch, or some aggregated content as a starting point. Those quibbles aside, however, the site looks and works great, and if I could afford to actually go anywhere, I would be more than happy to take advantage of it 🙂
For more reviews of PlanetEye’s relaunch, check out the posts by Mashable’s Kristen Nicole, Read/WriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois and Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch. Mark has his own take on it here, and CEO Langlois has some thoughts on it at the PlanetEye blog.
Google launches new book widgets
Google has announced new Google Book Search browsable widgets, as well as partnerships with retailers such as Books-A-Million and other booksellers that will see the “browse inside this book” feature added to their reviews and book pages, and also allow virtually anyone with a website to embed a Google book reader widget.
In addition to Books-A-Million, the company says that previews will be available soon at Borders and Buy.com, and that thousands of books will also be available for preview directly from the online library catalogues at both the University of Texas and the University of California. The new browsable widgets have also been incorporated into the websites of book publishers such as O’Reilly, Macmillan and Stanford University Press.
Of course, what the Google press release (or blog post) doesn’t mention is that millions of books aren’t available for preview through its Book Search widget because its book-scanning project continues to be the subject of multiple lawsuits and threats of legal action from book publishers, author groups and so on (Google’s response to those criticisms is here). And when it comes to non-Google book-browsing options, Amazon has its Ajax-powered online reader, while HarperCollins and Random House Publishing both have their own versions of a browsable book-search widgets.
slotMusic: the new 8-track tape?
You have to give SanDisk some credit for trying, I suppose. Just about everyone else — including the four major record labels — seems to have given up on the business of selling actual physical copies of music. Why? Because it’s a crappy business, that’s why. The days of fat profit margins on compact discs are long gone, thanks in part to iTunes. But SanDisk is giving it the old college try anyway, with its “slotMusic” venture, which involves buying a 1-gigabyte microSD card with music, photos and other content on it, which you can jam into your phone or your PC (with an adapter).
My hunch is that my friend Om Malik is probably right — this thing seems to have fail written all over it (TechCrunch is similarly unimpressed). The company makes a big deal out of how much space there is on the microSD card compared to a compact disc, but are people really crying out for more ephemera with their music? I think if anything they seem to want less. Then there’s the form factor. Can you stick it in your phone? Sure you can. But what about when you have more than one?
We may die, but the Web lives on
My friend Ethan Kaplan over at blackrimglasses has a fascinating post about the death of a geek — a man named Mark Hoekstra — and the strange feeling that is created by seeing his blog posts, Flickr photos, Last.fm contributions and other elements of his online life floating around in the ether after his death (just 34 years old, he apparently died suddenly of a heart attack while riding his bicycle). As Ethan says:
Bored? Read some comment fiction
There are plenty of reasons to read the comment sections of various blogs: to get different points of view on a topic, to spot other bloggers who might be worth reading, and so on. In some cases, the comments on posts are even better than the posts themselves, as bloggers such as Fred Wilson and Mike Arrington (and even me) have noted in the past. And then there are the times when comments take a left turn into the totally bizarre — like, say, the comments on a recent blog post at the website of The Stranger, the alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle.
The first few comments are typical, talking about video games (the topic of the post), and then it appears: a comment that says “The world premiere of Blog Theatre. Please give a warm applause for this evenings production of George Washington.” What follows is the text of what appears to be an absurd play, with different commenters playing roles in the investigation of the death of someone named George Washington, a 12-year-old billionaire drug addict. The comments come one or two a minute until comment number 314, which says the play has reached its halfway point.
Yes, Ludacris will sing about your jeans
Eliot Van Buskirk over at Wired magazine’s Listening Post blog has the hilarious tale of an advertising email gone astray: the missive in question came from one Adam Kluger of The Kluger Agency (or, according to Mr. Kluger, from an over-eager minion of his), and it offered a company called Double Happiness Jeans the opportunity to have their product name appear in the lyrics of a popular song, sung by “one of the world’s most famous recording artists.” Two problems with that: Double Happiness Jeans is an art project involving the virtual world Second Life, and — last but not least — it is also part of something called The Anti-Advertising Agency, run by Jeff Crouse and Steve Lambert.
Not the most auspicious person to contact for something that even relatively pro-advertising music fans might see as an abomination, but Mr. Kluger sees as “the opportunity of a lifetime.” Rather than dismiss his email, however, Crouse responds enthusiastically:
Microsoft gets the ad thing right
Okay, so maybe the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads were designed to soften up the market by letting people get out all their pent-up anti-Microsoft emotions, so that the newer ads would seem better by comparison (sort of a scapegoat strategy). Or maybe they were just a total screwup and someone thought better of them. Whatever the case may be, the new one I just watched is light-years better (and I was one of the few who actually liked the Seinfeld ones, along with Mike Masnick at Techdirt). It’s understated, it’s human, it’s international in flavour and it has some touching moments as well. All in all, pretty well done, I think.
eBay selling Stumbleupon? Not surprised
According to TechCrunch, eBay is looking to unload Stumbleupon, the “crowd-sourcing” Web recommendation engine that the online retailer bought last year for $75-million. Mike Arrington says that reputable sources have told him the company is for sale. I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Not because Stumbleupon isn’t an attractive asset (although whether it was worth $75-million is a different question entirely) but because it never made any sense as part of eBay in the first place. When the rumours of an acquisition first surfaced in April of last year, I said that I didn’t really get it, and despite the attempts by many people to justify the deal since it happened, it has never made much sense to me, and still doesn’t. Combine that with talk of layoffs at eBay in the near future and a sale seems fairly plausible.
Zuckerberg worth $1.5-billion — or not
It’s bad enough that people pay any attention to Forbes magazine’s pathetic “my portfolio is bigger than your portfolio” list of rich people, but at least most of the people on the list have actual assets that can be measured in some objective fashion — i.e., by stock-market value. But young Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, manages to get on the list at #321 with what Forbes calls a “net worth” of $1.5-billion, which is apparently based on little more than someone hitting a few numbers on a calculator. But hey, it makes for a great headline, right?
Is Facebook worth $15-billion? Not in any real sense of the word. Yes, it’s true that Microsoft paid $240-million for 1.6 per cent of the company, which theoretically values the entire company at $15-billion. But the key word there is “theoretically.” There’s about as much chance of someone buying Facebook for $15-billion as there is of me flying to the moon. In real terms, Mark Zuckerberg is worth something functionally equivalent to zero. I’d love to see him walk into a bank with a copy of the Forbes magazine list and try to get a loan for a couple of hundred million or so.
J-school student told not to blog about class
A few weeks ago, I came across a guest post at the MediaShift blog at PBS, in which Alana Taylor — a journalism student at New York University who also writes for the blog Mashable — talked about how disappointed she was with her classes at the university, and how “old thinking” permeated the school. Among other things, she mentioned that she was the only class member who had a blog, and that her teacher was encouraging students to think primarily about getting jobs at newspapers, and that the general sense at the school was that working online wasn’t a viable career choice.
It wasn’t a uniformly negative piece, nor was it solely about Taylor’s teacher — about whom she said some nice things as well, including the fact that she at least knew that blogging could be a paying job, and could lead to “real” journalism jobs. And it didn’t say much about the other students in the class, apart from some comments that a fellow classmate made after Alana asked her what she thought about the class during a break. That’s clearly not how her teacher saw it, however: according to an update by Mark Glaser at MediaShift, the NYU instructor called Taylor into her office and told her not to blog, Twitter or otherwise write about the class.
Continue reading “J-school student told not to blog about class”
Google: And then, we annex Sealand!
There was much chatter recently about a patent application that Google filed for a series of floating, offshore data centres, which would use wave energy to help defray some of the power costs required by the massive server clusters that Skynet, er… Google needs to function. Anchored seven miles or more offshore, the centres would also be outside territorial waters and therefore tax-free. My friend Om Malik says this idea isn’t unique to Google: a startup called International Data Security is working on a similar plan, although it proposes to use decommissioned ships docked in various harbours and served by fibre lines and high-speed microwave links.
Floating power centres would raise all kinds of issues, however, including — as one wag at Slashdot mentioned — the risk of Microsoft investing in a fleet of attack submarines, not to mention having to deal with the effect of salty sea water and humidity. More than anything, Google’s plan reminded me of Sealand, a former World War II sea fort anchored off the coast of England that was the subject of an ambitious (possibly even ridiculous) plan in the early 1990s to create an offshore data haven, with a server cluster suspended inside the legs of the structure.
Can you say The Streisand Effect?
I was flipping through my feed reader today, when I came across a post at BoingBoing about some funny doctored photos of kids at a science fair. You may have seen some of the same ones here and there around the Internet: there’s a girl holding a giant clip from a set of jumper cables in front of a cardboard setup that says “Electricity vs. Cat,” and another kid with a ’70s shirt and a bowl haircut in front of a board with a large hole and two nearby electrical wires that says “12-volt Sex Robot.” They are hilarious. Unless, of course, you are the kid in the ’70s shirt and the bowl haircut. Then, apparently, they are salt rubbed in a very raw wound that was created 30 years ago at the high-school science fair.
The BoingBoing post doesn’t have any photos any more. At first, it had photos but the faces were blurred, and there was no link to the site they came from, because Mark Frauenfelder said that he was concerned that they were real photos of real kids. Then he got a comment — not from one of the kids, or one of the parents of one of the kids, but from the kid in the bowl haircut, or rather the adult who used to be the kid. He said:
So this one time, at Bandcamp…
Longtime readers of this site will know that I have a fascination with the way that the music industry is being transformed by the Web, much like other content-related industries (such as the one I work in), and how artists such as Trent Reznor and Girl Talk are dealing with that transformation. In addition to those experiments, we’ve seen a number of Web services and companies launch to try and help musicians evolve, from Topspin Media, which was founded by former Winamp and Yahoo Music exec Ian Rogers, to RCRD LBL, which was started by Engadget founder Peter Rojas.
Now, Andy “Waxy” Baio brings news of another startup aiming to fill that void and make it easier for artists to connect directly with (and sell directly to) their fans. It’s called Bandcamp (great name) and was co-founded by Ethan Diamond, one of the founders of Oddpost. For those who may not recall, Oddpost was one of the first Ajax-powered Web apps, and offered a desktop-style interface to Webmail long before Google’s Gmail came along, and was eventually bought by Yahoo. Andy has a great interview with Ethan about what he is trying to do with Bandcamp.