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For those of you unfamiliar with Zipcar, I'll tell you that it's a 'car sharing' service (it's also sometimes called a car club). The idea is a good one though it seems pretty complicated logistically. They buy a fleet of cars and then lease spaces and keep the cars in throughout a city like Boston (where I live). The cars can be rented by the hour or for a 24 hour period. Zipcar is responsible for all costs related to the cars, including gas. Members pay just the rental rate. (There are also some other fees associated with the service, for example there is a yearly membership fee.) According to their website, the service is currently available in:

Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington DC.

So, what's are the differences between Zipcar and a traditional car rental service?

• The flat fee which includes gas
• Cars are scattered throughout a city instead of being kept at a small number of rental sites. The idea of course is that there should be a car available right in your neighborhood.
• The experience is quite a bit different. Cars are reserved online and can be picked up simply by using holding the membership card up to a sensor on the car itself.

There is a lot to like about the service. This is one of those ideas that, had I been approached with it, I may have dismissed as overly complicated logistically, difficult to promote etc. To Zipcar's credit the service does run pretty well. That's the good.

The bad is Zipcar the company, and the people doing the decision making on behalf of the company (and of course all of its members). The primary way that the company communicates with its members is by email. Usually these are intended to be cheerful newsletters. But frequently they are laced with some bit of bad news. The relationship is not unlike one you might have with a friend who you're happy to see but who frequently shows up only when she wants to borrow money or to ask you to watch her cat or something.

Anyway, Zipcar sent out another email today, announcing another rate increase. I thought I'd share it with you. As I state in my reply it's not the pricing that bothers me, it's the way that the structure the pricing for the service. Once upon a time rates were pretty consistent. As they've increased rates over the years, they've started to choreograph them in such a way as to give the impression of value without the actual value. I don't like it when companies treat their customers as if we're stupid. It's insulting to those of us who aren't stupid, and of course unfair to those of us who are in fact too stupid to avoid being manipulated into spending more than we might have anticipated. I don't like being made to feel as if I could be spending less but I'm choosing to spend more. Because I don't believe that is actually the case. I can't take a weekend trip to the Cape in the middle of the work week for example. For that matter I can't spend a day running errands while I'm working either.

What follows is my reply followed by the email from Zipcar. I'll post whatever response I get from Zipcar if any.

My reply

Can you explain to me why, if the new rates are motivated by gas prices, the rate increases are more on the weekends? This does not reflect movement in gas prices.

As a member for many years I can understand that an increase in costs necessitates in increase in rates. I don't appreciate what would seem to be a convoluted rate structure engineered to guide members toward costlier rates while giving the impression of affordability.

It would seem obvious that the majority of your members are not in control of their weekday schedules because we are working, in school, or otherwise occupied. Of course, I don't have access to data related to usage of the service but clearly weekends are periods of high demand for both hourly and 24 hour reservations. The weekday rates would seem little more than a pretense.

In regards to the $7/hr hybrids, obviously these amount to only a small fraction of the cars available. Because of the dramatically reduced rates they are frequently unavailable. Of course they aren't eligible for 24 hour reservations at all. The rates for other cars range from $9.75 to $13.75 under the new rate schedule, which is 39% to 96% more than the cost of a Prius. With differences in rates as dramatic as this, I'm sure most of your members would have preferred that you had purchased more hybrids. Of course decisions like these are out of our control. Unfortunately, it means that we are frequently unable to take advantage of the low rates for these cars. But that's the plan isn't it?

If these new rates are in response to an increase in the cost of gas, then explain to me why they are not distributed across all of the vehicles in the fleet and consistent regardless of the time of the reservation. After all, hybrids use gas too and the price of gas is the same on weekends and during the week. Of course gas prices do fluctuate but not according to this pattern. In fact if the people responsible for setting the price of gas tried to artificially increase the weekend price it would certainly be a cause for alarm and outrage.

You should know that I no longer recommend Zipcar. What's important for you to consider is that my change in attitude has nothing to do with the price of the service and instead is exclusively the result of this sort of disingenuous treatment of members. In my opinion, this is not the best way to insure the long term viability of your business.

Rob Reed

The email from Zipcar

Gas price increases over the last few months have forced our hand, and we need to make adjustments in order to keep up. We thought it was important to tell you up front.

The truth is that the jump in gas prices is unlike anything we've ever seen. It's affecting commuters, travelers, and even your neighborhood car-sharing company. We tried to minimize price increases wherever possible, especially during the week when our cars are typically driven shorter distances (and as a result use less fuel).

As of Monday, August 18th, the rates will look like this:

• Weekday hourly reservations increase by $0.25 per hour and 24-hour weekday reservations will increase by $4 for BMWs and convertibles only.
• Weekend hourly reservations increase by $0.75 per hour and 24-hour weekend reservations increase by $5-9, depending on the vehicle type.
• The incremental mileage charge (i.e. fee for miles over 180 per day) increases by $0.10 per mile.

As for the good news, our entire fleet of hybrids (more than 40 vehicles) continues to help us offset the cost of gas, so we're keeping those rates at $7/hr.

Zipcar continues to be a great value compared to owning a car, and we are committed to continuing to explore ways to keep our prices low. Our membership community has always been a source of support and ideas, and we are interested in hearing from you. Send us a note at info@zipcar.com anytime.

Your support means a lot.

Thank you,

Dan Curtin General Manager, Boston

This info is already included in my post Long Way Round / Long Way Down Documentaries from earlier today but because that post is a little bit long and this event is only a couple of days away, I thought it might be helpful to repost it.

This time Ewan, Charley and crew are headed down from John o' Groats Scotland (at the northern tip of the island) to Cape Town South Africa, a trip of roughly 15,000 miles and 18 countries, including:

Scotland (they count Scotland toward their total of 18), England, France, Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa

The Long Way Down is also showing at movie theaters across the US on Thursday July 31, 2008 (1 night and 1 showing only). There are several theaters carrying the event in the Boston area including the Regal Fenway 13.

Definitely worth checking it out if it's anything like the first one. The running time is listed as 2 hours 5 minutes so obviously this is going to be an abridged version of what you'll see on TV in the coming weeks. This article, Long Way Down - The Big Screen Version!, from the Fathom website provides a little more information about what we might expect to see in the theaters.

American audiences have yet to see the Long Way Down series on television and this exclusive director's cut is a unique prelude to the 10-part TV series, which starts on 2 August on Fox Reality Channel.

You can find a theater carrying the event here.

Several years ago Ewan McGregor (yes that Ewan McGregor "Ewan McGregor page at imdb.com"), and Charley Boorman, along with a cameraman and support crew (who shadowed the trio along the trip) set off on a motorcycle trip around the world; traveling East from London to New York.

That's 20,000 miles, 12 countries, and 115 days: London, Belgium, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, then hopping a plane to Alaska, before heading through Canada and finally riding across most of the lower 48 states, ending the trip in New York City.

Of course I only know about the trip because they spun into a project and documentary called "The Long Way Round". I caught the documentary the first time it was on TV.

What's immediately striking is the amount of planning that they put into the trip over the course of something like 18 weeks. The prep for them involved (among many other things):

• setting up an office, complete with what seemed to be full-time employees,
• meeting with consultants from many of the countries they would be traveling through,
• a physical fitness regimen,
• instruction in tactics for surviving hostile environments (i.e. people with guns, etc.),
• training on riding the motorcycles they would use.

Then there's the logistical challenge of pulling the whole thing off, which involved dealing with the the considerable amount of paperwork and political red tape, and pulling together all of the resources they would need for the trip (the bikes, support vehicles capable of carrying the necessary equipment and personnel, all of the supplies, etc.).

It's a real lesson in just how much planning and coordination must go into an adventure like this. in some ways it's maybe more difficult now then it would have been in the past (of course, certain aspects of the trip are also much easier). On the same trip you're traveling through areas that are completely unpopulated and wild, and negotiating all of the complications of the modern world from political issues and bureaucracy, to negotiating camera and other mechanical equipment, and of course there is the issue of all of the guns in the hands of frustrated people.

A lot of us fantasize about similar adventures from time to time, and in that sense the documentary is really instructive. If you really want to pull it off, you had better be willing to work for it.

After all of the preparation, the rest of the documentary covers the trip itself. Not to give too much away, it turns out it's every bit the adventure that those involved imagined it might be. This was definitely an interesting experience, and I'm glad they put on film and got it distributed.

Why am I posting about something that happened 4 years ago?

The Long Way Round is on TV again. This time Fox Reality is running the documentary.

Initially they are showing 2 one hour episodes at 9:00pm and 10:00pm EST on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. (The network has posted a short episode guide).

There is also a finale scheduled for 10:00pm EST on Friday Aug 1, 2008 (though the episode guide only lists a total of six parts).

Check the shedule because they are also repeating episodes at other times, for example they are rerunning all of the Long Way Round episodes from 2:00p (start of the first episode) to 9:00p (end of the last episode) on Saturday, Aug 2, 2008.

I was surprised to learn that Fox Reality is part of my cable package (Comcast Boston) so you may want to look for it if you're unsure about whether the channel is available to you.

The network is running the show because the same 2 guys have done another trip in much the same way and Fox Reality will be airing the new documentary, titled "The Long Way Down", starting on Saturday Aug 2, 2008 at 9:00pm EST, with new episodes airing every Saturday at 9:00p (and again at midnight).

This time Ewan, Charley and crew are headed down from John o' Groats Scotland (at the northern tip of the island) to Cape Town South Africa, a trip of roughly 15,000 miles and 18 countries, including:

Scotland (they count Scotland toward their total of 18), England, France, Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa

The Long Way Down is also showing at movie theaters across the US on Thursday July 31, 2008 (1 night and 1 showing only). There are several theaters carrying the event in the Boston area including the Regal Fenway 13. Definitely worth checking it out if it's anything like the first one. The running time is listed as 2 hours 5 minutes so obviously this is going to be an abridged version of what you'll see on TV in the coming weeks. This article, Long Way Down - The Big Screen Version!, from the Fathom website provides a little more information about what we might expect to see in the theaters.

American audiences have yet to see the Long Way Down series on television and this exclusive director's cut is a unique prelude to the 10-part TV series, which starts on 2 August on Fox Reality Channel.

You can find a theater carrying the event here.

If you miss it on TV and don't catch it in the theater, there are also DVDs and downloadable episodes available.

DVDs are being sold for both the Long Way Round and Long Way Down individually and as a number of different bundles.

Long Way Round online store

Long Way Down online store

There is also a third DVD documenting Boorman's participation in the Dakar Rally (a multi-day endurance race of more than 5500 miles) called Race to Dakar (2006).

Race to Dakar online store

Downloadable episodes are available for Long Way Round. In this format, the documentary is divided into 10 parts and each is available for $1.99. There are downloadable episodes for the Race to Dakar.

Anyway, do check it out if you're at all interested. From what I've seen already the show will be at least as good as you might be expecting.

Keep in mind that Long Way Down is in theaters on July 31, 2008 for one night only. Buy tickets here.

Having just completed my short review of 'The Dark Knight' I realize that I'm not finished just yet.

What I really want to emphasize is the fact that the movie has generated over $155 million in tickets sales in just the opening weekend to take the record for the top grossing opening 3 day period. In the process it's also broken just about every other relevant record:

• Top grossing opening weekend for an IMAX film: $6.2 million
• Best opening day: $66.4 million
• Top grossing midnight debut: $16.9 million

All of these numbers are based on early estimates. Final numbers are due shortly. Also keep in mind that ticket price inflation must be taken into account. The average cost of a movie ticket this year is $7.08, compared with $6.88 in 2007. That's an increase of approx 3%. (By the way I paid $10.50 for my ticket, 30% more than the average - grumble).

We might ask ourselves what held the record previously. It was Spiderman 3, just last summer. Interestingly, this is exactly the same type of movie (and not even a particularly good one).

OK, how about the other top grossing movies this year? The top two are:

1. Iron Man: $314.4 million
2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: $312.6 million.

In spite of these numbers we're still supposed to believe that the movie industry is reeling from losses due to piracy, It's completely absurd.

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The fact is there are more entertainment options now than there ever have been. In the absence of a compelling movie to see the moviegoing public will find something better to do. Let's not forget that the moviegoing public is also the tv watching, video-game playing, internet-using, social networking, music listening, summer traveling, and everything else-ing public (oh yeah and the economy is in the shit and with higher prices nearly across the board including food, gas, health care, etc.).

But these are only the top performing movies. These record setting sales may not be the norm. It's true. Let's look at some of the other choices we have from the movie industry:

Mamma Mia! Space Chimps Meet Dave Hancock (which for anyone who didn't see it is absolutely abysmal)

The fact that anyone is willing to pay to see these movies is a testament to the strength of the business. The fact that fewer people turn out for them than the industry might like is evidence that we're not (yet) completely brain-dead.

What's even more important is that these numbers tell us are that the people who drive record setting ticket sales for movies are the same people who we're told are responsible for the piracy problem, namely 16 to 24 year old men (No offense intended to all of you Batman loving 30+ ladies out there).

If the powers that be in the industry would simply stop alienating their best customers and focus on making good movies, there is a lot more money to be had. What's more they'll be able to keep more of their profits simply by not pissing it away on ridiculous and unworkable DRM schemes, and other nonsense (e.g. PSA's shown before a feature in a theater about a carpenter who works on movie sets losing his job). Movie studio execs would be well advised to stop producing that sort of ineffective crap and invest the money saved in trailers and other promotion.

To be perfectly clear the message is this: There's $150+ million just waiting to to be claimed by a single movie on any given weekend in the US alone. All studios have to do is make a movie people want to see. It's as simple as that. And apparently there are plenty of talented people to make the movies.

While studios continue to cry poverty let's remember that U.S. ticket sales are just the beginning. These people will go on to make considerably more from global ticket sales, DVD and Blu-ray disc purchases, video games, merchandise, rentals, video on demand and download services, television rights, etc.

Here is a list of movies which have earned more than 200 million dollars in worldwide ticket sales at imdb.com.

The top 3 have all grossed more than One billion dollars US and the top 10 have all made at least $890 million.

7 of the 10 have come along after 2000, when presumably piracy has started to have a big impact on the industry.

I can't emphasize enough that these numbers are box office totals only and as such represent only a fraction of the total revenue generated by the movies. Yes, we must take inflation into account when when making comparisons across movies, but if when discussing profits the numbers stand on their own.

Consider for example "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" which is number 2 on the list. At a cost of 280 million dollars, it was over budget by a whopping $70 million. But it took in over 1.1 billion dollars just from ticket sales. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know but this just a quick post and I'm not getting paid to do the research) the total income for the Lord of the Rings trilogy is estimated to be approx $6 billion dollars. That's 6 billion dollars against $426 million for all costs associated with making the movies (including marketing and promotion). That's a more than 1300% profit. Those numbers put the oil industry to shame.

Am I saying that piracy is ok? No, absolutely not. What I am saying is that the movie industry's supposed losses are for the most part imaginary. For example, there is no evidence to support the idea that the availability of movies on file sharing sites affects ticket sales (i.e. a causal relationship has never been established). It cannot be assumed that every download represents a real, measurable loss. It must first be established that the person downloading the movie would have paid for a ticket if the movie were unavailable online. Furthermore, we must somehow take into consideration the positive as well as the negative impact on ticket sales. It's conceivable that someone who would not have seen the movie otherwise will buy a ticket after having the opportunity to watch it partially or even in its entirety online. As evidence of this some number of people will pay to see 'The Dark Knight' in an IMAX theater after watching it first in standard movie theater. It's safe to say that quite a few people will watch the movie more than once in the same theater. These patterns suggest that the MPAA's assessment of losses due to piracy are overly simplistic. The surest measure of the impact of piracy are sales figures, and considering all of the other factors I've already mentioned, sales are extraordinarily strong.

Let's look at just one of these other factors, increased competition from video games.

Consider for the video game industry. I'm going to borrow some of the data presented by Sony at their E3 press event (just last week) to help me make my point.

The gaming industry has generated more than 6.6 billion dollars US in revenue in the first 5 months of 2008 alone.

It's estimated that revenue from the industry will reach more than 23 billion dollars this year.

What does this mean to the consumer? Well as a consumer I need to think about several platforms. Not considering PC gaming the current gen platforms are:

• PS3 - $400
• XBOX 360 - $350.00
• Wii - $250.00
• PSP - $170.00
• DS - $130.00
• PS2 - $130.00

All of these platforms offer exclusive titles so that in order for me to access all of the games I might want to play I would need to buy all of them at a cost of $1300.00. This of course is a gross underestimation because it does not include the cost of accessories. Still that $1300.00 represents roughly 184 movie tickets at the average $7.08 price per ticket. Also, keep in mind that we haven't factored in the price of games yet.

Year to date (through June) Sony has sold 1.8 million PS3s in the US at $400 a pop for a total cost of $720,000,000. They've also sold 1.6 million PSP, their portable system. At $170.00 each, 1.6 million PSPs have cost US consumers $272,000,000. Finally, the PS2 is still selling strongly with 1.5 million sold in the US for the first half of 2008 at $130.00 each for a total cost of $195,000,000.

Combined this is $1,187,000,000 in video games that consumers do not have to spend on movie tickets. It represents roughly 167,655,367 movie tickets at $7.08 a piece.

Again this doesn't include games. Let's simplify the math and say that each game sells for $40.00. In fact new PS3 games usually sell for $50 - $60 and PSP titles are $20 - $30. Let's say $40 per game for everything. If consumers buy just two games for each console sold (again I'm purposefully underestimating) then we are spending $196,000,000 just on Playstation games. Just like the hardware numbers this does not consider XBOX, Wii, and the DS all of which have done better since their introductions than Sony's platforms. So the actual amount of money being spent is considerably more than the numbers I'm listing here.

Of course Sony's goals are loftier than this. They have targeted sales for this year of:

• 09 million PS2
• 10 million PSP
• 15 million PS3

If these numbers are correct then we should multiply all of these numbers x7. So let's say $9,681,000,000 for software and hardware assuming just two games per system sold and no accessories or other associated costs and considering just Sony's products through the end of 2008. This represents loss due to competition of roughly 1,367,372,881 movie tickets.

Let's put it this way, since 1995 the Playstation brand has generated 50 billion dollars in the retail market. That's a lot of money spent on games. More to the point, that's a lot of money not being spent at the movies.

The market for video games is expanding aggressively. It is silly to pretend that increasing the amount of money spend on video games by tens of billions of dollars does not have an impact on the movie industry. The fact that strong sales and profits persist would seem to indicate that piracy is not significantly impacting the the movie business. Otherwise, after taking into consideration the impact of video games and other consumer product and service offerings (which like games play an increasingly important role in the lives of consumers), we should see a radical decline in sales.

It it certainly true that as a consumer I have only a limited amount of money to spend on entertainment. If I'm spending more on games today then I was a few years ago then I should have less to spend at on movies. This is just as true for just about every other consumer. If anything we should be amazed at just how deeply consumers are willing to reach into their pockets to spend.

The last point I want to make is that the industry needs to assume their share of responsibility for perceived losses. As ticket prices continue to rise, there will come a time, and I would argue that that time is already here, when the industry will begin to lose customers who are priced out of the market.

In conclusion, maybe the MPAA should quite with whining and stick to making with the movies so consumers can continue to throw their money at the movie studios, which is apparently what everybody wants.

Update 2008 0724 4:14p: Corrected a couple of typos and made some other minor changes which did not change the substance of the post.

Batman: The Dark Knight review

Batman the Dark Knight gets a score of 85.

Final score: 85

Goodness: 9.5
Degree of difficulty: 9.0

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For those of you unfamiliar with my innovative movie rating system, here's how it works:

• First I assign two subscores:

  1. Degree of difficulty
  2. Execution (i.e. goodness)

  These scores range from 1 to 10 and are assigned in tenth of a point intervals.

• The final rating is computed by simply multiplying the two scores together and then rounding down to the nearest whole number.

• The two subscores are always reported along with the final rating.

Degree of difficulty score

Batman is a established property, and so there's a lot to great source material to work with. There's no reason why we should expect that a Batman movie would be bad. In general movies based on comic book franchises should rank among the better movies (assuming you like this sort of thing). I say this because these stories exist in a very rich, fully realized universe with a strong sense of tradition and and well established ethos (not to mention literally decades worth of characters, storylines, locations, etc.)

It doesn't hurt that the original comics are themselves based on classic archetypes and deeply-seated, emotionally and psychologically compelling themes.

Lastly, the level of sophistication of movie-making today means that it's possible to make these types of movies more believable than ever before.

I have to subtract a few points from the degree of difficulty score ( 10 - 3 = 7) in acknowledgement of all of this (which isn't to suggest that I think it's easy). However, the fact is that quite a few of these comic book based movies are pretty bad, and so I have to give back a couple of points for a final score of 9.0.

Goodness score

The movie itself is fantastic, every bit as complex as it needed to be but not unnecessarily so.

There were funny bits but nothing was comical.

It was a little bit excessive, but in the best possible way. Just what should be expected from a movie based on a comic book franchise.

With a runtime of approx 2-1/2 hours the moviemakers have given us a lot to like and as evidence that they've done their job, the it doesn't seem long. Importantly, the movie is consistently good from beginning to end. Too many movies like this unfold as a very slow build toward a climactic ending; a pattern is almost always disappointing. After suffering through 90 minutes of nothing, it's almost impossible to cram 2 hours worth of excitement/action/drama/revelation into 30 minutes in a convincing way.

If you're a fan of science fiction and comic books, or if you've ever liked a story featuring a superhero, and you don't have some grudge against Batman in particular, then you should go see it. You'll like the movie.

Update 2008 0725 3:27p: 1. Patched up the post a little without affecting the rating or the content of the post. 2. Added jump link.

So what's the status of the Ode's plurk addin? Here's the idea...

There are two ways to specify that a post should be treated specially and added as a plurk.

You can create the post in a category called plurk. This category can be anywhere in your blog (i.e. under any other category). Furthermore you can create subdirectories under these plurk directories. All posts in a plurk category are automatically plurked.

Alternatively, you can tag any post you want to have posted to plurk.

When you plurk a post it is automatically tagged to indicate that it has been plurked to prevent adding the same post twice. These tags include the plurk id so they can always be matched to a specific message at plurk.com.

Does that make sense? Any questions?

I have some clean up left to do and there's a lot that can't be done. For example:

It might be nice to be able to add a post as a response to another plurk.

Also, it seems to me that there should be some way to create posts on an Ode blog automatically from plurks.

These things won't be difficult to do if I can work out just how I want it to work.

Lastly, at the moment adding to plurk from Ode is the simplest thing to do because it means first going through the bother of creating the weblog post (which is more involved than what you have to do at plurk.com) and then authenticating to the blog to post. It shouldn't be any more work to plurk from Ode than plurk.com. I'm working on eliminating much of the overhead from the process.

Stay tuned.

Hello world plurk

The Tour de France at Versus

More precisely, the Tour de France starts about 6 hours from now (12:30am). For several years now, we try to watch just about all the coverage. Versus, which used to be the Outdoor Life Network, carries it and does a pretty good job. According to them, they have 14 hours of coverage per day, but there's a lot of repetition built in. Assuming this year follows the same schedule as previous years, there will be live coverage in the morning, which is repeated in the afternoon, and then "enhanced" coverage at night.

It's sometimes difficult to pick out exactly what they've done to enhance he coverage. There are usually a couple of short interviews and maybe an on the scene report about the bikes the riders are using, or showcasing one of the athletes. It's just enough extra content to prefer watching it at night unless it's really important to you that you watch it live.

For the most part, and especially now that Lance Armstrong has been out of the race for a couple of years, it's not a problem to avoid hearing about the outcome of the day's race if you skip the live coverage in the morning. It must be working out pretty well for Versus because they just re-upped through the 2013 season. Of course, their other programming is bass fishing so... the bar is pretty low. No offense, Versus.

To their credit they have Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin handling the commentary. Bob Roll injects a lot of American-style personality, which actually plays well with the very British Liggett and the slightly James Bond villain-ish Paul Sherwin, who is actually South African.

Roll is the sort of "everyman" that they should have covering sporting events. He's very personable but he's a smart guy and he has real experience with cycling. The other option seems to be somebody like Al Trautwig, who proxies for the dumb American. After 5 or 6 years of doing it, he still acts like he has no idea what's going on and it's just frustrating to watch and listen to. If I could use only one word to describe his style it would be "awkward". Unfortunately, Al is part of the broadcast team every year.

Apparently Versus is broadcasting the live start of stages 1 and 2 online. Typically, coverage picks up toward the middle of a day's stage, skipping everything that went on before, except for maybe a highlight (which is usually a lowlight - like a crash or someone getting ejected from the race for a doping violation). I think it has more to do with the French controlling broadcast rights than Versus' commitment to showing the whole race each day. Hopefully it goes well and there is more of this sort of thing in the future.

Otherwise there are some bizarre facts about the race this year. For example, it's the first time that the previous year's winner is eligible but hasn't been invited to participate in the race. The Discovery Channel team has disbanded, with some of the guys, including Bruyneel going to Astana, the team started by Vinokourov in 2007 after he couldn't ride in the tour in 2006 because so many of his teammates were disqualified due to blood doping that there weren't enough people to race with him.

What happens the following year? Well, this is bike racing and the tour de France so it's Vinokourov this time who's caught blood doping and the entire team is asked to withdraw from the race. Of course, this casts doubt on whether he was clean the year before, when apparently just about everybody else on his team wasn't.

It gives the impression that there are two types of athletes in the Tour de France... those who are doping and get caught and those who are doping and haven't yet been caught. It's a little bit surreal actually. Speaking of which, Floyd Landis, who I believe is the only person to have won and then had the title stripped from him because of doping allegations was in court recently pursuing his final appeal after both Europe and the US found him guilty in separate investigations and let's see how that went...

apparently not well for Landis.

Of course we can't forget Tyler Hamilton, wherever he is, or Michael Rasmussen. And all of the rest of them before and after and in between.

I won't say that it's not depressing. I believe that eventually we'll find out how widespread these issues are and they certainly extend beyond cycling. When you're talking about baseball and basketball in the US I'm sure football in Europe, there's just too much money involved at this point. In addition to all of the performance-enhancing drug issues, there's issues of cheating on the part of players and referees. I'm sure that's just the beginning of the list of evils.

Legitimate sports are beginning to look a lot like professional wrestling. In fact, maybe history will judge pro wrestling as something of a pioneer; ahead of its time. After all, why leave the outcome up to chance when that outcome may not turn out to be satisfying. If you script the thing you can write it any way you want to. And why settle for selling tickets and merchandise for only 3 games of a 7 game series, and leave the rest of the money on the table?

As a sports fan, you'd have to e niave not to acknowledge the possibility that cheating is the rule, not the exception to the rule in professional sports.

So enjoy the Tour de France, everybody. It's 21 stages just to have the whole thing turn out to be absolutely meaningless in the end. Hey, at least there are still the crashes and the scandal. I'm pretty sure that's real.

I will say that I'm not a huge fan of YouTube. I would rather see people investing in themselves and their own online presence, than see the web dotted by a relatively few sites like YouTube and FaceBook which command a ton of traffic, and are potentially hugely profitable, but for a very small group of people.

The paradigm simply does not play to the distributed nature of the web, and as a result is fraught with all of the disadvantages of traditional sales and distribution models. Oh yeah, it also doesn't seem particularly fair that owners of sites like YouTube, whose success is based almost entirely on value of user submitted content, reap nearly all of the rewards related to the success of the site. The applicable technology is certainly nothing particularly special. If it weren't for the considerable first mover advantage and the momentum that attracts a commanding share of the potential audience, there might easily be dozens of YouTubes. Other's have certainly tried and have failed not because of technical limitations or an inability to match YouTube on the basis of functionality and features, but because they were unable to duplicate the wealth of content available at youtube.com. Sure YouTube assumes no small amount of risk and expense and is certainly deserving of compensation and their fair share of the profits, when/if there are any at all to be had, but I can understand why there is little to no discussion about allowing content providers to directly share in the success of the site. It's as if mere exposure is enough. The trouble is that without youtube exposure wouldn't be contingent on youtube. We've seen this sort of thing before. Ticketmaster comes to mind, but there are many other examples. In fact that history of nearly every talent-based/creative industry seems to start like this.

• Concentration of authority with a select few leading to consolidation of choice in a way that benefits only a few at the expense of everyone else.

  Leading to a landscape dominated by the opinions, and sensibilities and of a select few.

• Dangerous, single points of failure and bottlenecks.

• Out of control costs and resource requirements which threaten to create what are essentially defacto monopolies. Is everyone out there satisfied with their cable company, ISP, and phone company?[1] Then you should also be uncomfortable in a world where online video is synonymous with YouTube, search = Google, eBay is the only viable place to buy and sell online (Craigslist is eBay too), and Facebook is the social networking platform.

Of course, not to be lost in all of this are policies of copyright holders that seem to mirror political protectionism and which seems just as out of touch with current trends.

[1] How depressing is it that for a lot of people there is a single provider responsible for all of these services? Yes I understand the arguments in favor of consolidation but the fact is that customer satisfaction is way down and those first year teaser rates offered by places like Comcast last only long enough to negatively impact the competition. After a year, or in some cases as little as 1 - 3 months, the rates go back up, customer services stays in the s*#t, and the alternatives dwindle away. There is no free market economy, in the US or anywhere else, in the absence of competition.

What's the alternative? Well you may not have a lot of choice when it comes to your cable provider but you certainly can (and probably should) choose not to use Facebook.

Weblogs are far more functional and flexible, and best of all you are in control. You can be confident knowing that without a doubt you will have access to your weblog (or at least the content), and more to the point all of the time and effort it represents, 5 years from now. The same thing can't be said for Facebook. Think Facebook will be around and important in 5 years? Consider that it didn't exist 5 years ago and that before Facebook was Facebook, MySpace and Friendster were both Facebook. Still confident? Then consider Beacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook), which is just one of several serious missteps made by this guy and the rest of Facebook bunch.

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/05/12/Facebooks-Growing-Pains

I'd rather see the YouTube founders and Zuckerbergs of the world working on services to stitch together a web of content (that's why the web is called the web kids). Imagine a scenario in which I post my text, photos, and videos to my own site and YouTube is a service that collects together all of the distributed content on the web (in the same way that search engines work now) and works to publicize me and my content, not the site itself. Once upon a time there were portals, and this is precisely what they did.

What's the difference? Such a service promotes your content it doesn't control your content. Furthermore the service builds on the foundation of the web it doesn't co-opt it. Facebook is essentially a web running on top of the web. What's wrong with that? A lot.

The web is distributed across millions of servers; facebook isn't The web is open; facebook isn't The web is reliable; facebook isn't The web is designed as a platform to enable widespread collaboration among among essentially everyone on the planet; facebook is ultimately an advertising platform. The web looks like this

http://www.vlib.us/web/worldwideweb3d.html

Facebook looks like this

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/05/12/Facebooks-Growing-Pains

The web is a lopsided produced/consumer oriented media marketplace. I prefer the original vision of a shared collaborative space with easy and dynamic connections between content and services emphasizing persistence.

Facebook will fad fade. The internet and the web will live on and evolve. Where will your data be? 10 years from now are you going to be looking back on all of your posts, photos, videos, etc as treasured memories or are you going to be looking back with no small amount of regret over what you lost when Facebook went away.

Weezer is a great band.

The music is good for sure; fun pop rock/punk that's really easy to like.

They've had more than their fair share of hit singles, which to their credit hold up well over time - not an easy trick to pull off, judging by how few artists are able to do it.

The possible exception to this is "Undone (The Sweater Song)" from the debut album (thogugh it's possible that I never cared for the song). The rest of that album is strong with "Holiday", "Buddy Holly", "The World Has Turned and Left Me", "In the Garage", ...

Every album since has included at least one instant classic:

Pinkerton - El Scorcho

The Green Album - too many to pick just one (

Don't Let Go, Photograph, Island in the Sun, Knock-Down Drag-Out, Simple Pages, Glorious Day, O Girlfriend, ...). Let's just say the whole album is good.

Maladroit - Keep Fishin'

By the way the best Weezer video on YouTube, in my opinion, might be the video for Keep Fishin', which is based on the idea of Weezer performing on the Muppet Show.

Apparently embedding for the Keep Fishin' video is disabled. That is a topic for a follow-up post.

Make Believe - Perfect Situation (I prefer this to "Beverly Hills" which seems to have won the race for preeminent geek-pop song on this album.)

The Red album - Pork and Beans

"Pork and Beans" is a catchy song and appropriate enough for the first single from an album released in 2008, which may be remembered as the height of what has been branded 'Web 2.0' phenomenon, i.e. the form over function, quick hitting, immature, only vaguely useful, current incarnation of what might loosely be described as 'web services', which are dominated by everything that could possibly be described as social networking.

Weezer's efforts related to the song and the Red Album is a good indication of just how well the band is negotiating the new world of music (which is heavily impacted if not dominated by the influence of the web and the internet more generally).

Increasingly, succeeding as a band is contingent on not disappointing online. Of course, ideally, but not always, this is on the back of putting out great music in the first place.

But this isn't a post about the music. Weezer has proven to be a great band and not just a band with great music. What's the difference? A great band is consistently creative and is willing to take advantage of new media rather than protest the fact that what worked well in the past is no longer relevant.

Case in point, Weezer on YouTube.

There may be other bands who have benefitted more from YouTube, OK Go comes to mind, and their are seemingly an endless number of people doing really imaginative things and posting the videos to youtube.com, but there is something pleasantly simple and genuine about Weezer's efforts. Their videos aren't overly clever, but they are exceptionally effective.

This post was motivated by Weezer's hootenanny video ( I realize it's a little old, I have a backlog of things I want to post about unfortunately :| ). I contend that there has never been something quite like this, and the ease of it underscores the power of the web to connect people in new and profound ways.

Weezer has taken the simplest and most obvious approach on YouTube, which as it turns out is also the most effective strategy.

This is the sort of thing that a strong case for the web as a uniquely valuable collaborative medium and not just yet another time suck. It makes me want to cancel cable service and spend more time on enjoying the web. MORE about this

This is the opposite of all of the Web 2.0 services out there which do little more than add layer after layer of fluffy redundant garbage on top of the web (Facebook comes to mind). The web is an application, and one that is well suited to creative, ad-hoc styles of collaboration. It's a natural asynchronous complement to the synchronous exchanges that are better suited to the real world of meetings, conferences, and other forms of people getting together in one place at the same time to work or socialize together. Weezer's Hootenanny project is a great demonstration of this relationship.

Kudos to Weezer.