Customize Your Own Keith Urban Video

The technology behind this works very, very well. Have fun with it!

Wimax comes to Baltimore

Now you can get wireless access anywhere in Baltimore (at least that's the spin). A promo video from Intel:



The word from USA Today is it's fast, but not free.

Attention! And then some $$ to go with it, please

We're drowning in choices - music, tv channels, web sites. Why does so little truly excite us? And why are so few people making any real money from all that's being put forth?

I think Kevin Kelly is really on top of it, with so many nuggets here:

Where ever attention flows, money will follow.

Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow.

...the fact that something does work or is helpful is no longer sufficient for success. Good, useful stuff is now the minimum standard. I might even make the argument that great stuff is the minimum.

Now anything that lasts has to also maintain our attention.

Getting a quick blitz of attention is a no-brainer. The challenge is maintaining a flow of attention in an environment where you are surrounded by millions of similar things that are good and useful.

The problem for a band is not being "discovered" but remaining interesting.

Time (does) not equal attention. I spend a lot of time in my car but I don’t give it much attention..

- all from Kevin Kelly

and

The challenge for everyone is that we are getting better and better at creating “interesting stuff” but there is a finite supply of attention. Our dynamic range of “interesting” is lessening, as everything in the technium is more perfectly designed to grab attention.

- from Stan James (www.wanderingstan.com) in the comments

Again, here's the piece.

A now some words from McCain

A word cloud from Wordle.net of John McCain's acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican Convention (see Barack Obama's a few entries before). "Country" was the word of the night.

How to do more with your pictures at Flickr

Lots of tips on how you can get more out of Flickr, or get started, with this from ReadWriteWeb.

In-car Wi-Fi. It's here.

Well that didn't take long.

Information Week says: "will deliver download speeds from 400 to 800 Kbps and average upload speeds of 400 Kbps."

Combining this with the voice recognition features of Microsoft's Sync is when I think it's all going to get very interesting.

Thoughts about how this competes with satellite radio here from Motley Fool.

A PORTABLE Wii Screen?

Score another completely gotta have one gadget from ThinkGeek.com! So awesome.

The "Twilight" books and Stephenie Meyer

My daughter just started in on the "Twilight" teen-vampire books. To get in the loop I found this overview of who's who in the "Twilight" novels from Entertainment Weekly to be handy.

No doubt a road trip to Forks, WA will be in in our future.

Bwa Ha Ha... Chris Brown hit song is a commercial!

Wow, clever these marketers are.

We will no doubt see a lot more of this.

TV - it's getting old

Did you see this about the median age of TV viewers

now being outside the 18-49 demo?

More TV coming to a Blog Near You

CBS has announced that their video player will soon let you embed a show in to your blog, like this:



More and more TV will be seen on something that's not a TV...

"Why does embedding matter? Because it reflects the increasingly distributed nature of network television."

More is not better when it comes to text on a web page

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says you better not have much text on a web page if you want to communicate with your readers.

"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely."

Video Game Sales again up BIG, Nintendo upping Wii production

"Nintendo announced late last week that it would increase its monthly production of Wii video game consoles to 2.4 million, from 1.8 million."

Lots of strong video game industry numbers on the eve of GTA IV:

Software sales were up 63 percent in March compared with March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks sales. Equipment sales were up 46 percent over the same period.

Charlie Rose tries to connect with...

Ha - well done, funny, and a bit haunting... You get that Charlie really wants to connect with...Charlie

Online Video Viewing Way Up

No surprise - online video viewing is way up, 66% more videos watched in February than a year ago. YouTube had almost a third of the traffic. No one else was even close.

No doubt demonstrations of mad skills on the mike from folks like Chris from the Valory Music Company (below) have been driving traffic... :o

US Video Game Software Sales over a $$ BILLION $$ in March

Recession? What recession?

YouTube videos now playing on Google Maps

Here's a neat bit of news for small business owners from Google Maps.

Change a single note in a recorded CHORD (!) - and much more

Wow, the creative musical possibilities shown here in Melodyne's new software are limitless. Maybe even a little scary.

Note: I first thought the narrator in the video was saying "meaty," but it's how he pronounces "Midi."

And much like how digital image editing has challenged us in how we look at any kind of visual, this shows that going forward you'll never really be able to know what the original source of an audio recording was.

The path to small success with 1,000 "True Fans"

What if you could find and bond with 1,000 "true fans" who would spend $100 a year on your works? Interesting look at how an artist or content creator might not have to become a mass-appeal star to make a living. From Kevin Kelly's blog (thanks to the9513.com for bringing it to my attention).

Will Apple share Hardware $$ with the music labels?

Here's a good overview from CNET about Apple's possible "all you can eat" music deal.