As one of the video’s commenters quipped, it’s a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist. I call it the revenge of the audience. Many media companies are worth preserving, but the days of the dumb ones are soooo gonna be over.
The Long Tail links:
Wired: The Long Tail - the article that started it all
The Long Tail blog. Also see Thelongtail.com.
The Long Tail on Wikipedia
The Long Tail book.
The rainy weather has been getting into me. I used to feel good about the break from the sweltering heat of summer, but now that I’ve sworn off taxi (at least, as much as I could) and took FX vans or buses to and from work, it doesn’t help that it rains nearly all the time. I’ve been working for the new company for two weeks now, and so far the experience has been positive. The fact that among my colleagues are good friends, Jane and Jay Jay of course adds to the beauty of things. That, and the 10:30 log-ins.
Last Saturday, I watched Opera Now’s “Evening of Puccini” at the CCP with a few pals. The event featured Giacomo Puccini’s most popular arias, topped by selections from Madam Butterfly and performed by Filipino and Japanese opera singers to mark the Philippines-Japan Friendship Year. It was great for the most part, but my mind blanked out at some point of the program’s second half. Last year’s program was better.
After the opera, we had dinner at Cafe Adriatico, which served mostly “Filipino comfort foods”. Being still full from the buffet dinner served at the pre-show cocktails, I could only manage hot pandesal with kesong puti and a kopita of warm tsokolate-eh. We had planned to eat at a nearby Persian restaurant, but due to the heavy rains, we chose the safest and most comfortable restaurant instead.
Here’s another video service on the block! Check out Yahoo! Video. I still have to use the service, but here’s the semi-official announcement from the Yahoo! 360 team:
Are you making the most of embedding video in your Yahoo! 360º blog posts? (The ability to embed from YouTube, Google Video, and, of course, Yahoo! Video, is a recently added feature.)
I’d give everyone detailed instructions on how it’s done, but the Yahoo! Video team has made my job a bit easier by showing how to embed a video into a Yahoo! 360° blog post.
For those with digital cameras on hand, the team also made a video on how to upload your own video to Yahoo! Video. (Remember, videos that are uploaded to Yahoo! Video are viewable by everyone.)
This whole “blogging by video” has started a trend that people have started to call vlogging, short for “video blogging.” Nope, not blogging. Vlogging.
And while the word sounds horrible – no English word should ever start with the letter V and follow with the letter L* – the concept is kind of cool. Here’s Reggie from the Philippines, for example, videotaping himself playing guitar.
Check Yahoo! Video’s official blog for more. It turns out, users can’t post their videos on non-Yahoo blogs.
What’s next for FIM is leveraging MySpace’s online community and communication into a peer recommendations framework for leads on everything and anything: the best children’s playgrounds in Los Angeles to the best concert seats in Madison Square Garden to the best steakhouse in Dallas. Such peer recommendations provide a gentle seaway into targeted, fine-tuned behavioral marketing for national and local advertisers wanting to reach MySpace’s 15- to 34-year-old core user.
PornoTube offers on demand Flash videos (our sponsor Adobe will be proud I’m sure) of user uploaded pornography, including video, audio and photographs…Videos can also be embedded into other sites.
I attended Dennis’s birthday party last week with Mike, Rodel, Lani, Vernon and Sandrita. It’s been months since I last joined my TT friends for any food tripping/drinking session. As always, there was the ever-present booze and videoke.
Happy Birthday, Dennis!
(L-R) Rodel, Vernon, Dennis, Sandrita, me.
Lani and Dennis
Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man. Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’ This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
ComputerWorld predicts that it is important for technology workers to acquire skills that are not directly related to technology within the next 5 years. Due to the automation of most business processes, some 10% to 15% of technology workers will leave IT companies because there is nothing much else to do and work has become uninteresting. In this, IT analysts predict that the best jobs by 2010 will involve business interfacing, such as those catering to process and relationships.
Big IT companies will grow bigger through mergers, but the initial hurdle will only involve combination of technologies and processes. The trickier part will be that which involves merging of cultures;b this is where project managers and system-wide “business interfacing” leaders will play major roles. Also due to lower costs of outsourcing basic business processes, workers in more advanced economies will lose their coding, programming and testing jobs to emerging job markets.
“The more that [a task] can get codified or changed into explicit instructions or documentation, the more likely it can get transferred. The more likely it can be transferred, the more likely someone will come along and will develop tools to reduce even further the number of people required to do the job,” said Dianne Morello, a Gartner analyst.
IT workers must start learning the ins and outs of customer service through user-centric development. More than simply building things, developers should start focusing their energies on building technologies that will be easy for customers to use. Moreover, IT workers, specifically, developers and coders, are encouraged to learn from colleagues whose jobs involve customer service or communications with customers. It would still be better if developers themselves touch base with customers and end-users.
In a nutshell, versatility will dictate the success for both technology workers and IT companies.
We watched the advanced screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water earlier at Megamall. Having been disappointed with “The Village”, “Signs” and “Unbreakable”, I was ready to miss the film. I’m glad we didn’t.
“Lady in the Water” is one of Shyamalan’s best films. Based on a bedtime story written by the director for his children, the movie is about an apartment maintenance man, Cleveland Heep, who discovers a mysterious girl named Story hiding in the complex’s swimming pool. Heep soon realizes, with the help of his Asian tenants, that the girl is a narf, a water nymph, who visited “the world of man” to deliver a message to a writer. Trapped in this world, she tries to return to her own realm, but her life is in danger from a scrunt, a wolf-like creature, which tries to prevent her from taking the journey back. Soon, Heep seeks the help of his tenants to protect the lady from her fanged enemy bent on killing her.
Throughout the film, viewers are introduced to characters who, at first, seemed insignificant but whose importance are revealed as the story progresses: the horizontally challenged sisters, the guy who loves working out, a recluse, a husband whose secrets his wife loves to tell the other tenants, a father-son tandem that loves solving puzzles, a group of “smokers”. Like any Shyamalan film, Lady in the Water has its misleading twists as well as frightening scenes that make viewers jump out of their seats. Keep an eye on the lawn. The monster nearly gave me a heart attack.
Shyamalan plays a bigger role in this project compared to his past films, and his acting has clearly improved. But more than anything, it’s Giamatti’s stuttering and emotionally impaired repairman that is the heart of the story.
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