Mark Cuban thinks the Internet is boring.
I was around too when all the stuff he talks about went down. Hell we were investors in Geocities and looked at Broadcast.com when Alex Brown raised money for them.
But I am far from bored with the Internet. I agree that the infrastructure side of the Internet is pretty mature now and not particularly exciting, but I see stuff every day that keeps me engaged and interested.
Dominic Rivera, of The Blogging Times, alerted me to the fact that bLaugh does indeed have embed code right on their blog.
But unfortunately, it always shows their most recent comic as you can see below.
So good for them that they are thinking this way. But I’d still love the ability to get embed code for any comic I’d like to post. And I still can’t get the comic to fit onto my blog page.
I am really digging bLaugh, the new blog comic. It’s a little inside baseball and if you aren’t a blogger, you might not get the jokes. But I get them and I like them.
They make me want to blog them with a link back to bLaugh. But that’s not easy to do.
I hacked into the page source to show you what I want. I purposefully didn’t fix the right margin because I want to make the point. I want to click on the cartoon and be given some HTML to put on my blog, or better yet, let me blog it right there, like I do on Flickr.
That’s the way a blog comic should work.
The Killer’s new single is up on their website. I’ve listened a few times. It’s exactly what the buzz said, it’s Hot Fuss meets Born To Run. I like it.
Three or four months ago I was listening to radio paradise and a song came on that I instantly liked.
It is called Going Home and it is by Sophie Zelmani off her 2002 record called Sing and Dance
I immediately looked for the song on Rhapsody but it wasn’t there. So I went to the Internet, found it you know where, and sent it to the Gotham Gal. She listened later that day, she loved it too and bought the CD on Amazon.
We must have listened to Song and Dance fifty times this spring in our home. It’s a great early morning/breakfast record. I’d call it folk pop, but it’s more than that. It’s wonderful music that is truly infectious once you listen a couple times.
I am listening to it now on my iPod waiting at the train station typing this post out on my blackberry and its every bit as wonderful as the first time I heard it.
I have no idea why this record wasn’t big when it came out in 2002. Maybe it was, but I never heard of it. Maybe it’s becuase Sophie is from Sweden. But for me, the nordic countries are home to some of the best music these days. So that’s a plus as far as I am concerned.
In any case, its my Nuggets pick for this week and I suggest you give it a listen. It’s too bad it’s not on rhapsody. You’ll just have to trust me and buy it at amazon.
I told a friend of mine the other night that I do business lunches at the Shake Shack. He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “but what about the line?”
The line can be used to your advantage. I generally suggest people meet me there at noon, we get in line and start our conversation, just like we’d be doing at a restaurant while we order and wait for the food.
Generally at that time of day, its about 20 minutes wait, unless its raining in which case, you need to find another place for your lunch.
After we order, we get a table, and there are almost always tables to be had, and continue our discussion.
Then the food comes, we eat, finish our conversation, and leave.
All in all, it’s about an hour, the same as any other business lunch.
The difference is you get to spend that hour in the park and the burgers, hot dogs, fries, and shakes are great.
A friend of mine suggested I give Songbird a try. It wasn’t hard to convince me to do that. I love what Firefox has done to the browser market. They came up with a better browser and they forced Microsoft to start improving IE again. I’ll stick with Firefox anyway, but innovation is back to the browser category.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I have no love lost for iTunes. I use it every day, but there is so much about it that I don’t like that I can’t even list all of the reasons. So an open source competitor to iTunes built on top of the Firefox development environment sounded too good to be true.
Unfortunately, I think it is to good to be true, at least right now. To be fair I am using a pre-release version called "not yet ready to be called 0.2" so that tells you how raw it is.
But from what I can tell,the people at Songbird (that’s them in this photo that I ganked from Flickr) have built a browser with a player integrated into it. I already have a browser so I really don’t need another browser. What I need is a player that is not owned by a company that intends to execute its business model on me with it. I want a player that is by the people, of the people, and for the people.
There are some nice features. If you visit a page where there are mp3s imbedded, like my blog for example, the Songbird browser (because that’s what it is) finds those mp3s and puts them into a playlist. You click on one of them and it plays while you read the post. The sidebar on the left features a lot of my favorite web music services like last.fm, streampad, emusic, amazon, etc. But right now, there isn’t any integration with them. It’s just the equivalent of a bookmark list of sites.
I am sure that Songbird has a lot more up their sleeves and I can’t wait to watch them improve and extend this software. But the whole experience of using Songbird makes me wonder if a better idea might be to do the whole thing in the browser, on the web, instead of requiring all of us to download and use yet another piece of software.
The delicious playtagger, for example, is to my mind a better mp3 player for the web. I don’t need another peice of software to use it, it just plays the music I want to hear right on the page, in my regular browser.
If any of you have tried songbird, I’d love to know what you think.
Umair says strategic thinking has become a commodity.
And that creativity is what really matters.
In a world where strategy is a commodity, creativity becomes the vital
factor from which value flows. When everyone can think strategically
about everything, the locus of value creation shifts from out-thinking
everyone to out-creating them. The prime mover of value creation
becomes putting the ability to create (goods, services, processes – even strategies) at the heart and soul of the firm.
Here is the entire post.
You may have noticed that the three posts that I did yesterday disappeared from the blog at some point yesterday evening. It appears that TypePad had a crash. But I was able to get them back without much trouble. I hope all of your comments came back as well.
OMG. You got to check this out.
