There is some minor entertainment value though at watching the google ad-matching algorithm attempt to cope with the admittedly sometimes obtuse content of this blog. Ads for social services or psychology something or other, ads for electric cars under my post about electric fishes etc.

I used to wonder why ads never became the virtual tip-jar of the internet. When you read a blog post or article you like, do you ever click on a nearby ad as a tiny (but free to you) token of appreciation. I know I usually don’t because a) firefox+adsense I never see them b) I usually don’t think of it. The internet being something I like everybody has been trained to rapaciously enjoy for free and move on.

Which could explain a lot about the content we see on the internet. Blogging anymore is hardly it’s own reward anymore, at least directly and monetarily unless you can a) reach a very large audience b) keep your costs very low as far as your “talent” or “editorial” side (USG is good for this) c) have some other agenda to push (hence the trend to marketing, pr and company blogs)

As a vehicle for micro-payments ads should be a great way to sustain a tip economy on the internet.

For every ad, each click earns the webmaster some amount of cents or even pennies in revenue. It depends on the value of the adword though. They say it pays to write about really expensive or exotic patented drug treatments or home mortgages and insurance. Thrilling subjects to be sure.

Things might be different if there was a social norm around clicking on ads to tip a content site. A tip economy could be great for supporting (remember the dream of the long tail?) a lot of blogs/bloggers or webapp developers or any other content with less else to gain. However in the long run the system probably wouldn’t work as it should eventually devalue click-thrus if those clicking-thru are not really sincere.

On the other hand, we are kind of there already. Having also experimented with buying google ads, the non-search-related clickthrough rates of one click in a zillion impressions look a lot like the rate only those internet surfers with rare motor-skill deficiencies who of course meant to click on something else.

In the end Dave Winer probably had it right. Back in late 2005 he told me that anyone putting ads on a blog is a fool chasing nickels and dimes, if there is a real value in it, it’s the connections, recognition and whuffie you earn from it.

Anyway, I will report on how this nickel and dime experiment goes.

Apropos as the blogosphere feels like it’s going through a what does it all mean, and is blogging dead? phase.

Previously: bogging as a dead media on thomaspurves.com

Meta-social aggregators like friendfeed and facebook are turning the web into a mobius strip with a snake in it that’s eating it’s tail. Wondering what would happen if I fed my twitter to my, friendfeed, to my facebook status and back to twitter again. But I don’t dare, I’m sure I would crash the internet.

Go ahead, leave a comment… anywhere.

Toronto’s venerable Democamp event kept on ticking last night at the “supermarket” in Toronto (after too long a break since February). Wonderful crowd out last night. But with the long hiatus the it seems the demand for camps is exceeding supply. The event was long sold out and so packed some might have called it barely legal. Before the first demo, we’d already drank the bar out of glassware.

It was refreshing to have DemoCamp back at a more social venue (read hipster drinking establishment). The problem was that supermarket is built like a long flat tube. Sight and sound was a challenge and presenters had a challenge keeping the crowd engaged. Kindof like presenting from the wrong end of a subway tunnel. The good news was several good demoers last night rose to the challenge.

Here are my hasty notes on the demos as they happened:

Refresh partners Roy
Refresh presenting analytics, for facebook aps. Better than google analytics their differentiator is they track influencer scores, viral coefficients that you can blend into your facebook aps which is key for growing your cpm from cents to dollars (that’s the theory anyway). Been running it in house for their brand customers, but are now releasing it? Looks like a handy tool for anyone trying to build viral apps.

Blueprint requirements centre
To do with increasing quality of requirements. It’s based on eclipse its for capturing requirements. Um the app is fine, but why are we watching a sales demo? Quote of the day: What the audience gets out of the demo: increased awareness of blueprint analytics. But Woo! seat licences are 10 grand. The audience appreciates this, also wants a version for free (not likely). It does have commenting and collaboration tools built in. For what it’s worth, looks like it does what it says on the tin: looks like it does a thorough job of capturing requirements for a major software project.

Demo3: labs.well.ca
Ali and his intern (you have to yell at interns) are up and they are hollering into the mic like rockstars so eveyone can hear and they are demoing live chat for ecommerce websites, it has avatars, the usual webchat features and looks pretty good. If you have a simple question to ask a website you might have a quick solution. They looked at free and paid solution and wanted something better. Its comet based so its scalable, its not webbased in the backend it’s jabber. and the live chat can push pages on the site without losing the conversation thread. Slick, a proper demo and the well guys have panache. Works with any jabber client, eg adium. Sign up, try it out at labs.well.ca

Demo 4: A Dr project student demo it seems like?, this one a little harder to follow. IRC Chat interface of sorts for drprojectbot for injecting and receiving ticket info.

Jesse brown Bitsrips
Introducing himself as the creator of the most fun website ever made in Toronto. This may actually be the most fun website ever made in Toronto. Bitstrips lets anyone make cartoons. You can pretty much make anybody. Its sort of a ridicule engine. Jesse is making himself now and it’s pretty cool. As soon as you make a character it exists in a number of expressions and poses. You can make a comic share with friends they can edit it. Its fully social you can embed on your blog and soon facebook. I now want to put bitstips in all my future blog posts.

Spreed
Spreed is an iphone news and it speed reads articles for you with keywords somehow. So you can in theory read 300 to 400 words per minute. An unfortunate fail on the playing of audio with their demo video, but then we didn’t really want to see a canned marketing demo anyway. Combining cognitive science on reading comprehension with software. Nice to see mobile aps and apps with science behind them like this coming out of Toronto. Will have to try it first however to know if it really works.

Lastly: Jevon’s Ignite rant
Great ignite rant by jevon on the vc industry in Canada. Vc investment has cratered in Canada, plethora of stats, it’s up to vcs and start-ups to save the industry, dream bigger connect to your communities, what’s new now are that communities are holding each other accountable, that there is a flood of new and connected talent in Canada. It’s up to investors to take risks discover this opportunity, it’s up to startups to kick ass and save the VC industry. More always at StartupNorth.ca and StartupIndex.ca.

That’s it. Was great to see everyone again, we’ll have to get more camps going again sooner (mental note). Personal fav demos of the night: well.ca, bitstrips and Jevon’s VC rant.

Electric fish is pretty awesome. This is an electric fish I met yesterday at the zoo. But I don’t know his name. Electric fish “see” by pulsing an electric current through the water and then somehow watching and parsing the variations in the electric field as it’s reflected back at them. Sharks too, and other fishes I think have a way of “seeing” prey from the tiny electric impulses of twitching fish muscles. It does help that saltwater is a reasonably good conductor. Bats and dolphins “see” their surroundings and each other using echolocation. Electric fish and bats may even see things in relative shades of “color” as well as form, shape and distance.

This is like magic. But it’s not that different or that much more an unlikely form of magic than our own eyes “seeing” the world and parsing our surroundings in fine detail only by means of a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic radiation (we call visible lightly) as it bounces, scatters and reflects chaotically off objects after a very long journey from a fiery orb in the sky.

Computers can see too. In the simple case, barcode scanners and RFID readers have been around for ages. More complicatedly, homeland security uses surveillance mixed with face recognition and robot cars with shedloads of intel-processors crammed in the trunk, are known to race across the desert. Relying heavily on engineered computer vision.

This awesome technology demo shows a google android (phone) application doing real-time augmented reality using computer vision mashed with googlemaps and place tagging. With mobile devices getting more powerful and more packed with high resolution sensors, practical augmented reality is not that far away. Just one beyond location based applications that are all the rage right now.

Soon every electric fish will want to have one.

The only remaining question: if your mobile devices, your eyeglasses, your clothing could see, what would they look for? What spectrum(s) would they see in?

What color would their electric world be?

^{Electric fish photo by Michele}

Further reading:
Savournet.ca blog
Michael Geist
WirelessNorth.ca
AmberMac on net neutrality

If you are in to this sort of thing, check out AnandTech’s review:

For now, the Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 are both solid values and cards we would absolutely recommend to readers looking for hardware at the $200 and $300 price points. The fact of the matter is that by NVIDIA’s standards, the 4870 should be priced at $400 and the 4850 should be around $250. You can either look at it as AMD giving you a bargain or NVIDIA charging too much, either way it’s healthy competition in the graphics industry once again (after far too long of a hiatus).

Anyway, kudos to the boys and girls in Markham Ontario for pulling this off. You may just save your parent company yet.

You can buy one here.

The benefits of the programme are multiple in terms of streamlining travel, reducing queues, minimising cash handling, reducing the possibility of fraud by customers and cash theft by staff, and generally improving the customer experience. Having said that, the biggest benefit is the £60 million reduction in annual operating costs for TfL of the ticketing system since implementing the Oystercard.

An Oyster that’s a Diamond, London’s Contactless System

Toronto’s own equivalent the contactless Presto card is currently in trials, and may one day unify transit fares across southern Ontario. This link is for the metronauts out there.

At the $5-or-more level, buyers can choose to download the album in [DRM-free] MP3 or FLAC format, the latter being exact copies of the original source files without compression. Also included is a single MP3 file featuring the music without track breaks. Link Moar

M:

mp3 or flac?

T:

flac is for wankers

M:

…

T:

Audio compression algorithms work by taking out extraneous data (likemicroseconds of silence) from the raw source data file reducing the total file size. Lossless algorithms like FLAC or winzip for that matter, studiously make sure that all of the original meaning down to the last bit can be recovered. MP3 goes further by also taking out, unrecoverably, some extra data from parts of the sound file that the human ear can’t actually hear resulting in substantially further file size reduction. For really low-bitrate mp3 compression (like 128bit or less) the algorithm is starting to take out some parts of the sound that the human ear can tell the difference, just a little bit.

Essentially however, the differences between good high-bit-rate mp3 (like 192bit VBR) and completely lossless compression like FLAC are largely imaginary.

Not that true-blood audiophiles aren’t willing to pay gobs of money all the time for imaginary sound differences all the time.

These people are wankers.

mp3 is also more widely supported by every media player everywhere. FLAC not so much.

M:

whodathunk. damn it’s really hard to decide which track to send. they’re all really really good!!

T:

OMG holy crap ya!

Why has this turned into a music blog all of a sudden? I dunno, but file under Girl Talk Doesn’t need bill C-61 to rock you.

Now go download the crap out of this album. And pay for it.

Ironic for what’s basically a hyperkinetic schizophrenic cyclone mashup of past factory-produced hits in a nuclear blender of awesome, this album is both 100% the future of music… and a future that is wide OPEN.

Girl Talk is a two-fer another example of alternative (PWYC) business model that will probably be wildly successful. And of course, he’s long been the poster child of fair-use in mashups and sampling.

^{Photos: Greg Gillis / Girl Talk live at Spin Gallery in 2006. Moar.}

DemoCamp Details:

• When: Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 from 17:30 to 21:00
• Where: Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
• Registration can be done here

Sponsor tickets and the first tranche of free tickets are sold out but there are still plenty of cheap supporter and community allstar tickets remaining (you know what to do). Get a ticket while you can, it’s a big space but will no doubt sell out.

Here is the link if you would like to present at democamp18.

enjoy!

photo of yours truly at democamp17,by Pema Hagan
Many more DemoCamp action shots here.

1. Don’t buy DRM infected media. This includes CDs, DVDs, protected iTunes files, Microsoft Plays for sure (which by the way, usually doesn’t). DRM is a pain in the ass, you don’t need it and if Canada’s new legislation passes unamended, by accepting DRM you effectively void any privileges of how, when and where you might access your media unless explicitly authorized by the rights holder (effectively you do not own any media if it’s DRM infected).
2. Do pay for music.

Buy digital music in un-encrypted formats e.g. mp3, flac. With these formats all your the fair-dealings (called fair use in the US) allowances apply including time-shifting, format-shifting, being able to play it in more than one device etc.

3. Go to shows

Even in the hey-days of the CD, many bands still made all their income from touring and t-shirts rather the pittance of CD royalties. Buy tickets, go to shows and it’s a great way to discover new bands too.

4. Buy the merch At the show buy something from the merch table. Buy anything: a tshirt, a record etc. Typically the band will be getting 100% of your money when you buy something at a show.
5. Buy Analog media if you enjoy the pleasure of owning a physical artifact of your favourite albums, buy the vinyl! More fun to play, they sound great and vinyl is making a huge comeback. You can’t digitally encrypt analog media either.
6. Buy indie not major labels the indies aren’t suing anybody, and for the most part, the music is better anyway

-photo by pwac