Month: November 2007

Too Many Opinions on the Kindle and What it Says about the Internet

    Amazon introduced the Kindle on Monday and I ordered one on Wednesday. It didn’t take me long to decide I wanted one even with all the bad web press. I can understand why most casual readers wouldn’t feel the need for an ebook reader, but I can’t understand why so many people are attacking the device. I need large print books to enjoy reading, and the Kindle offers me the widest selection of reading for instant large font viewing. Easy decision. However, on Monday, the Kindle seemed to generate more opinions than the Presidential election.

    If you visit the Kindle site linked above you will find hundreds of customer reviews, most of which are by people who don’t own a Kindle and don’t plan to buy one. This really annoyed me. I shop Amazon all the time and I love reading the customer reviews but I hate when someone uses the service to just post their vague opinions. It wouldn’t bother me at all if Amazon only allowed people who purchased a product to post a review.

    Amazon releases a revolutionary gadget and hundreds if not thousands of writers across the net shoot it down because of whim opinions about the concept of ebooks. I think we need to show some self-control here because the ratio of signal to noise is cluttering up the Internet. Slashdot.org has always had that problem, as has every forum, bulletin board and mailing list since the start of the net. Slashdot however, has mechanisms to try to control the noise. I’m wondering if self-control shouldn’t be part of net-etiquette. Unless you have actual experience or expert knowledge, limit your comments to blogs, chats and fun forums, and let general information sites work at being clear and focused on their subjects. What if books, magazines and newspapers just let anyone jump in and say stuff?

    I’m sure Amazon appreciates having an active community on their customer reviews, but as a customer trying to buy something I’d like reviewers with actual experience posting comments. When I read general news and magazines sites I want a qualified person writing up a worthy review. I hate googling a product I’m considering buying and getting endless hits with a couple paragraphs of natter in the returns. I also hate getting dozens of product comparison pages that have no real information. People complain about Wikipedia not being valid, but it does have mechanisms to police its content. I think we need something like that for the web in general.

    I’m the first to talk since I’m a verbose bastard but blogs are designed for diarrhea of the brain. On the other hand, does every web page need a forum page attached to it allowing just anyone to chime in? Slashdot made a business out of the concept and they make it work with control. When I search the Internet I’m trying to find solid information about a particular topic, like when I was shopping for the Kindle.

     When David Pogue from the New York Times writes about the Kindle I expect a certain level of real information and he delivers because he’s an expert on technology and he has actually used a Kindle. When I go to Amazon and read customer reviews on the Kindle I expect to find less professional writers but ones who have actually bought the device and have used it. I also expect to read on any magazine or news site, whether based on a print edition, or purely online journalism, a professional level of writing based on actual experience.

    It’s too bad HTML doesn’t have tags like <news release></news release>, <review></review>, <opinion></opinion>, <discussion></discussion>, <news></news>, <scholarly></scholarly> or <advertisement></advertisement> and Google could filter returns based on those and other tags. Of course Google is in the business to sell ads so maybe it doesn’t have a real incentive to police the quality of information. The obvious solution is to learn to trust only specific sites and not use Google.

    Wouldn’t it be wonderful to use a search engine that allowed users to control how deep and wide to return searches? What if search engines had check boxes for:

  • Sites you have listed with us (we could list our favorites to save)
  • Top 100 sites
  • Top 1,000 sites
  • Top 10,000 sites
  • All the billions of pages
  • Sites noted for their authority
  • Scholar sites
  • Governmental sites
  • Sites tied to a print publication
  • Sites written by professional writers
  • Blogs
  • Forums
  • Etc.

    When you go down to your favorite bookstore and buy a magazine you expect it to have high quality content, even if you’re just looking for celebrity gossip. I’ve gotten so used to using Google that maybe I should go do a search on search engines and see if someone hasn’t already developed the one I wish for above.

    I’m tired of web pages that look like Venus flytraps for Google ads. I’m also sick of writers and articles that have an array of icons trying to get me to increase their readership on forum sites like Slashdot and Digg. I accept the reality of advertisements, but integrate the ad visually into the web page like magazines do in print. And if you want me to read your content, format the text so it’s easy to read. I’m tired of web pages looking like racing cars. And if I’m going to have to wait through an ad page before seeing my content you better make sure the content is worth it.

    The content level of the web is quickly moving towards total noise. Even in blogs and forums I think we all could spend more time focusing on what we write and trying to be clear, because many blog writers are now producing content that’s better than some professional sites. Maybe we should all work on content and spend less time trying to trick the system into returning our link on the first page of a Google search. I hope I’m not hypocritical.

JWH

    

Who is Still Playing Buckwheat’s Songs?

There is a song I love, “On My Own” by a guy named B. W. Stevenson, but sad to say it’s not easy to find anymore. I recently discovered that Lone Star Music has reprinted several of his old LPs as 2 for 1 CDs and I ordered a couple from Amazon. However, I wished Buckwheat’s music (that’s where the B. W. comes from) was on Rhapsody. I don’t like buying CDs anymore, because if it not on Rhapsody it tends not to get played by me. After playing B. W. Stevenson’s Best of Album on LP, I just had to order some more of his music. I’m getting rid of all my LPs, and a few inspire me to play them just one last time, like Buckwheat’s album. I sometimes think of getting rid of my CDs, which is why I hate ordering CDs, because I know I’ll be have to make another sad farewell in the future. CDs tie me to old technology that I’m very anxious to leave behind.

I hate to think of lost music and lost artists. How many 78s were converted to LP? And then how many LPs were saved for the future by conversion to CDs? And now, how many physical albums, from all that were ever recorded and published will make it to the new digital world of music? 113,895 visitors (since 7/22/01) have clicked on that B. W. Stevenson site above to see his discography, so we know he has some fans out there. I’d love it if all the digital subscription services and digital music sales sites had to report their data to a central service. How many people played “On My Own” in 2007?

I keep up with a forgotten writer, Lady Dorothy Mills, who published fifteen books in the 1920s and early 1930s. She’s forgotten today. I maintain that web site on her. I’m one of her last readers as far as I can tell. I get about one email a year either asking about her or providing me with a new snippet of information. If her books were reprinted as ebooks on the Internet would she gain new readers? If Buckwheat’s music was on Rhapsody, Napster and Zune, would he be acquiring new fans?

Lee, a friend of mine, told me how much he loved the old British folk group Fairport Convention and I was able to find 14 of their albums on Rhapsody, including 7 of their first 20 albums. I’m playing the first right now. Does being on Rhapsody help or hurt the group? They would probably make more money from actual CD sales, but as long as I can listen to digital music and not have to mess with a physical media to file and store, I want to leave the world of CDs forever. B. W. Stevenson’s music isn’t on Rhapsody. Except for “Shambala” on a 70’s hit record, his albums aren’t on iTunes or Amazon MP3 sites either. Why? Why does Fairport Convention get 14 albums preserved? Is it because Buckwheat is pretty much forgotten and Fairport Convention was famous enough to maintain a momentum into the future – for right now. Amazon has 12 of their records for sale as MP3 albums.

As a fan I’m more concerned about hearing the music I love, but I suppose the owners of the music, they are more concerned with making the maximum amount of money. Copyright protects their work, we’d like to think. I’ve always wondered how much artists make from providing their work on subscription services like Rhapsody. But I have to ask, does being available count for something? Would young people be listening to more Beatle songs if they were legally online? Rhapsody is catching on. Rhapsody is now on TiVo and cell phones and subscription music is a new feature on some cable TV systems, and offered by some universities to their students via campus networks. And companies like Sonos make Rhapsody America and Napster even easier to access – almost like science fiction magic. Subscription music is the music distribution system of the future, even if it’s not quite a success now.

It’s like that old question about a tree falling in a forest, who will hear Buckwheat’s music when all the songs are played digitally? Like I said, I’m giving up my LPs, and maybe my CDs soon, and even my SACDs. Eventually I’ll have to decide do I want to own music, like how I just ordered the B. W. Stevenson’s CDs, or do I just want to play music by beckoning it out of cyberspace? I own about 20,000 songs. Rhapsody lets me play from about 5,000,000 in the library, with a good deal of overlap. It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. If I hadn’t ordered those CDs from Amazon I would have lost access to “On My Own.” I don’t know how long I will continue to do that, just to save some old favorite songs. I did rip “On My Own” from the LP to save it before I discovered it on CD. But I hate saving and managing MP3 songs – it’s such a pain to preserve gigabytes and soon terabytes of information.

I’m moving to a new paradigm shift as a fan of music, movies and books. Instead of having a giant personal library where I hang onto everything, I’m moving towards a future where I discover stuff just as I use it and let it go when I’m finished. Rhapsody and Netflix work like dream in that new paradigm.

JWH


Inventions Wanted #4 – The Desktop Art Gallery

    I don’t know why this doesn’t exist already, but I’ve been Googling my brains out trying to find fine art masterpieces for sale to be used as desktop backgrounds. I’m shopping for a 24″ LCD monitor with 1920 by 1200 resolution and I want it to be my personal Desktop Art Gallery. A good example of what I’m talking about is here for Van Gogh’s Irises. Visit that site and right click on that image and make it your desktop background. It helps if you have a large wide-screen LCD monitor. (FYI, it will replace your current desktop art, so you may want to just view it on a full-sized window. If you are using Webshots, it will automatically replace Irises during the next scheduled photo rotation.)

    Last month I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and I was so impressed that I’ve taken on a minor obsession with art. My wife and I had been planning this vacation for years and I expected to go crazy over the Air & Space Museum, since I’ve been a space nut all my life. I loved the Air & Space Museum, but I was mesmerized by the National Gallery of Art. Since I’ve returned I’ve bought several art books and I’ve been watching a 24-part lecture series on DVD on the history of Impressionism. None of the reproductions can do justice to actually seeing the originals, but my high-definition TV and computer screen comes closest.

    Art for the TV screen has already been invented evidently, since I found Ambient Art at Amazon.com. Amazon has other TV art collections too. But I can’t find anyone selling fine art collections of .jpgs for computer screens. I guess copyright owners are afraid .jpgs will be pirated all over the internet, just like MP3 files. Although the prints in art books are great for casual study, their reproductions are usually just terrible when you compare them to the originals. (I have to admit that some reproductions are better than the originals. I don’t know why. The Pissarro exhibit at the Brooks Museum in Memphis was somewhat disappointing to me because all the paintings seemed color faded whereas the reproductions online and in books seemed colorful.)

    Here’s what I want someone to invent. I want a program that uses my desktop and screen saver to display art and if I hit a hot-key to narrate a history about the piece and if I hit another hot-key bring up text and hyperlinks for further study. I want this system to be open in such a way that when I buy an art book or visit a museum they can sell me a CD/DVD that contains a digital version of the show that I can add to my Desktop Gallery. I want it to be modular so that there will be folders for artists, show collections, and permanent collections. If a big collection is traveling around the country, I’d like a centralized service to offer a digitized version for my Desktop Art Gallery that reminds me when and where I can go see the originals. I’d loved it if art books came with a supplemental disk that added reproductions and commentary to my Desktop Art Gallery. And I supposed the same service could offer me shows by unknown new artists to try.

    I’d also like my Desktop Art Gallery to generate shows by programmed criteria. For example, I might want to see all the paintings from France from 1700 to 1900 in chronological order. Or select a particular artist and pull his work from all the collections. I don’t know what the technical ramifications would be, but I’d like to examine each piece like Deckard examined the photograph in the movie Bladerunner. I guess this would mean making a grid over each painting and taking further 1920×1200 resolution images of each portion of the grid. And if people write up studies and critiques of paintings on the Internet, I’d like a way for this program to track them – maybe through Wikipedia.

    This system really needs an open format, probably in XML, so my Desktop Art Gallery can grow with acquisitions from any source. I’d like it to be smart enough so it won’t duplicate paintings using the same image copy. Which means it needs to allow for multiple versions for each image. It’s actually very hard to photograph a painting and it would be worthwhile to have multiple perspectives. Brushstrokes can be seen depending on which angle the light comes from. Color is very hard to match. Some of the paintings I saw in Washington I’ve since seen in many different books and they all look different. Some don’t even look like the painting I saw since the colors are so jarringly different. I don’t know if there are calibration sensors for such copy work like there are for matching monitor colors with printer colors, but it sure would help if there were.

    I do have some art collections on CD-ROM that came with art books, but the reproductions are tiny and the software crude. And there are some screen saver companies that do sell art collections, but they only work with their software – a closed system. For my dream system to work it has to be open. It’s too bad the copyright owners can’t trust .jpg or its future improvement because that would allow many programmers to try and invent such a system, or for an open source system to develop. I think DRM systems will go the way of the Dodo, but it will take time. And the world of art lovers might be such a small group that there just isn’t enough of a demand for product like I’m describing. But if you love art, try finding some good 1920×1200 images to study and you’ll see why I want this invention.

JWH 11/14/7