tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

Blogging from my iPhone

2009-07-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Those who know me know how amazing my switch to a mac last year was. A 10 year thinkpad devotee, I reluctantly gave up on windows when I faced a 10 minute reboot. I haven't looked back since - and despite a few minor quibbles, I've been very happy with the switch.

Now it's time for another apple conversion - this time from a blackberry to an iPhone. I held out for more than two years, but the addition of video to the device really sealed it for me. I'm blown away at how polished the phone is - far more sophisticated than any mobile device I've used. (I know, I know - this is not new news to anyone. But I'm still in the honeymoon phase ... :)

More to test it out than anything else, I'm writing this from BlogPress, a nice $2.99 app that works with Blogger. Seems pretty good so far. Here's what this post looks like on the phone (yes, BlogPress supports images):

Pretty slick!

-- Posted from My iPhone

Collaborative podcasting

2009-06-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Several years back, I had what seemed to me a good idea for a fun hack: fill my iPod. Here's how it works: you find an MP3 file, you tag it at del.icio.us with the tag "ricksipod". I used the feed from del.icio.us for that tag as the source feed for a new feed in FeedBurner, and applied FeedBurner's "SmartCast" service to turn that feed into a podcast feed (by linking to the mp3 files as enclosures).

Since I just bought an iPhone, I'm using iTunes more often now (my iPod sat, unused, in my briefcase for quite some time). Subscribe to the resulting feed in iTunes, and voila! Now any MP3 file you guys tag gets routed to my iPhone.

I'll report back with any particularly good finds you guys steer my way.

Update: In the comments, Eric points out that I'm standing on the shoulders of a few giants (namely, Eric, Fred and David Hornik) by re-purposing this. I'd completely forgotten the origin of this idea - and enjoyed re-reading the original post that planted the seed for me. I also like the more modern implementation - Sam's idea to redo this as a Twitter-powered podcast. Neat!

My commencement speech

2009-06-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Last month I was the commencement speaker at the University of Richmond School of Law's commencement ceremony. I graduated in the class of '96, and was honored to be invited back to address this year's graduating class. The transcript of the speech is here, and the video of the speech is now available on YouTube:

Thanks again to the graduates for the invitation - it was an honor to share the day with the very accomplished graduating class.

Social media presentation at SMPS event

2009-06-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

Just finished presenting at the Society for Marketing Professional Services San Francisco event, where I shared the stage with Maura Ginty from Autodesk and Heather Durham of The Durham Group. We were there to talk about social media, and we covered a number of interesting avenues. The audience was marketers for architecture and engineering firms, and was a great opportunity to talk to a group for whom much of social media - blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. - is new territory.

These firms - much like the law firms I used to work with when I was at iManage and Interface Software - have to justify investing in new things with uncertain results to leadership who's often of a generation that didn't grow up with access to these tools. For many of them, "social networking" (as one of the organizers told me) still means cocktail parties and country club memberships.

I tried to stress more than anything else that the key to social media is keeping it personal and conversational. One of the lessons we learned on the Dean campaign was that supporters responded more strongly to the campaign when they got to know the people inside the campaign. Posts didn't go out on the campaign blog under Howard Dean's byline, they went out as written by Joe Trippi, Matt Gross, Nicco Mele, Jim Brayton, Zephyr Teachout, Garrett Graff, and so on. And as people got to know them, the connection to the campaign got stronger and more resilient. When Matt asked for tech help, or Zephyr called for volunteers, people responded.

This wasn't just a political thing - I watched it happen when we reached out on the publisher services team at FeedBurner, and it's equally true now with the Blogger team responding to users on Twitter. I stressed to the audience today that a blog can help individuals within a firm establish their own voice, and by creating that visibility directly benefit the firm in the process. It's a lesson that I think is too often overlooked, as people tend to emphasize the tools (do I set up a blog? get an account on Twitter? How do I use LinkedIn?) instead of thinking about the end result: do you want your firm to be more visible? More authoritative in industry press? Establish personal connections with business leaders, potential clients, business partners?

Blogs, networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, and yes, even Twitter - every one of them can play a role in accomplishing those objectives. But saying you have a blog, or getting a Twitter account - those aren't the objectives. They're the means to an end.

There was a good crowd there today - well over 100 attendees, which is apparently double the typical attendance for these events. I'd love to hear from anyone there - what questions didn't we get to? What else do you want to know? I'm guessing your colleagues have some ideas to share, or additional context to provide... have at it in the comments.

Thanks to the SMPS for being such great hosts, I had fun!

Who and where are you?

2009-06-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool hack: earlier today I created a two column Google Spreadsheet, and built a form front-end. One column is for location, the other column is the caption for that location. Using the Google Maps gadget for Google Spreadsheets, I was able to create a real-time map of the data in the spreadsheet. The gadget contains a "publish gadget" option, which provides the javascript to display the embedded map. Finally, I grabbed the HTML from the embedded form and added it to an HTML/Javascript gadget on Blogger right below the map itself. The result is a real-time, updated map showing the locations of visitors to my blog:

Go ahead! Add your location and be like all the cool kids:

I'm going to work on tweaking the Maps gadget so that URLs in the caption balloons are clickable... but I'm interested to see where this heads. Thoughts?

Blogger templates - favorite sources?

2009-06-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

A while back on Twitter, I invited @Blogger followers to share their favorite third party template designers, and promised a summary post on Blogger Buzz with pointers for our users. Responses were great - but unfortunately, they're lost (for the time being, at least) while Twitter works on repairing its archival search.

So I'm going to try again: and this time, I promise a more timely response. If you have a favorite source of Blogger templates, please share it in the comments. I'll summarize by tomorrow on Blogger Buzz (if I get enough comments), Wednesday at the latest.

Looking forward to seeing what you share!

Blogger custom search gadget

2009-06-01T15:17:00.001-07:00

Earlier today we announced a new gadget that Blogger users can install on their blog: with one click, they get a search gadget that will search not only their blog, but other sites they've linked to, their blogroll, and the web. (Here's TechCrunch's post about it.)

To call it "new" is actually a bit of a misnomer: it's been available on Blogger in Draft (akin to Gmail's Labs) for some time, but we polished it up a bit and let folks know about it this morning.

Louis Gray wrote up his reaction shortly after we published our post, concluding that Lijit should "look out!" I think Louis is as sharp as they come, but I'm not sure I agree. I've been fortunate to meet with the Lijit team on a number of occasions, and think that the opportunities they're addressing are a bit different than what we've done at Blogger with this launch. Indeed, in the comments on Louis's post, Micah Baldwin from Lijit does a good job pointing out that the custom search gadget and Lijit really aren't that competitive.

Where our custom search gadget enables visitors to find a specific piece of content from among the sites that the blogger has linked to, Lijit takes a somewhat more expansive view and uses search as a way to build a community around the blog in question. So there's search, but there's also stats, and there's an ad network built around the context Lijit has about how sites link to each other. It's that last piece - the network of associated sites - that I happen to know something about, as I helped build out a very similar idea at FeedBurner before we got acquired. I'm not just saying they're coincidentally similar - Lijit's networks were in many ways a continuation of what we started at FeedBurner. From the press release earlier this year about Lijit's networks:

Lijit Networks, Inc., a company that provides search-powered applications for individual online publishers and publisher networks, announced today the launch of Lijit Content Networks, which are sites built to support self-organized groups of bloggers that write about a common area of interest. Much the way FeedBurner, Inc.'s FeedBurner Networks once worked, Lijit's Content Networks aggregate their content via RSS feeds from many individual sites into a single website that captures the collective perspective of all sites in the network. [emphasis mine]

So... is there some overlap? Sure. But while I think our gadget provides a cool way of applying several Google products to solve a complex problem (notably our AJAX APIs and our Custom Search Engine), Lijit is different. I don't think it's likely that users would use both on their blog at the same time, but I think that's because users of one are likely looking for something different than users of the other.

Free screening of The Response - tomorrow in Chicago

2009-06-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

A few days after I gave my commencement address, I got an e-mail from Ari Lapidus, one of the subscribers to my blog. His cousin, Sig Libowitz (a lawyer at Venable) had recently completed a film called The Response that he thought I'd like. We've since corresponded, and I'm hoping to bring a screening of the film to Google at some point.

The film is a courtroom drama about the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals and is based on the actual transcripts from those tribunals. In addition to Sig playing one of the judges, it stars Peter Riegert (Boon!), Kate Mulgrew, Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi and several others.

Among other awards, The Response won the ABA's "Silver Gavel" for "drama and literature", and is being screened at the ABA tomorrow in Chicago. The screening is free, but you do need to register ahead of time - details are here. If you attend, let me know what you think - I'm looking forward to meeting Sig and his cousin Ari, and can't wait to see the film.

Hiring? Let me know

2009-05-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not leaving Google. (Far from it... working on Blogger is a blast.) Several months ago I set up a Google Group for people to join if they're looking for a job; as recruiters and friends share job openings with me, I forward them to the list. There are 50+ members of the list, and I'd love it if this helped connect anyone with the job they were looking for.

So... if you're looking for work, join the group. If you're hiring, let me know and I'll pass it along.

Chrome on the Mac (kind of)

2009-05-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

Catching up on some TV last night, I saw a reference to the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Visting the Microsft site, I saw that the download was an .ISO package - basically a pre-burned disk image intended to be a bootable DVD to facilitate the installation of Windows 7. And then it clicked: VMWare can create new virtual machines out of .ISO files. I could run Windows 7 on my Mac. Which means I could run Chrome on my Mac!

Getting Windows running on my Mac was shockingly easy. All told it took about an hour. Here's what I did:

Download the .ISO file from Microsoft's site (choose the 32-bit version), get a license key for the evaluation copy
In VMWare, click "New"
Select Windows Vista, point to the downloaded .ISO file and provide your license key
Wait and watch as VMWare builds your Windows machine

Once done, I fired up the virtual machine, and Windows 7 loaded flawlessly. Fired up IE, downloaded Chrome, and there you had it: I was now running Chrome on my Mac.

On the shuttle into work this morning, I tried using just Chrome inside of the Windows 7 virtual machine to see if I could use it as my primary browser. It was rock solid, and noticeably faster than Firefox on the Mac. (Which, when you think about the computing shenanigans going on, is rather remarkable.)

The Release candidate is valid for a year (though it'll start degrading itself by doing bi-hourly shutdowns in March, 2010), which means that if you have a copy of VMWare, you can run Windows 7 for the next 12 months for free. Of course, Chrome on the Mac will be released natively ahead of that... but in the meantime, this isn't a bad way to test out a new OS while also getting a screaming-fast browser as part of the bargain.

Text of Commencement Speech

2009-05-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Below is the text of the speech I'm giving to law students graduating from the University of Richmond School of Law this afternoon. The school is recording the speech; once I have the video I'll put it up in my YouTube account.

=====

Thank you, Rob, for that wonderful introduction. President Ayers, Dean Douglass, members of the faculty, and most importantly - graduates - I'm honored to be here, and I want to thank the students for the invitation to join all of you today.

When I showed up at Richmond Law, I had no idea where I'd be after graduation - the thought that I'd end up at one of the world's most influential technology companies was furthest from my mind. Much to the chagrin of my parents - and even a few professors here today - I rarely chose to do something because of where it would take me. Looking back, it's obvious to me that this is one lesson I've learned: if you think you know exactly where you're going, you're not far enough away.

Today, my path from Richmond Law to Google seems almost direct. I joined the ABA as a student. I founded a law journal. I wrote a technology column for the ABA. Got a job through contacts from the Journal and the ABA. One of those contacts asked me to write a book with him, and on the phone one day, he told me about how one of his clients - a Muslim citizen - was locked up after 9/11 without access to counsel. We wondered what we'd tell our kids when they studied this period in American history, so I made a call to Vermont, where I became one of the first volunteers on the Dean campaign. That didn't go exactly as planned, but friends from the Dean campaign got hired to work for a little-known Senate candidate, and they needed a local. That's how I ended up managing President Obama's campaign blog when he ran for Senate. I was too excited by what was developing on the Internet to let it remain a hobby, and I joined an Internet start-up. We got bought by Google. (I did say "almost" direct.)

Of course, I almost didn't make it through the front door. Unlike nearly every other company on the planet, Google actually interviews the employees of the companies it's acquiring. As a company that receives more than a million resumes a year, Google can be awfully demanding. One of my twelve (yes, twelve) interviewers asked about my GPA in law school. I wasn't sure, but offered, "2.8? 3.0?" He looked at me: "Why so low?" Realizing this wasn't a joke, I replied: "I started a law journal, the first in the world to publish online. And it was like a full-time job, while being a full-time law student. When I graduated, the faculty awarded me the T.C. Williams award for the most significant contribution to legal scholarship." I said it just like that: one run-on sentence, without punctuation. He paused, then looked at me: "There aren't many good answers to that question. But that was a good answer."

The reason that answer worked - and the reason I'm here today - is that I've been blessed to always be passionate about what I do. I've never known where the path in front of me was leading, but my passion guided me - through challenges as well as successes.

When I was young, my Dad often asked, "What are you passionate about?" It wasn’t until high school that I started to get a sense of my answer. I read the Supreme Court’s ex parte Milligan opinion during a lesson on the Civil War. A straightforward case, it established that even in a time of war, the President’s powers had limits. (Amazing, I know!) I remember grasping even then the genius inherent in our Constitution, admiring the delicate balance between the branches of our government. I knew that I wanted to be a part of a system that ensured individuals like Lambdin Milligan got a fair trial.

In college, I wrote a column for the school paper about the Gulf War. In 1990 - before the invention of the Web - I was exchanging e-mail with Israeli students in Tel Aviv and Saudi students in Riyadh. My column - for a school paper read by a few hundred students - had first-hand sources from 6000 miles away. The world was orders of magnitude smaller for me than it was when I left high school - and I knew the Internet was fundamentally changing life as we knew it.

At Richmond, a dozen of us were convinced that these fundamental changes would apply to the law as well, and we started an online law journal. Within weeks of publishing our first issue, we had visitors from Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nearly every law school in the country, and individuals from around the world. The ability to reach all corners of the globe - with little more than an Internet connection and something to say - was exhilarating.

A few years out of law school, I worked for a former law partner of Dean Douglas. He'd started a company that built private networks for litigation management, and one of our users shared with me the secret to keeping his clients happy. (Out of respect to the many southerners in the room, I will not butcher the beautiful accent with which these words were spoken. But trust me - this is even better when said with an Alabama drawl.) "Biggest item on any bill I send is one word: Thinkin'."

I've always loved that comment, because it speaks to me of the immense creativity at the heart of law practice: it's not what you read but your passion to apply what you know - that separates the great lawyers from the merely good lawyers.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful. All of the communication I've spoken of - whether through blogs, social networks, e-mail, or yes, even law journals - means it is increasingly possible for companies like ours to deliver on that mission. Let me give you a sense of the scale at which we operate: in four hours, Google indexes as much information as is contained in the US Library of Congress. In those same four hours, 3,600 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, and six million words are written on my service, Blogger. In our lifetimes, users will have near-complete access to the information they want. What will ubiquitous access to information mean for you? Your clients? Your firms? Think, for a moment, how the practice of law would evolve if all the world’s information – including legal source materials - were searchable by anyone, anywhere, any time - for free.

I don't know exactly what that path will look like, but I'm betting some of you might. I do know this: it will change how lawyers perceive themselves, it will change how the law reacts to fundamental principles like privacy, community, and intellectual property, and it will change the nature of how clients interact with their lawyers.

I would hope that like me, after three years at Richmond Law you have all developed a passion for the law. If so, then I believe you have an obligation to change it. Precedent must not define the path in front of you, it can only help you navigate it. The Internet that I first saw 20 years ago is finally effecting change that is fundamentally altering entire industries. Newspapers in their current form may well be gone before any of you make partner. Every book I read last year, I read on Amazon's Kindle. Sales of CDs and DVDs are falling, just as iTunes downloads surpassed 1 billion and Amazon now delivers rented movies in high definition to my TiVo.

The innovation that has reshaped these industries will certainly accelerate change within the legal profession, and those of you who shape the change that's coming must be passionate about it - and must understand the forces at work so that you might guide the law to where it needs to go.

To those of you who, either after graduating today or after practicing for a bit, find your passion misplaced, or worse, lost: stop. Passion for the law does not need to mean passion for the practice of law. My path is, after all, an "alternative" path. (A word about "alternative" - when I chose to join a fledgling tech start-up after getting my law degree, the word my Dad used to describe my career choice was most definitely not "alternative".) Your JD need not be a precedent that binds you to practice. Let it be your foundation, from which you can find your own way to apply what you’ve learned. My JD informs every decision I make at Google, yet I have never practiced law.

Richmond Law helped me learn how to think, how to synthesize, how to write, how to argue – and no matter who signs your pay checks, you will find these skills put you head and shoulder above your peers. I used to joke that my JD was like an MBA without math, but I'm increasingly convinced that an MBA is a JD without arguing. And trust me: the arguing matters.

Google didn't get to where we are by following those before us. Nor will change come to the legal profession incrementally. To be an agent of change, a steward for the profession, you must think big. The forces at work are too large, too numerous, and evolving too quickly. You must have the audacity to, to borrow a tagline from another Silicon Valley company, think different. (As an aside, after three years of "Law Skills", I'd hope that I'm not the only one who heard that Apple ad and thought, "shouldn't that be Think Differently?")

I'm unbelievably lucky to have studied at a law school whose leadership thought it might be cool if every incoming student had a laptop. Dean Harbaugh later admitted to me that they didn't really know what would happen when students had laptops - but by thinking just a little bit differently about the education of law students, an unexpected accident happened: some of us started a law journal. Which, among other things, gave me a good answer in my interview at Google.

When you think differently, accidents happen. Failures are unavoidable. But accidents aren't always failures, nor are failures always without value. When it's OK to fail, success becomes possible, and, through experimentation, the next step in the path presents itself.

Today, as you graduate, the economy makes the path before you seem more challenging and even less obvious. But regardless of whether you practice law or apply your education to some other endeavor, and regardless of whether you're juggling options or looking for the right opportunity in a tighter job market, when you’ve found your passion and you think big, you'll realize that you won't find your path: it will find you.

Look at me: an experiment in undergrad - Internet access for everyone as a result of a wealthy alumnus’s donation - followed by an experiment in law school - laptops for everyone - mixed with passion for technology and law - produced a legacy I remain proud of to this day.

If you leave today with a diploma and a passion for the law, then you and the faculty did your jobs well and you begin your careers with nearly unlimited potential to be a positive force for change within the profession. I walked off this stage thirteen years ago. Thirteen years from now, when one of you is standing where I stand today, addressing the class of 2022, I don't know what the profession will look like, but I know it will be better because you channeled your passion and you thought big.

Congratulations on your accomplishment, and best of luck in your careers. Thank you!

Commencement speech in 3 days!

2009-05-06T09:02:00.001-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

I leave for Richmond tomorrow afternoon, where I'll be giving the commencement address to this year's graduating class at the University of Richmond School of Law. It's been almost four months since I received the call from Dean Douglas, I've spent quite a bit of time in the last several months refining what I want to say.

Writing this kind of address is a very different process than most other presentations I've given, and it's been a terrific process to get input from a number of people who've provided very useful feedback. I'm probably leaving a few out, but I wanted to say thanks to my friends Ann Lee Gibson, Norm Rubenstein, Leigh Dance, Barb Miller, Ross Fishman, Deborah McMurray, Jason Mendelson, and Prof. Joel Eisen - each reviewed at least one draft of the speech and helped me see what fit and what didn't. The speaker team at Google is terrific, and my wife Robin was tremendously helpful in listening to several drafts and helping me hone in on the key messages.

The finished product is rather different from my first draft - and I'm much happier with where it ended up. I'll share the final version after I give the address, and the school is recording it - once I have a copy I'll put it up on YouTube. I'm excited, and am really looking forward to the ceremony.

Blogger FTP vs. Custom Domains

2009-05-05T10:33:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend on Twitter, I asked for bloggers to share reasons why they used FTP instead of Custom Domains. Most people, once I'd explained the advantages of Custom Domains, tended to agree that was the better path... and the time seemed ripe for diving in, as we'd had a number of FTP-related issues over the last several weeks.

A number of users responded, and I just did a pretty comprehensive post over on Buzz (do I get the award for longest Buzz post ever? I think I do!) If you're using Blogger FTP and would like to better understand whether Custom Domains might be a better option, I suggest you check it out.

We've also created a Help Group specifically around this topic, so we can answer additional questions that you might have. Please read the article, then head over to the help group if you need additional help. Thanks to everyone who provided input, and to all of you who rely on Blogger as your blogging service.

TiVo turns ten years old

2009-05-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Dave Zatz has a thought-provoking piece up asking whether TiVo has lost its way. The impetus for his post is a recent NY Times article about recent TiVo developments extending advertising throughout its UI, and the recognition that the core of TiVo's innovation hasn't changed much since it first launched in 1999.

I called TiVo last week after I did the math on how much money I've spent with TiVo over the years, hoping I could save a few bucks. Starting in February, 2001, I've owned four different TiVo units - and between hardware and service fees, I've spent thousands of dollars in the 8 years I've been a subscriber. I was also an early adopter of TiVo's Home Media Option, which meant I spent $100. (Months later, they made HMO free. No refund, however.)

All of which is background for why I was going to turn this post into a bit of a complaint. For all of my TiVo fan-boy love over the years, thousands of dollars is a lot of money to spend for a product that has not, as the NYT points out, radically changed the game since their launch in '99. There's one exception to this: the release of TiVo to Go a few years ago, where I could transfer TiVo recordings to my PC and watch on the computer. Between my commute (on the train, ~1 hour each way every day) and my travel (~100k miles/year), this was an absolute revelation. I was able to stay current with shows I cared about - particularly those that Robin didn't like. :)

But since switching to the Mac, one of my biggest complaints has been the lack of a viable equivalent to TiVo to Go. The app is inexplicably free on the PC, but the only alternative supported by TiVo is a $100 Mac app by Roxio that does about 50x more things than I need. I asked @tivo on Twitter over the weekend whether I was missing anything; @tivo replied that I should check out Roxio.

But @shellen and @CPWestergaard pointed me to an option I wasn't familiar with: iTiVo. If you own a TiVo and you use a Mac, you absolutely, positively need to download this. It's a free app, and it allows you to do exactly what you can do w/TiVo to Go on the PC: not only can you download recordings on a one-off basis, but you can also "subscribe" to shows so that they're automatically transferred once there's a new copy on the TiVo. If you're an iPod/iPhone user, it also includes the ability to convert to iTunes on the fly so that the files are available the next time you sync your device.

This post has a happy ending: iTiVo has given my TiVo new life, since it means I can once again enjoy the functionality of my TiVo to its fullest. Why TiVo doesn't offer this natively is beyond me... I'm not overstating it when I say that iTiVo and TiVo to Go are the difference for me between a decent service (but not necessarily worth the $20+/month I pay to them for the two current units) and a service that I wouldn't consider going without.

Sadly, in my call with TiVo last week, their only suggestion was that I spend $300 to get the lifetime service for my Series 3 (the HD TiVo). Spending hundreds of dollars to save a few bucks a month wasn't exactly where I was hoping that conversation would end up. :) On the plus side, Robin and I rented our first HD movie from Amazon via the TiVo on Friday night. Great picture quality, easy browsing for movies. Download speeds were a tad slow (and I'm on a very fast Comcast connection) - next time, we'll probably pick the movie in the afternoon before we want to watch. But other than that, it was pretty impressive.

Google Latitude badge

2009-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

This is really cool: go to the Google Latitude badge maker and create a badge that you can add to your blog. If you use Latitude, you can show off where you're located.

The end result:

(Used a screenshot so those of you looking in a feed reader will see it.)

Works on all blog platforms, though there's a simplified +Add to Blogger button. More details at Blogger Buzz.

The Stand, playing out on Twitter

2009-04-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Stephen King's The Stand - part sci-fi, part horror, mostly a wonderfully engaging view of what happens to a few survivors of a man-made apocalypse. I've read the book at least four or five times - never for the story itself, but to be immersed in a world of characters you want to spend time around. King's gift has always been his ability to draw out his characters - particularly through inner monologues - and The Stand remains his best stand-alone book.

As I mentioned last month, I'm in the midst of re-reading the Dark Tower series. I finished book 3 this morning (The Waste Lands), and mentioned on Twitter how magnificent the series is, even a second time through. Shortly after that tweet, I was followed by @LeadDealer, a brand new (started yesterday) Twitter account of the Dark Tower's protagonist, Roland Deschain. Intrigued, I checked out some of @LeadDealer's recent tweets... and saw references to a slew of characters from The Stand: @VegasWalkinDude (Randall Flagg), @MotherAbigail, @MOONtomcullen. Another tweet replied to @KingdomSearch, personal account to researcher Dirk Rensmann who runs The Stephen King Research Project, a remarkable full-text archive of all of King's works, along with lots of other links and materials.

Checking out @KingdomSearch, it turns out that a whole bunch of fans of The Stand are re-enacting The Stand on Twitter. Why would they do that? Well, the event that triggers the apocalypse in The Stand is a virulent strain of the flu known as "Captain Trips" - and the emergence of swine flu as this week's news story du jour gave the fans all they needed to get started. Other characters on Twitter - one-hit wonder Larry Underwood (@digyourman), professor Glen Bateman (@glenbateman), Nadine Cross (@nadine_cross)and poet-gone-wrong Harold Lauder (@haroldlauder). Wow.

This is going to be fun.

Update: Roland points out that The Stand isn't the only story playing out. Ka is a wheel, indeed.

Music rights are killing good TV shows

2009-04-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Mike Masnick at TechDirt has repeatedly identified cases where the difficulty of obtaining rights to music played in TV shows is either holding up or killing attempts to reissue those shows on DVD. WKRP in Cincinnati is probably the best-known example, but more recently this meant that the claimed "complete" release of Beavis & Butthead on DVD was in fact an edited version of the show with all of the music videos removed. Why? Because the shows relied heavily on music at the time, and the difficulty of obtaining all of the necessary rights to display the music in the episodes proved to be too cumbersome (or too expensive).

Well, now we have a less egregious but no less disappointing example: MTV is reissuing The State on DVD. That's a good thing: The State and Beavis & Butthead were two shows that were much-needed comic relief while I was in law school. And there was no better sketch from The State than Barry & Levon and $240 worth of pudding:

The State - MTV Shows

Cool, right? Well, not so much. Turns out that MTV has completely edited the original sketches, removing the Marvin Gaye music (and presumably other music) due to licensing problems/costs. Check out the first comment on the post:

Where's the original Marvin Gaye music? Don't tell me you didn't get all the orginal music rights for the DVD release, if that's case, then it's a big NO SALE for me, and many other fans. There must be 4 or 5 Barry and Levon skits in total, and one where they even mention Marvin Gaye ("I'm starvin' for the Marvin..I got the Gaye in a bad way"). So would these be redubbed versions? The inflections in their voices sound off too....

What a waste. The rights-holders of the Marvin Gaye music end up without promotion to an entirely new generation of people who might find that they like Marvin Gaye (and who would then, oh, I don't know - buy his music), members of The State, like the hilarious Michael Ian Black, end up seeing their work modified (and rendered less effective), and fans of the original show don't have a legitimate source of re-experiencing the works they enjoyed the first time around.

Sigh.

If I swing like this...

2009-04-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

... you might think I actually knew what I was doing. Actually played a lot better than I thought I would, which made it a lot more fun. In all, we played 4 rounds of golf, playing the Fazio course, Arthur Hills course, Robber's Row course, and Oyster Reef. Needless to say, these courses are well above my station - but I had enough good shots to make the trip feel like I held my own.

Happy birthday, Dad!

"Golfing" for the next few days

2009-04-16T19:58:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Last summer, my brother and I told our Dad that we'd take him golfing for his 60th birthday. The weekend in which we actually deliver on that promise is upon us... and the reality that I will be soon defiling courses of incredible beauty is finally setting in.

To the thousands of golfers who will undoubtedly be paying higher greens fees on Hilton Head island as a result of my "golfing" this weekend, I apologize in advance. Please know that this was not done for my own edification, but for my Dad's enjoyment.

(That image to the right is of Ernie Els, who is among the many golfers competing in the Heritage Tournament this weekend right around the corner from where we're playing. I think we're going to get to watch the final day's play on Sunday, which may be as much for the courses' benefit as our own enjoyment.)

2009-04-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

Posting to my blog via SMS is rather cool.

Nintendo DSi is a big hit

2009-04-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

Both boys had birthdays last month (nine and seven!), and they set their sights on the new Nintendo DSi. That was a bit pricey, so we gave the boys a chance to earn some money towards their gift through extra chores. When the DSi finally came out a month after their birthdays, we picked up their new gifts.

Have to say - I'm really impressed. Here's what I really love:

Built-in cameras. The kids have had a ton of fun snapping pictures with the built-in cameras (there's both a user-facing camera as well as a camera that faces away from the user) and using the DSi's image editor to distort the pictures. (Nothing quite like a 7 year-old's face stretched to three times its normal width.)
Wireless gameplay. There's actually three different ways for the DS to play wirelessly. Having seen it in operation with two kids, it's great.

Certain games - like Brain Age, Mario Kart DS, both of which we have - give multiple players with a DS the ability to wirelessly download a companion version of the game and play together. (On the game boxes, this is called wireless multi-player download, details here.) This requires you to only own one game card, but multiple players can play.
Other games support multi-card wireless play mean that if every player owns a copy of the game, they can connect to each other to play head-to-head. We haven't bought them the same game yet, so we haven't played with this version yet... now it's up to the boys to decide if they want to spend their gift cards and chore money on copies of the same game. :)
Nintendo WiFi Connection. Yet other games can play head-to-head over the Internet. My nieces both have DS Lites; with copies of the same game (say, Mario Kart) the cousins can all play together over the net from 3,000 miles away. That's pretty darned cool.

DSi Shop. If you connect the DSi to a broadband connection before October 5, you get free points to spend on free games from the DSi shop. The boys picked different games, and the quality isn't bad for free games. There's not much to pick from right now, but I'm sure there's more coming.

Also, a final plug for GameStop. The boys were able to trade in some unused Wii games to stock up on a couple of DS titles they wanted. Not bad.

Final note on the DSi - if you're looking for a little more info, IGN has a great walk-through:

In case Google doesn't work out...

2009-04-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

All I need to do is push "1", and serious money awaits:

Twitter: Topical, Polemical and Short

2009-03-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

Pulitzer-prize winning historian Bernard Bailyn:

Twitter is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since Twitter is always short, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, Twitter does not have to follow any prescribed pattern... All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

Prof. Bailyn didn't actually write that. He wrote that years ago in The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution, and was talking about the role that pamphlets played in socializing the ideas that laid the foundation of the revolution.

I've made this point before, in 2003 when I first read Bailyn's book - back then, my focus was weblogs. In 18th century America, pamphlets were the fastest, easiest, most unfiltered way of distributing content. Today we have blogs and Twitter - but the dynamics that make them so compelling are the very same ones that made pamphlets so powerful 225 years ago.

Eight Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter

2009-03-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

Back in January, we set up the official Blogger account on Twitter. We had a general idea of what we hoped to accomplish - better interaction with passionate users, quick communication of known issues, bug fixes, etc. - but this was not a long planned deliberate move by us. If anything, it was a bit of an experiment.

A few weeks ago I promised a post detailing what I have learned so far. In no particular order, here goes:

Setting up a username makes monitoring Twitter much easier. This was a particularly acute problem for Blogger, since "blogger" is a pretty generic term. Setting up a persistent query for "blogger" yielded far too many hits per minute to be worthwhile... weeding through all of them to find the few that were specifically about big-B Blogger would take all day. Searching for "@blogger", by contrast, is much easier and more effective.
Replying as an individual is sometimes better than replying as the brand: The traffic of replies directed to @blogger varies from a couple a day to a few dozen (after launches like our Friend Connect integration), and some of those tweets are pretty specific to the individual user. Learning from Max Kalehoff's experiences at Clickable, in mid-February I started replying more as myself (@rklau) when the tweet was specific to the user. This has two advantages (at least): reducing the noise from the actual Blogger account to the more than 8,000 followers, and establishing a more personal connection between the user and myself. And I'm not alone - several other Blogger team members are engaged, and reaching out directly to users. Reactions are uniformly positive: people love knowing that individuals are involved, that we care about the product, and that we are trying to improve their Blogger experience.
Negative feedback and user frustration are part of the cost of admission: Not everyone is going to be thrilled with everything we do, and we needed to be comfortable with surfacing that frustration once we got active on Twitter. It's possible to turn frustrated users into fans with just a single message (see here: "Makes me sad!" "Try..." "OMG I love you!"), but the key is to engage users when appropriate, and offer guidance if you have any to give.
Users will help you do your job once you commit: This was true at FeedBurner when we used persistent RSS queries to surface blog posts and comments about FeedBurner so we could respond rapidly, and it's no less true today: once you open up this channel of communications, your users will help you spread the word. We won't catch every comment intended for us (not everyone knows we're on Twitter, for starters) - but the clusters of friends and followers often means that one of our followers will be following someone else who could use our help. When one person asks about unexpected behavior on Blogger, one of our followers will direct them to the right place. This is not a rare occurrence, and it creates a wonderful network effect that routinely amplifies our communications.
Use content you've already got: At Blogger, we already had Blogger Buzz, Blogger Status, Known Issues, Blogger in Draft blog, and Blogs of Note to communicate various info about Blogger. We use Twitterfeed to route the RSS feeds from each blog to our Twitter account. This ensures that anyone looking for the latest info about Blogger - whether it's a product announcement, a known issue, or a response to a user problem - can get it without having to look in multiple places. If you've got a corporate blog, recent announcements, or other content you're already producing, use Twitterfeed or Hootsuite or another tool to automatically route that content to Twitter so your followers hear from you on a regular basis. (Bonus tip: Press release-speak does not lend itself well to Twitter.)
Make sure multiple people are monitoring @replies for early warning signals. When Louis Gray notices that his RSS feed is broken due to what appears to be a Blogger bug (it was), you ignore such reports at your peril. Fortunately several of us saw the report, we were able to isolate the cause (one engineer in his hotel room in Austin, followed by one of our engineers in Krakow picking up where the other left off) and had a push ready within a day. Not only was Louis happy, it made our ensuing encounter on the plane home much more pleasant. :)
Ask questions. If you wait for everyone to ask you questions, you'll be reactive and you'll set the expectation that people will only hear from you when they complain. It's increasingly clear to us that a lot of Blogger users don't know that there are lots of options for customizing their templates available on the web, so last week we asked followers for their favorite recommendations. I'm summarizing those recommendations and will put a post on Blogger Buzz later today. (Which, of course, will get posted to Twitter as well.) Important note: if you ask questions, be prepared to act on the replies you get. Readers whose replies go into an apparent black hole will not be happy.
Be consistent. This is very much an extension of our "voice" online, and as such we've tried to ensure that when we do post, it sounds like us. 140 characters (the limit on Twitter messages) can be very restrictive, so ensuring that consistency is not always easy. This is particularly tricky if you're posting from multiple sources (corp blog, known issues, etc.) - so make sure some thought goes into how those posts are communicated, not just what is communicated.

As experiments go, this has been quite successful. We're reinforcing to users that we are listening and that we care about their experiences with the product (good and bad). It's no silver bullet - building and maintaining the product still require a tremendous investment of time and energy - but as part of a larger commitment to making a great product and keeping our users happy, it's absolutely a worthwhile investment.

Re-reading The Dark Tower

2009-03-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

On my way out the door to SXSW, I walked past the bookshelf in our bedroom and took The Dark Tower off the shelf. I originally read the entire Dark Tower series in 2005, effectively back-to-back-to-back, and adored them. I can't really recall a Stephen King book I haven't enjoyed, but a few stand out: my favorite is The Stand (which I've read 4 or 5 times), and a few others that I recall rather vividly are The Mist (a short story in The Skeleton Crew), It, and The Shining.

But as I'm 2/3 of the way through The Dark Tower, I'm coming to the realization that as good as The Stand is (and if you haven't read it, you really must), The Dark Tower is in a league of its own. In just a few hundred pages, King establishes a more epic landscape, with characters who are more intriguing, with a story arc that is breathtaking, than any other author I've ever read.

For those that don't know the story of the Dark Tower, it's part Western, part science fiction, part fantasy, and just a little bit of horror thrown in for good measure (but not much). Most interestingly, countless other King works are referenced throughout: characters, places, and themes from other stories pop up in the most unexpected places. If you're a King fan, this is the series that makes his entire body of work fit together - not always how you'd expect it to, either.

I told a friend at SXSW I was re-reading the Dark Tower series (it's a total of 7 books, written by King over three decades), he marveled that I'd do so, particularly knowing how it ends. If you've read it, you might be able to appreciate why I think it's kind of poetic to be reading it again (I'll leave it at that, don't want to give anything away to the uninitiated).

Bottom line: if you love well-written, character driven stories that completely transport you to another place and another time, the Dark Tower series will not let you down.

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