Even so there are already three posts today up here, I just couldn’t resist posting this music video of Bogan Irkuk. The sound is some hmm I would call it down beat electro. But the fascinating thing is the animation. It is one of the most excellent works in the use of 3D animation/CG without all this virtual feeling. A kind of mixture between a comic, a real world and some dreams. Just… impressive!
Updated: The video is done by http://www.pistachios.se/, with at least as creative and fascinating videos on his page as the one above.

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Another little story on the edge.
The web is still buzzing around about the latest “Digg-thing” .
Someone submitted a story which got dugg quite often. Well, thats how Digg works, but the story this time was about something people related to the music industry already have found their love in. It was about DRM, in fact a few numbers and letters which are the AACS key to decrypt HD-DVDs.

The key is now on it’s way to earn his web fame. As Fred von Lohmann of the EFF (oh… and don’t forget to join the EFF!) wrote in his blog, it is even illegal to post it but more over “In addition to having been posted on hundreds of thousands of web sites (and resulting in the temporary shutdown of Digg.com), the key has already spawned a song, a quiz, a domain name, and numerous T-shirts.”
Again a great step to the death of DRM. Actually I’m thinking about putting a countdown or so on this page. Something like 1000Days Till DRM’s Death.
By the way, there is a really interesting interview, with the DRM hacker out. It’s, of cause, a big topic over at BoingBoing.

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To be honest I just ignored the last Coolfer posting on Amazon and their Mp3 model. It is the same rumor which is around in the music industry blogs for over a year, about their soon-to-come online shop. Mark Mulligan at Jupiter Research put out on his blog (uh guys, I really l-o-v-e blogs with deactivated comment functions…) a posting that Amazon has no other way than offering DRM free songs, just because… well DRM on it’s way to death is. In the end no big news and I wouldn’t write about it, cause stories like this are just without any newsworthy insides.

But…

What I found quite interesting is Jupiter Research’s way of promoting their research studies. Their analysts write blogs on a constant basis, you can buy their reports instantly over the web and - this is something what is definatly a added benefit - you get also a half hour phone conversation with the analyst. Ok, a research report costs around $700 but at least it is a really personalized way of selling something like this. And it may even bring additional revenue through establishing a direct connection between the analyst and the company buying a report.

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Sometimes I really wish to have time to go deeper into details on this blog. But so far I will just stick with a few thoughts mixed up with facts, or let’s just they the basics of blogging.
It looks like I missed last year the coverage of the paper by the American Sociological Review on the factor of closed friends in our society.
They compared the number of closed friends people had in

1985 - 2.94
and
2004 - 2.08

(uhm, did it really took almost three years to get this published?)

So in the end, over this period of time Americans almost lost one close person, who is important to them in their lifes. It looks like the time of very closed friends is shifting through technology into a much more open networking time. It is hard to judge in how far this might be positive or negative.

Feel free to digg deeper into this by reading the 23 pages “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades” research paper. I might do it as well over the weekend…

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Seth Godin pointed in his blog to a great article in the Washinton Post. Shankar Vedantam talks about the so called Decoy Effect. It is, taken all fancy words aside, a description for the fact, that most people tend to choose always the one in the middle. In my view it is this kind of pain free behavior people show in these cases, when marketing DIDN’T work. If there is nothing really relevant what influences someones decision to be passionated about one particular product, artist or brand, the Decoy Effect comes in. And since most people seem to live in a pain and challange avoiding way, this effect gets bigger and bigger. (Just turn on your radio…)

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Actually I thought about posting some of them on slow days or days I’m to busy for some more research. But I thought browse throuth them is really inspirational for creative people who deal with visual arts. Groupthink, another web 2.0 project ( user generated content, group behaviour, you know the deal… ) put togehter an interesting list on the Stranges Music Videos Of All Time. The leading vid is right now:

Quite funny stuff for all the alian hunters.
Also in the list legendary web videos like Tunak Tunak or quite rare ones like Klaus Nomi.

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It is good to see that some people take the hype around Second Life serious and actually look behind the Linden Lab hype system. Randolph Harrison did put together a really great analysis of the whole economic theorie existing around Second life, goes down into detail and not just rough rambling around as we do over here.

To quote R. Harrison:

“I believe Second Life’s much hyped economy resembles a pyramid Ponzi, or more accurately a type of high yield investment program (HYIP) scheme.”

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For all of you using some public torrent trackers or oldschool peer to peer sharing sites: Idolator has discovered the hardest keept secret ever. Invite only torrent trackers!
And the funny thing is, they are selling it, like an inside scoop to the promised land.

Now, fortunatey I turned my back on all this illegal music stuff already somewhere in the late 90th, but it looks like bad times are coming up for these trackers. Other trackers have already banned RIAA or MPAA material just to stay away from getting involved in this jump and run game. But the bad thing is, some trackers, and I’m shure it’s the same with Oink, are making even money with the sharing. (I won’t go into details, most will deny it…) It’s like you can download all you like, but you have to take care of a ratio system which tracks your up and downloads.
On the other hand the question is of cause what these closed trackers differ from book clubs or a dvd sharing system like Netflix. Through their system they keep track of who is sharing what, especially of things they got exclusive. And people who “leak” their material got usually quite fast kickt out of the club.

I’m shure the find the easter egg game over at Oink already started.

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It’s weekend, so here comes a little geeky interlude:

Steve Rubel, one of the real blog authorities comes up with the insight that trackbacks are dying. He argues that several websites like cnet or yahoo dropped it and that the basic function got replaced by widgets.

Trackbacks are these little comments under blog postings, which show a direct link to another related posting on another blog. I personally use it a lot because it is in my view the most simple and easiest way to show readers what else might be relevant to them if they enjoyed this posting. That is the beauty of it. Simple & Stupid.

Widgets might be much nicer looking and be a way fancier, but are distracting. I will try my very best to keep this blog free of them. It’s just distracting and neither me nor all the wonderful readers of this blog should be forced to sign up to any social bookmarking or what so ever site. I would say only a maximum of maybe 1-5% of the web users get what social bookmarking is or care about the difference between del.icio.us or digg. The best example for this is still, that if you check the digg top storys they are most of the time nerd related stories.

Steve shows some statistics that the number of blogs mentioning blog is not growing any more. Even so if you take a closer look at it the technorati statistic is way different. I would be happy if this whole blogging thing would just become a normal thing. Who does really care if it’s a blog or a stupid html file (think drudge!), as long as it’s content is relevant.

Btw, Steve shows this image: (90 days)

If you check out the bigger picture (180 days) it looks like this:

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I’m right now playing around with Twitter. It’s a really sweet tool, but unfortunately it still seems kinda buggy. I’m using AIM on my cell all the time and don’t ever turn it on at the computer at home (noone is interrupting you if you put your cell aside) and at work (noone can log your messages). Why I’m telling you this? Not to show you how paranoid I am, but because Twitter’s AIM verification doesn’t seem to work with my cell. Don’t ask me why but it’s kinda worthless to me if I can’t post through AIM. So you won’t find here this sweet little sidebar Twitter Box Etan runs there.

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