Linked List: July 24, 2009

Friday, 24 July 2009

HD trailer for the upcoming Tron Legacy. Phenomenal. I love it. (Thanks to Chris Carlozzi.)

Update: Direct link to 1080p QuickTime version.

Kickstarter and the 1,000 True Fans ★

Andy Baio, who recently took the position of CTO at Kickstarter, on their amazing stats to date:

Based on data from the first three months of Kickstarter’s existence, it looks like there’s more than something to it. To date, if a project manages to get to 25% of its funding goal, it has a 94% success rate.

I’m convinced that Kickstarter is really on to something.

The AP, Stuck in a Hole, Digs Deeper ★

Richard Perez-Pena, reporting for the NYT on the AP’s latest announcement regarding their attempt to restrict their articles from being linked to or appearing in search results:

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

And:

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

They have no idea what they’re talking about. Seriously, look at this gibberish. Someone just sold the Associated Press a bag of magic beans.

How Palm Re-Enabled iTunes Sync ★

Dieter Bohn:

The Pre is now telling your computer that the vendor who made it is Apple. The change here is that with previous versions of webOS, the Vendor ID was “0 × 0830 (Palm Inc.).” So while previously the Pre identified itself as a “mass storage device” called an iPod, now it’s identifying itself as a “mass storage device manufactured by Apple” called an iPod.

This is a direct violation of the USB licensing agreement. But, in what can only be described as true chutzpah, Palm has preemptively filed a complaint against Apple to the USB Implementors Forum, accusing Apple of misusing the USB Vendor ID.

Dave Winer: ‘What Worked for HBO Won’t Work for News’ ★

Dave Winer, responding to David Simon’s essay in Columbia Journalism Review arguing that newspapers must start charging readers for online access:

With all due respect, putting up a “pay wall” is exactly what these organizations don’t need. They need to decentralize, get further out into the world, not hole-up behind a wall and try to tough it out.

What worked for HBO won’t work for the news because HBO is fiction, and news is not. You can take years writing and developing a story on HBO, polish it, cut out parts that don’t support the plot you’ve devised, even drop the series in the middle if you lose interest. That doesn’t happen with the news. News is happening all the time, on its own schedule, all over the place, including many places you don’t have reporters.

I’m working on my own response to Simon’s argument, but I think Winer is correct that the HBO model is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of news.

The Onion Publisher T. Herman Zweibel: ‘Well, I’ve Sold the Paper to the Chinese’ ★

Now a subsidiary of Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corp.

Update: Zuo Xiabing, CEO of Yu Wan Mei Group, has put the newly acquired news-paper back up for sale:

It appears that in America the very business of published news is in the midst of widespread atrophy, and now carries forward as does a sickly and aging man, coughing up blood and gasping for breath and bearing the pronounced stench of inevitable failure.

Why did no one inform us of this?

Mark Hamburg Returns to Adobe ★

Jeff Schewe reports:

After over a year spent working at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington offices, Mark Hamburg has resigned from Microsoft to rejoin Adobe Systems, Inc. where he will again be working in the Digital Imaging department. Mark, a former Photoshop Architect and the founding engineer on Lightroom had gone to Microsoft to work on new usability for Windows. His decision to return to Adobe is more a statement of desire to again work on products in the digital imaging realm rather than a more research driven project.

Hamburg is undeniably a rock star. His role at Microsoft, as I understood it, was grand and ambitious: to design a truly next-generation user experience for computer software. I can only assume that his Microsoft experience went poorly.

Flash Security Vulnerability Exploited in PDFs ★

Shocking.

HTC Hero Supports Flash in Web Browser; Performance Is ‘Maddening’ ★

Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky has a detailed review of the HTC Hero, the new top-of-the-line Android phone and the first to support Flash in the web browser. Here’s a transcript from his video demonstrating loading a web page containing Flash video:

“As you can see, it’s loading a video page, not super content-heavy. We’re on a Wi-Fi network. (Waits.) It’s not really… that snappy. It’s actually… it’s actually kind of maddening waiting for pages to load.”

Flash video playback is so atrociously slow that it doesn’t even look like video — it looks like a slideshow of still images. Shocking, I know.

But yet Topolsky concludes the video by saying “It’s nice to have Flash.”