Heh.

(Look, if Glenn can do it, so can I).

I'm picky about valid HTML, and have been for a while.

But does Google share my sentiments?

am I?

Really, it's not a big deal if Apple doesn't pull something magical out of its hat for their 30th Anniversary.

It seems like a big deal to others, though.

I've always been an evangelist for cross-browser web development (with some pretty good results). So things like this don't bother me in the least.

but can it do infrared?

Yes, it can.

I've liked Apple's iBooks over the Powerbook/MacBook Pro line for a while now, but their limited screen resolution was always the one thing I wish I could change.

Wishes can come true.

Build a hidden passage in your next house.

I. Want. One.

No, not a contradiction.

I like this idea. A lot. Will the corporate world have enough lack of ego to allow the best ideas to bubble to the surface, though?

Application folders for OS X. Know what's in each folder at a glance.

Cool.

Don's post about two jugglers involved in a bit of, um, professional rivalry got me thinking about how we shooters work.

What we photographers see as challenging, and what the client thinks is difficult, can be two different things. Also, *why* we shoot is just as important as what or how we shoot.

How many times has a client dropped off a layout for a shot that they THINK is just a simple shot, "Shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to knock this out, right?", but when you see it, you call home and tell them you'll be late for dinner. Again.
It's part of our job as consulting professionals to increase our client's knowledge of what is and isn't a tough shot, without bragging about our mad skills. This'll pay off both in an increase in the perceived value for our work, as the client understands that it is work you do, and not just goofing with a camera (most of the time... :-) ), and it'll allow your clients to set reasonable deadlines and budgets, win-win scenarios for both of you.

And let's compare those two videos: The first was (apparently) less challenging for the juggler, but it was widely distributed on the internet and entertained a large live audience. Was it an over-the top display of juggling skill? No. Did it appeal to a wide market and entertain people? Oh yeah.
The second is probably a better display of the juggling arts. But it's done in a high school gym, it looks like, to a crowd of none and with little or no thought to appeal to anyone other than other jugglers. (Personally, I've always thought The Flying Karamozov Brothers were the cream of the crop as far as juggling. Their "jazz juggling" routine is... stunning.)
And that's something I've seen shooters do over and over again: We take the picture WE want to take, not the one that the client wanted. Sometimes, in the case of clueless clients, that's a good thing. Sometimes, it's not.

The question remains: Like juggling for other jugglers, do you take photos that appeal to other photographers, or take photos that appeal to your client?

but I do enjoy watching the occasional professional tennis match. To me, it's like ballroom dancing (or dancing of any kind...) : I can understand the amount of effort it takes to get to the top levels, but don't ask me to do it myself.

But somethings go beyond sport, and into life.

There are many different ways to win.

Buy a Mac.

It's "Continuous Partial Attention."

Excuse me, I have some email to answer while I surf the 'net.

While I don't remember working with this guy, his style seems very, very familiar...

The only thing worse than having clients like him is not having clients at all.

I'm not gonna gloat... The hell I'm not! :-)
(With apologizes to The Duke.)

Windows Vista delayed yet again.

Netvibes, my defacto home page, has rounded up a bunch of VC capital.

Good for them.

Okay, so this was a little too much for my birthday...

Maybe this is more our price range...

And they didn't even need the internet to do it. (Quicktime req'd.)

The horror. The horror.

Ok, so a lot of this Pinko Marketing Manifesto is nothing but the marketing speak it claims to reject.

But.

There's still some great nuggets of truth in there, nevertheless.
Amateurism means passion, curiosity, intrigue and growth. What the hell is a professional? You get paid for doing what I'm doing right now? Cool. How do I get that gig?

• Ask your shareholders, Board of Directors and investors to kindly sit down and relax. If they've invested in a dog, they'll know soon enough.


• Having a corporate blog does NOT mean that you get it. In fact, it mostly means that you don't.


• The voices of the community, your employees and your competitors are more valuable than anything you could ever say. Listen. No...really...listen.


• Put down the marketing plan and walk away slowly. It'll be alright. I know. You have a tough job ahead of you. It's called killing your inner control freak. I have the same issue.

via buzzmachine.

While I like the books that iPhoto makes as it is, it's always nice to have other options.

And now I do. MyPublisher now works with iPhoto.

Cool.

Fascinating stuff.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. "

"The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade." (Interesting...)

"The best way to think of the Web is as a direct-to-customer distribution channel, whether it's for information or commerce. It bypasses all middlemen. And, it turns out, there are a lot of middlepersons in this society. And they generally tend to slow things down, muck things up, and make things more expensive. The elimination of them is going to be profound."

Sometimes I agree with what DefenseTech.org has to say, sometimes I don't. But anyone willing to put himself up for critical review like this immediately goes up a couple of notches in my book. Ego is the second most common substance in the universe (after stupidity), so it's nice to see someone who can set theirs aside for a moment or two and worry about the facts and not the rhetoric.

Nuh-nuhnuhnuh-ahhh.

How to make your site instantly hip.

WindowsXP on a Mac, for real.

Ok, aside from opening up the Mac universe to the security nightmare that is Windows, I can see this as being useful, especially for people like me who enjoy the odd computer game now and then or people who need to test in a cross-platform environment.

OS X needs this: iTunes for fonts. Glad to see it's free.

I have *got* to learn how to program AJAX. I know XML fairly well, and JavaScript, too, so I'm hoping it won't be that hard.

Hoping, I say. Hoping.

Attention, high-powered movie executive types:

The way to get us back in theatres is not thru ad campaigns, it's by making stuff that doesn't suck first, THEN telling people about it.

In that past 3 months, we've had so many remakes and rehashs of old movies thrown at us, I've lost count. And most of the successful movies right now are the franchises like Harry Potter. Only Pixar is doing consistently unique and entertaining movies, and maybe, just maybe, that's why theater attendance is down.

It was down in the 50's, too, when TV first came out, and back then, they tried the easy stuff first, too, with ad campaigns and tricks. But eventually, the powers that be realized that making good movies (including on of my all-time favs) is what brings people out to the movie theaters.

Spot Runner: Selling cheap unsold TV spots to local businesses.

Dang, that's a good idea.

Don's post about using about my post about slivercasting (Ah! Recursive loop! CTRL-Break! :-) ) as a marketing tool got me thinking. Sure, a regular vodcast is a good way to get your name out to others, but you can also use video to increase your existing customer retention. Your clients take pictures in the spare time. Everyone does. I would have clients ply me for photo tips and camera advice all the time while I was shooting for them. So why not make a short movie on how to take better pictures and send it as an email with your branding on it, and encourage them to send it to others?

• Find a good online guide to taking snapshots, like this one, and script out the steps it lists to taking better pictures. Most of them will be 10 shots, max.
  
• Grab your digital video camera and a couple of assistants (or some other semi-willing volunteer), and go out and shoot each step, framing it as you would a still-photo shoot.
• Edit it in iMovie. I'm sure there are comparable Windows programs out there, but the iMovie/iPhoto/Garage Band integration of iLife makes this sort of thing a breeze on a Mac. Use basic transitions (cross-dissolves and fades) and throw a long (5 seconds at least) still shot of your logo and contact information as the beginning and ending credits.
• Send to Garage Band to record a short narration for the video. Don't worry about following the script tightly, speak naturally; you're supposed to be an expert at taking pictures. Act like it, and the narration will sound great.
• Save it as a QuickTime movie (320x240 at 15-20 frames is just fine), and publish it online.
  
• Send out an email to your clients with a brief (2-3 sentence) description of what you did, and a link to the video. Tell them how you think it'll make their personal photos better, and encourage them to send it to other people they know who have questions about taking better pictures.

That's just my stab at it. There are many other ways to let yourself be known, now that barriers to creativity are dropping so fast.

Business Week looks at cutting edge techonlogy from people under 30.

"Don't look at what the industry is doing. Look at what they're not doing and focus on that. That's where the real disruptive technology comes from."

Presentation Zen blog has a great post on the theory and practice of visceral design.

With the signal/noise ratio of marketing dropping lower by the minute, things like this, that grab and hold the viewer's attention not by listing benefits, but by outstanding visuals, will be more important than ever.

I've got a couple of friends trying to get start-ups off the ground, and I hear about their funding woes and triumphs with equal measures of sympathy and greed. :-)

And this report dovetails nicely with what my friends are telling me.

The New York Times is just catching up to the idea of "slivercasting" (a very narrowly-targeted broadcast delivered viz the internet).

Welcome to the future, Gray Lady, too bad many of us are already there.

The fact is, I'm just as likely to listen to on of my favorite Podcasts as I am the radio these days, MacTv's vidcast is on my iBook and with Apple's iLife suite making it so darn easy to vodcast, this will only get bigger.

Heck, I even try the occasional narrowly-targeted podcast, myself.

Does NBC *really* think that removing clips from Saturday Night Live from uber-hot YouTube.com and putting it on oh-so-not-hip NBC.com will somehow increase their exposure and popularity, even though the videos in question can't be downloaded and pirated from either site?

Clueless.

This Microsoft campaign is just one of many out there that seem to have the following message:

You're an idiot if you don't buy our product.

Is that really what they want to do? Shame people into a purchase? What happens when the next version comes out, and all those people who you told where smart the minute they upgraded are now stupid again if they don't buy?

So much for customer retention.

Step 1: Set up an out-of-the-box, stock Mac Mini on the Internet.
Step 2: Invite everybody and his dog to attack it. Game on.
Step 3: No successful attacks. None. Nada.

So much for that "Macs are insecure" baloney.

If it were *anybody* other than Microsoft doing this, I'd be giddy with excitement.

But.

Microsoft's not exactly a hotbed of cross-platform, cross-browser development, so if clipboard functionality ever comes to the web from them, I'd expect to see it for Windows/IE only.

Whether it'll be the security nitemare that ActiveX is remains to be seen, too.

Microsoft has made a Newton!

While originally, this was written about the Oscars, I think it applies to just about every branch of marketing, too.

And I couldn't be happier.

Power to the people.

In other news, studies have shown that if you leave your door unlocked, you get robbed more often.

30 minutes to crack a Mac, given local SSH access?

Pardon me if I'm not quaking in my boots, given that Windows gets cracked in 4 minutes by just plugging it into the Internet.

Heh.

Slashdot links to a great story on the origins of Flickr, my favorite photo-sharing site.

BTW, if you're not in the habit of reading the comments on /., you should be. Cruise the highest-rated (2 or better) comments, there's some good stuff to be found.

I could never figure out what setting the bar for your marketing so low was about: Do you really want to show dumb people in your ads? Sure, there's an elements of the everyman in such ads, but at the end, you're telling people they're dumb if they don't use your product.

Not exactly appealing to their better nature. The list of people I've agreed with after they've told me I'm stupid is rather short...

Okay, maybe not pillars.

But they're good suggestions, nevertheless.

Some cool sites around the web...

Feedwhip : Website notification service

Behold the power of AJAX

Web 2.0 hits the modeling industry

(via Gizmodo and TechCrunch)

Sometimes, the "wisdom of crowds" is wrong.

Really, really wrong.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Napster blames Microsoft for poor sales.

Me? I think trying something that failed before (subscription-based online music sales) has more to do with it.