Alexander Becker Shares

Sliced Preview

2009-07-06T09:31:00Z

An appetizer for stuff to come --

Introducing Lyrois' architectural essays, conversations between architecture and art.

The Insanely Byzantine Radio Spectrum Map [Graphic] | TechWatch | Fast Company

2009-07-06T13:41:05Z

And here's the thing in its entirety. Click through for the full size and enjoy; it's about the size of your bedroom wall.

20 Questions To Ask Clients Prior To Designing A Logo | The Design Cubicle

2009-07-06T12:24:21Z

Since my primary focus in is logo design, below are 20 questions to ask your clients prior to beginning their new logo design.

(Pic) Nonsesnse Infographics

2009-07-02T16:55:07Z

Artist 1chord & a fib has created a wonderful series of “infographics” that don’t contain any information. Playing off of information design’s current wave of popularity, the fake infographics maintain all the beauty of the medium but lack actual meaning or content.

[via GOOD]

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Design and art, Design, infographics

blocked

2009-07-05T20:57:56Z

People get "blocked".

With their jobs, with their relationships, with their marketing, with their own passions and creativity...

And yes, with themselves. I'm as guilty as anyone. So are you.

So then the next question becomes, well, how do you become "unblocked"? How do you get your mojo back?

Wouldn't it be great if somebody could invent a product- a book, for example, or maybe some audiotapes, or a three-day seminar, whatever- and all people would have to do is pull out their credit card, pay the fee, use the product once et Volia! Problem solved! Blockage removed!

Yes, that would be great, in theory. But knowing what I know from past experience, I'd recommend that if you ever meet somebody trying to sell you something like this, run away in the opposite direction. That fellow is selling you a bunch of psychobabble snake oil. Nobody can unblock you, but you.

Instead, read the following one-word quote. Unlike the snake oil, you can have it free of charge and yes, this actually works, every time:

Love.

So now you know...

[Update: Just added this blog post to "EVIL PLANS".

[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades."EVIL PLANS".]

INDEPENDENCE

2009-07-04T07:01:00Z

Enjoy your Fourth of July... SS

Know The Ledge

2009-07-03T20:42:09Z

The new Skydeck at the Sears Tower in Chicago has a new attraction. “The Edge” is a glass encased balcony attached to the 103rd floor of the building. Hit the jump for a few more pictures as well as some other crazy places you can walk on glass!

The Grand Canyon Skywalk was built in Arizona:

The Aurland Lookout was built in Norway. It overlooks the fjord. You’re not walking on glass here, but if you are up for it try leaning:

The Top of Tyrol in Austria is well camouflaged:

But you might want to go during the summer! It doesn’t look much fun in the picture below and I doubt you can see much.

and based on this picture, you will still need a jacket when the snow melts:

The Dachstein Skywalk in Austria. Again, we recommend going during the summer.

The Landscape Promontory in Switzerland:

Via Deputy-dog.com(except for Sears Tower Pics which are from Yahoo.com)

What to do with special requests

2009-07-03T09:20:00Z

The bike shop is busy in June. If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost $39 and take a week.

A week!

What if someone says, "I have a bike trip coming up in three days, can you do it by then?"

At most bike shops, the answer is a shrug, followed by, "I'm sorry, we're swamped."

The problem with telling people to go away is that they go away. And the problem with treating all customers the same is that customers aren't the same. They're different and they demand to be treated (and are often willing to pay) differently.

So, why not smile and say, "Oh, wow, that's a rush. We can do it, but it's expensive. It'll cost you $90. I know that's a lot, but there you go."

Outcome: Maybe they'll still leave. But maybe they'll happily pay you for the privilege of doing business with you. Why should this be your choice, not theirs?

If you do tax accounting for mid-size businesses, why not offer a special last-minute service? A service in which you process shoeboxes filled with unsorted papers? A service that costs less but happens during your slow season?

There are two really good reasons to turn down special requests:

1. because you're marketing yourself as extremely busy and perfectly willing to turn down good work.

2. because you want to market yourself as someone who is a rigid artist, a stick in the mud or a crotchety perfectionist. This works great for pizza places.

Court to Defendant: Stop Blasting That Man’s Mind!

2009-07-02T12:53:59Z

Shared by Alexander
... what!?

Late last year, James Walbert went to court, to stop his former business associate from blasting him with mind-altering electromagnetic radiation. Walbert told the Sedgwick County, Kansas panel that Jeremiah Redford threatened him with “jolts of radiation” after a disagreement over a business deal. Later, Walbert, said, he began feeling electric shock sensations, hearing electronically generated tones, and getting popping and ringing sounds in his ears. On December 30th, the court decided in Walbert’s favor, and issued a first-of-its-kind order of protection, banning Redford from using “electronic means” to further harass Walbert. No, seriously.

I recently took part in a BBC Radio 4 program, which took a light-hearted look into the “the real Manchurian Candidate” — and examined whether there is any truth in stories of mind control. It gave me a chance to talk about exotic non-lethal weapon concepts like the so-called telepathic raygun, the system which beams sound directly into your skull, and the “voice of god” talking fireball. Most of these projects are just lab experiments, or examples of Powerpoint engineering. But in some legal, policy, and business circles, electromagnetic brain assaults are being taken seriously.

Walbert’s cause is supported by Jim Guest, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives. He’s working on proposed legislation to addresses electronic harassment, including a bill against the forced implantation of RFID chips.
The U.N. is also now taking the possibility of electromagnetic terrorism against people seriously. And for the first time this year’s European Symposium on Non-lethal Weapons included a session on the social implications of non-lethal weapons, with specific reference to “privacy-invasive remote interrogation and behavioral influence applications.” Those who believe they are being targeted are getting a bit of official recognition.

For some, this opens up a new business opportunity. There are already quite a few companies out there offering “Technical Surveillance Counter Measures,” or sweeps to determine if you are the victim of electronic harassment. As well detecting the usual bugging devices, they can check if you are being covertly bombarded by microwaves which may be the cause of “headache, eye irritation, dizziness, nausea, skin rash, facial swelling, weakness, fatigue, pain in joints and/or muscles, buzzing/ringing in ears.”

Much of this trade may come from people with symptoms caused by something less exotic than high-tech military hardware. But companies will no doubt be willing to sell them expensive protection measures, anyway. And as awareness of these developing technology projects increases, we are likely to be hearing a lot more about “electronic harassment,” “gang stalking” and the like over the next few years.

And there is also likely to be what folklorists call “Ostension,” or acting out. Now that there are so many websites explaining how easy it is to harass people by zapping them with a modified microwave oven, sooner or later someone is bound to try it.

[Photo: U.S. Army]

ALSO:

Make Like a Dolphin: Learn Echolocation | Wired Science | Wired.com

2009-07-02T09:50:35Z

Make Like a Dolphin: Learn Echolocation

By Hadley Leggett
June 30, 2009
4:53 pm
Categories: Brains and Behavior

With just a few weeks of training, you can learn to “see” objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do.

Ordinary people with no special skills can use tongue clicks to visualize objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings, according to acoustic experts at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain.

Notepad Concept Provides Low-Tech, Clean Slate

2009-07-01T19:02:11Z

Situated somewhere between a cocktail napkin and a smartphone, this notepad concept developed by Piotr Górski is ideal for the Luddite in all of us, who secretly craves a bit of elegant, low-tech design in our lives. The slim, credit card sized tablet utilizes the qualities of rubber and foil in combination to create temporary imprints that can be made using any pointed object from an included stylus to a swizzle stick. When passed across the surface, an attached slider bar produces a clean slate that can be written on again and again. Just one of many product innovations viewable on Gorski’s site.

[via Yanko Design]

By Scott Lachut | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Design and low-tech design, notepad, Piotr Gorski, Product Design

The Hacker Ethic - Harming Developers?

2009-07-01T12:00:00Z

On Monday Neil McAllister posed the question "is the hacker ethic harming American developers?" Slashdot picked it up and Tim forwarded it to the Radar list. As you might expect, it resulted in some spirited discussion.

James Turner kicked things off with this response (it has been slightly edited from its email form). After James lays out his argument I'll reply with my thoughts. Then we hope to hear from you. Let us know what you think.

I've worked in a lot of organizations that thought that the kind of rigid deforesting paradigms that Nayar is referring to were the magic bullet to keeping all three of the variable (dollars, time, features) under control. Without exception, all they did was get in the way and reduce the productivity of the most senior people to the level of the most junior. All of them exhibited some degree of failure, some catastrophic.
The India shops *love* methodologies like UML and the like, specifically because the problems have been reduced to a simplistic enough granularity that they can be doled out to junior-level staff, who may have only been onboard a few weeks because of the massive churn over there.

At least 3 times at 3 different companies, I've seen major pieces of work brought back in-house because the Bangalore team had fallen so far behind or proved so unable to get beyond the literal description of work that they were endangering the project. When you combine the time difference with a tendency to halt dead in their tracks as soon as they hit a stumbling block, it can be a recipe for disaster.

There are certainly some good Indian shops, and I know some outstanding Indian developers (most of whom have come to the States.) But I find Nayar's comments hilarious. It's akin to someone saying that American football players aren't employable in Jamaica because they aren't able to limbo well. Look at the most successful Web 2.0 companies today, most of them started as garage enterprises with a few talented developers, not a 60 person team of UML jockies following some Arthur Anderson project management program. Heck, look at Google Labs.

In huge projects, you obviously need some master planning and coordination to make sure the tracks meet at the right place to drive in the spike, but I don't see any effort being made these days to right-size the amount of project overhead to the needs of the projects. Instead we get a one-size-fits-all approach that smothers anything but the largest project in paperwork. Even some of the original authors of the Agile manifesto, when I've talked to them, point out that part of being Agile is picking and choosing the right components of project management that make sense for a given task.

Nayar's remarks are incredibly self-serving. "We're the best, because we can mindlessly follow some arbitrary and flawed development process." Or is he claiming that Indian projects do better QA? Not in my experience...

This entire debacle is representative of a problem I think is endemic in the industry these days, the inability or unwillingness to engage in rapid prototyping. Every successful project I've ever worked on (and I've worked on some fairly large enterprise-sized projects), we started by designing and coding a quick "throw-away" skeleton of the application, that let us look at how the thing worked, where the unseen warts were, and where the vendors had lied about their APIs, etc. This is the crucial and neglected stage in project design, one that most modern design paradigms ignore or actively discourage. Even Agile tries to jump in and start coding the finished application from the get go, although if project teams were willing to aggressively refactor (a tenant of Agile), early project work could be a rapid prototype (although the story model of scrum really doesn't fit well with this, unless you make the prototype a story...)

This is also something I've never seen an offshored team do particularly well...

Well, I'll be damned if I'm going to jump in and take the side that says hacking is bad for American programmers. First off, I don't need that kind of flame bait and second, I don't believe it. I think approachable programming is hugely important because that's how many people get into the field in the first place. However, my reaction to the article was very different than James' and I might as well try to explain.

I'm not going to take an opposing position, but it's not really an orthogonal position either. Maybe it has a power factor of about .7 or so. Here's my (also edited) response...

When I when I read McAllister's piece, at least some of it resonated with me. Before we were bought by a large firm, we were a small company that grew from nothing to 250 people, about 200 or more of them were programmers. So, a whole lot of my time over three years was spent hiring programmers and building cohesive teams that could deliver to our customers.
In our hiring we aggressively hired hackers into the mix. We wanted outside-our-industry thinking and we thought they brought in creativity. We called it "hiring weird, but not weird weird." Occasionally we pushed it to weird and a half. For our efforts we got creative problem solving and interesting (but frequently weird) dinnertime conversation when we travelled.

However, our pollyanna idea of "disciplined teams catalyzed with a bit of weird" didn't always work out.

That leads to the bit that resonated with me: the sense that hacker = distilled essence of American individualism combined with lots of ISTJ Myer's Brigg's Type Indicator. Individualism is a trait that I hold dearly, but it can make a cohesive team effort difficult if people are unwilling to suborn themselves to the goals of the team. Remember those tee shirts the football team always wore at your university? "There is no I in team?" I sometimes joked that I was going to make a batch that said "I'm the Me in team."

Maybe we were just growing fast and it was going to take more storming and norming than I had patience for, but at times it was a struggle to get everyone to see past their individual biases and focus on what we were trying to achieve, and we couldn't do what we were trying to do with teams of one.

But it really wasn't a hacker problem if hacker means self taught like McAllister implies. We had a lot of people with CS degrees and we used to talk a lot about whether and how their degrees had prepared them for their jobs.

Separate from the individualist approach to development, few of our recent graduates came to us prepared with the terminology and practices of any development approach (or engineering approaches like continuous integration etc.). They knew how to code, but not how teams coded.

At one point I gave a talk on agile software development to about 100 CS students at a university in Philadelphia and I asked them to raise their hands if they had ever done a team project with greater than two people on the team. I don't recall anyone raising a hand. Then I asked if they had ever covered development methodologies in their classes and a few acknowledged they had, but it had been abstract classroom stuff only. That part surprised me.

I'm not sure that the "sanctity of engineering" argument really makes that much difference. I have little faith in McAllister's scheme to do computer engineering instead of computer science coursework.

My undergraduate degree was in Mechanical Engineering and I can only imagine how useless I would have been to a firm that actually did engineering, and for mostly the same reasons. I knew how to take integrals and I still know the packing ratio of a hexagonal close packed material but I didn't know squat about how a complex machine actually got designed in a team setting. It's interesting to note that the Engineer in Training exam I took (a precursor to the professional engineer's exam) didn't probe my knowledge of team practices at all.

Maybe there just isn't time in an undergraduate degree to teach everything that an engineer needs to know. Plus, can you imagine the drop out rate in CS/CE if ITIL was a required course?

Since James mentioned Google I'll switch gears and muse about ecosystems for a moment... I guess I tend to bristle when I hear that everyone should just develop software the way Google does.

Google is to computing what LA was to Aerospace and Electronics in the early 60's. It's gravitational force attracts five sigma talent (probably a bunch of six too) in ways that the rest of us can only envy. More generally, Silicon Valley has had programmer talent flowing into it for the last twenty years the way Hollywood sucks pretty people out of the midwest.

Maybe it's not as obvious because you can't spot brains the way you can spot an oddly beautiful wait staff, but the valley has been the vortex of a talent-laden embarrassment of riches for a long time and, if you work there, you might not even notice it. However, I think that at some level this effects what kinds of processes work when you build software. I think it's at least a little part of the reason why an ERP system in a manufacturing town gets implemented differently than MapReduce (there are other reasons too having to do with software as product vs software as supporting infrastructure). Combine that with the very clear shared vision of "lets do something great and get rich together" thing that valley firms often have, and well, it's easy to see how smart people coalesce to build amazing stuff.

It's easy to denigrate Arthur Anderson's progeny or the offshore firms they compete with, but they do different work, with a different talent pool, for different ends, and with a very different set of personal and organizational incentives. Or, put another way, Kelly Johnson didn't build the SR-71 with General Motor's engineers, and General Motors didn't design the Chevy Cavalier with the Skunkworks' processes. However, even at the Skunkworks, Johnson's brilliant engineers did conform to a process and work together as a team toward a shared vision. And, conversely, I bet a lot of talent is left on the table at General Motors because of processes too restrictive in their attempt to remove all uncertainty.

So,... maybe it's possible that Google's (or the valley's in general) processes are appropriate to an ecosystem that, because of the intellectual environment and potential for riches, is rich in IQ and initiative. So it ends up feeling more "special forces" and less like "infantry regiment." And over there closer to the hump in the normal distribution curve, or in a different cultural environment outside of the valley, a different flavor of processes may be effective?

The counter argument to that, which I'll go ahead and provide, is that I once helped teach a team of engineers at midwestern defense contractor how to do agile development. The effect was amazing and immediate and their productivity and satisfaction went up tremendously; until their management freaked out and shut it down when they "perceived" that it created too much uncertainty in their processes.

Well, it's obvious that I don't know the answers here, so, with that, I'll stop thinking out loud.

What do you think?

Malcolm is wrong

2009-06-30T20:37:00Z

I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.

Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.

The first argument that makes no sense is, "should we want free to be the future?"

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, "how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?"

Who cares if it does? It is. It's happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient, but it's true.

As I see 'free', there are two forces at work:

In an attention economy (like this one), marketers struggle for attention and if you don't have it, you lose. Free is a relatively cheap way to get attention (both at the start and then through viral techniques).

Second, in a digital economy with lots of players and lower barriers to entry, it's quite natural that the price will be lowered until it meets the incremental cost of making one more unit. If a brand can gain share by charging less, a rational player will.

Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris's magazine) and yes, the New Yorker (Malcolm's magazine)), is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They're going to disappear before you do. I'm not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.

Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn't have worked in 1784, and they're not going to work very soon in the future either.

We're always going to need writers, but the business model of their platform is going to change.

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we? A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it?

Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple:

In a world of free, everyone can play.

This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage.

The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive.

Of course, it's ironic that sometimes people pay money for my books (I view them as souvenirs of content you could get less conveniently and less organized for free online if you chose to). And it's ironic that I read Malcolm's review for free. And ironic that you can read Chris's arguments the most cogently by paying for them. [Update: you can chime in here and see what's being said around the web as well.]

Neatness is for historians. For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy, which means that there are going to be huge opportunities for people (like you?) able to get that most precisous asset (our attention) for free. At least for a while.

The risk/reward confusion

2009-07-01T10:13:00Z

It's easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside.

Here's the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase in risk can double the reward. It's the second doubling of reward that brings serious risk with it. But the first leap is relatively painless.

In the chart above, notice that going from point A to point B brings almost no incremental risk. It might feel scary, but rationally, it's not. Doubling reward again from B to C, though, brings significant incremental risk. It's this second doubling that gets you through the Dip, that leads to a breakthrough, that makes you remarkable.

But I'm not even talking about that. I'm just hoping you'll warm up by making the tiny leap of avoiding all risk. Riskless is hardly worth your effort.

Water Should Be a Human Right

2009-06-30T19:47:11Z

Water, water everywhere, and you’re entitled to a drop.

As scientists warn that the world’s fresh water supplies will soon run critically short, and companies scramble to privatize them, some researchers and activists say water should be considered a basic human right.

“Access to clean water, which is essential for health, is under threat,” write the editors of Public Library of Science Medicine in an essay published Monday.

In terms of intellectual coherency, the idea passes muster. Water’s just as essential to life as food, which makes an appearance in Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As of now, the World Health Organization estimates that inadequate water is responsible for nearly one-tenth of the world’s disease burden, and that six percent of all deaths could be prevented by universal access to safe drinking water and better sanitation.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to declare a right than to enforce it. Despite the UN’s pledge to end hunger, nearly a billion people don’t have enough to eat. And the UN’s promise to halve the number of water-impoverished people by 2015 has a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of being met. But as the PLoS Medicine editors point out, recognizing water as a human right would at least provide a framework for dealing with water privatization.

Over the last 20 years, with the help of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, water has become a $500 billion global industry dominated by just three companies. According to reports published by the nonprofit Food and Water Watch, it’s been a disaster in both the United States and the developing world.

“This model has proven to be a failure,” wrote Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water issues to the UN General Assembly’s president, in an essay published last year. “High water rates, cut-offs to the poor, reduced services, broken promises and pollution have been the legacy of privatization.”

According to the UN, 2.8 billion people won’t have enough water to meet their basic needs by 2025.

“A human rights approach to water recognizes the potential for inequity and ensures that the most vulnerable are not ignored,” write the editors.

See Also:

Citation: “Clean Water Should Be Recognized as a Human Right.” By the PLoS Medicine Editors. Public Library of Science Medicine, June 30, 2009.

Image: Terry Shuck/Flickr

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter.

Experimental Coffee and Tea Designs from Tel Aviv

2009-06-30T17:42:18Z

Students at the Shenkar Academy of Design in Tel Aviv were directed to scrutinize and reexamine the ways in which coffee and tea drinkers interact with their beverage, in terms of materials, taste, and ritual. The results are visually arresting and for the most part functional, and without a doubt a thoughtful, refreshing step beyond the mug and teaspoon. Below are some of our favorites from the project.

The ‘Audrey’ espresso cup comes with an extension to store a companion spoon that can also function as a finger grip for a diminutive shot.

The ‘Cubis’ mug’s angled shape allows a set of four to be stored away neatly, while the added thickness insulates hands from the coffee’s heat.

The ‘Tea = Time’ saucer set is low and broad, and comes with sugar capsules that dissolves slowly when submerged in hot tea. The design is meant to encourage tea drinkers to drink slowly so as to savor the experience, as opposed to just slurping their cup down.

A full gallery of the team’s results can be viewed at the link below.

[via designboom]

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Design, Food & Drink, Home & Garden and coffee, tea, tel aviv

Free vs Freely Distributed

2009-07-01T00:21:29Z

With the publication of Chris Anderson’s new book Free, the discussion about the role of free, today and in the future has expanded. Articles from Malcom Gladwell in New Yorker, and Seth Godin discuss the various merits and challenges of Free. Is Free inevitable ? Is Free the beginning of the end ? Let me answer the question.

First of all, what we are experiencing right now is “Better Than Free”. The videos on Youtube, magazine articles, newspapers reports, anything that used to be analog that now is digital have a perceived value that is based on their legacy delivery. We value all those TV shows on Hulu highly because we assign a value to what we pay for cable or satellite. We assign a high perceived value to newspaper and magazine reports based on the years we spent paying for them. Anything that we paid for as recently as last year, that we now get free, of course we assign a value of more than free. That makes it worth the effort to find it for free. Because the effort is worth your time. You are getting something for nothing, who doesnt want that ?

Of course that is a challenge for those industries. Not only do they face the challenge of their former customers wanting their content for nothing, but they have the problem that their costs are based upon their ability to sell their content.

There in lies the problem for the free movement. The subsidies of pro content producers from the newspaper and magazine industries will disappear as those businesses contract significantly. What happens then ?

You get the music industry. Anyone can create any song for no cost, and they do. The problem of course is getting your music to stand out among the millions of songs available at any given moment. Its expensive. Very, very expensive. (If it werent for groupies, would the number of musical artists contract 90pct ? )

The future of content outside of the music industry is exactly what you are now seeing inside the music industry. The music industry uses what they have learned from more than 10 years of competing with free. First they cut the size of their organizations to the bone, keeping just those they hope and pray will know best how to guide them through the world of free.

Those survivors have learned or are learning how to identify the music and artists that best fit the new world of free. They learn how to work with the artists and those willing to pay for music in some form, whether CD, Download, Licensing or in concert, and do their best to maximize the return on their investment. They use free as a weapon. They use free as an asset. They use it anywhere they can leverage it into something more. Something hopefully profitable.

What they music industry realizes that they have to offer quite a bit of music for free. What they have learned however, is that they dont have to allow it to be freely distributed. They can and do control where its delivered. You can have it for free, if thats how you want it, but you have to come get it where we want you to get it. On our websites. On websites we co produce with Youtube or Hulu or whoever. If you want it for free, you have to go through the exhausting effort of clicking to our website and giving us something in value in return. It may be your attention. It may be your interest. It may be a referral or your email address. We give you something free, you give us something that costs you nothing.

The music is often free, but it is NEVER freely distributed.

The TV and Movie business are realizing this is the case. Hence TV Anywhere. They will give you access to content for free if you are already a customer of their distributors. And before you IT ALL HAS TO BE FREE BIGOTS EXPLODE, even google requires you have internet access of some kind, which costs you in subscription fees , taxes or coffee.

Newspapers are catching flack for saying there should be copyrights on their news reports and the summaries. They are right. Their work, their ability to control it. They should have the right to control where it appears. If, as Chris Anderson and others suggest, there will be plenty of content creators and the quality of the work is sufficient for consumers of that content, then there will be plenty of open source content and it shouldnt matter what the newspapers request for protection. The market will decide.

Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont want their content openly distributed. On this point, they are correct again. They should have complete control over where it is distributed. They should have the ability to choose where it is offered for free.

Not only should they have this control, taking back this control is the exact right business move. Im not saying it will save newspapers or magazines, it wont. But it will make their website offerings stronger in the long run. If Im them, I take the risk that the “printed” content business follows the path of the music industry.

In other words, you take on the role of identifying the best in breed for your business and use your resources to help those talented people figure out how to make money for themselves and for you. You provide your resources and knowledge to make them smarter and then you go and compete against the masses.

In the long run, printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for. That they are the best source for breaking news about the topics I care about. THEY NEED TO MAKE SURE I DONT HAVE THE CHOICE OF GETTING IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT WHERE THEY DICTATE. If they cant make their content stand out from the open source masses and convince enough people to transact with them in a way that makes them money they dont deserve to exist.

They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.

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Could Sony be working on a ‘PSP phone’? - Telegraph

2009-06-30T10:02:31Z

Sony has just unveiled its newest console, the PSP Go, but could the Japanese company be working on a mobile phone that combines the gaming capabilities of the PSP with a traditional handset?

Censorship of the web is futile, says Google CEO - Telegraph

2009-06-30T10:01:48Z

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, says that countries such as Iran and China block access to the internet at their peril.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker

2009-06-30T08:27:41Z

Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.