infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Epoch, a new coffeeshop owned by former Mojo’s employees, opened Saturday. Unlike Mojo’s, which occupied a grungy house near campus, Epoch is in a shopping center near the “hipster stripmall” on North Loop. It’s vibe is still funky, but more classy, decorated with darkly stained wood pieced into interesting shapes. Decorative elements from Mojo’s have found its way into Epoch. A detourned Starbucks banner hangs in the kitchen, and a metal relief of a coffee cup hangs near the register. The kitchen is pretty big for a coffeeshop; they were serving catered sandwiches, but it looks like they have the capacity for a broad menu.

I visited Epoch on Saturday and today, and the owners seem to be getting the store off the ground. The space has a shortage of tables – they’re waiting for the indoor tables to arrive – and I had difficulty connecting to the WiFi connection. Despite these hiccups early on, I’m happy to see Epoch carry on the spirit that made Mojo’s so great.

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• Slashdot | 50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive
  Oh rad, Slashdot posted a story I suggested!
  (del.icio.us tags: storage slashdot history)
• New Mac Ads!
  Via Plasticbag,org, an excellent parody of those annoying hipster Apple ads that make me embarrassed to love my Mac.
  (del.icio.us tags: video parody OSX)
• Beryl Ford Collection
  Wow, the Tulsa library has scanned and uploaded hundreds of old photographs of Tulsa. Unfortunately, the interface for browsing the images is terrible. There are no thumbnails and you have to click twice to get to the image.
  (del.icio.us tags: oklahoma history archive photography tulsa)

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I’m always a little dismayed when back-to-school season starts up in mid-July – it seems a month and a half is more than ample time to be shopping for folders and hand sanitizer. The New York Times is in the back-to-school spirit, as well, with a special section about colleges and college life today.

Two stories mention my alma mater, The University of Oklahoma, arguing that it’s an overlooked hotbed of academic excellence. One story, titled “Redrawing the College Map” discusses how elite institutions have become so competitive that many bright students are turning to second-tier institutions. It quotes Mark A. Longenecker, who I guess is an education policy researcher. “The University of Oklahoma is a classic example,” he says. “Many students never used to consider it. Now it has the largest share of National Merit Scholars in the country.” Ugh, I really do think the National Merit issue is a canard. OU awards National Merit Scholars such generous scholarships that students of modest means can’t really afford to go elsewhere. (As a freshman, I got a few thousand dollars in cash after paying for tuition, books, and housing.) While the school has the most National Merit Scholars per capita (I think rival UT-Austin has the largest absolute number) most of the students attend on OU’s nearly open admissions policy. The other story notes that OU has an 82 percent acceptance rate. My experience at OU was that while there were many very bright students, classes were geared toward slightly above-average students. I and many of my peers were bored and unchallenged in classes, and campus life had little to offer beyond football and church. The National Merit statistic is used to mask an tedious and conservative environment.

I attended OU nearly a decade ago, and perhaps things are less dreary. For example, there were no venues for indie rock bands when I attended, and now there is The Opolis, which is owned by members of The Starlight Mints. And perhaps classes have gotten more interesting, but OU needs to develop a better strategy for attracting top students and raising its profile than simply handing money to good test-takers.

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Over on Lost Remote, Cory Bergman explains why the blog is using YouTube to embed video in posts, rather than link to clips on the Comedy Central site. Although using YouTube implies a degree of copyright infringement, it is too difficult to find a linkable URI on the Comedy Central site, as well as a host of other sites. The only easy way to share the video content with readers (and promote Comedy Central programming) is to use the service. Bergman asks, “Why aren’t media sites copying YouTube search and share functionality?”

This is a good question, and I thought I would raise a tangential question. As John Battelle and others have pointed out, YouTube’s business model isn’t really sustainable. Although the site has become wildly popular in a short amount of time, the content that is driving people to the site is copyrighted material, like the Colbert Report clip on Lost Remote. Investors and larger businesses will balk at throwing more money at a company that is so vulnerable to litigation. And since YouTube uses a substantial amount of bandwidth, it will quickly burn through money.

So, I’ll ask, “Why doesn’t YouTube pursue the business-to-business market and license its technology to networks like Comedy Central?” Instead of competing with Google Video and sites like eBaumsworld, it should compete with the likes of Brightcove. YouTube has demonstrated that its Flash-based video service is easy to use and flexible enough for a variety of different Web formats, so why not approach content providers as an alternative to the current streaming technologies? Comedy Central (or any other TV network) has a great opportunity to promote its shows by allowing bloggers and MySpace users to embed clips in their blogs and, more generally, simplifying the architecture of their sites.

I guess YouTube has two or three hurdles it has to overcome. First, I don’t know the legal status of its technology. Is it sufficiently unique and sufficiently protected that YouTube could license it to networks? Or could Viacom (the parent of Comedy Central) develop a similar homegrown solution relatively quickly? Secondly, the quality of YouTube is fine for sharing video created with consumer-grade equipment, but it’s pretty poor compared to other technologies like QuickTime and RealPlayer that large TV organizations use. As Valleywag pointed out, “The resolution is 2002-quality.” I imagine YouTube is working on improving the quality and performance of their player. A final issue is that old-media TV networks are probably resistant to sharing their content. It may not be an accident that Comedy Central makes it difficult to blog clips from “The Colbert Report.” They want to drive viewers to their site. Of course, I and a thousand other bloggers think this is short-sighted, but it probably requires a shift in the culture of TV production. Moreover, while bloggers like me who adminster their own sites, have no problem with embedding outside content, the major providers of online presence might. While MySpace explained their upgrade to Flash 9 as a security measure, it may also be motivated by a desire to restrict what kinds of content are embedded on user pages. Despite these hurdles, YouTube’s solution for embedding video online could be a great solution for major content providers.

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• Some background on the likely forthcoming conflict in Somalia
  Ethan Zuckerman describes the post-colonial history of Somalia both before and after the US intervention in 1992.
  (tags: Africa war Somalia)
• Torvalds critical of new GPL draft
  I don’t fully understand Linus’ objections to the anti-DRM provision, but the bit about TiVo is quite interesting.
  (tags: GPL opensource intellectualproperty DRM law)

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After screening a few episodes of early Fox teen drama “21 Jump Street,” I was inspired the other night to watch another text that featured Johnny Depp as an undercover cop. Donnie Brasco was as good as I remembered it, and I wondered, “What else has this Mike Newell guy done?” A check of IMDB revealed how little I pay attention to film, but it also revealed a really interesting movie in pre-production. Newell is on board to direct “Sealand,” which is a biopic about Roy Bates, who squatted an anti-aircraft platform in the English Channel and declared himself the prince of the independent nation of Sealand. I would love to see a silver-screen treatment of this bizarre story.

Geeks may remember Sealand’s efforts in the early part of this century to create an off-shore data haven. The company HavenCo set up shop on the rusting hulk of Sealand to serve data that would not be regulated by governments other than Sealand, presumably offering an opportunity for gambling sites and purveyors of adult content. Wired magazine had a nice feature on the genesis of HavenCo. Eventually HavenCo shut down for a variety of business and logistical reasons, not to mention the fact it was kind of a goofy idea to begin with. Regardless, it’s worth mentioning that HavenCo wasn’t Sealand’s first foray into pushing the envelope of media content. It also operated a pirate radio station before Britain liberalized it’s broadcasting laws and legal stations played rock music. I don’t know what slices of Sealand’s history the movie will portray, but it should make for a fascinating story.

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Mark Cuban challenged readers a few days ago to come up with a strategy for attracting more people into theaters. In the original post, he pointed out that studios often spend more money on marketing on a per-viewer basis than they spend on the price of admission. Cuban owns his own theater chain as well as a distributor, so presumably his organization gets the full ticket price, unlike distributors who take a cut of the box office, but still this is a poor business strategy. (The major studio/distributors make the biggest chunk of domestic money from DVD sales, so the marketing blitz that surrounds theatrical releases largely serve to create buzz for the DVD.) For someone like Cuban, who produces movies for niche audiences, he can’t rely on a hit or two floating the rest of his movies.

Today, Cuban posted a follow-up. He is impressed by the response, but disappointed with the suggestions. Some he has already floated, like discounting multiple versions of the same film. When he spoke at the RTF department this spring, he discussed how his day-and-date release schedule might eat into box office sales, suggesting that more folks might see Bubble in the theater if the DVD was discounted with the ticket price. I’ll let readers read the rest of the suggestions, but one gave me a good chuckle, creating a tagging system for releases to harness Web 2.0 social networking mojo. Cuban says “The problem is that its a downstream idea. It works in response to something that is working well.” This sounds about right, but I also think that tagging is mostly successful for sharing content in the same context. If you’re online it’s good for sharing stuff online, but not for getting groups of friends to go to the theater.

It’s worth mentioning that this idea has already been implemented to a certain extent. Bside is an independent film distributor that uses social tagging to find what films audiences respond to. I was skeptical of the idea when I met Bside’s founder Chris Hyams at a party last year. I sort of chortled at the idea of tagging films, since it seemed like everyone was applying tagging to a variety of different problems. At that time, however, I was barely using del.icio.us – which is probably the paragon of tagging systems – and clearly I’m a heavy del.icio.us user. (Actually, my conversation with Chris convinced me to give del.icio.us a second look.) What Bside does is creates folksonomic social network systems for film festivals, where festival-goers can go online, share thoughts about the movies they see, and categorize them as they see fit. This helps Bside determine what markets might be interested in the films at the festival. Since Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures only puts out a few pictures each year, it probably doesn’t have the critical mass of films to support a similar system, but social tagging probably shouldn’t be discounted entirely as a new model for creating interest in movies.

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• Foreign Policy: Congo’s Implausible Democracy
  Analysis of the upcoming elections in the DRC, the first since it gained independence in 1960 and two devastating wars in the 1990s.
  (tags: Africa Congo elections politics war)
• 17 containers for a concept store
  Pictures of the Freitag concept store in Zurich, built out of those standardized shipping containers. Freitag makes sweet messenger bags out of recycled materials - too bad I can’t afford one.
  (tags: recycling architecture)
• The New Yorker Covers Wikipedia
  Here’s a blog post that compares the fact-checking processes between mass-circulation magazines and Wikipedia. In my experience, fact-checking at trade magazines is not as stringent, and I understand that newspapers are similarly loose.
  (tags: wikipedia production magazine thereal)
• Elections and a great deal of hope
  This overview of Sunday’s elections in the DRC emphasizes the social impact of the militias that fought in Congo’s civil wars and how victims and militia members living side-by-side has created tension in the nation.
  (tags: Congo Africa elections politics war)
• DIY laptop case: a 12-step program
  My gadget bag is dying, so I just might have to make a laptop case out of closed-cell foam and duct tape.
  (tags: DIY)

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The New York Times has a more detailed story about the recent Las Vegas ordinance that prohibits groups from feeding the homeless in parks. After I posted that link, I worried that many cities might have similar policies. While I’ve seen groups distribute food in the streets of Berkeley, I’ve never seen similar efforts in Austin – could Austin have a similar ordinance? Apparently not, it seems. The article says, “the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed ‘the indigent’.” I guess Las Vegas is leading the way in cracking down on charity. The local ACLU says that the law is unenforceable because it violates the freedom of assembly clause of the Bill of Rights, and, at a practical level, it’s difficult to prove what aid recipients are indeed indigent. Regardless, this does little to improve Las Vegas’ crappy reputation for sprawl and greed.

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Today on the bus, a middle-aged man got on at the St. David’s Hospital stop. He was carrying a blue pamphlet. I’m always curious about what people are reading, so I glanced at the cover. It read “Schizophrenics Anonymous.” Schizophrenia is a terrifying disease, and I hardly want make light of the suffering of others, but it gave me a little chuckle. If I could read the title from across the bus, the organizers of the support group are hardly doing a good job of maintaining anonymity. He was wearing work boots and work clothes, so I’m pretty sure he was a patient and not a social worker or therapist. I hope things work out for him.

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