Archive for December, 2004

Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives “are considering a change in House ethics rules that could make it harder to discipline lawmakers”.

This according to the Associated Press, Washington Post, CNN, and others.

I believe that our elected representatives should be held to the highest ethical standard, not the lowest. Criminal and unethical behavior in the line of duty should be incomprehensible. It is shameful and ugly to squirm for some fuzzy gray area. I refuse to be represented by anyone of questionable character.

“It would lower the standard of official conduct, and if that’s the case, it would be the first time that it has been done since 1968, and it would be done on a completely partisan basis,” said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (search | wiki).

“If House Republican leaders are allowed to prevail, they will have gutted the single most important ethics standard in the House and turned House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s multiple ethics transgressions into acceptable conduct for all House members,”

If my open community-edited Wikipedia encyclopedia entry ever has a section devoted to proven ethical shortcomings, I’ll be forced to consider Seppuku. He has no such shame. The House Ethics Committee has found him guilty. Judicial Watch, a right-leaning watch group, has called for him to resign from his Majority Leader post. He is the focus of a current grand jury probe into his campaign finance practice: Here, here, here, and here.

“We think this sends a message that there are no consequences for unethical behavior,”

said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for Common Cause, part of a coalition fighting the proposals.

I refuse to send that message. Write your personal elected Representative and choose to refuse.

An ofoto.com photo album of Lindsay Lohan and her friends smoking blunts in their car and partying., apparently on Thanksgiving.

I gotta say, even though she’s not captured on film, she earned herself a little cool in my book.

Broadband Daily posts an interview with Nicholas Reville of Downhill Battle, which just recently released Blog Torrent, a very exciting new initiative:

Blog Torrent is a key first step of our plan to make software that builds participatory culture. Video (specifically television) is a huge part of culture. But it’s still an extremely top-down medium– even as the tools to make high quality video and animation have become extremely cheap, very few people watch any significant amount of video other than what’s on networks and cable. We think homemade video can compete directly against professional television, especially as reality shows have brought down viewers expectations about the production values needed to make engaging TV.

More from the BlogTorrent site:

What is Blog Torrent?: Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol. Blog Torrent is easy to install on your website: we don’t use MySQL so installation is as easy as uploading a folder to your web host, and all administration happens in the web interface. Blog Torrent is easy for users: even if they don’t know what bittorrent is, they get an installer that downloads the file they want. But most of all, Blog Torrent makes publishing with bittorrent painless. Just click “upload”, pick a file, and you’re done. This is our preview release and it has a lot of bugs and rough edges… but we’re smoothing them out for the next version, so stay tuned.

Why does Blog Torrent matter?: Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings. It lets people create vast networks of truly peer-to-peer video content– video that was made by individuals and shared with individuals, no bandwidth budget or distribution deal needed.

We’ll definitely be seeing more torrent news lately, and this convergence with the blogging world / blogging technology can only help.

Here is an amazing page of photos taken from a kite-mounted camera in post-earthquake 1906 San Francisco. As you can see in this photo, the city has been literally leveled by the quake and fire.

This novel aerial perspective drew world attention. Flown two thousand feet above the bay, the lens scanned the waterfront.

The photos were taked by George R. Lawrence at least three weeks after three days of fires — caused by the earthquake — left at least the two hundred thousand homeless.

Color Trends

An article on the Du Pont automotive web site, Silver Still Strong, But Livelier Hues Lead Change — 2004 DuPont Automotive Color Popularity Report Indicates Car Buyers "Yearn For Color", via ResourceShelf. It’s interesting to think about color from this particular perspective. In general, I like learning about how specific groups think deeply about topics most people don’t think about at all.

The auto-specific nature shows up in predictable statements like:

We see the desire for color mirrored in the worlds of fashion and home furnishings. Yet, our research in small focus groups indicates what people prefer isn’t always what they buy when it comes to cars and trucks. Some buyers may rein in their expressive side and choose mainstream colors based on their perceived impact upon vehicle resale,” [Ed: emphasis added]

My favorite quote:

Yellow has moved into the Top 10 in North America for the first time since 1992

Here are the rest of my notes from the article:

“People use color to express their personality,” said Eiseman, who is the director of the Pantone Color Institute and recently was named one of the top style-makers in the United States (just behind fashion icon Ralph Lauren) by HFN, the home furnishings magazine. “Even white, which is re-invented with the addition of pearlescent effects, is breaking out to become, perhaps, an expression of urban glamour.”

Global Trends: Silver, a value color, will be refreshed with warm reds, light brown and cool color tints in green or blue. This trend also will take silver into new color areas where cross-over colors appear, such as grayish blue and green metallics. These cross-over colors will make the frontiers of a given color family less distinct and add interest to modern vehicle designs.

Gray, a major component of the neutrals, has potential with the addition of color, such as a purple-gray, that exudes elegance. Higher chroma content blue maintains its strong popularity level in Europe and also has potential for the Americas. Green, which has fallen from its high in 1998, could be a renaissance color in Europe, especially in cross-over hues for neutrals and blues that can go toward turquoise or teal. Red and yellow are “notice me” colors and provide a distinctive, differentiated statement for certain vehicle types. Red is strengthening in the Americas as a mainstream color, and, yellow, even if still a niche color, really stands out on cross-over SUVs and sport and compact models.

They also share their interpretations of “What Your Car Color Says About You”:

• Silver: Elegant, loves futuristic looks, cool
• White: Fastidious
• Vibrant Red: Sexy, speedy, high-energy and dynamic
• Deep Blue-Red: Some of the same qualities as red, but far less obvious about it
• Light to Mid-Blue: Cool, calm, faithful, quiet
• Dark Blue: Credible, confident, dependable
• Taupe/Light Brown: Timeless, basic and simple tastes
• Black: Empowered, not easily manipulated, loves elegance, appreciates classics
• Neutral Gray: Sober, corporate, practical, pragmatic
• Dark Green: Traditional, trustworthy, well-balanced
• Bright Yellow-Green: Trendy, whimsical, lively
• Yellow Gold: Intelligent, warm, loves comfort and will pay for it
• Sunshine Yellow: Sunny disposition, joyful and young at heart
• Deep Brown: Down-to-earth, no-nonsense
• Orange: Fun loving, talkative, fickle and trendy
• Deep Purple: Creative, individualistic, original

I was catching up on my blog reading this morning with coffee and was stunned to read that “Google gets nearly a dime for every search it serves in the US”. To be precise, it’s actually about 9 cents per US search on Google (up 8.3% this quarter). To borrow a phrase mysteriously attributed to the late Senator Everett Dirksen: “A click here, a click there, petty soon, you’re talking about real money.”

Another interesting stat from John Battelle’s Searchblog coverage (of this research), is that on average Google commands 54 cents per ad. In other words, advertisers (bid and) pay Google 54 cents on average for each click. This is commonly known as CPC, or Cost Per Click. I stress on average because the spectrum of CPC prices can be pretty extreme: Obscure, hard-to-monetize words command only a cent or two at CPC auction, while highly prized words, especially those in competitive deep-pocket industries easily command several dollars. It’s fairly obvious that the toe jam industry would pay significantly less to run an ad alongside “toe jam” that the big-bucks airline industry would pay for “airline tickets”?