ULTRA, the Personal Rapid Transit vehicle
Alameda, the island I live on, is cut off from easy access to the local rapid transit system. Residents need to cross one of three bridges or a tunnel to make it to a BART station. Some people (including yours truly) ride a bicycle to the train station where they have a place to park your bike for the day. For those that drive to the station, by the time they take the trouble to get into their car, they figure they might as well drive the whole way - clogging the roads and using up gasoline.
One idea being passed around is the ULTRA, a small, 4-person transporter that is something between a tram and a Zip Car. Grab one of these that run on fixed rails around town and are parked at stations along the track. Punch in your destination and you’re on your way. The idea is that a network of these ULTRAs could shuttle people to the nearest train station and cut down the need to wait for a bus or drive your car.
NBC holding Olympic videos hostage
NBC is milking their investment in broadcasting rights for the Beijing Olympics by making anyone that wants to view their videos jump through a few hoops.
Hoop Number One: Install Silverlight 2.0.
This limits installation to only Windows machines or Intel-based Macs. Oh, and you have to restart your browser so you if you don’t save the URL of the video you wanted to watch - your left to the mercy of NBC’s navigation.
Hoop Number Two: Reveal your local NBC affiliate & zip code info.
This gives NBC data to see just how much traffic they are taking away from their local affilates with online video. When it comes time for re-negotiation, they can hold this data in their hand to show how they don’t really need the affiliates to reach their audience which is why they need to pay more for the rights to re-broadcast NBC programming.
Despite these two hoops, the desire to see a quick reply of something like the incredible 4×100 meter Men’s relay is so strong that people will jump through these hoops. Not enough to jump out of the current habit of hitting up Yahoo’s Olympic coverage (which is doing a stellar job), but still respectable.
Badi hated installing Silverlight and may never use it again but he did install it and I doubt he took the time to remove it after he saw the video. As far as Microsoft is concerned, mission accomplished.
Despite the hassles, I actually like some of the features of Silverlight as it’s featured on the NBC site. It’s really smart is that you’re able to fast forward (or reverse) in low resolution but once the video starts playing, it gradually sharpens the image to higher resolution. The video clips on the NBC site are of exceptional quality to those used to YouTube clips. As with NBC’s other site, Hulu, NBC is leading the way, showing us how a television company can reinvent itself for the internet.
Izumi’s Race for the Cure
It’s that time of the year again. My wife is running in this year’s Komen Foundation Race for the Cure. If you have some spare coin, please make a tax-deductible donation to this worthy cause.
Izumi’s Race for the Cure page
Golden Gate Western Wear
We have a friend visiting from Japan and besides visiting the redwoods, she’s also on a mission for some Tony Lama cowboy boots which are all the rage in Tokyo. I found a place that carries them up in Richmond, Golden Gate Western Wear. The site speaks to you out of the backwoods. From the Store Hours page:
I may be the last guy in the country not to use an answering
machine. I figure you don’t need to waste a long distance call
to find out we’re not here. You’ll know that after 8 or 10
rings for free. Please refer to above opening schedule and
call back.We’re closed on holidays and for earthquakes.
Should be fun. Looking forward to meeting the guy.
UPDATE: The owner wasn’t there but photos from the visit are here.
Wagging your Long Tail with Just for You
What if you could ask each reader that came to your blog what they were interested in and show them a list of posts from your archives that matched those interests? I’ve been blogging for over five years and as posts roll off the front page they fade into the archives to be mostly forgotten,.
Today MyBlogLog published a WordPress plug-in that grew out of a concept that I’ve been playing around with for the past year. Forget contextual matching for relevance and targeting, what if you could match against someone’s stated interests? Blow past trying to parse out meaning from the other text floating around on the current page and reach through the glass and query against the tags that people attach to their MyBlogLog profile. Target the Reader, not the Page. It’s a vision of programming that says, “OK, now that you’re here on this site, did you know there was a series of articles this author wrote about your passion for Harley Davidson motorcycles last year?”
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb writes,
There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free
The Just for You plug-in works with hosted WordPress and, once installed, looks at each visitor to your site to see if they are a MyBlogLog user. If they are, the plug-in looks up the tags on that user’s profile and searches through your blog’s archives and presents a list of headlines pointing to posts that match those tags in a widget that runs in your blog’s sidebar. For more details and sample screenshots, see my post on the MyBlogLog Blog.
If you look to the right, the Just for You widget is right there, five headlines fresh from my Archives for your reading pleasure. If you’re a MyBlogLog user, let me know in the comments if they match the tags on your profile. If you’re not a MyBlogLog member, what you see is a collection of headlines based on the the tags of the most recent MyBlogLog visitors to the site so hopefully there’s some connection to why you’re there as well. Either way, I’m interested in your thoughts.
BrowseRank - Microsoft’s Answer to PageRank
Microsoft announced today that they’ve discovered a better way to rank web pages. While Google’s PageRank sorts roughly on the number of incoming links that point to a page, a vote of confidence by bloggers and website editors, Microsoft’s BrowseRank looks at browsing behavior to see which links get more clicks.
Sounds good on the surface. More democratic because it looks at the entire browsing population, right?
The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance
Not so fast. Andy Beal points out the obvious shortcomings:
“More visits?” - sure, spammers will have no idea how to inflate that metric.
“Longer time periods?” - couldn’t that also mean that your web site usability and navigation just sucks?
I would add a third. For this to work it requires that Microsoft know each and every link that you visit. I don’t know about you but there has to be a pretty good personal benefit for me to let Microsoft peer over my shoulder and take notes on every site I visit. Maybe they’ll just pay people. But as with Live Search cashback, that’s just going to attract the wrong audience and skew your biases.
Pay-per-Click Marketing comes to Television
Tivo and Amazon have teamed up in a partnership that anyone following the two could have seen coming. It will soon be possible to click your Tivo remote and order items like the latest album from the musical guest on the David Letterman show.
The concept of using your remote to purchase stuff you see on TV is an old one but it’s never taken off. This time, based on the success of Amazon’s one-click fulfillment platform (including the ingenious mobile version), it might just succeed. They just need to get more than 4 million Tivos into US homes.
Gnip is Ping spelled backward
Congratulations to Eric, Jud, and the crew on the launch of their new service, Gnip. MyBlogLog has been using Gnip for a few weeks now and we’re pleased with what we see. Submit and item to Digg and it’ll move your update to the top of our polling queue and you’ll see your updates on MyBlogLog within a minute or so.
Even more exciting is that Gnip solves the infrastructure problem that each member of the social media ecosystem has stuggled to resolve. How to get updates out to their partners and how these partners can read them in effeciently. With this and other common problems out of the way, we can all focus on high-order benefits. From the Gnip blog:
We’re incredibly excited by the bounty that Web 2.0 has created. We are living with an embarrassment of riches in terms of shared information and experiences. But it’s overwhelming. I personally believe that Web 3.0 will herald a return to the individual — story, picture, friend, experience — because in aggregate, that which has great meaning often becomes meaningless. So it’s up to these awesome new services to take the Web 2.0 bounty and find for each of us those few things that will fundamentally enhance our lives. To give us something meaningful.
Google’s Flash-Eating Spider
This announcement is definitely cool and will open up whole new areas of the web to search. But truthfully I just wanted to post this because it lends itself to a great headline.
From the FAQ posted on the Google Webmaster Blog:
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Alameda Theatre Restored to Art Deco Grandeur
When I moved to Alameda four years ago I was struck by the beauty of the local movie palace. It was clearly from a different time, built before VCRs and DVDs, when going to the movies was a social activity, an occasion which you would dress up, put on something special.
Since closing its doors in 1979, the Alameda Theatre has been a roller skating rink, a disco, and most recently, a gymnastics studio. There was quite a bit of debate over how to revive the building which had, over the years, become infested with rats, water damage, and an alarming amount of pigeon shit.
Alameda is an anomaly in the Bay Area, debates rage over improvements. There is a decades old measure in place that prevents any multi-story condos or apartment buildings and the debate over how to sustainably develop the long-abandoned naval base on the West end of the island is regularly featured in the opinion pages of the local papers (we have two). The final agreement with the developer of the theatre included construction of a 300+ car garage and several mini-screens in a newly constructed addition. The thinking was that a single screen would never be able to draw the audience necessary to make the $9 million investment pay off. Debates raged with the traditionalists opposed to what they called “cineplex” - eventually the developer won over the city council and development went forward.
Unfortunately one casualty of this theatre has been that our local pocket theatre which I’ve written about before. Apparently there’s a strange arrangement that’s been made between the Alameda Theatre and the big studios that only allows first run films within a certain geographic radius. This little theatre with donated couches for seating was within that area so they could no longer feature the films that they felt brought people to their doors. Several people suggested that they could feature “art house” films but the owner confessed that artsy types don’t really go for the soda & popcorn which made up his margins. Izumi had the idea that he could still stay in business if he ran classic kids films (the Disney classics, Little Rascals, Lassie, etc) but the decision has been made and he’s showing his last filmings today. In my mind it’s unfortunate but the additional exposure for Alameda via the refurbished Alameda Theatre and the new business (and tax revenues) it’ll generate is worth this small sacrifice.
On opening weekend the renovated Alameda Theatre opened it’s doors to the community with free screenings of classic movies from the theatre’s golden age. I caught the Wizard of Oz with the family which was a real treat to see on the big screen. It was easy to imagine how incredible it must have been, at the height of the depression, for folks to come into what can only be described as a movie palace and see color moving images for the first time. Experiencing the film in the theatre, Oz’s themes of faithfully following the yellow brick road but that no wizard can grant you what you need, you ultimately need to find it in yourself rang true in context like they never did before.
After the film, we joined all the townspeople and toured this new structure and could not believe that such a small town as ours could play host to such an amazing piece of architecture. It was as if Radio City Music hall opened up on Main Street. Kids were riding up and down the escalators as if they’d never seen one before. Everyone was smiles.
So far so good, everyone in town I’ve spoken to has seen several films since opening and we all just went to see the new Pixar movie, Wall-E and when the previews started to roll, people in the crowd yelled out “Focus!” and there was a brief intermission as they threaded the second reel halfway through. One of our neighbors across the street serves popcorn. They’re still working out the kinks but I kind of like it. The theatre has a real community feel despite its grandeur.
New businesses are opening on either side of the theatre (a wine bar and a gourmet hamburger place) and, from what I hear, business is up and the line at the local ice cream shop is always long. I was skeptical that this project would ever get off the ground but, now that it’s open, I’m glad and hope it leads to a revival of Alameda’s Park Street district.
Other resources:
- Alameda Theatre website
- Short documentary on the history of the theatre
- My flickr photoset
- Alameda Magazine article
- Alameda Currents, local TV channel, covers opening gala
