DOPPLR

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If I were a frequent traveller I might be interested in this.

Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers as a tool for our own use. We liked it so much that we decided to open it up to our global friends.

If you travel more than five times a year and have friends who do as well, then Dopplr is for you.

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

Membership by invitation only. I heard about it via Tim O’Reilly, who says it was the nicest thing he saw at Etech.

Addiction

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From Jeff Jarvis…

So I went to a large breakfast this morning thrown by the Newhouse School at Syracuse and The New Yorker (much more on that in a minute). Most of us were assigned tables and so I put down my briefcase and went off to schmooze, which is what one does at these things. I came back and my case was moved and chair occupied. I looked miffed — and various folks later hovered around to throw themselves on swords for this — but I was embarrassed to say why the chair mattered to me. It wasn’t because this was Table 8 and that enabled me to look down my nose at the poor sods at Table 10. It wasn’t because I was going to sit next to some media mogul and make a deal that would change my life and finances. It was because the chair was near an electric plug. We bloggers arrange our lives around wi-fi and plugs. To make my thought process even more pathetic, I then had to rearrange my route to the airport today so I could find someplace to recharge — because, you see, I didn’t want to be out one watt for the plane ride — or I contemplated going to the airport quite early to scope and stage out a precious plug there. Sad, isn’t it?

It is, it is. The post attracted some nice comments from fellow addicts. Like this one:

THis post made me laugh at myself — there have been so many times when I got to my gate at our local airport an hour or so early and since I know where the plugs are on the concourse, I head for a plug. When someone else is there already, I find my initial reaction is a bit of irritation — ‘hey, what are you doing at MY plug?’ Since other travelers know the location of plugs, not only are them often taken, but there is the inevitable small group of hoverers sitting ‘casually’ near the prized two seats, waiting to jump in when they are vacated. It’s no wonder that batteries with extended lives (a week for a laptop; a full day of use for a drilll, etc.) are so highly sought after by R&D firms. Their social impact through the phenom of changed seating priorities will be huge — I will actually get to sit with my family while we await our flight.

Googlemapping

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I didn’t believe this when I saw it on a blog, but it’s true. If you ask Google Maps for directions from Harvard University to King’s College, Cambridge, step 14 is:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean. (3,462 mi 29 days 0 hours)

Wonder how they know it takes 29 days.

Interesting also that the route involves landing at Le Havre rather than anywhere in Cornwall.

Hmmm… Other people have noticed this too.

What’s wrong with Viacom?

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The question is John Dvorak’s — and it’s a good one.

BERKELEY, Calif. — I’ve been looking for analogies to describe Viacom Inc.’s recent demands that 100,000 short clips be removed from the YouTube video site. These clips, to me, represent 100,000 moments of free publicity for various Viacom properties, such as the “Daily Show” starring Jon Stewart.
It finally dawned on me that there was no good analogy, since this unprecedented act of stupidity was unlike anything I knew.

It wasn’t like someone finding a pot of money on a cab seat and making sure the rightful owner got it back. It was more like finding the pot of money, then suing the rightful owner because you were inconvenienced by the whole thing.
Make no mistake: Viacom’s decision was more like the person in the cab than it was “protecting copyrighted material,” which is the company’s claim.

First of all, what is an old 3-minute clip of the “Daily Show” worth on the open market? Seriously, what is its value?

Answer: zilch.

Wuff, wuff, wu…. yawn, zzzzzzzz

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Guess what — Prozac for dogs!…

Anxiety-ridden dogs that go berserk when left alone by their owners will soon have a new treatment option–a reformulated version of the antidepressant Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine. To be marketed under the name Reconcile by Indianapolis-based drugmaker Eli Lilly, the drug is chewable and flavored with a doggie-delectable zing. It is the latest in a string of recently approved canine drugs, reflecting the growing market for pet pharmaceuticals.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Reconcile in February after clinical tests in dogs showed it significantly improved symptoms of separation anxiety, a problem that strikes 10 to 20 percent of canines with varying severity; dogs affected may bark, chew household items, or urinate in inappropriate locations when left alone. The drug, which will go on the market in April and will be sold along with a behavior modification program, is the first product introduced by a new division of Lilly devoted entirely to pets…

Don’t you just love that phrase “doggie-delectable zing”?

Forty years ago today…

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…Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. Peter Blake, the artist who did the cover, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He was asked if anyone had refused to allow their image to be used. “Yes”, he replied, “Mae West. She said ‘What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club band?'”.

What a dame! She left a legacy of quotes that rivals Dorothy Parker’s. For example: “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” And: “I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.” And: “Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”

She agreed in the end to appear on the album cover — but only after all four Beatles had written to her individually.

Sandals with built-in flask

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Beach sandals now available with hollow sole, liquor for the storage and transportation of. A snip at $44-$46 from Amazon.com. Form an orderly queue. Hic. No shushing or poving. Er, pushing and shoving. Hic.

I am reminded of Myles na gCopaleen’s design for trousers with hollow pipes running down the seams which could be filled with Guinness by publicans just prior to closing time, thereby enabling customers to continue drinking on the bus journey home.

[Source]

Why eBook readers won’t change the world

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Nice essay by Charlie Stross. The gist of it is:

publishers don’t manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra bells and whistles that sells for $350. We’ve had the tech for a $20 (or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they could sell the beast, they’d be churning them out by the bucketload — and it’s perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160×160 green screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The reason nobody makes such a beast is because it’s simply not profitable to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain’t gonna happen.

Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters of the “pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry” theory, until ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore them. And that’s regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and having the cultural artefact — is, well, it’s just bogus.

We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you’re paying $20 a pop. After a year you’ve got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and you’re out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will stay in (they’re set up for the club and they’ve already got a small bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the profits to pay for that first year’s loss-leader.

But 80% of readers don’t do book clubs. I’ve seen my book club sales, and they’re piss-poor (except in France, which is different).

Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter — at least for this generation — for the same reason that it’s near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more than US $24; consumers don’t like being milked.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the link.

Fact of the day

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From Owen Barder’s blog…

I have just learned from DFID’s Chief Economist, Tony Venables, that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.

I’m baffled by all this enthusiasm for ethanol (not to mention BMW’s absurd obsession with hydrogen-fuelled limousines). A good rule of thumb is that if George W. Bush is keen on something, then it’s baloney. And he’s very keen on ethanol.

Second thoughts about old and new media

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Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…

It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.

It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:

In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.