Audio recording

Dave says::

This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

Dave, you should have asked, instead of searching. Here's some free code to record audio using QuickTime from any Windows device. The code dates back to 1992, and was working on Windows in 1997.
This is what AOL use to do the Audio/Video chat in the latest AIM releases (that iteroperates with iChat).

Value destroyed is not owned

Tim Oren writes on DRM as a warning sign:

Copy protection DRM always destroys end user value, in both convenience and robustness. When you see DRM in a business plan or analysis, it is always there to benefit someone other than the end user. Find out who, it will indicate where power lies in a content value chain.

The mere presence of DRM indicates a failure to deliver end user value. If the information object were to lose value when extracted from the bundle or service from it was derived, DRM would not be felt necessary. Therefore the presence of DRM suggests a vendor that is behind the curve, failing to find a new value to deliver as their chokepoint disappears in the digital world.

Tim is correct that DRM destroys value, but he is mistaken in his implication that it can just be Customer value that is destroyed. The 0th law of economics is that a trade only happens when both parties see themselves as gaining from it. If the Customers see less value, they pay less for the product, and its value is thereby reduced. This kind of short-sightedness is foolish enough with conventional goods, but is especially stupid with digital media, when you have no measurable marginal cost of goods and can carry over Customers' excitement into other goods.

How about mass video editing?

Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took something like the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which bits of action people as a whole found interesting.

Losing language sales

This weekend we attended the Home School Geography Club, which was about Viet Nam, and enjoyed it immensely. Our friends the Hamiltons hosted it and, among many other fascinating things, taught us as few words in Vietnamese, and fed us Phô .
However when writing out the Vietnamese sheets, Bich was adding the accents by hand on the printout. It turns out that the Vietnamese keyboard inclued with OS X is far too hidden for anyone but experts to find(System Preferences, International, Input Menu Tab, and check the ones you want in a scrolling list).

This reminded me of an idea I had for an Apple ad campaign to highlight OS X's language support.

What I suggest is a poster campaign, showing a localised Mac screen running Mail with large type saying

Macintosh speaks your languages

Except that you do it as a teaser.

Start with the least common (in the US) languages Apple localises to, eg Korean, and work your way up the demographic to English, changing posters once a week or more often

매킨토시는 너의 언어를 말한다
マッキントッシュは言語を話す
Macintosh говорит ваши языки
Macintosh fala suas línguas
Macintosh spricht Ihre Sprachen
Macintosh parle vos langages
Macintosh habla sus lenguajes
Macintosh speaks your languages

Each time you change a poster and add a language, you switch the outer UI (menus etc) to that language. You deliberately place the posters in non-ethnic areas, so they are cryptic to most.
(Obviously, you get native speakers to translate the slogan instead of using Sherlock like I did).

47 million Americans speak a non-English language, according to the 2000 Census. 26 million also speak English well, 21 million are less proficient. Millions more learn a foreign language in school.

Imagine the media buzz these cryptic posters would generate, and the feeling of pride the bilingual people would have when they see an ad in their language, out in public.
In other countries, you do the same thing with a different language order.

Heckling the debate in irc

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it.
I combined the two:

You can call this audioblogging with comments or maybe it is something else.Note that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords like 'flu' or 'bin Laden'.

Direct link: http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

Hackaton at Technorati next Wednesday

As we'll have a huge concentration of web geeks just up the road at Web 2.0 next week, we decided to have a hackathon at Technorati on Wednesday night.

Bring your laptops and brains, and hack on our API and other web code.

RSVP promptly