The McKibbiners...keeping the NY art scene alive?

And I thought I'd lived in some small apartments.  Some young (and even some OLD) artists are living in converted factories in "cubbies" as small as  4 people in 25 square feet.  Yikes.

Brian Belukha, a 23-year-old musician who describes his look as “intergalactic space castaway,” decided to leave after someone threw a 40-ounce beer bottle at his head. “It’s a dorm, and it’s insane. It’s just insane,” said Mr. Belukha

That sound slike a good time to leave.  Apparently I'm late to the party on lambasting the culture of theft/parties/urination which some of these residents seem proud of, but I will say that ready buyers and sellers of housing services- of all walks of life and price ranges do seem to be meeting in this sketchy neighborhood. 

I'm probably not cool enough to visit, but may all of the residents live to see their next birthday, critical recognition, a paycheck of some variety...or at least the occasional night's sleep.

Link: Young Artists Find a Private Space, Only Without the Privacy - New York Times.

Marketer Owned Social Networks

Darren is right on target when he says users don't want to join multiple social networks just for a particular element of their personality.  I think I'm pretty much locked in to LinkedIn and Facebook- there's not much else I think I really need- I am not one of those people who thinks twitter is a social network.  The smartest brands are creating content that energizes users within their exisitng communities, and creates a lasting association with the product or brand.

A splinter effect of the niche social net phenomenon is the marketer-owned social network, like Saturn's recently launched social network-called ImSaturn. I don't have high hopes- trying to shift a conversation entirely to your site is going to alarm the most enthusiastic elements of your target audience.  They'll wonder what they won;t be allowed to do there.

A bigger question in my mind is what the company thinks it is getting out of these initiatives.  I still remember when GM killed and recalled is Saturn EV-1, which had about as dedicated a user base as you can imagine- people were evangelists about this revolutionary automobile. GM will never be able to recapture the enthusiasm it had with those users, whose zeal to protect the environment was swept away by a change in corporate strategy. 

The Ferrari Diet

I've really done well in the last 7 months.  As of last Saturday (my un-celebrated 7-month anniversary of my personal fitness odyssey), I've lost about 40lbs.

I know that I'm stronger, look and feel better, and have a plan for how to keep going.  I'm on my way.

I didn't really plan to post this info, but it's nice segue to a video I've been meaning to upload and post: an interview I gave on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show back in January.  We're looking at the Ferrari stand and wondering, "Can you fit in that?"


The Ferrari Diet from Benjamin Bloom on Vimeo.

Not Scrabulous? You're probably screwed, then!

This just feeds my theory that branded/sponsored ROBUST services will defeat apps which are basically just ads which do something silly.  I don't want to be a ninja or a a vampire bat behind the wheel of a Ford Model T drinking a Mike's Hard Lemonade wondering if my friend "sitting next to me" is more like an obscure TV character or an obscure movie character!  Those apps are attracting $.15 CPMs!!!!! 

Link: Facebook Platform Faces Rough Road Ahead, Despite Successes.

In the long run, more engaging apps such as Scrabulous are set to do better not only because they attract more dedicated users, but because they provide better opportunities for direct monetization, even if their CPMs are also quite low. Ravikant made a point to say that travel, dating, book, and game-related apps have the brightest futures whereas “everyone else is kinda screwed”.

videos + autoplay + Google Reader = ouch

I was reading my feeds in Google Reader (where I subscribe to the  NextNY blog), and I noticed that before I even got to it, the Social Shore vid from nextnyers started playing.  That is, I heard the audio but didn't know where it came from.

It seems that the video begins playing as soon as Google Reader pre-fetches the post.  I've known for some time that Google Reader will allow a video in a post to play while you scroll through the rest of the items so i began to do so while I listened to the audio, which was still playing.  Before long, even though I had not yet reached another video, the "mod my life" video started playing, and the audio was now running on top of the Social Shore audio. 

Never seen any other feeds react to Google Reader in this way- it's frustrating and it makes me want to avoid the feed.  I now see that this is the default site behavior- I wish nextnyers would think about changing that.

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Twitter Test- Are You a Bot?

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I'm having a lot of thoughts about twitter.  There are plenty of good primers on twitter, and lots of discussion of how the API traffic far exceeds site traffic.  There's plenty of discussion about web metrics that suggests that such a service really can't be accurately measured by panel based or site-side analytics services.  What this post is about, though, are the twitter use cases, the experiences of using the service.

One thing that I have observed from a conversation about a rash of new twitter followers coming out (apparently a couple of days ago the twitter mail queue held its breath and then burped out a whole bunch of notification e-mails) that in many cases these followers had a kind of artificial quality- particularly in cases where they are following dozens and being followed by far fewer.   That irks a lot of people, because it suggests that you are not contributing as much as listening, or dare I say, stalking. 

Twitter, to my mind, will lose value if it moves toward to the 90/10 rule participation - Twitter is no fun if you never send anything, as many people have pointed out to me.  What twitter really does is force you to think about the balance...unless you're a bot.

When is it best used?  When  you send a lot and listen a lot.  Charlie and Nate's video about Jamba Juice and Twitter or Michael Arrington's Comcast Outage or HR Block experiences are perfect examples of this.  There is of course the infamous @jasoncalacanis passport debacle. 

The twitter audience is kind of fickle..and the twitsphere really centers around tech right now, with @jasoncalacanis kind of the king of twitter self promotion.  He can cause weird stuff like this to happen:

One mention by @jasoncalacanis and I get a torrent of new friend requests. Howdy folks!

I probably  err on the side of being too human, in that I follow too few people who are following me.  I try to exercise judgment about how much information I can reasonably consume- I am noticing that if you follow enough high volume twitter users, you can miss a lot of stuff, even @ messages from real-life friends. I try to make my tweets a mixture of the immediate, the insightful, the random and the humorous.

I've never met @mikedoe in person but I really enjoy his tweets. Most of thew original people I followed on twitter were NextNY people like @innonate @ceonyc and @quirk.   Jason Calacanis sent a whole bunch of people to follow @alanataylor- I'm sure she's gonna go far.

So, if you got here from twitter, say hi here in the comments or D msg me- er, do they have bots that do that?

 

Amazon affiliate sales higher for available titles

In response to a UK publisher's strategy of making a DRM-free version of a novel availabe online for a limited-time before the book went on sale in paper form drew an agitated but smart response from Cory Doctorow, who has himself written a number of books and released them for free in their entirety online.  His rant includes  great data point about search and affiliate marktgin, and shopping intent:

I know from watching my affiliate link payments here on Boing Boing that ten times as many of you buy books that are on sale when I blog them than buy books that have to be pre-ordered. The Internet exists in an eternal NOW, and expecting someone who downloads a book to hold onto the impulse to buy it for four days is so unrealistic, it makes me suspect that this strategy was conceived of by someone who doesn't actually use the Internet.

The growing trend of NOW has data somewhere- I want more....NOW!

Link: Scott Sigler's INFECTED -- free download, inexplicably limited - Boing Boing.

No Comparison - WSJ.com

Some really great stuff in the WSJ's weekend edition special report on the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  While I do like the stories about urban/rural divides and the presence/creation of heroes in a centrally managed culture, my favorite is about the very premise of holding the 2008 Games (I'm also learnign that "________ Games" is a really popular way to title your book about the olympics.)  in such a restrictive regime- that this would be a way to apply a liberalizing pressure to the government on the world stage.  The article- called  No Comparison goes into the parallels between the '88 Seoul Olympics - which

Chertoff can obliterate opposition to Border Fence Project

How is the the first time I'm hearing about this?  From today's "Sidebar" column by Adam Liptak
 

The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.

For students of American government, yet another frightening reminder of how far this administration will go to ensure that no institution, even the Constitution, can get in its way.  I am not hopeful that SCOTUS will help out here, but this is plain and simple tyranny.  Sigh.

Link: Challenges Arise to Border Fence Project

Gothamist: Meatpacking District's Hog Pit Out, Ralph Lauren In

This is just sad.   Gothamist: Meatpacking District's Hog Pit Out, Ralph Lauren In.  Hog Pit owner  Felisa Dell adds:

It's very sneaky, but in 5 years the 4AM liquor license will be a thing of the past, without any community input.

I only went to the hog pit once or twice, but the wussification of the city appears to be sneaking in.

My mom and Tractors

So my mom asked me if I would get her a lawn tractor.  Like, buy her a lawn tractor.  Here's how that conversation went:

Me: You really want a lawn tractor?
My Mom: Yeah, can you get me one so I can ride around on it?  Just for a day?
Me: I'm sure we could rent you one...
My Mom: No!  I don't want to rent one.  I want to have it all to myself, for a day!
Me: [pause] Isn't that what renting is?

then we LOLed.  My mom is awesome.

Disgrace Alert- Shady 22year old supplies defective ammo to DoD for use by Afghanis

Terrible, horrible news, but great investigative reporting by the New York Times.  Whhat piosses me off most is that the massive expansion of private cpontracting combined with a completely useless DoD munitions policy is behind this mess.  Every defective round )(and there are literally millions of them that have been supplied to Afghanistan by this guy) takes our reputation as a nation down a notch.  Why would we do that?  Why wouldn't we have guidelines specifying the quality of the ammunition to be used by our proxies allies in the fight against terrorists?  Well, at least we have an answer:

“There is no specific testing request, and there is no age limit,” said Michael Hutchison, the command’s deputy director for acquisition. “As the ammunition is not standard to the U.S. inventory, the Army doesn’t possess packaging or quality standards for that ammo.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!!!????????

This whole thing is fascinating and horrifying and has me kind of worked up.  Check it out for yourselves. Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans.

across_the_curve_031808.pdf (application/pdf Object)

This is interesting [pdf].(Written by Bear Stearns economists earlier this week.)

Near the end of the newsletter, “It is only a pity (and from our perspective that is a massive understatement) that the Fed did not hike rates more rapidly in 2004 and 2005, which would likely have headed off the rise in leverage and the boom in mortgage lending.”

It is so strange when a firm with extremely aggressive leverage, who would have claimed at the time, “Leave us alone-markets work!” meets a post-facto desire for regulation. Sigh.