Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Roboprof :: 20 Seconds To Comply

Follow up :: Roboprof explains himself in the The Washington Post!

posted by @ 11:08 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Tonight In The Bay!

posted by @ 10:00 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

How For Do Business Like One Local

This one’s for all the kotonks, kachinks, haoles, and all my Pilipino cousins who wish they were from Hawai’i. Courtesy, Hawaii Business Magazine and Tanimitsu Mitsuyoshi Yoshimura and Associates.

posted by @ 4:55 pm | 1 Comment

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

BREAKING NEWS :: Robot In Iowa Heckles Bill Clinton Over Sister Souljah

During school hours, he’s a mild-mannered University of Iowa professor. But during the primary season, when he’s not grading papers he’s a Robot Seeking Truth and Racial Justice.

He’s Kembrew McLeod, and he’s in today’s Des Moines Register. (Here’s his manifesto.)

BTW: absolutely no truth to the rumors that the protest was organized by Cylons For Edwards.

posted by @ 11:44 am | 2 Comments

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Rap Sales And Globalization :: Hip-Hop Verses The World?

When I was doing work on my piece for Foreign Policy–and for those of you in China still hoping to get at this, please hang on, I’m working on it–these past several months, I kept on trying to work one intriguing storyline that I could not quite pull together fully for the piece: the idea that U.S. rap is in decline because it hasn’t globalized as fast as other genres.

Now I realize that this is completely counterintuitive to the argument of the piece (nor does it explain country music’s continued rise, among other trends) and this is why I left that particular storyline hanging. But some of the buzz I was getting from industry sources was intriguing.

Here are two things that came up…:

+ One top-selling label finds its overseas sales now outstrips its domestic sales but hasn’t been able yet to capitalize on it fast enough because of its U.S. focus and its rap-dominated roster.

+ U.S. rappers are now more likely to guest-appear on overseas artists albums than they are to appear on those rappers’ albums. It’s not because of North American arrogance, but because those rap artists desperately need to build demand overseas.

Trust that there’s a lot more where that came from, and I might develop it into a future piece.

In any case, the excellent music industry reporter Jeff Leeds has a great story in today’s NY Times on Martin Kierszenbaum, an Interscope music exec who is charged with bringing U.S. music to the world (and to a lesser extent these days, to bring the world’s music–forget that antiquated term “world music”–to the U.S.).

It’s a good read and perhaps another reason that the music industry is fast becoming the Mike Gravel of the global media/entertainment complex.

OK, that’s not fair. Most of what Gravel says and does makes sense.

posted by @ 8:31 am | 3 Comments

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

12-0!


Best fan sign all night!

Honestly for me, the crowd shots were just as great as the game the Warriors played. If you want a taste of the vibe, check Stephen Tsai’s blog.

Next stop: New Orleans to turn out the Bulldogs on Sashimi Day.

posted by @ 1:04 am | 3 Comments

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

The Wire :: Season Five Teasers

HBO Teaser

McNulty

Omar

Marlo

Carcetti

posted by @ 5:04 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, November 26th, 2007

Not All Info Wants To Be Free Anymore

Thanks to Dave Goetsch, who is currently walking the WB picket line, here’s a link to
Jaron Lanier’s change of heart.

To the media monopolists and privatizers-run-amuck, not all information wants to be free. Not anymore… ::

Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!

That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.

Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

We could design information systems so that people can pay for content — so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author and yet can also be paid. Information could be universally accessible but on an affordable instead of an absolutely free basis.

People happily pay for content in certain Internet ecosystems, provided the ecosystems are delightful. People love paying for virtual art, clothing and other items in virtual worlds like Second Life, for instance. Something similar is going on for music within the ecosystem of the iPod.

Affordable turns out to be much harder than free when it comes to information technology, but we are smart enough to figure it out. We owe it to ourselves and to our creative friends to acknowledge the negative results of our old idealism. We need to grow up.

posted by @ 1:08 pm | 4 Comments

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

BCS (Brah, Cannot Stop) ‘Bows!


Island Pride.

posted by @ 8:28 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

Shake That Turkey


posted by @ 10:54 am | 0 Comments



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