Author: Gary

1) I found a bunch of photos from my travels I didn’t have up on Flickr. They are now up. I don’t know why but they were up on the kodak photo site, which I think used to be oPhoto.com (which in a brilliant branding move ~not~ was changed to Kodak Galllery).

2) You can read the comment from Nate and Bietz regarding my previous post on Myspace. I got an account last night and went randomly searching profiles of kids from the Twin Cities and Appleton. What I noticed is that hardly anyone is overweight, everyone is good looking, has photos and all the comments seem totally generic. Most of the profiles seem generic too with nothing specific about any places or events. Most of the comments people would leave were the type you’d get in a spam mail that was trying to trick you into thinking it was from a friend. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Also, while I don’t doubt that many high school kids are on myspace, the number shouldn’t overwhelm the number of college kids, the vast majority I’ve noticed use Facebook.

3) I finally found a desktop weather application I like. Weatherpulse. No ads, no garbage, stable and free. Temperature is sitting right there on my toolbar.

4) I mentioned a long time ago that one of my favorite pieces of software is a product called World Watch. Its a simple little app that is a software version of a geochron. World Watch hasn’t been updated in a looong time and I’m now looking for an alternative. So far, I’ve found Sun Clock, which is OK. I’ve always felt that there was huge potential in an application like this. There is lots of free data now available online which uses lat/long data where you could use a map like this as a front end.

I think this would make for a great open source project. Weather maps and other geo data is freely available. I’m sure you could even tie in Google maps and satellite images somehow. Your just taking data in a standard format (lat/long) and plotting it on a map with set coordinates. Creating a standard interface for accessing geographic data would be extrememly useful.

From a Wired Magazine on myspace.com:

By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August – more than Google – and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren’t the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace’s parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.’s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.

I don’t doubt the financial numbers, as they can be verified and they were probably audited prior to purchase, but in no way do I accept that they get more traffic than Google. Also, at 3.5m new users per month, they would have quickly exhaused the population of who would probably visit a site like this on a regular basis in a year.

Furthermore, I know a lot of people into music and deal on a regular basis with college and high school kids. No one has ever mentioned this site before. Even if they are visiting it, I’d think if it were this big you’d hear some sort of buzz about it.

Something is inflating the numbers here. They claim there are 400,000 bands registered on the site. Assuming a band with 4 people, that’s 1.6m people in garage bands, or about 1% of the population. Considering the median age in the US is in the 30’s I really doubt that this much of the population a) are in garage bands, and b) have a band website on myspace.com.

I have no doubt its a popular site and probably even a really big site, but bigger than google??? There has to be some sort of inflated number from the same people hitting forum pages over and over.

Moreover, if they are doing 9.4b page views in a month, and to be conservative we assume they have no growth over a 12 month period, that’s 112.8b page views per year. They expect to gross $30-40m this year. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they make $40m, and assuming 100% of revenue comes from advertising, that gives them 2,820 page vies per $1 of revenue, or a CPM of about $0.35. This is giving them all the benefits of the doubt. Drop the revenue numbers a bit, assume less than 100% of revenue is from ads, and assume that the page view growth continues, you are looking a CPM in the range of $0.25-0.10.

Oh, and that’s assuming 1 ad per page, which they don’t do. On the front page I count 4 ads, 2 of which are text ads. If they are serving up 12% of the ads on the internet, it is because they are giving the ads away.

They claim to be like Craigslist. Check out their classified ads for your city and compare it to Craingslist. They claim to be like friendster. How many people do you know on myspace compared to friendster??

Something is really fishy or I am really out of touch with what is happening on the Internet.

The Star Tribune recently redid their website….and they did a good job. They site appears to be built for Firefox and most amazingly, they have RSS feeds available. They also cut down on the number of articles you have to be registered to view.

I’m sort of stunned.

I don’t expect an old media outlet like this to be this on top of things. I expect disasters like the NYT who decided to put their columnists behind a pay to view service, thus rendering them non-existant in all internet debates. With ABC making some of their shows available on iTunes and NBC putting the nightly news up for download, they might slowly be getting it.

– I’ve been listening to List of Demands by Saul Williams lately. I’ve had the mp3 on my computer from the big SXWS download earlier this year. There are so many songs in the collection (2gb) that its hard to listen to everything. I put the SXSW collection on shuffle a few days ago and this gem popped out. There are several artists I’ve found from this and I hope SXSW does this again for 2006. You can get the 2.6 gb 2005 collection via bittorrent from here.

– I’ve run into several people the last few days who were unaware of RSS. Some of them were people who are involved in technology as a profession. For those who don’t know what it is, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you look on my site, you’ll find a button that says RSS in the lower left column. If you click on it, you’ll see a bunch of confusing looking code. When you cut and paste the URL for that page into and RSS reader, it will go and grab the new article from my site when they get updated.

I’ve been using reader.Google.com as of late. Its not perfect but it has several things going for it. 1) its online, so it will keep track of items I’ve already read from wherever I access it. 2) its free. I had been using Onfolio with Firefox as my RSS reader. Onfolio is made by the guys who made Cold Fusion, so I have a natural desire to see them do well. Its a good product. It is probably the best RSS reader out there. However, it costs $30 and it only works on one computer. Google reader is good enough and with the cost and online advantages, it makes it hard to beat.

*Update* When I read this very post in Google Reader, it put an audio control at the bottom of the page to play the mp3 I linked to above. Neat.

Q: What is better than a straight guy getting a fashion makeover by 5 gay guys?

A: A straight guy getting a fashion makeover from 3 hotties.

On Saturday, I spend most of the afternoon with Haley and her two friends Kerri (left) and Emily (right). They went through my closet, took me to the MoA, and had a grand old time having me try stuff on and letting me buy it.

In the proess of buying me clothes, I threw away my sneakers that I’ve worn since 1997, and had strong pressure on me to throw away my old jeans which are 2 sizes too big for me. (which I have yet to do).

As it turns out, I have no clue what is “fashionable”. (well, I guess I knew that). Hence, the need to bring in professional help in fixing my wardrobe.

Even thought I might not have showed it at the time, I actually had fun, which might have been the first time in my life I had fun buying clothes. It was an experience to go from store to store with three women fussing over you and picking stuff out.