I’m pleased to offer this latest revision of the Web Video Cheat Sheet, a quick and dirty guide to sharing videos online. I’m in the process of compiling another report that examines a specific facet of the video sharing experience (more on that later). Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait to get this 61-site overview out there so folks can figure out the best place to host their most memorable (drunken) holiday moments.
AT&T: No Fiber to the Home
Well, we Wisconsinites subject to AT&T’s new monopoly can pound sand. No fiber for us…. Reuters:
“Our view at this point is that we’re not going to have go ‘fiber to the home.’ We’re pleased with the bandwidth that we’re seeing over copper,” Chief Financial Officer Richard Lindner told a Credit Suisse conference.
“On average, at this point, we’re producing about 25 megabits (per second). But in many many locations, we’re producing substantially more than that.”
Nice to see the status quo – standing still while the rest of the world moves on.
Search Wisconsin Political Blogs
WisOpinion. A good idea.
A New Goofy Short: “How to Install Your Home Theater”
It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story” and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”
Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.
I’ve long enjoyed short films. Clusty has more.
The Top 100 Red Wines of 2006
Books and the Future of Publishing
Michael Maiello and Michael Noer:
Are books in danger?
The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media–the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames–compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.
But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.
Revenge of the Garlic Farmers, or More Feeding at the Public Till
For decades, the fiercely independent fruit and vegetable growers of California, Florida and other states have been the only farmers in America who shunned federal subsidies, delivering produce to the tables of millions of Americans on their own.
But now, in the face of tough new competition primarily from China, even these proud groups are buckling. Produce farmers, their hands newly outstretched, have joined forces for the first time, forming a lobby group intended to pressure politicians over the farm bill to be debated in Congress in January.
Nobody disputes that competitive pressures from abroad are squeezing fruit and vegetable growers, whose garlic, broccoli, lettuce, strawberries and other products are a mainstay of world kitchens. But the issue of whether the United States ought to broaden farm subsidies beyond the commodity crops like corn and cotton, which have historically been protected, is a big flashpoint.
Greek Blue Cave Photo Gallery
These two beautiful arches are located near the Blue Caves at the north end of the Greek island of Zakynthos. Unfortunately the boat trip from the city of Zakynthos to the Blue Caves no longer visits these arches. Photo by Dimitris Raptis, who has a very nice web page about the island of Zakynthos.
Baseball & Innovation
Jeff Angus over at Management by Baseball sent me an intriguing update about Billy Bean’s approach to Moneyball. Bean is famous in the baseball world for developing quantitative techniques to help identify players that are underpaid by market standards and for developing a system that enables such “bargain” players to contribute to overall team performance. There are many signs that the system works, for example, Oakland’s cost per win in 2005 was $450,000 in salary, while the New York Yankees paid 1.4 million. The 2006 payrolls (when Oakland had a better season than the Yankees) were about 60 million for the A’s and about 200 million for the Yankees. Bean and his staff do impressive analysis to make decisions that gain them cost advantages and increase their odds of success. For example, they stay away for star players that are coming out of high school and prefer college graduates because only 5% of baseball players drafted straight out of high school are in the major leagues in three years, while 17% of college graduates that are drafted make it to the majors.
Beane watching is worthwhile…
Udell Chat with U of Michigan’s Wilkin regarding the Google Scanning Deal
My guest for this week’s podcast is John Wilkin. He’s the director of the University of Michigan Library’s technology department, and coordinator of the library’s joint digitization project with Google. It’s been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM’s earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all of us. …
The Google Library deals have been controversial (rightly so). The UW-Madison also has a deal with Google.