30 Highest NBA Salaries for 2006 - 2007 Season

Which of these NBA player is being the most grossly overpaid in the '06 - '07 season? I say Webber over Houston, since Webber letting everyone score at will is worse than Houston sitting at home watching TV. Also remember Grant and Finley are being paid by previous teams, after being waived last year via the Allen Houston rule:

1. Kevin Garnett Minnesota Timberwolves $21,000,000
2. Chris Webber Philadelphia 76ers $20,718,750
2. Allan Houston * Retired $20,718,750
4. Michael Finley ** San Antonio Spurs $20,154,625
5. Shaquille O'Neal Miami Heat $20,000,000
6. Allen Iverson Philadelphia 76ers $18,281,250
7. Jason Kidd New Jersey Nets $18,084,000
7. Jermaine O'Neal Indiana Pacers $18,084,000
9. Kobe Bryant Los Angeles Lakers $17,718,750
10. Tim Duncan San Antonio Spurs $17,429,671
11. Brian Grant *** Boston Celtics $17,370,625
12. Stephon Marbury New York Knicks $17,275,781
13. Grant Hill Orlando Magic $16,901,500
13. Jalen Rose New York Knicks $16,901,500
13. Tracy McGrady Houston Rockets $16,901,500
16. Eddie Jones Memphis Grizzlies $15,680,000
17. Antawn Jamison Washington Wizards $15,101,626
17. Vince Carter New Jersey Nets $15,101,626
17. Dirk Nowitzki Dallas Mavericks $15,101,626
17. Paul Pierce Boston Celtics $15,101,626
21. Baron Davis Golden State Warriors $15,070,000
21. Shawn Marion Phoenix Suns $15,070,000
21. Steve Francis New York Knicks $15,070,000
24. Ray Allen Seattle SuperSonics $14,611,570
25. Elton Brand Los Angeles Clippers $14,248,000
26. Larry Hughes Cleveland Cavaliers $13,363,012
26. Michael Redd Milwaukee Bucks $13,260,000
28. Joe Johnson Atlanta Hawks $12,744,190
29. Mike Bibby Sacramento Kings $12,500,000
30. Lamar Odom Los Angeles Lakers $12,489,000

Technorati Tags: nba, salaries, 2006 season

No more Colbert or Daily Show on YouTube

If you haven't noticed this y ourself, YouTube has complied with an order to pull all clips of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and South Park from their service. Presumably the demand comes from Viacom, who clearly doesn't understand how helpful the Comedy Central clips have been to generating popularity around their porduct.

*** UPDATE: The Comedy Central clips are up; this was apparently a negotiation move by Viacom to fairly gain some revenue from the content being on YouTube.

Technorati Tags: colbert, daily show, southpark, youtube, viacom

My top downloaded videos

You now see 37 videos on Google Video if you search for kskobac.
Today's report shows the most watched and downloaded videos as:



The top video, Ben Kweller live at Webster Hall in New York, is odd because it has 111 downloads to only 32 page views; I wonder if this is because of it being embedded in my website, as well as others, and incorrectly tracking?



The Irish spice girls tap dance video is doing really well also - over 2400 views and 30 downloads.



The rest of the videos are from the summer's Wildwood Ultimate Frisbee tournament. We have the crazy chubby bunny competition that has been downloaded ten times....



And several great frisbee plays, including Bruce running over someone on the sidelines, a great defensive play, and some good catches.

k. b. skobac readership statistics

Here's a quick look at the readership statistics for my website, for the week of 10.10 - 10.26.

From the chart above I found that:
- 69% of my traffic is organic (from search engines), but those people read only 1.36 pages at a time, so they likely leave after they get what they were searching for.
- 24% of my readership is from referral links and they read just a little more, at 1.4 pages per visit
- 7% of my readership comes directly to my site, and they stay for almost 2.5 pages at a time, reading much more content on average.

The raw numbers:
- 41 people a day on average
- 58 page views a day on average
- 284 visits total
- 409 page views total

FullTorrent - a new torrent search aggregator engine in the block

share your files at box.net

This looks like a great new torrent search aggregator. FullTorrent has a simple interface, and a few tests bring up good results from several of the premier torrent sites.

By the way, I served that image on the fly with Box.net Lite, a simple one-two-three tool to upload an image and get a code for pasting into blog postings or webpages. 1 GB of free storage for all of your files.

Technorati Tags: torrent, search, aggregator, torrentspy, piratebay, isohunt, box.net, box.net lite, file sharing, storage, hosting, image

Hear George Bush read your speech

This could be mildly ammusing if you're bored at work: Attach phrases together and hear President Bush read the speech. Unfortunately there's not categorization of terms and there isn't enough flexibility to make a truly funny one, but then again look how successfull the YouTube remake of him singing Sunday Bloody Sunday was.

Technorati Tags: president bush, george bush, sunday bloody sunday, speechwriter

Google trys to protect its copyright and avoid becoming xerox

Google issued a statement yesterday that walks through the ways you should use the term "google" in relation to the engine.  Why are they doing this? Intent to protect copyright is an important issue now online, where people are utilizing websites like Google as part of what they do on their own, blurring the lines between the two.  In order to keep "Google" from becoming open domain, the company has to defend its usage, or they cannot help it at all becoming a word like "xerox", which will mean to copy, regardless of if you are using a Xerox machine or otherwise.  Since "google" was redefined in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries this year...

Usage: 'Google' as noun referring to, well, us.
Example: "I just love Google, they're soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!"
Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There's no question here that you're referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.
Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.

Technorati Tags: google, copyright, xerox, definition, merriamwebster, oxford, dictionary,

Coca-cola decides to embrace the diet coke and mentos thing

Remember this?

Coke is finally embracing it, with a new viral marketing campaign pushing the creative minds to utilize the explosive effect for something artistic...

Technorati Tags: coca-cola, coke, diet coke, mentos

Visa and Mastercard cut off AllofMP3.com

Visa and Mastercard have restricted their cardholders from making purchases on AllofMP3.com, the russian music website that's selling single song mp3's for as low as 10 cents a track (and now moving to a free model). Are there other examples of credit card companies taking proactive measures to bar their cardholders from using their cards to make purchases that might ultimately be deemed illegal, though the outcome is not ambiguous and undecided at that point? It's either socially responsible or risk averting, but nonetheless an interesting decision.

Tags: allofmp3, visa, mastercard, intellectual+property

Capturing the Ben Kweller Concert

Friday night I made it out to Webster Hall in New York City for the Ben Kweller concert - great show. You get the sense that after being on the road for a while, playing for the home crowd is an incredible high for him. It showed, and the crowd ate it up. I posted a set of photos of Ben Kweller and the opener, Sam Roberts Band. I also loaded some videos of Ben Kweller from solo acoustic performances and his first encore.


. You can also read about the concert over at the A VC blog, where Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures talks about the show, and social communities (the human factor). I actually went to see the show half because Ben Kweller is Tali's cousin, and half because of Fred's article on Ben Kweller's gutsy performance last time he came to New York City.

Technorati Tags:
ben kweller, webster hall, new york city, concerts, fred wilson

Endy Chavez at least temporarily saved the day

This was a rediculous catch by Endy Chavez last night in the Mets - Cardinals game 7 of the mlb eastern conference finals playoffs.

Random Postal Fact

I never knew that if a mailbox gets less than 25 pieces of mail per day, it's candidate for removal (we're talking the giant blue ones on the street corner). Thousands of the 42,000 mailboxes have been removed in the past few years. The Postal Service issues a public notice, and it stays only if there's public protest to the iconic removal.

Technorati Tags: mail, post office, mail box

Yahoo has a Time Capsule

Yahoo! has a Time Capsule that users can submit electronic content to for the next 29 days, at which point it will be archived in the Smithsonian Institute until 2020, Yahoo's 25th anniversary.  In conjunction with this, Yahoo will date $100K to charity that is voted upon.

Tags: yahoo, time+capsule, smithsonian

Internet Explorer 7 to ship tomorrow (IE7...maybe)

Though not totally confirmed, we are all expected to receive Internet Explorer 7 via automatic update to Windows tomorrow.  This makes a lot of underground things officially standard, simply because of Windows / Internet Explorer market share:
1. Tabbed browsing comes to the masses
2. Integrated RSS reader on everyone's desktop
The second of these is big - will the general public start embracing RSS, enough to make it completely mainstream?  It looks like IE7 will be beat Firefox 2.0 to market.  Firefox 2.0 has its own huge improvements, but will they be enough to continue growth against IE?  Tabbed browsing was alone probably one of the biggest reasons people downloaded Firefox (at least those outside of the tech-heavy group); without this unique feature, I'm not sure the larger public will continue to embrace Firefox unless it has another killer feature.

Technorati Tags: Windows, Internet Explorer, IE7, Firefox, RSS, tabbed browsing, automatic update

powered by performancing firefox

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion

After 3 days of heavy speculation, Google has formalized the purchase of $1.65 billion in stock. Google maintains almost 60% share of voice in search, and now they control almost 60% of the video market as well.
If you want to listen in on the press conference announcing the purchase, you can do so here. It's actually pretty interesting; you can listen in on the major investment banks asking various market related questions, such as why they made the purchase in stock (tax breaks) and how they will utilize YouTube in the short term and present. YouTube will stay as a seperate brand from Google video, but improvements will come on both ends.

- Online press conference: http://investor.google.com/webcast.html.
- Replay of the call will be available until midnight Monday, October 16 at 888-203-1112
Confirmation code for the replay is 2260624.

There are a lot of questions about the safety of this purchase from Google's perspective. Google has a search deal with MySpace, but that's a direct competitor to YouTube; will this create friction? Will MySpace block posting of YouTube videos from their pages and curb YouTube's traffic? Will Fox corp. then back out of their content deals and sue YouTube for copyright infringement of hosted content? There could be a major fued here, or there could be a renesance in the online video world.

Technorati Tags: youtube, google, video, google video, myspace, fox, stock purchase

New James Bond Casino Royale Trailer

This may be a new Casino Royale trailer, or it may be a Sony marketing ploy, with heavy emphasis on tech and close ups of Sony laptops. Either way...

Technorati Tags: james bond, casino royale, sony, 007

Is anyone using BlueDot?

I'm guessing no, but is anyone using BlueDot instead of del.icio.us for social bookmarking? Seems to have potential, easy tagging and imports a photo of every page you save.
My del.icio.us page.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, bluedot, social, bookmarking

Movie: 300

The trailer for the movie "300" is intense.

Technorati Tags: 300, movie, trailer

Switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

I'm switching from Bloglines to Google Reader for a period of time, to see if it helps in reading way too many RSS feeds.  Why do I think it will help?  There are so many ways to burn through the hoard of information that pours in every day:

• River of news view that shows headlines in a list for quick viewing
• Integration with google personalized start page for quick reading of new articles
• interesting 'next' feature that lets you use a bookmark on your browser to fly to the 'next' article by loading that website directly in your browser

It also offers one click sharing of posts in a public blog clippings  page, article tagging, and alerts of new blog postings by only revealing feeds that have been updated since you last read.  So we'll see how this goes.  Anyone using an RSS reader that they love?

Technorati Tags: google, reader, google reader, bloglines, rss

Fox shows for free on MySpace

 
Rupert Merdock's master plan of spinning together his media properties is starting to take shape.  Free on-demand streaming video of some of this fall's top Fox TV shows are being hosted on a special MySpace page under the "Full Throttle" title.  Prison Break and a bunch of other shows I don't know anything about.

Technorati Tags: fox, vod, myspace, prisonbreak, streaming video, full throttle, free, free video

Google gadgets for your blog or webpage

Google's second announcement of the day - if you're using Google desktop or Google Personalized start page, you're familiar with Google Gadgets, mini-applications that you can load through each to check the weather, stock reports, rss feeds, and more. Now you can add those same gadgets onto your own website or blog, so that the functionality is available to all who visit. Here's an example - a CBS Sportsline Scores gadget that lets people check live scores for all in-season sports.

Technorati Tags: google, gadgets, widgets, rss, blog, personalized, desktop

Google has a new search engine

Google has rolled out an experimental new search engine, Searchmash. It is unbranded, and Google is implementing technology that they have yet to role out in their standard search engine. Right now you can see ajax that allows you to move results around, and a mix of link/image search results. Watch for more to be rolled out here, and if it becomes popular enough, possibly even rolled out into Google itself.

Technorati Tags: google, search, mashup, ajax, searchmash