Posts from August 2006

  IMG_0550 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

Last night I went up to Rucker Park with some buddies to see the playoffs of the EBC league.

Rucker Park is in Harlem, at 155th street between Frederick Douglas Blvd and the harlem river drive west side highway, the site of the former Polo Grounds where Bobby Thomson Thompson hit the shot heard round the world in 1951. It was cool to be at a place with so much history. But the Polo Grounds is long gone, replaced with a basketball court with some real sports history of its own.

Rucker Park is known for being the home to the best street basketball in the world. I get to see a lot of street basketball at the West 4th Street cages near my home in the village, so I wanted to see what the big deal was about Rucker.

  IMG_0556 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

The big deal is the players, the crowd, and the announcers. You get bigtime college and a few pro players up at Rucker. Last night we saw JR Smith dominate his game. He put on quite a show for the crowd who included Fat Joe, Joakim Noah (whose team had been knocked out last week), and Macy Gray.

I sat next to Fat Joe for both games and was entertained by his play by play banter and the occasional ribbing of the coaches.

But the best part is the announcers, who do the play by play rap style loaded with humor (some of it inside humor), who are on the court with their microphones right next to the refs. They are so much more entertaining than the announcers who do college and pro ball.

  IMG_0562 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

It’s a really fun time and easy to get to. You can drive straight up the west side highway or take the D train which has a stop right at Rucker Park at 155th and Frederick Douglas.

Next week the cities play each other and everyone is hoping for a final between LA and NYC. If that happens, it will be next wednesday.

Microsoft announced this morning that they are releasing a suite of tools to make it much easier to create videogames on the Xbox 360 game system.  Regular readers of this blog know how big a fan I am of letting the user be the creator as well as the consumer.

But to be honest, I never thought that videogames were on the table. If they are (and I have no idea how simple the new tools are to use), then this is going to be a big deal.

I remember when I was in high school and a friend of mine and I created a football game on the TRS80 computer. It wasn’t very good but we built it and we played it.

When Josh and his buddies can create a NFL 2006 game of their own, with their own rules and players, then that’s what they are going to do. I am not saying they won’t play the games from the publishers, I am sure they will. But I think they’ll have more fun creating games of their own and playing them.

There are some people who don’t comment on my blog often, but when they do, it’s always spot on. Druce is one of those people and when he commented on the subject of the “war on islamofacism”, I just nodded my head. So here is the most sensible thing I’ve heard on the topic in a long time:

how can anybody even think a problem like ‘Islamo-fascism’ can be ‘solved’?

That’s like winning a ‘war on racism’, or ‘war on poverty’, ‘war on
drugs’, or ‘war on pornography’. Why not a ‘war on violence’ or a ‘war
on war?’

Human imperfections can’t be solved, but some people are capable of
managing them rationally, while others self-destruct and bring everyone
else down with them. Think of something like the UN as an AA meeting
for the world.

Thinking there is a ‘final solution’ to complex problems that have
been part of humanity since the dawn of time is what creates these
catastrophes in the first place.

Posted by: druce | Aug 10, 2006 10:00:28 AM

One of my favorite R&B songs is Tighten Up by Archie Bell and the Drells. If you have never heard this song, you gotta give it a listen. It’s a uptempo happy party song if I ever heard one. There’s a great guitar groove that runs throughout the song and Archie directs the instruments to come in and out. Classic stuff.

Tighten Up – Archie Bell and the Drells

We are starting to get the hang of using GarageBand on my MacBook to record the show. It’s not great, but its good enough. Thanks to Chrispy and Jackson for the free GarageBand consulting they provided me in their 100 degree hot studio a couple weeks ago.

Topics of discussion included movies, books, the fringe festival, and the hype machine.

Here is the song list:

• Saving Grace – Tom Petty
• Waiting For The World To Change – John Mayer
• Alfie – Lily Allen
• Hot Cookin’ – G. Love and The Special Sauce
• Bye Bye Love – The Ditty Bops – cover (not sure who wrote this song, if you know leave it in the comments)

Listen Live Here

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 4.9 or above, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

I read Michael Parekh and Jeff Jarvis on the subject of flying cross country or, worse internationally, without laptops, blackberries, and iPods this morning.

This is huge deal for me. I carry multiple batteries so I can use my laptop for the entire flight. I use my blackberry and iPod too. There are four things I wont fly without; laptop, iPod, Blackberry phone, and a bottle of water. Now all of them are at risk of being forbidden.

Jackson has some advice for me in his comments to my post yesterday on this subject.

I say we all travel naked.  A sort of ‘get to know your neighbor’ program.

As long as food and beverage is provided, and reasonable, on the plane, then I see no reason for grumbling.

Far too many people exceed a reasonable amount of carry-on anyway.

I’d love to see no carry-on luggage.

You are allowed a book.

A book doesn’t cut it for me. I need to create as well as consume. I like his first suggestion better.

Last December I wrote a post in which I called for an open online ad marketplace.

I got lots of interesting feedback from that post, but the best thing about writing that post is I got to meet Michael Walrath, founder and CEO of NY-based Right Media.

Last week Right Media introduced RMX Direct which was covered in TechCrunch yesterday.

I’ve had an invitation from Michael to put RMX Direct on my blog and I plan to do that, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Simply put, you put RMX Direct on your blog instead of an ad call to whomever you are currently using to servie ads (adsense, ypn, burst, blogads, federated media, etc) and they call those services for you and act as a broker to determine what ad network is going to give you the higest CPM for every single page you serve.

They already do this for large publishers, so RMX Direct is their effort to enter the blog market.

I believe that ad networks are going to dominate online advertsing in the long run and posted my thoughts on why I think this a couple months ago. If you take those thoughts to the next level, then a system to optimize ad networks for the publisher is the next logical step.

We will see if RMX Direct gets traction. There are some issues they will have to solve. First, is it simple to deploy? I’ll let you know the answer to that shortly. Second, will third party ad networks agree to work with them? There is some discussion about that subject in the comments to the techcrunch post. And third, and most importantly, will RMX Direct filter out spam, viruses, and unattractive ads from my blog. They have something called MediaGuard which purports to do this. If it works well, they have solved a big issue with an open ad marketplace.

I don’t yet know if RMX Direct is going to work well for blogs. But I am very interested because I firmly believe that an open marketplace for online ads will develop in the coming years and it will bring increased efficiency, performance, and revenue to the marketplace. And that is a good thing.

I got this email from Andrew from Sumo, which makes soft furniture and sells it on the Internet:

My name is Andrew and I have a company named Sumo which sells a modern/funky/high-quality line of bean bags & soft furniture on the net. Our products are great and not to let passion or pride take hold but I could simply say, our Omni chair is the most comfortable chair in the world and truly enhances ones life! I like am a fan of your site & was wondering if you would be interested in taking a sample of our Omni chair and posting a review on it.

Normally I ignore such emails, but I have always been a fan of the bean bag chair. I think I lived in one in college. So I went to the website and checked it out.

It looked pretty cool so we took Andrew up on his offer. It came to our beach house last week and when I got out here this morning, I checked it out.

I must say it’s a fantastic bean bag chair. First, its huge. It can also serve as a bed in a pinch. It should work great for the afternoon nap I have in mind for today. And the fabric is like a parachute and seemingly very durable material. Gotta avoid the leaking bean bag chair thing you know.

If you are headed to college or have a child who is, I suggest you spring for the $150 and buy one of these. It should last four years and I think no college kid should be without one.

We are going to keep it and I think it will get a lot of use in our beach house. Possibly as soon as this afternoon!

  TV on the Radio 
  Originally uploaded by dreadfuldan.

I first heard this band from Brookyn on The Hype Machine a month ago. The song was Wolf Like Me and I was immediately struck by the pounding drum beats and the distorted guitar that weaves throughout the song. I tagged the song in delicious and went back again and again.

Then I started listening to their other songs and quickly found great tunes like Staring At The Sun and Ambulance (see YouTube video below).

Then I went to YouTube and watched their live performances at Cochella. I want to see these guys live. Apparently I missed the opportunity at the end of June at Celebrate Brooklyn. It looks like they put on an intense show.

This clip is Ambulance live at Cochella, it’s about 90 seconds long.

Last week their new record, Return To Cookie Mountain, came out in the UK. I bought it at Amazon and have been listening a bunch. I think Wolf Like Me (the song that got me hooked) is the best song on the record, but there are a number of other good tracks on it as well like Province, Let The Devil In, and Blues From Down Here.

It’s hard to describe TV On The Radio’s music. The best I can come up with is a harder darker Arcade Fire. They use a lot of cool instruments and I particularly like the great horn sounds throughout their music. But the great thing about mp3 blogging is that you can listen to the songs yourself and make up your own mind.