Excited About Quarterly Co, a Subscription Service for Wonderful Things

One of the new web services I'm super excited about heading into the new year is Quarterly Co, a "subscription service for wonderful things".  Basically you subscribe to a person of your choice, and that person sends you an actual package in the mail every quarter with an interesting object(s) of their choice.

Of course these aren't random people with nothing to lose; the curators that Quarterly has brought on board are all tastemakers of some sort that make finding interesting things the basis of their reputation.  People like Josh Rubin from Coolhunting, Tina Roth Eisenberg from Swissmiss Studio, or the famous Maria Popova of Brainpickings.  I've chosen Alexis Madrigal, tech writer at The Atlantic.

So every 3 months you can expect to get something interesting in the mail that reflects their taste, perspective and interest.  It's a brief moment in time to turn away from the rapid information stream on Twitter (partially populated by these same people) and enjoy a tangible thing hand selected by someone you admire.  It remains to be seen whether any of us feels the object we receive is worth the $25 per quarter, but I imagine the surprise gift and the ensuing conversation will leave me very content.

Let me know if you've subscribed to anyone in the comments below, and stay tuned in March for an update on what I get in the mail.

Welcome CharitySub, "Simple Collective Giving"

At midnight last night a few of my friends launched CharitySub, a website to power simple collective giving.  Their focus is on ease, impact and understanding.  You "subscribe" by committing to donate $5 each month to charity (or an extra $1 if you're willing to be a benefactor of the site- which I highly encourage).  Then each month they choose a cause and send simple but rich information in the form of key facts and documentary videos 3 different charities you could support that are working for that cause.  You can digest as much or as little information as you want, and then simply select which of the three charities will get your $5 dollars that month.

It's as simple as that.  As the community of charitable donors grows, so will the site.  You can expect to see visualizations of your contributions to causes, how many people you recruit to the community, how your money is being used to help the charities and more.  CharitySub's mix of story telling, gamification and goodwill should be a powerful motivator for people to sign up as part of their 2012 New Year's resolutions.

CharitySub's first cause is childhood obesity, an issue I know is important to many people I know. Your first $5 could go towards one of 3 great charities that are helping to end this cause. I'm really proud of Alexis, Amy, Brian & Jim for launching a great resource, and I look forward to being a part of it.

Roger Ebert Finds His Voice Again

I guess I was living under a rock but I completely didn't know the courageous story of Roger Ebert. For everyone under there with me, here's the quick summary. After years of terrible health issues that left him stripped of much of his face and throat, he completely lost his ability to speak in 2006. His body is terribly weak, he's a sliver of the size he used to be, but nothing has slowed him down. He does the movie reviews he's famous for, but he's also returned to writing in a way that he'd left behind. He writes a prolific blog that has thousands of engaged readers. And until yesterday he was forced to handle speaking needs through post-it notes or computer generated read-outs in a blocky voice.
But yesterday a company called Cereproc gave him his voice back. They were able to take the audio tracks that Roger Ebert had recorded for movie studio DVD extras and stitch together a full framework of his voice. Now when he types into a computer, the output will be his own voice speaking to his wife or children. It may be a small change, but it makes a huge difference in enabling Ebert and his loved ones to feel like they're speaking to the real him. Yesterday he demo'd the difference between his computer voice "alex" and his revived personal voice, and its heartwarming to watch.
Ebert's history was told in this month's issue of Esquire, which I coincidentally read the morning before the story broke. It's magnificent. Read the article, read about the breakthrough that Cereproc enabled, and watch the video.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Roger Ebert gets his voice back: "Uncanny. A good feeling." (boingboing.net)
• Roger Ebert talks to his wife with his own voice using CereProc (crunchgear.com)
• Roger Ebert dramatically regains his voice with help from CereProc (video) (engadget.com)

The Economics of Free

Trying out the Zemanta reBlog plug-in to share an interesting conversation happening over at Union Square Ventures about the economics of Free:

Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift. Until we agree on what resources are scarce and have a framework for how they will be allocated in the future we are not just talking past each other, we are talking about the wrong things

Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention. avc.com, A VC, Aug 2009

For me, time and attention is the by far the biggest scarcity. I constantly give up sleep to consume more, which means I'm paying a price in health and also making choices on how to pay out the scarcest resource. But how is our time and attention to be converted into value for the content producer? Something I'm thinking a lot about because I'm someone who's constantly looking for "free" alternatives, and working in a business (advertising) that is increasingly underwriting content production.

do we publish too much too often about our lives?

Recently I was at a bar having a very challenging conversation with a friend about the state of our lives now that we are connected in so many ways.  He looks at facebook and flickr and twitter and yelp and youtube and blogger (and more) and challenges me to explain just how life has gotten better now that I am actively recording, updating, blasting, publishing, posting just everything I do.  And not only do I do it, but I often do it in real time- as it's happening.  He thinks people like me have lost the ability to really enjoy anything because we are too busy recording everything and telling everyone about it.

Its a troubling question- mostly because I spend a gross amount of time and effort doing it all.  By some counts I'm active in over 40 social networks (depending on definition), and I'm often the one stopping to take out a phone or camera or,when I have nothing else, a pen and paper.  In my friend's estimation, this means I am not really enjoying anything as much as I could be, not getting as much out the moment as I could be.  I'm never as happy as I could be because at any given time I'm half checked out somewhere in my mind and being.

The more I thought about it, however, I simply couldn't agree with his assessment.  I don't agree because his measure of utility, his definition enjoyment, is too one demensional.  To him it seems you can only enjoy the moment you're physically in.  For people like me though, the moment itself is just the beginning. 

To begin, we do things we like, we enjoy it.  But then we record and comment on it.  We start to think about it deeper.  We revisit it, find more reasons to appreciate it and enjoy new levels of appreciation from ourselves.

And we start conversations.  We talk about our activities with other people, unlock things we didn't know, learn about things similar that we might like that we never would have known about.  Or we make new friends that we never knew enjoyed similar things.

And we enjoy the platforms we share on.  We explore them too, discover their value, help them to expand and grow and develop for the betterment of others.  We gain satisfaction and a sense of worth by contributing for society benefit.

In short, we take a simple moment and expand it into a cascading sequence of experiences that continue to enhance and add value to our lives.  While any one might be less than the other, together they may far exceed.

Post: I wrote this before seeing "we live in public"; i'l have to regroup and add more thoughts including response to the film

Speaking Through Pictures

Digital Marketing Strategist Brad Kay has an interesting series going on over at his blog The Third Place called "Speaking Through Pictures."

This one in particular stood out to me... I tend to agree that the most interesting people are the ones that are the most interested in learning about other things.

Did You Know 2008

This is a really cool video that throws very interesting statistics at you in a way that can help change your perspective and re-think the way you look at things. If you spend the 5 minutes watching it, you'll have at least 1 significant wake-up.

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes

This is a pretty cool video someone mixed together of 40 inspirational speeches from iconic movies. The best part is picking out the little scenes from the cult favorite movies I loved - Newsies, Cool Runnings, Mighty Ducks... what were everyone's favorites?

Missing Calvin and Hobbes

 

I stumbled upon an article that reminded me of Calvin and Hobbes, and how Calvin and Hobbes could be summarized in one single word - Friendship.  How reading the books, we not only witnessed Calvin and Hobbes friendship, but became best friends with them.  I miss Calvin and Hobbes - there has never been a comic close to it, and I don't have as many fond memories reading anything else as I do reading them over and over.  Leave me thoughts on the ones you remember, and if you can, link me to prints.  

(I posted links to rare Bill Waterson comics a while back)

Obama's potential to be the people's president through social media

When Barack Obama was running for President, he used almost all social media platforms to connect with his supporters and raise awareness for his messages. Now that he's president, a question is - how much will he actually continue to reach out to the people on such a grass roots level?

Early signs are that he will:

* Just a day after his election, Obama's group posted a flickr album that provided an intimate look into the Obama family during election night

* He also launched Change.gov, a website that will keep America informed on how the presidential transition period is going

* Finally, he launched a YouTube channel where he'll post videos of his weekly presidential address, starting now

Now though he's leveraging social media, he's still holding back - you can comment on the flickr photos, but not the YouTube videos. Also Obama's Twitter account has gone cold, and I haven't received a text message since election night either (though is last message did mention that we'd hear from him soon, implying that his direct texts aren't over). And really, while publishing communication through social tools is a start, it's only the beginning - he (or his administration) needs to interact with the people as well. TechCrunch and GigaOM have written recommendations and requests to the new administration on ways to embrace new media to create more transparency and two-way communication with the nation at large, and I'm hoping to see some of the recommendations be put into play. It may be unlikely to see the President launch a social community on GetSatisfaction enabling feedback, ratings, and recommendations by anyone who wants to voice them, but it would be an amazing break through. In the mean time, I'm enjoying the personal touch of flickr and youtube, and feeling more intimiately connected than ever to a President.

Tina Fey delivers another fantastic Gov. Palin performance

Learning from the $700B Government Bailout of the Banks

Fred Wilson makes a great proposal for the public disclosure of the results of the government loan to the banks:

I would like the splurge legislation to require that we not only have public disclosure, but that we have in effect a real time listing (like the Nasdaq) of all splurge related transactions. This is good for the public (so we know what's going on with our money) and it's good for the Treasury (so it is forced to behave rationally) and it's good for investors who want to profit from all of this splurge activity. It will also allow us, after the whole things is over, to analyze the splurge and learn from it, like JLM learned from the RTC.

This is a great opportunity for the US at large to learn about investing - the US Government should be using this time to teach us all about risks, investing, returns, everything they can as they put a nation-wide contributed sum of money to work.  I hope the US government is paying attention to people like Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban, who have been pouring out intelligent recommendations for the use and management of the funds almost daily.

Twitter tells us today's pop culture news trends

Twitter has a great post today on top pop culture interest trends as displayed by twitter activity.  In true Twitter fashion, all of the trends are described in 140 characters or less:

• T-Mobile is trending because Google and T-Mobile have announced G1 a fancy new computer phone like the iPhone.
• Obama is generating tweets today as people react to his comments on CNN from Florida about the current state of the US economy.
• Heroes is still inspiring tweets even after the US premiere of its second season—lots of folks are just now watching it via DVR or online.
• Sarah Palin trends every day but today folks are tweeting about her visit to the UN and that she's only had a passport since 2007.
• iPhone is generally popular but trending more today because of a power adapter recall and the new competitor from Google.
• Adobe is generating tweets today because they've released their flagship software suite, Adobe CS4.
• Paulson is showing up in the Twitter trends as people exchange opinions about the government bailouts in the US.
• Mothra is trending apparently due to a growing meme of "Your Mothra..." jokes—not sure what's up with that.
• Apple seems to be trending for two reasons: folks are eating a lot of apples today and they're discussing iPhones and other Apple products.

Notes from The Future of Media Panel

The panel on The Future of Media was a collection of brilliant minds all looking at the media landscape from different historical backgrounds, different working positions, and different needs for the future. All of this lead to a dynamic conversation that leveraged the broad opinions across the panel to come to some vague truths, but more importantly some important learnings about how to continually approach the future of business in general. Overall it was a 2 hours we worth spent listening to a rare group of people that respected each other, respected the challenge of the discussion, and will likely be some of the key drivers in the developing future media landscape.

In no specific order, here are some of the key topics and ideas that I thought were interesting:

• Yahoo and AOL are examples of great companies with valuable products thcat face the weighty challenge of unwieldy expectations; if a new company reached their traffic and income levels, they'd be the darling of Wall Street

• A challenge that websites face: web browsing is fragmented, and so all of a single website's audience is able to be reached somewhere else. This is why YouTube has millions of users but nobody really needs to chance advertising with them

• When Google's revenue growth slows, investors will start to start asking why it is subsidizing the internet's video streaming with no profitability; businesses need to start thinking about what's practical versus what's possible

• The future of brands in media is uncertain
• proponents of brands as significant believe that brands organize perception and author trust, which is all the more important in this 'everyone has a voice' landscape
• proponents of brands as outdated believe that brands are overvalued premium prices on content that's readily available from countless sources and that millions of people are ready to produce for free

• The opportunity with social networks is the massive information layer that's being formed. The true value for Facebook won't be within Facebook itself, but leveraging the data that's been collected as an information platform that can enhance targeting outside of the individual web property. This will be the power of Facebook Connect - allowing brands to leverage the detailed personal data that Facebook has collected about its users to enhance product relevance and advertising matching on partner sites

• Data is a currency and a commodity - how you leverage data is a key question. Project Canoe is broadcast television's attempt to add a data layer to their product in order to provide both a better product and a better value to advertisers, and it's a key to broadcast television's continued profitability

• Right now behavioral data is a currency but is that a generational thing? If it becomes apparent that the sale of behavioral data is a trojan horse, then future generations will value privacy more
• On the other hand, is there even a possibility of privacy in the future? This may have died the second camera phones became ubiquitous
• Andy Warhol "We're all famous, now how long"
• The electronic footprint - will it enable transparency (in the '08 presidential election we learned of Edward's affairs for example) or will it force us to shut down in order to preserve what little privacy we have left

• The future of media is imagination and courage; the courage to brave new approaches and reinvent yourself time and time again, the imagination to think of how to do so
• One example of a brand with imagination is Uniqlo - a creative idea spurred it from a small Japan retail chain to a global phenomenon through the development of Uniqlock http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/

• Users will want to pay for services on the internet when they see the value of a superior product that can only come through funding; right now, services are surviving without revenue due to relatively low cost structures, but soon the millions of websites and start-ups will need to show profit, and we will lose the services we treasure that were offered for free because advertising can't support everything

• We are the point of devaluation of content - we're seeing this quickly with music, the music itself is being pushed to zero, and the music industry has to find value around the music (around the content)

• "Music will never again change the world because of how it's passed around now" - Neil Young
• We have lost the ability to experience awe in the way that single instances of content creation could once jump start a nation
• To be on the cover of Time used to mean you had reached the pinnacle - there is no single powerhouse left that can create such a stir
• Is the internet in this way actually destroying community in its quest to unite everyone on one level?

• Technology enables the path of least resistance - expect that the internet and computing as we think of it now will die as technology enables more robust mobile consumption and rich interactive television enables us to consume content on the big screen (this is Mark Cuban's bet)

• One investing truth: when everybody is looking in one direction, then the opportunity to create value is in a whole different direction
• This may be true for Mark Cuban, but plenty of firms are successful investing in emerging web trends. It may be that the degree of return is correlated to the degree of which you can step farther in front of the wave

• There are interesting opportunities to find value and reinvent in this landscape because everyone is focused on one specific landscape - the internet. This is why Rupert Murdock was able to buy the Wall Street Journal - it's loss of valuation despite its profitability and it's significant brand value. Murdock buying WSJ is an example of opportunity in chaos

Speakers

Moderator: Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

Cathie Black, President of Hearst Magazines

Mark Cuban, Chairman of HDNet & Owner of Dallas Mavericks

Randy Falco, CEO of AOL LLC

Jeff Goodby, Co-Founder of Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners

Bob Guccione Jr., Guest Editor of MediaPost

Nigel Morris, CEO of Isobar

Joe Uva, CEO of Univision

Susan Whiting, EVP of Nielsen Company

Michael Wolff, Editor & Columnist of Vanity Fair

Paul Woolmington, Founding Partner of Naked Communications

Registering to Vote

I realy need to be paying more attention to election coverage, and learning more about our potential presidents - today I filled out my voting registration; if you haven't yet, and you live in New York, head to this link now to register to Vote 

update: Obama and Biden's Economic Reform Plan

Pirating Decreases When Content Producers Give Consumers What They Want

ars technica has an article discussing how P2P traffic is beginning to decrease as streaming of media online increases. Why is this important? IT hammers home the fact that consumers just want to consume media (music, tv, movies, etc) in the easiest way possible. They want to consume it when and where they want it. If I miss an episode of Scrubs, and the only way I can watch it is wait months for a re-run, or spend a few hours downloading it, then I'll be downloading it. But if I can stream Scrubs off Hulu even faster, then I'm more than happy to sit through some advertising, and turn to Hulu for my online television needs. It's the reason a centralized spot like Hulu for broadcast TV is going to be so powerful. Content producers need to see this trend and realize that they will cut off pirating as soon as they provide a better product.

Theater Was Once Afraid of Radio

Sticking on the theme of Old Media needing to learn how to adapt to and embrace New Media, techdirt has a hilarious post reminding us that at one point, Theater companies were afraid of Radio broadcasters mentioning their upcoming play on air:

Once upon a time, complimentary theatre tickets would come with a
covering note like this: "Dear Sir, The Management of the ------
Theatre will be much obliged if you will very kindly co-operate with
them in safeguarding the enclosed invitation from being used for the
purpose of broadcasting a notice of the play from any station of the
British Broadcasting Corporation. The invitation is intended to meet
the convenience of legitimate journalism, exclusive of broadcasting."
Dated 10 October 1929 and quoted in Ego: The Autobiography of James
Agate (1935)

Just helps to put the current music and movie evolution that we're going through, and the ongoing battles of the RIAA and the MPAA, in perspective.