Linked List: June 30, 2009

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Speaking of DF Advertising and Sponsorships 

A heads-up to anyone considering sponsoring the DF RSS feed: July is sold out, but most weeks in August are still available. If you have a product or service you’d like to promote to the DF audience, get in touch.

(And if display advertising is more your bag, this tweet from my friend Jim Coudal may be of interest.)

Seth Godin Says Malcolm Gladwell Is Wrong 

Godin says he disagrees with Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free, but it’s unclear to me exactly what he thinks Gladwell is wrong about. What I took away from Gladwell’s review is that Anderson is wrong that free media alone will satisfy our demand, not an argument that existing not-free media institutions must somehow be preserved.

On a related point, several readers have asked why I seem opposed to Anderson’s view, given that I’ve made a nice career for myself by giving away my own writing for free here on Daring Fireball. My answer to that is that Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it.

Clipstart 1.1 

Update to Manton Reece’s $29 video library app for the Mac adds support for importing clips directly from your iPhone 3GS. As I wrote in May, it’s like iPhoto or iTunes for the video clips you shoot with your camera.

Craigslist Map Thingie 

Genius from Poeks:

Craigslist Map Thingie slurps housing listings from Craigslist and plots them on Google Maps, with a panorama view of the property, if available.

Update: It’s news to me, but a slew of DF readers emailed to point to Housing Maps, which does something similar.

WSJ: Dell Working on Android-Based iPod Touch Competitor 

John Paczkowski:

The consumer electronics wizards at Dell who brought us the now defunct DJ Ditty MP3 player and the Axim handheld are hard at work on another gadget, a mobile Internet device. Sources tell The Wall Street Journal that the MID uses an ARM-based chip, runs Google’s Android operating system and has been in development since last year.

It’s funny, of course, because the DJ and Ditty were huge failures, but when they debuted, many pundits predicted they would topple the iPod. But I hope this rumor is true. I’d consider buying an iPod Touch-like Android device — something for $200 or so, without any sort of monthly phone contract.

Update: To be clear, the reason I’d consider buying a $200 non-phone Android device is so I could use, try, and write about Android apps. Same goes for WebOS, by the way.

Jackass of the Week: Joe Wilcox 

Issues “personal challenge” to Steve Jobs to return to work in his “full capacity”; declares that Apple accomplished little during his medical leave:

Across product lines I see a consistent trend: More of the same, only better.

With insight this deep it’s hard to believe Wilcox was laid off from eWeek.

On the ‘Wall-E’ End Title Sequence 

The Art of the Title Sequence has a wonderful interview with Pixar’s Jim Capobianco and Alexander Woo, regarding the fantastic end titles for Wall-E. (Via Kottke.)

John Nack on Adobe’s Closing for the Week 

John Nack:

Let me first mention that these Adobe shutdowns are nothing new. I’ve worked here for 9 years, and the company has done the shutdowns off and on throughout that time — at least since ’01 or ’02. I didn’t hear the news of this one and say (as DF does) “Uh-oh.”

He also says (and I’ve heard the same thing privately from a friend who works at Adobe) that there’s no pressure to work through the break. Company-wide vacation.

Update: Company-wide vacation, that is, for Adobe employees with vacation time. For those without vacation time, it’s a company-wide unpaid vacation. Next week, free shit sandwiches in the cafeteria.

The Potential of Web Typography 

Mozilla-hosted demo page showing the potential of web typography with the @font-face CSS rule, using typefaces licensed for use just on that page. Looks great in both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.0.

Firefox 3.5 for Developers 

Firefox 3.5 is out, and, among a slew of major improvements, it now supports the HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags. I don’t post many video clips to Daring Fireball, but henceforth, when I do, it’ll be with the <video> tag. IE users can suck it.

Update: Whoops, not so fast. The only video format Firefox 3.5 supports for use with the <video> tag is Ogg, which almost no one uses. And so it can’t play H.264 MP4 files like the one in YouTube’s HTML 5 demo page.

PC World’s Nationwide 3G Network Testing 

PC World commissioned an extensive nationwide 3G test in the U.S.:

The AT&T network’s 13-city average download speed in our tests was 812 kbps. Its average upload speed was 660 kbps. Reliability was an issue in our experience of the AT&T system: Our testers were able to make a connection at a reasonable, uninterrupted speed in only 68 percent of their tests.

Reliability is the single most important factor, and AT&T’s network is clearly the least reliable. “Sorry about your complete inability to get a connection at all, but if you did have a working connection, you’d have a good upload speed” is little solace.