Being Mark Cohen

Wired Magazine reports that ‘Futurama’ will be returning. I love futurama. Probably because in between the great humour, David X Cohen and Matt Groenig are about as pessimistic as me. It seems that the risque’ (if you could call it that) humour was behind Fox pulling the plug on futurama five years ago

Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”

The new series hits comedy Central next year so we can expect it to hit Aussie TV some time in 2015.

Flickr Uploadr 3.0 (beta software) is available for download. It’s an open source uploader, and for Mac users its great. The uploader doesn’t like RAW files, and for some reason if you drag from iphoto it doesn’t bring the preview jpg across (I could swear it used to). It does tell you that it couldn’t read the raw file though, and so you can jpeg it and re-add it. The uploader software allows you to select multiple images and edit their tags, headings, descriptions, etc before you upload. It is also useful as you can edit multiple headings or descriptions, then make small changes to the individual ones if for example you wanted to add a sequence number. If you’re using the flickr uploader and if you haven’t updated it in a while I highly recommend grabbing the new version here

Domain is running a hoax ad for Kirribilli house, the residence of the Prime Minister. This is interesting as this weekend is Election time, and the listing is not exactly a politically neutral item. Have a look and see for yourself….

There’s a great article titled The Future of Reading, which is an interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The article is about a new device amazon is launching called the Kindle, which is intended to be to ebooks and Amazon what the iPod is to digital music and Apple. One aspect of what they are doing is taking free content from blogs and effectively selling it by charging for the delivery of the content to their new device

You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.

That feels a bit cheeky to me. I assume the “selected blogs” will be selected A list and similar blogs whose owners have ok’ed the sale of their content (possibly through some revenue share). The device looks interesting (just google it)

Maybe I’m old school but I don’t see this device knocking the humble paper book off it’s age-old pedestal.

EDIT: Seth Godin’s post about why you won’t find his books on amazon’s Kindle is well worth checking out. He wanted his books to be available for free on the device. Amazon apparently didn’t…

[EDIT AGAIN]From Mark Pilgrim

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Took myself off to The Coffee Club for a coffee while I wait for the shops to open. Have to do more things today than there will be time for. At some point in time the list of things to get done on a weekend changed into a wishlist.
Blogged from my mobile

I use Google Desktop as my homepage, and one of the better widgets is the “quote of the day”. Today’s is fantastic

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
– Neil Gaiman

The aptness appeals to me in the face of what I’ve been watching, reading, and seeing lately. I went in to the city yesterday at lunch to pick up some photos. I stopped and watched a homeless guy on the pavement, sitting with his cardboard begging sign. He was staring at a vacant space about a metre in front of him, almost looking at the knees in suits going past him. Not one person stopped. Nobody looked or noticed. I don’t say this to be patronizing at all, so forgive me if it does seem like that. In Africa people only half-see beggars because there are so many. They are numb to them. In Australia I hardly ever see beggars. Why are we numb to them? Why don’t we look and think “I’m about to drop ten bucks on a sandwich and a coffee, why don’t I skip the coffee and spare two dollars”. We rationalise and say “he’s going to spend it on beer” or something like that. So what. Why don’t we stop and live in the moment and feel sorry and spare the dollar or two. How does this relate to the quote of the day? Well, it’s a long walk back to my office from Pitt St. And the whole way back I couldn’t decide whether my flash of lucidity in a blurry day left me as the emperor or the half-wit.

I decided that as a balding, pale-white, tired-looking geek the Magnum PI look wouldn’t work for me. So I’m going for the Hulk-Hogan-gone-anemic-with-no-sleep-and-no-muscles look. It’s itching already, and I think my wife is going to be very angry when she wakes up tomorrow morning

Sponsor me, make the suffering worthwhile (My wife’s suffering)

The worst part for me is that I often walk around looking like an unshaven hobo (in the words of our Tester) and the rules of Movember say to be clean-shaven all the time except for the ‘Mo. This will be a challenge in itself

Seth Godin is great. I love his work, it’s inspiring. Today, though, was the first time I read anything he’d written and he lost me at his first point.

Google announced an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from one site to another. MySpace just joined in. This changes the rules for FaceBook, because now users have a choice of picking from dozens, soon to be hundreds of open sites… or just one closed one.

Let me make my point using find-and-replace. Google –> *nix, MySpace –> IBM, FaceBook –> Microsoft. open sites –> operating systems.

[*nix] announced an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from one [operating system] to another. [IBM] just joined in. This changes the rules for [Microsoft], because now users have a choice of picking from dozens, soon to be hundreds of [operating systems]… or just one closed one.

See the flaw here? If you read The Dip (by Seth Godin) you might look at this and think “meh”. Still not no 1. It doesn’t change the game if every second-tier player adopts an open standard. It doesn’t change the game. All that it means now is that All the long tail players make it easier for their audience to move between themselves.

My bet would be (unless there’s some license restriction against it) it will only be a matter of time before someone writes a “FaceBook Container app” that loads into this new open platform, and hosts Facebook apps inside itself. Voila! Uberdominance for Facebook. Checkmate.

In my opinion, changing the game is not tweaking the game. It’s about the big guns. Its the “go big or go home”. Not the “meh”.