2006.12.29
Posted in Music, Technology at 10:24 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I can finally claim to be winning the battle of the metadata.
Now that I have an iPod, I’ve been spending a not-insignificant amount of time working with the metadata for my iTunes library. I’ve fixed bad metadata (incorrect track names or artists, mostly) on about 100 tracks, and I’ve managed to rate over 80% of the music in my library. This opens the door for a number of smart playlist tricks that will make my iPod listening more rewarding, and I hope to get some funky smart playlists set up over the weekend. Given the amount that I use my iPod, I’m sure this effort will pay off very quickly.
It’s a little surprising just how quick I was able to rate this many songs. My best estimate is that I’ve spent about 9 hours rating the 2,400 some odd tracks that I’ve gotten to so far. Definitely quicker than I would have thought.
I’ve also spent a bit of time organizing my podcast audiobooks so I can play them back start to finish. I’ve got a growing list of audiobooks I’ve obtained via services like podiobooks.com that I have to manage in addition to my usual music collection.
I also have to mention that I didn’t accomplish all of this completely unassisted. In this process, I’ve made judicious use of several applescripts I obtained from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, which has proven to be an indispensible resource. If you run iTunes on a Mac, you’ll no doubt find at least a few gems in Doug’s collection of AppleScripts.
And now it’s time to get back to enjoying my music.
Permalink
2006.12.28
Posted in In the News, Technology, The Web, This Site at 6:37 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Suppose you’re out to buy a new car. You’re kinda partial to Japanese cars, and you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve narrowed it down to two options:
- A Honda Civic
- A Toyota Corolla
Both cars fit your criteria. You just have to pick one. Here’s the $1,000,000 question: which of the following would pull more weight with you?
- A paid television advertisement for the Honda Civic, which highlights the excellence of its engineering and how fun it is to drive.
- A trusted friend’s informal, unsolicited review of her Toyota Corolla, which she absolutely adores and can’t stop gushing about.
If you picked B, you’re a winner. Or rather, Toyota is the winner, since you’re busy driving your brand new Corolla.
Here’s the catch. Everybody knows this. Even slow, lumbering multinational corporations have figured this out by now. And so the marketing departments now have some new pages in their playbooks.
Recently, there have been a couple of news items that illustrate the emerging trend of using weblogs as marketing tools:
- Sony has admitted that the website http://alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/ (seemingly now offline) was a fraud, created by a marketing firm that Sony hired.
- More recently, Microsoft gave brand new laptops loaded with Windows Vista to prominent bloggers as gifts. This action has caused at least one blogger to reconsider the ethics of accepting gifts from vendors.
Going back to the original question, there are two key phrases in option B that are the focal points of the new marketing plays: trusted friend and unsolicited review. By creating alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, Sony was looking to trade on the unsolicited review bit. Rather than having a slick, professional, corporate marketing website that just oozed Sony, they tried to create the illusion of an average Joe who was in love with the portable gaming device. On the internet, people sometimes pay more attention to weblogs that appear to be impartial than they do to the manufacturer’s own site. They’re looking for the real dirt, not the corporate line.
Microsoft was trying for a double-whammy – trusted friends giving unsolicited reviews. There are many bloggers who are rather influential with the tech set, and by giving them free review laptops with no obligations whatsoever, Microsoft was hoping that the bloggers would nonetheless feel obligated to write some sort of positive review of Windows Vista. These influential bloggers could easily have a significant impact on the general internet buzz surrounding the launch of Vista.
This whole mess has caused me a moment’s reflection about things I’ve blogged about. Just the other day I was raving about Solio. In my case, I didn’t buy a Solio, but it was a Christmas gift. Furthermore, and I’m sure nobody at Better Energy Systems Ltd. has even noticed that my weblog even exists, let alone has a positive review of their product. I don’t feel any ethical qualms since I’m fairly sure that the person who gave me the gift had no idea I would even want to write about it on my weblog. And as a personal thing, that’s the way I intend to keep things – all of the stuff I write is my own opinion. It hasn’t been bought via bribes yet.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the position Joel Spolsky has taken on the issue. Even without him disclosing the fact that by reading his weblog I’m indirectly contributing to the “Joel gets a Hot Tub fund”, I already knew that. I don’t trust him any less (or any more) for disclosing that, and I still take everything he writes with a grain of salt (as I do with information source).
I suspect that if people generally had better critical reading skills, this whole new frontier of weblog marketing would be less of an issue; the issue would still exist, though, since many weblogs are being written more or less anonymously, and it can be tough to even discover who the source is, let alone evaluate their trustworthiness or authoritativeness. Surrogates like Google Pagerank are helpful as a guide for assigning trustworthiness, but as with everything, the hard work is still up to us humans. And luckily for the marketing companies, that probably won’t change anytime soon.
Permalink
2006.12.26
Posted in House and Home, Travel at 8:38 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
The stockings were hung, and Santa delivered. I got a number of great gifts this year (thanks, everyone), but I have to say, the coolest gift I got this year caught me a little off guard.
No, I didn’t get a Wii (though I probably will at some point), and I already have an iPod, so that’s not it either. But the iPod guess isn’t all that far off, as it turns out.
I got a Solio.
I vaguely remember hearing about this thing a while back, but it didn’t register. And it certainly wasn’t on my radar at all. But now that I have one, I’m amazed at how infinitely freakin’ cool it is.
Solio is a travelling eco-nerd’s dream come true. You stick it in the sun and it charges. Then you can plug it into your mobile phone, iPod, Nintendo DS, or whatever you’ve got, and Solio will charge that.
This is a great thing for a couple of reasons.
- When I travel, I can take one charger instead of a whole bunch. It will charge everything I currently have and also will charge things I’m considering picking up.
- I hang it in a sunny window while I’m at work (or sitting on a beach sipping margaritas), and it’s fully charged in about a day.
- Cloudy day? Solio’s parade won’t get rained out – it comes with a wall adapter with plug adapters for pretty much everywhere in the world.
This means that when I decide to head overseas I can continue on with my digital lifestyle without hunting down a bunch of plug adapters and things for the countries I’m visiting. I can just bring the solio, the appropriate dongles for my devices, and the plug adapters I need for the countries I’m visiting.
Solio also gets bonus points for being able to charge my razr, which won’t charge over a standard USB connection to a computer without a bit of voodoo. Yes, I’m glaring at you Motorola. I realize you want to milk the overpriced accessory market, but honestly…
After trying it out with my razr and my iPod, I’m thrilled with it. It fully charged my iPod from darn near empty in a few hours while sitting in the sun, and still had plenty of charge left. Very cool. It also solves a problem I was having – I don’t have an iPod dock or other wall adapter to charge my iPod – I have a car charger and I also charge it via USB all the time, but when I’m visiting the relatives, sometimes neither car nor USB is handy. Solio’s great in that situation.
Permalink
2006.12.20
Posted in Music at 7:28 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve lived in or near Calgary for most of my life, and I have to say that the radio in this city is rather pitiful. You would think a city as large as Calgary would have at least a few decent radio stations, but that’s not really the case.
So what’s on the airwaves here? The majority of the stations fall into the following slots:
- Country music
- Rock music
- Top 40 / Pop
- Classical
- Talk
- Easy Listening
- JACK format
There’s a notable lack of anything else. There’s no decent Jazz station. There’s no dance / electronic / underground station. There’s no alternative station.
I still remember when the JACK FM station launched in Calgary. For a while it was the most popular FM station in the city. Take that as a measure of how bad things were – a station which essentially is a hundred or so CDs on shuffle was the most popular one for a while. How pathetic is that? I’m embarrassed to admit that the JACK format originated here in Canada (Vancouver, actually).
As bad as things are, there are a few bright points in our radio constellation:
What all these stations have in common is a bit of a variety of formats (especially CJSW, the University of Calgary station), and a lack of corporate overseers. The CBC stations are funded by the federal government. CKUA used to be funded by the provincial government though it is now run as a non-profit and funded primarily by listener donations. CJSW is almost all-volunteer run and again funded mostly by donations.
Definitely commercial radio has let us down in Calgary – the best stations we have are all non-commercial entities. Sadly, things don’t seem to be improving much.
Fortunately, there’s another way to get radio nowadays – the internet. What I find really interesting is that the station I listen to the most online is actually a regular old radio station in San Francisco. Energy 92.7 is an unusual station, to say the least. They play dance music. And lots of it. While they are a for-profit operation, they aren’t owned by any of the radio megacorporations, and you can tell if you listen to their programming. Some of the things they air would probably make ClearChannel executives squirm more than a little bit. But I love it.
I guess the best indicator of this is how much Energy 92.7 has influenced my music purchases. During the last 6 months, the vast majority of the music I’ve purchased was things I heard first on Energy 92.7. Some of it eventually makes it to Calgary’s Top 40 format stations, but I guarantee a track like Tom Novy‘s Take It will never be aired on the radio in Calgary. And it would be rather unusual to hear Paul Oakenfold, Gabriel and Dresden, or heck, even some of the dance remixes of Madonna‘s recent singles on the radio here.
And for a real trip, how many other radio stations actually play Mash-ups on the air? I can’t think of any in Canada.
There’s a bit of hope yet for Calgary, though. Recently a new adult comtemporary / jazz station launched here, though it’s not really to my taste. Also, we’ll have to see what CFEX turns out like in January. Hopefully they don’t degenerate into another CJAY – one is more than enough.
So until one of Calgary’s radio overlords clues in, I’ll stick mostly to San Francisco’s finest and my iPod, venturing out to CKUA and CJSW from time to time.
Permalink
2006.12.13
Posted in Board Games at 9:18 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve received several new board games as birthday gifts (though fitting them on my overflowing shelves is another matter). So far, I’ve only had the opportunity to try Bang!, and it hasn’t disappointed. Bang! is a fairly straightforward card game – the rules only take a few minutes to learn, and for the most part, you just have to follow the symbols on the cards. There’s an interesting bit of a twist. In a three-player game, the goal amounts to “eliminate the person to your left”, which is balanced by the fact that you have to be the one to deliver the killing blow – if the third player kills off your target, it’s just the two of you left in a showdown.
With more than three players, things get truly interesting. One player plays the role of the Sheriff, and all of the players know who he is. The other players have other roles, which are kept secret from everyone else. The differing roles have different goals, and part of the fun is trying to figure out each player’s role.
The game moves fast and it’s a lot of fun. I’d like to try it with 6 or so and see how it goes, but I haven’t had the chance yet.
Permalink
2006.12.04
Posted in Movies at 9:45 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
This weekend, I ventured out to the movie theatre for the first time in months to take in Happy Feet. While I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, I came away smiling. It was a very fun, cute story about a young emperor penguin named Mumble. As animated musicals go, it was quite good. It was refreshingly not Disney-esque, though the music wasn’t quite as memorable as classic Disney films like the Little Mermaid.
About the only beef I had with the movie was that I had to see it on the IMAX screen since no other screens were showing it in Calgary. In exchange for seeing the movie on a larger screen and with a better sound system, you have to pay a little more (as if movie theatre prices aren’t already high enough) and even worse, you have to suffer through a four minute advertisement for IMAX technology that is boring, repetetive, and more than a little annoying. Oh well. The movie was definitely enjoyable otherwise.
Permalink
Subscriptions