Peak Web

Have we reached the peak of internet usage? Knee jerk reaction would say "no way!"

After all, there are apparently 729 million people online (with 70% of american having broadband) and thousands coming online daily.

Still, what do you make of this graph?



This is a graph of Google, MySpace & YouTube's pageviews over the last 5 years.

Clearly, something rather dramatic happened in January's as Google's meteoric rise to search dominance seemed to peak out and actually decline for the first time, ever?

Why do you think this is? Are they getting smarter, and getting people to their destination faster? Do you ever go beyond the first page of Google to find search results? Maybe that's it.

Of course, that's just Pageviews. But a look at the Reach, or % of total users, you get this:



I think we're seeing a natural selection / survival of the fittest type things and potentially reaching internet carrying capacity.

With only so many hours in the day, and only so many things to do online, at some point you're going to have to stop and go outside.

Good advice, for me...

Email

I don't know where I sit on the scale of receiving email, but I've gotta be up there somewhere. I get a lot, and have been struggling for years to find a real solution to my inbox issues, while also keeping in tune with my priorities (see below)

Last weekend I made the switch to Gmail. I am now forwarding all email through Gmail, logging in there to check it, reply archive or delete and then using Outlook to download it to my computer for dealing with if I really need to.

Gmail doesn't have folders. It has labels, but that's it. Instead of sorting through messages, you archive them and then search for them later. It's kind of a revolutionary idea, and I'm starting to like it.

The goal of email is communication, it's not meant to be a To-Do priority list. But so many people use their email inboxes as a reminder of what they need to get to, and after seeing the other side I might just be committed to switching forever.

The real reason I switched to gmail in the first place is the spam filter. It rocks, and so far today has caught 568 spam messages that haven't been downloaded to my computer. It's an amazing feeling having a clean inbox and no spam in your outlook spam folder. All told I'm using 3 spam filters. The one on my mail server, gmail's and Cloudmark in outlook.

Honestly, I'm thinking about getting rid of Outlook all together. Gmail really wants to be the center of my universe, and I'm about ready to let it...

Now if I can only get back to the stuff I really need to be doing to move things forward...

Time is of the Essence

What is our expectation of email response time?

It varies depending on the relationship:

• Friends: immediately
• Co-workers: within a few minutes or an hour or so, depending on the conversation
• A company you're partnered with: within the day.
• Inquiring about a new business relationship: within the week
• Customer service from a vendor: yesterday

Woh - oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?

An Inconvenient Truth

Saw the movie last night. 90% environmental awareness, 10% Al Gore biography perspective.

Most of the movie is spent talking about the problem, debunking myths and proving (with facts) that Global Warming is real and could have an enormous and scary impact on our entire civilization.

The last little bit of the movie delves into what we can do as individuals to help combat the problem.

It's intelligent, provocative and eye opening. It's also disturbing and embarrassing that we as Americans are the cause of most of the problems and are doing the least amount to help solve them.

Walking away, my thoughts clearly turned to the political realities of this issue. Until we get an administration in power who is willing to address the real problem head on, develop real solutions and aren't financially embedded in the wrong direction then the greatest positive impact is still looming far on the horizon.

It's a must see. Go: http://www.climatecrisis.net/findatheater/

Priorities

What do you use to keep track of your day to day priorities?

I've gone through everything from legal pads, sticky pads, dozens of re-written word docs, excel spreadsheets, Outlook tasks, tried MS Project once, used Google Homepage Tasks widget module for a day and just tonight created a new BaseCamp project to manage my To Do list.

Ideas come quickly, but then tend to get backlogged as it takes a while to execute on the great theories. Then, it feels like you're rushing to catch up and simply keep up with the latest and great trends that are launched everyday. Then Google launches Music Trends which hooks into your iTunes through Google Talk and you wonder what they're really up to.

Amazing how things move so fast sometimes...

Maybe the idea behind keeping priorities lists is to try to stay on top of the ideas and attempt in some uncontrollable way to SLOW DOWN the moments so you can catch your breath, get some perspective and try to plow through the ideas that you had months ago.

Of course, with things changing so quickly, you want a system that can be adaptable and flexible enough so you can actually make some headway. Are you really ever going to get the 40th item on your list? Or are you constantly re-prioritizing and shuffling objectives as new ideas come in and you say to yourself "That's important this week."

Your NetFlix queue allows you to have 100 movies in it, but you can only have three at your house at a time. You're never going to go through them one by one, but it's a reminder wish list, which you can reference and move various ones to the top and reshuffle constantly.

When making a priority list, put the 2-3 things on the top that you really want to get done, and the rest underneath in no particular order. Then start at the top, do the first few and then reshuffle. If you can actually get through three without adding or reshuffling, then it's impressive.

Amazing that after all this time I still haven't found my perfect system to keep things in order, yet I still manage to push ideas out the door that I've been working on for years...

As Bob Dylan said that an artist never wants to feel as though they're arriving at any place, I suppose an engineer never wants to clear their list completely. There are always new ideas, always new horizons to explore and always an opportunity rewrite something that was done years ago before you went through the process of learning all the things you needed to know to make it do what you wanted it to do.

Just like I'm trying to find the perfect sentence upon which to end this post, I can't really conclude it and will leave you with the lyrics to ALO's BBQ song which goes:

The road is long and windy,
Like a good mystery unfolding
It twists and turns
In colorful subplots and sunburns
And fake out endings
And sometimes my patience in the whole process starts bending

As I attempt to unravel the web
By rehearsing and reversing and perversing and traversing
Along the doubt laden extension chord threads
Of my life

And in this life we're free to dream what ever we want to
But that doesn’t' mean that your dreams are gonna come true
Instead as a way of getting us to move
Life dangles your dreams in front of you
And unable to resist the temptation
We continue

And it's clear to me that this life is gonna be
All about the dangling possibilities that keep turning in and turning out

Yes it's clear to me that this life is gonna be all
About the dangling possibilities that keep turning in…
The road is long and windy
Full of twists and turns
But before you can rise from the ashes
You've got to burn baby burn

Welcome to your Barbecue
Where we roast all the dreams that never came true
Welcome to your Barbecue
Pig out and dream a new

Welcome to you're, welcome to you're, welcome to you're barbecue…

Netflix & IMDB

Amazon.com should buy Netflix. Or Netflix should buy the IMDB.

I just recently re-subscribed to Netflix. Both to re-invigorate my music watching experience and also to fully explore their website which many people lately have told me I should model the new version of JamBase after. They're right, it's slick, and what I love most about it is that it very truly wants to be a movie recommendation service wrapped in a subscription service.

There's a slight flaw in it though. OK, maybe it's not a flaw, but an upgrade I'd like to see them implement.

Search for an actor - Robin Williams - and you get back a list of all of Robin's movies in Alphabetical order. But I want them in chronilogical order, so I can see the evolution of talent, understand the context of time and experience the artist from the beginning of their career. Unless I'm missing something, this isn't available on Netflix. But it is on IMDB.

The Internet Movie Database is a resource. Owned by Amazon.com. I can only presume that it makes money from advertising and linking to buy DVDs on Amazon. They call that 'contexual commerce'.

Combining Netflix into this would make for a truly amazing experience. Maybe they're planning it, or maybe they're going to converge with TiVo and then it would be Rhapsody for movies delivered through the TV.

Now that would be something...

What's an RSS feed?

I've been asked this question three times in the last day so I figured it was time to revisit this simple, yet often over-complicated idea of RSS.

Instead of rehashing what's already been said, I'll point you to some experts in the field:

• Seth's Blog: What's RSS?
  
• Understanding RSS on Squidoo (Also written by Seth
  
• Feedburner: Feed 101
  

If content is king, then distribution is queen.

The bottom line is that RSS makes it easier for your content (blog, website, podcast, etc) to get out there into the world and makes it easier for you, the reader, to get the stuff you want the way you want it.

Check it out.

Tableclothes

I spent the day home in Marin today, trying to get some focused code work done.

For lunch I went out to my favorite burrito place in Larkspur called Burritoville. There's just something about the way they make it that hits the spot, plus they always have the Arizona Green Tea with Organge Mandarin in stock, after I suggested it years ago. I hadn't been back in a while and as I walked in, I immediately noticed something different. The tables were covered with tableclothes.

It was a simple, inexpensive and effective thing to do, and while practical in covering up those sticky table tops which would attract salsa and kids spilling their drinks, it also elevated the look and feel of the place tremendously. It felt legit (not that it didn't before, but you know) and I felt better for just being in there...

...and that feeling was worth every penny of the burrito.

footnote: Later today I went to the Safeway to buy bus tickets, because that's the only place you can buy them. While I was there I figured I'd pick up a few home items (it worked!) and as I was leaving I saw the woman checking out next to me struggling with her groceries as they were piling up on end of the counter. She was pleading with the checker to stop the conveyer as her blueberries were getting squashed.

I left that place with the complete opposite feeling...

Jerry Day

11 years ago today, Jerry passed.

Honoring his memory, I spent the day in Marin (more on that later) and have been listening to Nugs.Net Radio's daylong tribute. Tune in today, or any day for that matter - great stuff.

Vegoose is Loose

Vegoose has announced their initial 2006 line-up: http://www.vegoose.com

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Widespread Panic
The Killers
The Mars Volta
The Black Crowes
Fiona Apple
The Raconteurs
Keller Williams Incident featuring Keller Williams backed by the String Cheese Incident
Damien "Jr. Gong" Marley
Medeski Martin & Wood
The Roots
The Rhythm Devils feat. Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzman, Mike Gordon & Steve Kimock
G. Love & Special Sauce
Jurassic 5
Galactic
Praxis
Yonder Mountain String Band
Gomez
Built To Spill
Guster
Jim James of My Morning Jacket
Dr. Octagon aka Kool Keith
Band of Horses
Jamie Lidell
The Zutons

Read the press release here: http://www.jambase.com/headsup.asp?storyID=8940

Talk about it here: http://www.jambase.com/festivals/vegoose/

Viva Las Vegoose...

Update: Blog Email Subscriptions

Sometimes blogging can be educational for the blogger.

It turns out, there are three solutions to the Email Subscriptions problem I posted about:

• Feedburner
  I use Feedburner to give my subscribers options and it gives me RSS stats, and now i've implemented the email subscription feature which you can sign up for at gadiel.com. It will send you an email every morning with any new blog post.
  
  
• FeedBlitz

There is a limitation here, however, in that I, the blogger, need to set these up and have you subscribe to my Feed.

There is one other option it appears which will email you the Feeds whenever you want: Squeet - Cool name, did they come up with it by inventing the feature and then saying "Sweet!"5 times really fast?

I just subscribed to this blog through that, so we'll see if I get an email once this post goes through, and that would be really squeet.

Footnote: Of course I also realize that someone could use one of the thousands of email hosting services out there to create a mailing list, get people to subscribe and then email out your blog everytime you post (or set blogger to email out to the 1 address it allows), but that just doesn't seem like a very integrated solution...

Blogger, Feedburner and Squeet should really unite and take make everyone's lives a whole lot easier...

Thanks to Justin, Paul and of course Jon for educational experience.

Why isn't there a Blog email subscription standard?

My friend Jon called me tonight, who due to a foot injury is spending some extra time at home these days. Luckily he has a blog to keep him busy. Nice odeo.com inclusion!

He was asking me if there was an easy way for people to "subscribe" to his blog and get an update whenever he made a new post. Easy, I thought, with vision of RSS solutions passing through my head. As I attemptd to explain to him the concept behind RSS, how to link to his atom.xml page from his blogger template while sorting through all the HTML and then instructing his readers what to do with that page, it occurred to me how very un-simple this whole thing is.

Sure, I'm an RSS junkie. I've got the Newgator Outlook Edition which checks my feeds 10 times a day and updates them immediately in a special folder at the bottom of my Outlook, just like I'm getting an email, except it's not email, it's RSS. It's brilliant, it's perfect, it works.

But most people I talk to don't have an RSS news reader nor do they even understand what it is. They understand MyYahoo, which now allows feeds, along with the Google Personalized Homepage (Google Reader never quite took off) and now the Web 2.0 adapters like Netvibes and Live.com (From Microsoft) are making it easy to customize your own homepage and pull in content from various sources. The idea here is to give you a starting point for all the news that's fit for you. Smart. But still, they all require that you visit your website to stay updated.

According to my Feedburner stats, 1/2 the people that subscribe to the JamBase Newsfeed do so through Firefox Live Bookmarks. Cool. Bloglinesand Google Desktop is 11% each and Newsgator online is 9%. Windows Media Center 2005 Feedreader, whatever that is, accounts for a few % and the rest are unknown. That means that most people looking at the feeds are doing so in a web browser.

Couldn't one of these services convert the posting into an email and send it to me? Somebody's gotta be doing that, right?

As much as I try to avoid it, I still find myself living in Outlook throughout the day. I'll take breaks and actually get work done for a while but sooner or later I'll go back to the inbox. Gmail is trying to be the center of the non-Outlook universe, but still hasn't integrated RSS in a way that is intuitive. The Gmail web clips top bar is more of a distraction than a resource, and they've got that great side bar area where "labels" are to do some great work. C'mon people! and integrate Calendar while you're at it.

So I digress. You can subscribe to any blog's RSS feed with your news reader, but what about the other 80% of people who don't really get that and just want an email when their favorite blogs are updated. Can't Blogger enable an email subscription feature which will allow people to subscribe to your blog and automatically get an email whenver you make a new post? Or are they all about the RSS that email is becoming passe and there's a real world desire to phase it out, even though most people use it still and the resulting effect is an inefficiency of communication.

It's amazing that with all of this technology at our disposal, things are still complicated. It's as though the cool stuff is being made at such a feverous pace that only the folks who are exhaustedly on top of it can try to keep up and enjoy it, while the rest of the world struggles to make some practical sense out of what they're supposed to do with an XML API.

We need better solutions. We need simple answers. There is far too much information and far too little time for us to try and figure it out or find it all.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That last word is really important, and we clearly haven't delivered on the promise of the fully connected MyWeb.

Back to Jon. What's he to do? If you've got the solution, you can comment below. Or better yet, visit his blog, subscribe to it through your news reader and tell him yourself.

Scloop!

Run Like Bisco

A quiet Saturday afternoon at home, so I put on The Disco Biscuits live from High Sierra Music Festival Late Night Funk n' JamHouse - 7/2/06.

http://www.archive.org/details/db2006-07-02.mk41.flac16

The show started around 2am on Sunday night (Monday morning) after 4 incredible days in the woods of Quincy.

They open with a poppy Highwire, which gives everyone a kick of the happy before seguing beautifully into an intense Run Like Hell which goes on and on for upwards of 10 minutes without getting meandering or losing steam.

In the end, it's pure bisco - triumphant, exciting, goosebumps, peaking, "We Win! We Win!"...all the stuff that made me fall in love with them in the first place.

A beautiful The Very Moon, taken from the never produced epic Hot Air Balloon Rock Opera. Debuted New Years 1998, the complete HAB has only been played a handful of times and has yet to see the light of day in what would surely be a proper two disc orchestral release. Some day...

Next comes the heat of the evening - a blistering I-Man > Helicopters > I-Man > Helicopters! back into I-Man yes it's Helicopters again and wait now I don't know where we are but it's really awesome and now we're back in Helicopters, huge and bright and triumphant and ... and ... wait now it's I-Man again over it goes i'm breaking through, look out below Helicopters, back to the I-Man

This is the whole other side of the band. On one hand you've got your trance fusion dance party, and then comes the ultimate head fake transitional overload symphony, switching from one song to the next, inverting and distorting, around and around and back again, a musical carwash, blowing out the cobwebs, wiping the slate clean with dance party thrown in for good measure before bringing it all back home...

Wow, that was fun...

Why Don't You Use Rhapsody?

Full disclosure: This isn't a sales post, but JamBase is a Rhapsody affiliate partner.

I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for a few years now and it completely opened up my musical world.

I find myself using it for a variety of purposes:

1. Recall: I think of a song and want to hear it immediately, or think of a lyric and google it then listen to the song. Very satisfying

2. Fanatical: My daily Neil Young dosage, nuff said

3. Active Discovery: Looking through music history, if want to aquaint myself with the early My Morning Jacket catalog, or figure out how Bob Dylan recorded Desire and Hard Rain in the same year, or just want to research the John Coltrane experience...it's all there, along with every Bob Marley album I could want.

4. Passive Discovery: Rhapsody Radio - put in 10 of my favorite artists, it spits back an unlimited amount of music relative to those musicians. Great while making dinner.

5. Rarities and Exclusives: Interviews, Accoustic versions and Live Shows not available anywhere else...

I'm sure there are a dozen or so more uses for Rhapsody which, if you're a Rhapsody subscriber, you can tell me about using the comments section below.

If you're not a subscriber, I'm really interested to hear why not.

If you're a MAC user, well, then...yeah, that's your reason. But for the other 90% of you, is it the cost, portability, reliability, your desire to pay 99 cents for every track you want to listen to?

I like to say that if I bought all the music on iTunes that I've listened to on Rhapsody this month, I'd probably have spent $1000. That brings up a bigger issue for the music business, payment to artists, etc...but we don't have to get into that right now.

Rhapsody is one of those rare products that actually delivers on its promise. It is the ultimate celestial jukebox - hundreds of thousands of song at your fingertips...

So why aren't you using it?

As I said at the beginning, this wasn't intended to be a sales post, but if you're interested in checking out Rhapsody, you can download it here: http://rhapsody.jambase.com
It's free for 2 weeks and if you're not totally hooked on it you can never use it again.

Enjoy...and seriously, post a comment below and let's talk about what else you might be looking for in your digital music universe.