Month: March 2007

Our wedding gets mentioned in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal Online titled The Minutes of Our Lives, which looks at the growing phenomenon of liveblogging — that is, blogging about an event while at that event. It’s no longer unusual to see people liveblogging at tech conferences or events on live television, but some people are liveblogging things like their Thanksgiving dinner or the birth of their child. Twitter.com, where you can post ultra-short entries typically no longer than a sentence, even had a post made from a mobile phone at a funeral.

Jennifer Saranow, WSJ staff reporter and author of the article, has been in touch with me and my wife Wendy for the past couple of weeks. She contacted us after finding this article on our wedding blog by Wendy:

If you would like to blog our wedding, you may do so! But after the fact. We really want all the fun things to be a surprise. And we really, really don’t want you to bring your laptops to the wedding (JKB). We want you to pay undivided attention (Ethan, hee) to the ceremony and then have face-to-face exciting interactions – like dancing! (Erica, I know you don’t need to be asked twice) – during the reception. But after you leave, we’d be more than happy to have you blog about it. There are a lot of bloggers and readers whom we weren’t able to invite, and the more of a taste we as a group can offer them…well, it’d make me happy. We hope to post some photos soon after ourselves.

Here’s the snippet from the Wall Street Journal article that mentions us:

Hosts who want to ensure that guests focus on the festivities are responding with countermeasures. Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted “A Note To Other Bloggers” on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact. “I wanted them to pay attention and enjoy themselves and participate,” says Ms. Koslow, who came up with the idea for the embargo. “I wanted them to be in the moment.”

Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony. From his hotel room, he wrote, “the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway.” Rev. Adam says, “It was the thing that happened that day, so I wrote about it.”

My thanks to Jennifer Saranow for including me and Wendy in the story.

(And yes, George was at the wedding — he was my best man!)

I just recently got around to listening to Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, speak at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium (a “symposium?” Faaaancy). A lot of people made note of his comment that Apple’s sold 90 million iPods like it was news. In fact, Apple first posted that number when discussing their most recent quarterly results (Q1 F2007) in January 2007. Since we’re going into the final month of Q2 of the current fiscal year, and estimates have Apple selling between 10 and 12 million more iPods, I think we’ll see Apple’s cumulative iPod sales cross 100 million by the end of this month.

That’s 1, followed by eight zeros.

So what does 100,000,000 iPods mean? Well, over the course of the iPod’s life, Apple has sold:

18,181,818 iPods per year
1,666,667 iPods per month
353,357 iPods per week
50,352 iPods per day
2,098 iPods per hour
35 iPods per minute
1 iPod roughly every 2 seconds

On average, of course.

When Apple Inc. wanted to bring its series of “Mac vs. PC” ads to international markets, it faced a difficult issue: What’s funny in one culture can seem ill-mannered in another.

Here’s the shorter version of the WSJ article on how Apple’s adapted their “I’m a Mac…” ads for other countries:

People in Britain and Japan are different than they are here in America. In America, the Mac Guy is called “smug,” while in Britain, he’s called a “tosser.”

On the other hand, people in Britain and Japan are the same as they are here in America; there’s always some loudmouth who thinks I care about the fact that he doesn’t like the Mac Guy in the commercials.

While you were reading the Journal article, Apple sold another 160 iPods.

Source: Mac and PC’s Overseas Adventures – WSJ.com

Annalee “Techsploitation” Newitz, whom I met at the first CodeCon back in 2002, has written an article for Wired News about her successful attempt to buy Digg votes:

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!Once I had created a blog destined to be least popular in the ‘sphere, I opened a Digg account under a pseudonym. Then, at 8 Monday morning, I posted a story linking to the blog. My brilliant headline was, “Why Are People Fascinated By Photographs of Crowds?”

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That’s when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help “submitters” get Digg stories noticed by paying “users” to digg them. There’s a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn’t get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.)

User/Submitter has a pretty customer-friendly service. Shortly after paying them, Analee received an email telling her that her story was likely to get “buried”; they offered her a refund. She decided to go on, and amassed 40 diggs in about 10 hours. That was the tipping point: soon came the “organic” diggs and comments. “Overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror,” she wrote. It seems that to get a popular article, you have to have a popular article.

Links

• I Bought Votes on Digg (Wired News)
• User/Submitter

Can’t Buy Me Love

Twenty years before he would be known as “McDreamy” on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey starred in a better-than-average teen movie called Can’t Buy Me Love (produced under the unfortunate working title Boy Rents Girl). You can probably guess the plot from the title and poster: geeky guy attempts to become popular by paying the head cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend; hilarity (and later, a relationship) ensues.

FakeYourSpace

FakeYourSpace takes the Can’t Buy Me Love approach and applies it to social networking sites. Their service, which is supposed to become available today, lets you pick from their roster to “friends” with head-cheerleader-good-looks to pretend to be your friends on your MySpace, Facebook or Friendster page. For a mere 99 cents a month, these fake friends come with good looks (they’re photos of models) and will post comments on your pages.

Here’s some copy that was on their site earlier this week:

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall.

They ran into a little trouble recently: iStockPhoto.com, the source of the “friends'” photos, objected to their use of their models photos. Apparently there’s an agreement in the iStockPhoto.com license that states that the photos cannot be used in such a way to make people “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person for which they are being used. This News.com report says that FakeYourSpace founder Brant Walker was looking for alternate sources of model photos.

As of this writing, FakeYourSpace isn’t up and running. Going to their URL currently takes you to a GoDaddy “coming soon” domain parking page.

Links

• FakeYourSpace.com
• FakeYourSpace.com Lets You Buy Hot-Looking Friends (TechShout)
• FakeYourSpace.com: The Web Gets More Like Real Life (InformationWeek Weblog)