Bit Revolver

Seth Godin on creativity:

“99% of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn’t coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you’ve thought of.

“The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.”

If you have a “big idea”, I see two possible results of not following through. They are not mutually exclusive.

1. Someone else will follow up on your idea.
2. You’ll always wonder whether you could have succeeded.

Godin’s blog is full of similar short quips, whose length make them no less meaningful.

JC from Mac Geekery has a nice little procedure for adding items to the Mac OS X Dock.

Paul Stamatiou wrote up a half-serious Vista Challenge, in which he, a diehard Mac user, attempts to use Microsoft Windows Vista for one day. The first entry in Paul’s timeline is golden: “2:20 PM: Just woke up.”. Ah, college.

“Everthing in its place(ment)” does not discuss Radiohead, but rather a new feature in the Google AdSense program that allows you to attract more advertisers and increase competition for space on your site. The new feature allows you to target custom channels as they relate to your ad placement, and make that information available to advertisers as they’re searching for publishers. Do you have a banner strategically placed above the fold, in a high-profile spot? Shouldn’t publishers looking to purchase space on your site know that?

To create a targetable custom channel, log into AdSense, click over to Adsense Setup > Channels, and create a new custom channel. Give the channel a name, and then check off the box labeled “Show this channel to advertisers as ad placement”. A slew of new options will appear, allowing you to input various pieces of information that give advertisers an idea about the placement of any ad unit tracked with this channel. Here’s a screenshot:

Be as descriptive as you can, using details that let anyone reading about your custom channel to understand exactly where this ad unit will appear on your page, and how that benefits them as an advertiser.

Leon Ho of lifehack.org reflects on the site’s growth from zero to 12,000 RSS subscribers. Looking at his graph of subscribers over time, I wondered about the relationship between the growth of lifehack.org’s subscriber base versus its metrics with regards to traditional web traffic. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of lifehack.org’s subscriber growth versus traffic growth:

As it turns out, lifehack.org’s subscriber growth is right in line with it’s traffic growth (traffic according to Alexa, that is). If you smooth out the traffic spikes from the Alexa traffic graph, the two fit together almost perfectly. I was a little surprised by this, partly because I have never really looked into the general relationship between subscriber growth and traffic growth in websites. I expected the relationship between the two graphs to be much more logarithmic (in favor of web traffic), instead of so linear.

At first I reasoned that the relationship between these two graphs was due to the sophisticated nature of the readership that lifehack.org carries. Lifehack.org is a site that attracts a much more technologically savvy crowd than other non-tech related sites. To investigate this theory I produced the same side-by-side comparison between the subscriber growth and traffic growth for my own Of Zen and Computing. While OZaC is also a technology-related site, its target audience is not the tech-elite, but rather the tech-curious (even though I’m flattered to have had a handful of “tech savvy” subscribers pick up my feed, such as the LifeHacker editors). Once again, I expected a logarithmic relationship between the two graphs, with web traffic growth out-performing subscriber growth by far.

Surprise - virtually the same result as lifehack.org. I’m almost certain that subscription spike in late October was due to one of the major aggregation services suddenly beginning to report how many of its users subscribed to my feed. Because of that, I’m imagining that a more accurate graph would have a much smoother transition between September ‘06 and November ‘06.

Once again I am intrigued, although my lack of an explanation may be all together due to my lack of seasoned chops when it comes to Internet marketing. This is also a completely terrible and unscientific “study”, because I am using three completely different analytics services to measure two different samples of data.

Every developer loves a good easter egg every now and then, and the only thing more fun than hiding them is finding them. In “Secrets In Websites“, Robert Accenttura tracked down easter eggs hidden in the headers and html source of 10 prominent websites. The eggs range from Yahoo! News’ homage to Sesame Street, to Slashdot embedding Futurama quotes in custom HTTP headers, to an unintentional easter egg produced by a server bug on the NSA’s website that produced a few bits about “top secret data collection”.

Link via Daring Fireball.

It appears that someone recently registered and then sold the e-mail address “iPhone_wholesaler@yahoo.com” on eBay. The auction attracted over 35 bids, and the winner paid $355 for the e-mail address.

We’ve all heard of companies that buy domain names containing common surnames and then selling e-mail addresses on those domains, but individual e-mail addresses? Commenters on John Chow’s website, where I found this story, note that eBay’s “similar items” feature reveals many more similar iphone e-mail addresses for sale.

“I suspect that children will eventually support some kind of thin-client email-to-affection gateway. From an evolutionary standpoint, it may be the only solution that scales.”

— Merlin Mann’s particularly witty reflection on work, burnout, and work’s intrusion into our homes through technology.

Just as CES wraps up, four senators are reintroducing a bill that would overturn the fair use rights afforded to us by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. The four senators are Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joseph Biden (D-DE), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Ars Technica has the full scoop in “Senators introduce bill to restrict Internet, cable, and satellite radio recording“.

The primary purpose of copyright is to enrich the general public, not not protect the interests of corporations. Time-shifting broadcast content for personal use constitutes fair use. I know “the industry” just doesn’t want to hear it anymore, but how many times must it really be said?

Actually, I don’t think they ever wanted to hear it.

When considering the benefit of the various organizations that constitute “the industry”, the saddest part of the copyright debate is realizing how wildly successful they could be if they would just get out of their customers’ way, survey the evolving nature of that audience, and truly innovate. Instead, “the industry” prefers to whine and cry like a big, old baby.

The race to unify all of your media and devices is obviously well underway, as seen by the recent release of products like the Apple TV. In “YouTube coming to your TV (in several ways)“, Ars Technica explores several of the ideas floating around for bringing YouTube content to your living room. Ars covers the two core options: creating a YouTube television channel that highlights the most interesting flicks, and creating an on-demand television interface to the library of YouTube videos.

A YouTube channel may be interesting, but this concept is not exactly new. First of all, various celebrities like Jim Breuer already count down the “funniest” and “most viral” videos on VH1’s Web Junk 20. I don’t know many people who watch Web Junk 20. Secondly, America’s Funniest Home Videos did this model in ‘89 (albeit via VHS and snail mail). As ABC’s third-longest-running primetime series [source], AFV has been extremely successful. The problem is that the “AFV model” doesn’t jive with the inherent on-demand nature of YouTube and the Internet in general. Massive numbers of people flock to YouTube because the site offers something different for each of them.

YouTube is not a one-way road either. Another reason the site is successful because it has bred a massive community of devoted followers who interact with each other and the YouTube service daily. On America’s Funniest Home Video’s, Bob Sagat does funny voices over videos of people getting hit in the crotch. On YouTube, community members post replies, blog entries and response videos in reaction to clips of people getting hit in the crotch.

The floundering Recording Industry and Motion Picture Association have certainly taught us plenty about the difficulties of an arranged marriage between traditional distribution methods and the next generation of media consumption. Not even Bob Sagat, given his own dedicated cable channel, could count down enough top videos to pique the interest of that many people in the same way that an on-demand service can. Perhaps a YouTube channel will make its way into our homes, and perhaps it will be successful. It’s not a bad idea. I just don’t think it will be as successful as a service that brings YouTube, in all of its on-demand, web 2.0 social networking glory to our big screens.