MattMaroon.com

Saw this on New York Times today.

Here’s a discovery that may help with obesity: a Chipotle Burrito is something like 1,300 calories fully loaded.

I think I may be the only person in the entire world who is actually ambivalent about Twitter. Most people either love it or hate it, yet I find myself somewhere in the middle. I guess it’s just my contrarian nature imploding upon itself.

Unlike some of its more extreme fans, I don’t find it to be the template for all future communication, and while I’m not going to say it’s a fad, I am going to say it could be. It might not evaporate overnight like Crocs Inc’s share price, but I don’t feel like it has the staying power of Facebook.

I still maintain that it’s pretty hard to put anything more relevant than “im going 2 the gym” or “holy shit a plane just crashed into the hudson, that was so freakin awesome!!!” into 140 characters. (You can, however, link to more info, which has created a cottage industry of url shorteners, and a wave of ravingly-liberal geeks [redundant, I know] decrying them as the web’s newest dictators.) Neither of those are news, one’s simply annoying and the other is a headline. Twitter may have been (directly or indirectly) how a lot of people found out about a plane crash after it happened, but they spent a few minutes reading about it there and a few months reading about it on blogs and newspapers, and watching updates on TV.

On the other hand, unlike the haters, I kind of get why people like the site, and don’t think everyone who uses it is borderline retarded. It’s sort of a fun, open conversation, and the coolest thing about it (and the hardest thing to maintain going forward) is the community. Where else can you just talk to Shaq? After spending some time using it, I think anyone who thinks Twitter is “important” is nuts, but people who think it’s fun I understand.

I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify. My belief that it wouldn’t grow that large was actually more wishful thinking, not because I dislike anyone at Twitter but because I wanted to believe that humans were still able to tell or care about the difference between “headlines” and “news”. I like to think there’s some lower bound to our ADD, and that we reached it somewhere around Facebook. A brief perusal of cable TV, which I don’t subscribe to, would have dispelled that notion quickly enough for me, so I should probably stop prognosticating until I start receiving it again, or at least spend more time in airport bars.

Twitter has clearly hit some sort of tipping point lately, as evidenced by the drastic and sudden increase in the number of people over the age of 35 who I have to explain it to. There’s even action on whether or not they’ll be acquired in 2009. Given that it’s paying +250, the astronomical price tag that would be necessary given Twitter’s presumably high valuation as of the last funding round, and the severe reduction in acquisitions due to the miserable state of the economy, I really like the odds on “no acquisition” there. Even if they find a way to monetize, I think they’ve got a couple more years of independence ahead of them.

But despite their surge, I find myself using the service less and less. I’m just tired of it. It’s the sort of thing you really can’t do casually, and I just don’t have the time or desire to know exactly what beer every one of my friends is drinking right now.

And call me nuts, but no matter how often Twitter’s people go on Colbert and talk about how 140 characters inspires creativity, all I see when I look at Twitter are outdated limitations and people going to great pains to work around them. Limiting messages to 140 characters, all text, maybe made sense three years ago. Now everyone who uses it has a phone with a browser, because every phone has a browser. Even the crappy free-after-contract clamshell can view an image from a link. We don’t need TwitPic and bit.ly anymore, and I resent being forced to deal with them to do what I want to do with the service.

That’s why I’ve largely switched over to Posterous. It doesn’t force me to use antiquated SMS (though I think it offers that if you so desire). It will let me just send it a picture from my phone. I don’t have to worry about shortening URLs, and I don’t need some Adobe Air client just to make it tolerable. If I want to post something short and fast, it’s really easy (they have the best bookmarklet I’ve ever seen) and if I actually have something to say, I can do that too, rather than blogging it and then getting a tinyurl for it and then putting that on Twitter.

You’ve probably seen a number of posts here lately that ended in “via Posterous”. That’s because they’ve brilliantly included every viral hook known to man, letting your posts be automatically sent to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., but in a way that actually makes sense and doesn’t feel bloated. In fact, I don’t know how they’ve made their site do so much so succinctly and so intuitively, but it’s a marvel of user interface/experience design.

So at the risk of sounding too much like a cheerleader, I’m going to call it right now. Posterous is a Twitter that doesn’t suck, and all the cool kids are going to end up there. I guess I’m not going too far out on a limb there given their traffic graph:

But I think they’re already a way better experience than Twitter, and they’re just getting started.

Whoops, there I go prognosticating again. Better sign back up for cable.

YouTube comments have long been known as possibly the dumbest conversations on the Internet, which would place them pretty high in the running for dumbest conversations in the world. Here’s the stream for the hilarious Obama Wassup ad as of right now, with my interpretation of what must have been going through their writer’s head below it in italics:

Peoplesuckass234 (12 seconds ago)

Kill all niggers, jewfags, wetbacks, and chinks.

I’m frustrated and ignorant so I blame all of my problems on other cultures because it’s easier than accepting responsibility for the many mistakes I made that lead to me living with my sister in a leaky trailer in Alabama. Maybe if I can just leave enough comments on YouTube advocating genocide, despite the fact that I’ve never killed anyone, I can effect some real change.

theartist124

So great!!!!!!!!!
Go O!

OMG THAT WAS SO AWESOME!!!!!! I just have to anonymously tell the 8 strangers who accidentally scroll down far enough to see a comment on YouTube that I feel that way!

danielsunshinedahl (2 minutes ago)

Yeah, well I’m just sad that Ron Paul didn’t get the opportunity now or earlier, as he is pretty much anti-everything that has to do with government control, and so am I in actuality. But out of the choices I find the democratic policies much better as Obama agrees with Paul concerning economic cooperation rather than building a militaristic empire.

I really don’t know much about politics, history, or economics, but I’m an alarmist and I read Digg a lot.

XOmniverse (4 minutes ago)

The closest thing to a candidate that actually wanted real change was Ron Paul.

But go ahead and vote for your socialistic black version of Bush. After all, socialism is the “change we need,” right?

I don’t really even know what socialism is, but I heard Sarah Palin say that and I don’t like black people.

mssedmebich (6 minutes ago)

TP I don’t allow government to run my life so whoever wins may have some effect on me but not so much as to ruin my life or make it much better. That is my responsability. I have a roof over my head because I bought a house I could afford and I watch my spending.

I’m such a genius that I don’t even bother with punctuation while I comment on YouTube videos.

marcusmartins1974 (6 minutes ago)

PAINKILLERS??
wHATS WRONG WITH PAINKILLERS IN USA?

I FROM BRAZIL

I’m a crack fiend from Brooklyn who really just Googled to find a place to buy Vicodin without a prescription, but I like to pretend my stupidity is actually just a cultural mistranslation while commenting anonymously online.

misterfisherman (6 minutes ago)

like it some great shame not to vote the confidence trickster? you know what they say about nice people? they’re easily lead

Durrrrrrrrrr I like candy!

I’ve still been reading and contributing to Non-Hacker News daily. Being Moderator-In-Chief there has become harder than I thought it might be, even with only a dozen or so people contributing stories.

My goal is still to keep moderation light, so my philosophy is that when I think a particular story is borderline, I should leave it. I’d rather err on the side of not killing, as to do otherwise might enforce my own personal viewpoints onto the site, which I really don’t want. That’s what this blog is for. On the other hand, there’s a fine line at which discussion devolves into what we see on Digg, which has become little more than a P.R. machine for Obama and Apple.

Politics is, unsurprisingly, the trickiest part. On one hand, I want to allow political discussion, and there’ve been some fascinating links there about it. On the other hand, I don’t want it to become apparently pro-Obama (or McCain, though there’s little chance of that on a social news site).

So I try to keep it to articles that examine and report about trends and facts with little or no editorializing. Articles such as this one, pointing out that both campaigns are going negative with personal attacks, and this one pointing out that the GOP is filing a fundraising complaint against the Obama campaign, were easy. Two tough ones submitted in the last couple days were this one about recent McCain rallies and this one about CNN’s reporting on the Bill Ayers story.

Both I thought long and hard about. The first one could be seen as anti-McCain, but I really didn’t feel it was. It was just reporting on what’s going on with his camp. The second one (which is certainly anti-Obama) had my finger on the kill button for a few seconds mainly because it editorializes in the last paragraph. Up until that point, it was just someone reporting that CNN reported that Obama was lying about the Ayers connection. Ultimately I decided to let the votes decide in both cases, but I’m still not sure if I made the right call. At least if I erred, I did so once in favor of each candidate.

So far I killed one story that was outright racist, and in fact I think I waited too long to do so because I hadn’t fully read it. I killed another one too. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I think it was a link to Daily Kos or Huffington Post or something like that, that I felt editorialized too much. And I changed a few titles to match the title of the article it was linking to, because someone had clearly editorialized there (or in one case, it felt a little too link-baitish) which I don’t want.

Either way, I think we’re at 2 kills out of 230 posts, so not bad. I really do believe that killing is discouraging enough that, when combined with outright bans of people whose posts are killed repeatedly (which I’ve not seen at all yet) will allow you to keep a site’s quality up with only a very small amount. Something like 0.5% moderation might mean the difference between Digg and Hacker News.

Slinkset, which I host it on, has been great. Setup was easy, and they even rolled out a couple nice features for me. The site is up and responsive every time I look at it, so there haven’t been any dependability problems. In fact when Hacker News went down (as it is wont to do sometimes) people commented on it on Non-Hacker News. Ah, the irony.

So I couldn’t really be much happier with them. I’ve used a couple similar services in the past, including CoRank and self-hosted Pligg, and this is far easier and better. There’s really no comparison. Ability to use my own domain makes them much better than CoRank (though in fairness, I haven’t used that in a long time and they may offer it now) and Pligg was just a constant pain to customize.

Interesting story here on my local rag‘s website about an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran who returned home to Akron only to get shot in a gas station hold up.

My favorite two quotes:

”I looked at him and I chuckled. I said, ‘I’ll be damned if I am gonna give you my s- – -.’ I said, ‘I’ve been in the Marine Corps. I went to Iraq and Afghanistan and came back,’ and I said, ‘You are not going to rob me.’ ”

Richard started the truck to turn the vehicle around so he could get his gas. That’s when the man pulled out a pistol.

”The first thing that came to my mind was, I told him I was a cop.”

That wasn’t true, but he thought it might intimidate the robber. Then Richard decided to get his wallet out to show the man his permit to carry a concealed weapon.

”That’s when he shot me.”

Richard’s fingers went numb and his arm was bleeding.

The gunman was still standing there. He put the gun to the back of Richard’s ear and pulled the trigger.

Click.

The gun didn’t fire.

”That’s when I handed him my wallet and he took off.”

and then…

I got shot for a reason and I don’t know what the reason was.

Well, I have a guess. Maybe it’s because you thought that your being a veteran somehow made you impervious to bullets fired by crack fiends? (I wish it did, that’d be a hell of a sign-on bonus for those who serve our country.) I don’t care how many IEDs you dodge in Kandahar, when someone at a gas station points a gun at you and asks for your wallet, you don’t laugh at him and then proceed to fill up your tank. You give him your wallet.

I’d go ahead and chalk the gun not firing the second time up to karma for serving your country well. The first bullet was because you were an idiot.

You know Apple is in a good position when you read articles like this one. Note the headline: Vista notebook falls in hacker challenge.

You see that and have to think the article is about how unsecure Vista is. Then you actually read the piece, and discover that during a contest a Vista laptop was actually the second one to fall victim to hackers. What fell first? A Macbook Air (due to a hole in Safari, an Apple product, which one would presume means all Macs are most likely vulnerable).

And how did they exploit Vista? They found a security flaw in Flash Player, Adobe’s nearly ubiquitous third party add-on. Flash, while on 90-some percent of PCs, isn’t produced by Microsoft and doesn’t come with Windows.

So, here’s what I imagine went through the writer’s head. “Ok, hackers had a contest, tried to hack a Mac, a Windows machine, and a laptop running Linux. On the second day, they hacked the Apple by exploiting some Apple software that comes loaded by default. On the third day they hacked the Windows laptop using a third party add-on that doesn’t come with the machine and has to be installed by a user. How do I title this one? Maybe ‘Windows Vista: Unsafe At Any Speed’? No, too sensationalist.”

Tech journalism at its finest here. The author or whoever else titled that article should be fired immediately for lack of journalistic integrity.

Just too good not to share. From the Onion:

Guy Who Says ‘Previously On Heroes ‘ Wishes He Was Guy Who Says ‘Previously On Lost’

Favorite excerpt:

Cavanaugh, who landed his first big “Previously on” role during the short-lived CW program Veronica Mars, said he had struggled for years to make ends meet by doing freelance “To be continued” jobs and the occasional “Promotional consideration provided by” gig. But after landing a dream “Previously on” opportunity with the premiere of Heroes, Cavanaugh says there was no looking back.

I know I’m a little late writing about this, but I’m going to anyway. A few days back Billy Bragg wrote an article in the New York Times opinion section called The Royalty Scam that made me wonder if the Gray Lady isn’t in need of a logic editor. Maybe someone whose job it is to sift through articles and remove all bad arguments.

Of course if they had such a thing, this article wouldn’t have much left other than the date and the name of the author, as everything in it is pretty much a steaming load of horse manure. The author, in record time, proved that he doesn’t understand how the music industry or social networks or startup investments typically work, or how capitalism functions in general.

In the article, Bragg posits that since Bebo has some music on its site (which was put there voluntarily by musicians who had signed an agreement saying they were owed nothing for it) and it sold to AOL for $850 million, the owner should be sending checks to them.

His logic had me laughing out loud:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

Yeah, lots of startup investors give companies money with no clear understanding of what’s in it for them. “Here’s a check for $5 million. Don’t worry about any paperwork. We’re sure you’ll take care of us if you hit a liquidity event.” I know a lot of founders and a lot of investors, and this just doesn’t happen. You might get the occasional “we’ll deal with the paperwork later” between good friends for a relatively small amount if one is in a pinch, but even that is extremely rare. Almost always there is a clear written contract detailing what each side is giving and what they are getting in return.

(As a side note, we at Draftmix are not really looking for much more investment now, but if anyone wants to fund us on these terms, email me. We’re always open for that. I can just see a term sheet that says nothing but “You give us money, and if we feel like it later, we’ll give you some back. k thx.” Maybe I’ll send that in to Sequoia through the contact link on their website.)

The musicians on Bebo were more like strategic partners. They posted their works there because they wanted the increased exposure that comes with it. They knew when they did it (assuming they read the agreement that they clicked ok to) that they wouldn’t get a red cent directly from the company, even if it sold for $850 trillion. But they hoped that the extra audience would make them some money in CD and ticket sales, and one would assume that for many, it did. That sort of thing built many careers recently. See Dane Cook.

He continues:

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

First of all, Bragg should Google for “payola”. Until fairly recently, record labels were paying radio stations more than they were getting in return for airing new music. Even when that became illegal, it was almost immediately routed through a third party, and business as usual resumed. In fact it still occurs to an unknown extent today, and where it doesn’t, it’s not because the labels wanted it to end, but rather due to radio stations wanting to avoid being prosecuted. So it would seem that free publicity is, in fact, a favor to artists, or at least they and their labels think so.

Also, royalties actually do apply to the internet. At least they do to internet radio stations and other sites that play music without strict agreements with the artists (usually through their labels) to the contrary. There’s a royalty rate for that, just like there is for terrestrial radio stations, and not paying it is just as much a crime for the operator as it is for Clear Channel.

The primary difference between Bebo and a radio station, online or off, is permission. The Foo Fighters didn’t upload their song to 100.7 WMMS and click a button agreeing that The Buzzard could play it for free. The radio stations just play whatever songs they wish, without the artist’s involvement, then pay the requisite amount (generally through ASCAP or BMI) as per applicable laws and agreements. It’s all agreed upon in advance.

Likewise, Bebo and its artists have an agreement that the musicians can upload any song they wish, and Bebo won’t pay them anything. So no, the artists are not owed any dividend. It really is that simple. Agreements are the backbone of capitalism. The whole system falls apart without them, which is why we have the legal system we do. You cannot simply expect Bebo to pay musicians who have digitally signed an agreement that they were owed nothing.

In less than one minute of searching (and note that this was the first time I had ever been to the website) I found this in Bebo’s Terms:

The license you grant to Bebo is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Materials to anyone else in addition to Bebo), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Bebo is not required to pay you for the use on the Bebo Service of the Materials that you post), sub licensable (so that Bebo is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet and WAP content delivery networks to provide the Bebo Service), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Bebo Service are global in reach).

I’m certainly no IP lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that that means that if I post a song on Bebo, I’m not getting paid for it.

Bragg’s idea that musicians who contribute to a site should acquire a stake in it becomes even scarier when you apply it to other forms of intellectual property. For instance, Facebook and Myspace are full of writings and photographs submitted by their users. Are those any less valid or deserving of royalties than music? They aren’t in the real world. You can’t legally go around selling bootleg copies of Harry Potter any more than you can Abbey Road or Moon and Half Dome. Did the YouTube founders owe LonelyGirl16 a check when Google bought them?

Let’s apply his silly logic to me. My blog entries and comments have probably created tens or even hundreds of thousands of clicks and page views for Hacker News. Hacker News is owned by Y Combinator, which invested in and therefore owned a portion of Auctomatic, which just sold for $5 million. (By the way, congrats on that guys!). By Bragg’s logic, PG owes me a check.

Social networks, and all websites that host user generated content for that matter, exist only because people are allowed to sign agreements giving away their intellectual property.

Technology is advancing far too quickly for the old safeguards of intellectual property rights to keep up, and while we wait for the technical fixes to emerge, those of us who want to explore the opportunities the Internet offers need to establish a set of ground rules that give us the power to decide how our music is exploited and by whom.

Those ground rules already exist. They’re called user agreements. Bebo forces you to agree to one before you sign up, and when you do so, you are deciding how your music is exploited by Bebo. Don’t like the terms? Don’t sign up. It’s that simple.

It’s unreasonable to expect some sort of law governing user agreements in that way, given that the market can clearly regulate them. If Billy Bragg thinks the terms are unfair, he can start his own social network that pays royalties. If that works out, the market will have decided that social network user agreements should involve royalties to musicians. None of the ones that don’t pay royalties can seem to turn a profit though, even with billions of page views, so I don’t like his odds.

We need to do this not for the established artists who already have lawyers, managers and careers, but for the fledgling songwriters and musicians posting original material onto the Web tonight. The first legal agreement that they enter into as artists will occur when they click to accept the terms and conditions of the site that will host their music. Worryingly, no one is looking out for them.

So essentially what he wants are lawyers and agents for struggling musicians. Or maybe some sort of union/approval body that warned them when a deal was beneficial for them and when it wasn’t. Both are fine ideas, and probably a good solution to what might become a real problem. But expecting Bebo to pay artists who agreed they were owed nothing is not only anti-capitalist, it threatens the future of the entire modern internet. Thankfully for those of us in the business, he hasn’t got a legal leg to stand on.

One weird side effect of the human intellect, seemingly brought on by our fear of our own mortality, is the tendency to eulogize people after they die. A recent case in point is science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Here‘s a classic example.

I can’t say I’m an Arthur C. Clarke fan. I don’t have anything against him. I liked the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey quite a bit (as with most Kubrick films) which I know he collaborated on, after writing the short story that inspired it. But I’ve never read any of his work.

In fact, I don’t like science fiction in general. I find that like most niche genres, it’s inhabited mainly by poor writers who use their domain knowledge to cater to an otherwise ignored audience, which in the case of sci-fi and fantasy, are geeks. It’s works on pretty much the same principle as XKCD. There are, of course, a few good writers in the genre (and every genre for that matter) but for the most part, the quality is pretty poor, and though I love science, my loathing of hacky writing prevents me from enjoying most of the fiction written about it.

So I don’t really have an opinion on Clarke specifically, because I haven’t read him. But upon reading the eulogy… err… article I smelled a rat. Especially when I hit the following statement:

Without him, it’s safe to say that there would be no direct TV, no satellite-routed ship-to-shore phone calls, and no global navigation systems.

I couldn’t imagine exactly how it could be “safe to say” anything so broad and sweeping. It’s later explained:

During World War II, when he was a young officer in the Royal Air Force in Britain, Clarke first thought of geostationary satellites as communications tools. Geostationary satellites are satellites whose orbital periods match the Earth’s rotation. In 1945, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. They have since revolutionized communications and weather forecasting.

Curious, I did 5 seconds of research, something the author of this abysmal story apparently couldn’t be bothered with, and discovered that geosynchronous satellites were dreamed up 17 years before Clarke wrote about them in 1928 by Herman Potočnik.

So in the history of the satellite, you have the guy who thought it up, the guy who wrote about it in a short story almost two decades later, and the guys at NASA who made it happen almost two more decades after that. And who, out of those three people/groups, is it “safe to say that there would be no direct TV, no satellite-routed ship-to-shore phone calls, and no global navigation systems” without? The one who just died, of course.

The article then goes on, like every other written about Clarke since he died, to talk about what a great predictor of technology he was. It points out all of the wonderful ideas he predicted would come to fruition that later did. And viewed without context, it’s not an unimpressive list.

But it glosses over the fact that he was a sci-fi writer. Making tech predictions is what they do for a living. The overall number that turn out correct isn’t impressive, it’s the percentage relative to his peers. Is there a long list of predictions Clarke made that didn’t pan out? I bet there is. And if you added up both categories, was he any better of a futurist than others of his time? I don’t know, because nobody bothered. It’s certainly possible he was, but also possible that he wasn’t.

But who would ask such a question about a guy who just passed away? That seems downright rude, given that it might not be 100% positive. So instead we focus only on the things he got right, entirely out of context. The things he “invented” that someone else did in reality. The things he predicted that came true without the things that didn’t.

Which I don’t understand, because if you read Clarke’s Wikipedia entry, the life he really lived is impressive enough. Doctoring it with inaccuracies for the sake of making him look better is insulting to Clarke, who doesn’t need the help, insulting to the people who really invented satellites and put them in orbit, and insulting to the many other science fiction writers who made predictions similar to his.

Pretty awesome article here about a guy learning to smoke at the age of 46. I find it refreshing for a few reasons.

For one, it’s kind of neat to see someone go through the same thing you and everyone else did, but 25-30 years later in life. No 16 year old could ever be so eloquent about their experience and motivations, and even if they could, they’d be far different. So much has been written about why people start smoking (peer pressure, rebellion, etc.) but I’ve never seen anyone discuss the many non-biological reasons why they keep smoking.

Also you never hear anything about the positive effects. Clearly there must be something good there. Roughly one third of adult males smoke worldwide even knowing the health problems cigarettes cause. If that many people are willing to engage in a behavior that they know is likely to kill them eventually, there must be something redeeming about it. People are surprisingly irrational, so it doesn’t have to be a net positive, but they’re not so far from irrational that there can’t be any.

But the anti-tobacco nuts have made any honest discourse about smoking taboo, much like drugs. Impressive from a marketing standpoint, I suppose, but harmful to society. People don’t respond to fear tactics, especially teenagers, but an honest assessment of both sides of the coin is the only way to make an informed choice.