Somebody should get canned.  This is another Mark Cuban inspired post, he just blasted the lack of journalism and how TV is losing ground fast to the internet.  He says its lack of investigation and inability to find a persona that resonates with viewers.  I think that's part of it, but I think the real problem is the decision makers look at the ratings the wrong way.  Look at the graph above.  It's pretty obvious whats going on.  Now imagine that in each year, the highpoint in ratings comes from some catastrophe like Katrina or the Tsunami that they ride on for a week or two.  So they spend all year looking for these catastrophes, and publicizing miniature ones in the hope of getting people interested.  But people don't care, so they watch less and less, because it is less and less relevant.

Everytime I watch the evening news, I see lowest common denominator scare tactics.  YOUR ORANGE JUICE IS EATING YOUR SOUL!  TRIPLE HOMICIDE! etc. etc.  These features have little informative content beyond the headline, and don't help me to learn more about the things I actually care about.  If I ask you in the morning if you cared about a fight between four drug dealers in a seedy part of town, you'd say no.  Why should the answer be much different that night?  The headline tells it all, and I don't need to see their neighbors going on about it.  Give me something I care about.

Ok, enough bitching.  Jon Stewart has found something I care about.  Howard Stern, to a lesser extent, did too.  Politics seems to be the way to go.  And there is no other real avenue to get local politics.  Talk about the governor race in a way that makes sense, and covers the issues.  I don't want to see a debate between the candidates, they won't say anything.  Give me two supporters.  Give me a pundit.  Say something with content.  

And yeah, you can't do that every night.  But have a special on nearby universities, and which ones to consider, pros and cons.  Talk about things that I crave information about.  And don't make it sensational.  I can tell.

Give me something that I want to watch, and I will watch.  But I want info, I want in depth, I want more than I can see on the AP feed.  And I want it to really affect me, personally.  I want to leave your show and say, I'm glad I watched that.  Please. 

But do they offer any solutions? No, just bitch, steal, and mail a buck. I smell lots of guilty dollars sitting in peoples pockets who just did the first two steps.

1. Bitch
2. Steal
3. Profit!

I'll mail your damn dollars for you, and take a dime for the pleasure. So i'm gonna buy up a memorable domain, allow you to pay as few as five dollars, divvied up to as many artists as you like, and once that artist has 5$ saved up, they can have it. (The limits are to prevent credit card companies from burning me) If they never get 5$, or it takes too long, you can have it back.

If you want to code monkey for me, I'll give you 50% of everything.

You tell me, because I lost patience with this post. :)

• Handmade pies for twenty something bucks.  Whats wrong with the local bakery/farm stand etc?  No market, way too much cost for the payoff.
• Dollhouses.  Not only do girls spend less time playing dolls, but they can be had for cheaper over the internet.  Small market, too much expense (space).

As far as focus, I was talking to a guy from craigslist who had what he thought would be the king of all music sites.  The plan was to have buddy lists, dj'ing, collaborative editing, indie artists, and anything else that might come along.  But each of those needs a team of developers and the money to pay them.  So the project is stuck at square one with a cool prototype image.  If you pick one of the great ideas that is involved, and make it happen, instead of a jpg on your computer, you have last.fm, mercora, or pandora.  That is, money in the bank, and a name, and a way to get interested people involved.   

Colbert was in fact funny. Colbert did rip into the Bush administration. That's side one of the story. Side two is that Bush was funnier, and also ripped into the Bush administration. Liberal bias? Vast right wing conspiracy?

I look at this in a couple of ways.

• Because of the hype about Colbert and the internet viewing, people missed Bush's routine immediately beforehand. Also, many read the transcript instead of watching, which prevented them from seeing Colbert's painfully slow delivery. So to these people, Colbert was funny, and satirical. Compared to Bush though, he was sort-of funny, and only a little harsher than the man himself.
• The media are in fact lap dogs, and were incredibly worried about how harsh Colbert was to the president. This is why few laughed at Colbert's speech, and fewer still commented on it.  The people who organized this event clearly knew what Colbert is about, so they shouldn't have been surprised by a speech that repeated lines from his show verbatim.

I think the first option is closer to the truth. I'm a fan of Colbert, and not a fan of Bush, but I was feeling like a flipflop after watching them in action. Colbert was a schtick, and not particularly original. He rehashed comments from his show. His best jokes were clever, witty ones, not good hearty laugh inspiring.

All the talk about media bias is too generalized to get the point. It's not a left wing or right wing bias, its both biases interacting in complex ways. Al Franken's book 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them' looks at the issue in meticulous detail, coming to the conclusion that, although most of the foot soldiers of the media, the journalists, are left wing in their own thinking, the media's tone is set by the editors and producers, who are usually right wing. That doesn't mean that article's arent written leftish, it means they get corrected to the right. So if the conservative bias was in effect, the liberals would have been laughing at the dinner, and then not publishing after it. But nobody was laughing. Colbert just wasn't funny.

Like most popular votes, this one is crippled by three factors:

-time to vote

-time to understand choices

-inability to effect outcome

While I appreciate Mark's power to the people, vote or die attitude here, its not the solution. And if anything, it sounds more like a STFU to those who complain about poor corporate governance. I think something can be done beyond blindly hoping your pittance of votes can make a difference. Organize. Imagine a social responsibility brokerage house. Set up like e-trade, but in addition to market research on profit margins, it also includes social issues in its reports. That's easy, and probably already exists. The kicker is that you make all these people aware of the other people who aren't happy. You make voting the key feature of your brokerage. This is making money to make a difference. Every time a vote comes up, they tell you who to vote for, and how many people will be right there next to you. Even better, they could tell you which stocks are the most vulnerable to grass roots agitation, and encourage buys in those stocks. Make all aspects of making your voice heard available easily, and show people how they have made a difference and how they can help the most, and the world will listen.

The basic version should be released by this weekend.  Then I'm going to add facebook stalking features: find out instantly when your friends add pictures or change their relationship status.  Then after that I'm going to take over evites and calendars.  Then maybe I'll have enough people to convince Google or somebody to give me AdSense. 

First of all, the UN will get to go to bat first, and hopefully, they'll lay down some vicious sanctions. Second, Iran's stability is at risk because of that most powerful US export – culture. Iranian students are learning whats out there, and theyre not going to be satisfied with a country that forbids them so much of it. However, that will take time, and if Iran or the US put the pressure on too fast, it won't happen. I don't think that either country is in the position to bring that much pressure to bear. Iran is (hopefully) several years away from having an effective weapon, so they can't put too much bluster on the table. The US has many reasons not to pursue a violent course of action. We are already stretched thin in Iraq, and any attack on Iran would fully mobilize terrorist groups, which means either escalation of our troops, or evacuation. Neither one is appealing. Evacuation may be our best option, though. We can stop Iran's nuclear development, let the region battle it out, and CIA-back the one we want to come out on top. Doves will be happy our troops are out, neocons will know what we're actually doing, and that will be that.

The troops will pull out in September, to prepare for November elections and the January bombing campaign. Or they could do nothing until just before the Presidential elections, and pull out the troops then. Then the administration has about a year to get in and make it look good before it starts spoiling the next presidential candidate. However, I'm inclined to think they won't care, unless the democrats can bring some amount of political clout to bear on some issue.

So look to see one of two things happen: either UN sanctions, or a removal of troops for the elections and then a bombing campaign. My bet, and my hopes, are on UN sanctions.

• audio output
  • bluetooth headset
  • sound card – audiostix AC97[BRD00006] – includes out and in – might be able to just make the bluetooth do it
  • mp3 codecs
  • skype
• audio input
  • bluetooth headset
  • ?
• storage
  • ideally hard drive, but might be harder to connect
• visual capture
  • probably hack apart a camera
  • should be a separate device that transmits over bluetooth?
  • unobtrusive
• visual output
  • lcd screen, gumstix supports this well
• written input
  • actual keyboard or palm style graffiti
  • serial port
• mouse-type input
  • touchscreen – included with lcd
• internet and phone access
  • evdo – 60/mo, over PCMCIA card(50)
  • skype – ?/mo no need for dealing with wireless hardware

So the equipment -

• gumstix connex-bt 200~
• audiostix, maybe – 40
• bluetooth headset – 40
• storage – ?
• lcd screen – 200~
• camera – ?

Form factor should be small, dominated mostly by the lcd.

http://www.gumstix.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Display 

Imagine if MapQuest had done the same thing, harnessing their users to annotate maps and directions, adding layers
of value. It would have been much more difficult for competitors to enter the market just by licensing the base data.

Cool idea, right? But where do you start?

One way would be to allow users to adjust estimated travel time. If
MapQuest comes back with 45 minutes, and you know you always do it in 30, type in your estimate, press submit, and it goes into the
database. When enough get compiled, the user's average response is
displayed alongside the algorithmic one.

Another way would be to allow user submitted pictures of difficult
intersections, or landmarks to watch out for. Maybe even things to
check out nearby?

As far as implementation, itd be nice if you could get this service
to ride on somebody else who has already paid for the data. Query
MapQuest for the directions, and retrieve the annotations alongside it.

Users of AIM cannot send messages to receivers who don't have 'presence'. If the other user's internet connection goes down, or if they decide to leave the service, senders have no recourse within the AIM framework. For many users of the service, this can represent a time consuming or even impossible dilemma. Possible reasons for this include:

1. Lack of familiarity with other message software, such as email, icq, or msn. For many users, especially younger ones, AIM is the only service they understand.
2. Lack of contact information in other software. If a sender doesn't have the receiver's email address, the existence of email as an alternative is irrelevant.

Even for those who do have other software and the relevant info, switching to a different medium makes the AIM software less useful. It takes time to switch programs and enter the person's contanct info, and for the short messages that AIM is often used for, the sender will often give up.

My system creates a new, always-on screenname, that holds messages until the receiver is available. The sender can continue to use the same software, and needs only remember one additional piece of information – the screenname AIMSweringMachine. Furthermore, the system will register popular misspellings (this was misspelled mispellings before) of the name, in the style of domain parking, that will redirect to the correct name.

The system will be implemented in Perl, since it is lightweight, common, and has already existing AIM interfaces. There are three main components:

1. Parser/Receiver – When the bot receives IMs, it check if its formatted properly (send )
2. Buddy List Manager
3. Send Queue

-to be continued…