a blog about information
Take a look at this:
A mashup involving Google Earth, local time and Santa Claus. So that you can show your children precisely where Santa is at a given time. [The rest of the year, Santa lives at the North Pole, located just off 1 Infinite Loop, where his elves make iPhones, iPods and Macs].
My thanks to Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid; his tweet brought this to my attention.
I wrote recently about a conversation with Jerm about commit logs, opensource and hiring; Ted chipped in to the debate with a reminder for us to visit code_swarm, a project I’d been aware of but only peripherally. There is much about the project that makes it interesting, even remarkable; one that gives me personal pleasure is the usage of Processing as the visualisation tool.
What Michael Ogawa has done is find better and better ways to visualise the human interactions that take place in software development, particularly community-based development. Many of the lessons we’ve learnt in opensource are made tangible and graspable by all, just by watching what happens. The organic nature of the process is brought out beautifully. Anyone interested in opensource and community-based development would do well to take a look. I think there are applications for the use of codeswarm in many open multisided platforms; as and when we use them I shall keep you posted.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the visualisations created by Michael and his team. Our thanks to them.
I love coffee. Haven’t had a cup since October 2006, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love coffee. Probably something to do with my South Indian roots, and being served fresh “decoction” coffee first thing in the morning for 16 of my 23 years in Calcutta. Wonderful stuff, I can still smell it. So when people tell me “wake up and smell the coffee”, I usually do. I can bring that aroma to mind at will.
[It took me a while to realise that my recidivist craving for nicotine was so deeply intertwined with that for caffeine; once I figured that out, and abstained from coffee and tea, the nicotine stayed given up. Cold turkey given up after a 31 year habit.]
So where was I? Yes, coffee. Here’s how it was made at home, courtesy of Latha Narasimhan at the Yum Blog.
Nowadays I spend my time learning about different teas, training myself to distinguish my gunpowders from my silver needles. A part of me, nevertheless, keeps an eye on what’s happening in the world of coffee. Which brings me to the point of this post.
This little character. The luwak, a type of civet. Coffee beans that have been digested and egested by these creatures are treasured for their taste, treasured to the tune of $600 USD per pound. The most expensive coffee beans in the world.
That’s all right then. You get some coffee beans. Give them to your local friendly neighbourhood civet, wait for them to be digested and defecated. Then you collect the faeces, separate out the beans, make coffee with them. All’s well that ends well.
That wasn’t the part that got me. What got me was something far simpler. Questions like “How did they know? What made them try to make a drink out of the detritus in animal droppings? What else did they try? What are they going to convince us about next?”
Answers on a postcard. Preferably undigested.
Today I “met” someone via Twitter. Dallas W.Taylor. The Dallas Taylor, as in “Crosby Stills Nash and Young Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves“. The Dallas Taylor who played drums on that album shown above (Deja Vu), on the first album Crosby Stills and Nash, on the first Stephen Stills album, and on the two Manassas albums.
[And not the Dallas Taylor who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for a short while in 1953. Or any other Dallas Taylor.]
I’m delighted to learn that there’s a new band in the works and that there’s new music to come. For sure I will be buying it, I want to support a childhood legend. My wish to support him grew even stronger when I found out what Dallas has been doing in the decades since. Go here if you want more information on the work he’s been doing on addiction intervention.
An aside I can’t resist, germane to this discussion. I read an article in the Times today trashing the Long Tail, referring to a study I studiously avoided mentioning till now; it smelt of trolling. But now I can’t resist. The headline was, believe it or not, Long Tail Theory Contradicted As Study Reveals 10m Digital Music Tracks Unsold.
Turns out the study was done by Will Page, Chief Economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. Yes, as in the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Right Society.
Now I shall resist the temptation to say that it’s a bit like reading a report on why cigarettes don’t cause cancer written and published by Philip Morris, or maybe on why gas guzzlers have no impact on climate change written and published by General Motors. I won’t say that. Having successfully resisted that temptation, I will state that what I can glean about the study looks quite reasonable. Except for a couple of points. A couple of big points.
First, Long Tail actually requires you to make the right Long Tail things searchable, findable, sellable, buyable. Not just any old things hanging around in inventory like elephants-without-colour. The right things. Too much of past inventory management focused on what was sold, what wasn’t sold. Whereas what should be measured is intent, not sale or purchase. How many things, Long Tail things, didn’t get sold despite the intentions of buyers? Mary Modahl, in Now or Never, a worthwhile book written at the turn of the century, makes that point very well. Nowadays, understanding buying intentions is at the heart of VRM, particularly unfulfilled intentions.
The Long Tail may not always be visible in a business environment that has been Hit Culture dominated, at least partly because industries in such environments are so far away from the customer and her intentions. How else can we explain the fact that it would appear no one considered that it would be worth while to re-release the Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen versions of Hallelujah as physical CD singles last week?
Long Tail is about what happens when the costs of discovery and contracting drop in an environment where inventory can be managed flexibly and dynamically, making the case that there’s a lot of people wanting to buy a lot of things that they can’t buy because of unavailability, high search costs, high fulfilment costs and so on.
Second, even if the study’s conclusions were right, they will not continue to be right. Because people like me will buy the songs and albums of people like Dallas Taylor, even more so if he starts connecting up with the Greg Reeves and Chris Hillmans and Joe Lalas and Al Perkins and Paul Harris and Fuzzy Samuels.
You see, these people are part of the Long Tail. Many today have not heard of them. But enough have. Even measured in readers of this blog, there are enough. Even measured in Facebook friends, there are enough. Even measured in Twitter followers, there are enough. Enough to form a Long Tail.
So people will buy their music. And not necessarily through traditional routes either.
In the meantime, I will continue to relish the sensation of being in touch with someone whose name used to adorn my wall as a teenager.
So today history was made, as Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah went in at No 1 (Alexandra Burke) and No 2 (Jeff Buckley) in the Christmas charts in the UK, and with the original version at No 36. Some of us tried to make the Buckley version No 1, tried and failed, failed gloriously; remember it made No 2 on download sales alone, unlike Alex’s version.
It was worth it: from what I’ve gathered so far, it looks as if Leonard Cohen will earn over $2m in royalties from the week’s sales, with more to come. Given that he’s 74, given that he was allegedly cleaned out of his savings by his erstwhile business manager, that he sued her, Kelley Lynch, and won $9m in damages, that he has apparently not collected a red cent from her since; given all this, one could surmise he’s not rolling in it. So the money’s going to come in useful. [Yes, he’s under new management since!].
With the song so much in the news, I kept hearing that there were over a hundred versions of the song recorded; not as many as for Suzanne, but a substantial number anyway. Now I believe that the Buckley version is outstanding; Cohen is rumoured to have told Buckley’s mother that once he heard Buckley, he never needed to sing the song again. But that does not mean that other versions are awful, there are many different treatments, each to their own. I thought there must be a definitive list: but when I looked around, I could not find one.
So I thought I’d build one up and put it on Wikipedia, with as much detail as possible. Could you take a look at the list below and help me crowdsource this task? I promise to take all the inputs and load it up over the holidays, as a labour of love. If one of you would prefer to do it instead, be my guest, just let me know.
I stopped at 100, I am sure there are many more. I’ve taken care to make sure that all versions that predate 1984 and therefore couldn’t possibly be the same song are removed from the list, whether it’s from Handel’s Messiah or even from the Deep Purple one. Similarly I’ve excised all of the Lordi and other Hard Rock variations that are unrelated to the Cohen one. There is a rumour that Prince once recorded it, but I have not been able to find anything to back that up; there is evidence that he sang it but none of his recording it.
Incidentally, I spent some time going through a number of sites on the web to get this far. So if you want to listen to any of the versions, you’re best off visiting these sites first: here, where there’s a fine post on the subject, here, where there’s a good discussion, and of course YouTube.
[My thanks to www.sweetandbitter.com for the silhouette image].