Gregory Heller Get in touch

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January 2007

48 posts

  2. Music Industry Gets hit with the Long Tail

    Today’s NYT carries an article that sites further evidence that the major music labels are getting creamed by indie music and net distribution and promotion methods. In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry’s established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV. “It’s not as easy to shove something down people’s throats anymore and make them buy it. It’s not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that’s cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading.”

  3. An early New Years Resolution for CivicActions

    I resolve to use Skype more in the new year. This only works if you guys resolve to do it too. Why do I want us to use skype more often? Well if we are skype chatting about something and then need to talk to close the loop, we can easily move from IM to Voice with the click of a button. It is seamless. So put a plantronics DSP400 on your Christmas or Chanukka list. Or if you have Bluetooth on your computer you can use a Bluetooth headset

  5. Washington Post makes Congressional voting records available via RSS

    Props to Scott Trudeau for IMing me this blog post on 37Signals about a new service of the Washington Post . The US Congress Votes Database allows users to search votes by member, by congress, by margin and more! Then you can subscribe to an RSS feed. So an organization that wants to spread the word about how congressmen in their area are voting could aggregate the vote feeds for their congressmen on their website!

  6. Grumblings about the Do Not Call list and political solicitations

    If I had a dollar for everytime a voter got angry with me for calling them about an election and said “I am reporting you, we are on the do not call list!” I would have a few bucks (probably more if I put in more time on the phones 😉 I saw this letter in the NYT this weekend unforunately the article is behind a pay wall, but it would seem that it just talked about dreaded tele-marketers. It is the letter that talks about political calls. Recorded political messages are even more intrusive than commercial calls and should be banned. During the past election campaign, all political calls to our household were recorded solicitations.

  7. Google and Privacy

    This is a good op-ed from the NYT about Google and privacy. People love google and seem to ignore the fact that they are pretty bad on privacy, with tracking cookies, saved search history, merky privacy on google desktop serach and then the “never delete your mail” gmail pitch. I heard someone from EFF talk at NTEN regional SF talk about email privacy and wire tap laws. As the op-ed states: The government can gain access to Google’s data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages.

  8. Donating the Advertising revenue your eyeballs generate

    I just saw this article on DailyCandy.com about GoodSearch.com / GoodSearch is a search engine, now powered by yahoo that donated profits from advertising revenue to the charity of your choice. GoodSearch has a goal of donating 50% of revenues to charity, however in the fine print there is a caveat about a lower percentage in the first year. Anyway, seems like a good idea, wish you could choose your own favorite search engine though and not be forced to use Yahoo. This kind of reminds me a bit of the Interra Project where you decide where a percentage of the profits made by your shopping go.

  9. A New Battelfield: Ownership of Ideas

    Noel pointed me toward this article in the Internaltion Herald Tribune about intellectual property. I have pulled out just a few quotes below: “In certain cases,” said Elsa Lion, an analyst at the London research firm Ovum, “technology companies are beginning to realize they have more to gain by releasing patents to the general public than by hoarding licensing income.” Companies, even those the size of Intel, could one day be blocked from marketing a particular product whose design is made up of hundreds of thousands of patents just because an opportunist has claimed ownership of a single patent, said Adam Jaffe, dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a patent expert.

  10. Sony / BMG shoot own foot with DRM

    Just saw a snip on the Black Friday Morning News about the Sony / BMG DRM fiasco (apparently Sony wasn’t sure that installing spyware on their cusomters machines was a bad thing). Anyway, some “industry analyst” made a comment that I hadn’t thought of: “Sony just gave kids another reason not to buy CDs and to download music instead” I guess because I have never really been an [illegal] downloader of music, I hadn’t thought about this impact. But why should kids today buy music when the music companies are going to mess up you machine?