Category: Technology

This entry exists solely for the sake of pinging Flutterby. The automatic Trackback RDF stuff doesn’t work yet, apparently — we’ll see if the discovery works better. (Answer: nope. Trying a manual ping…)

Testing again, now that Dan’s tinkered a little.

And one more time! (It worked.)

This is my favorite picture so far from the blackout. New York by night. That’s not a picture you’re going to see very often. I like the grainy effect produced by the cell phone camera; it’s very post-apocalyptic. Mad Max was here.

By way of Warren Ellis, we have open phonecam NYC blackout coverage. News moves at the speed of people.

Boston’s doing pretty well in the community wireless sphere, although perhaps not as well as Portland. Now Somerville is talking about business-based free community wireless networks.

Not only is this fun times for me, it’s got cool potential as a prototype that could easily catch on elsewhere. Michael Oh is thinking of each network he builds as an instance of a larger concept, rather than building one-offs, which is the kind of thinking that makes a difference in the long term.

Meanwhile, there’s a Starbucks opening next to my laundromat of choice, so I can get online while doing laundry.

Short form of the controversy:

Dave Winer and Harvard are throwing a one-day blogging convention at Harvard. The entry fee is $500; $250 if you’re a Harvard affiliate. This strikes some people as too high.

Today, Dave explained why the fee was $500, as follows:

1. It’s absolutely non-profit.

OK, good. Irrelevant to why the cost is so high, though.

bq. 2. We will use the money to pay expenses for speakers and students who will get in for free, some of whom will have their expenses paid.

This is the bit that actually irked me enough to get me writing. Students aren’t getting in free; it’s costing them $250. Speakers will presumably get in free. But that doesn’t really speak to the question of where the $500 goes; you need to explain that before you claim that it’s meaningful to give anyone a discount. When you reduce this down to its actual components, what it says is that the money is going to pay for plane tickets and lodging.

3. We’re going to have parties and dinners, all of which cost a lot of money.

You know, I’d be totally OK paying for my own dinner, because I’m pretty sure I could swing it for less than $500. Even two dinners. I also don’t believe that $500 a head is a reasonable cost for a party — and let’s be real, this is a single party, because most of the attendees will have to clear out before Sunday night.

Maybe he’s planning on putting on lunch both days for the attendees? If so, perhaps he should consider not doing that to make it possible for more people to come.

I don’t know how many attendees he expects, but he has 12 presenters and moderators listed. At least two of them live in Boston. Many of them live on the East Coast. I’m having trouble believing that the numbers balance out.

Jeremy Zawodny makes the observation that I’ve made a couple of times; namely, Google’s PageRank is broken. (OK, he’s said it more than once.)

In the comments, Phil Ringalda defends Google on the grounds that Jeremy’s page is as good a result for the search terms in question as anything. He discusses the issue further on his own blog.

I would just like to note that I am currently the top result for google://population+of+indianapolis.

I am currently in possession of 20 discount codes for TypePad, the new weblog hosting service/software from Six Apart. (They wrote Movable Type.) If you’re looking for someplace to host your weblog, TypePad is so much superior to Blogger that it isn’t even funny; it’s the perfect place for the non-techie to go.

The discount codes give 20% off the usual prices for life. The prices are pretty reasonable. If you actually know me and you want to start a blog with minimal effort, drop me a line and I’ll shoot you a discount code.

Now, that’s a job posting. Pity it was taken down, but luckily someone saved it from obscurity. Since I stole the link from Phil Ringalda, I’m sure it’ll be all over the Internet by Monday at the latest.

It opens like this: “So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the ‘correction’. Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century.” From there on in, it’s all uphill.

That’s interesting. The pricing on CafePress books just dropped to 4.5 cents a page for wire-o and saddle stitch and 3 cents a page for perfect bound. The base price for wire-o stayed at five bucks, saddle stich base pricing dropped to four bucks, and perfect bound went up to seven bucks.

So the hypothetical 32 page comic book now costs, um, $5.44. The 250 page paperback costs $14.50. Now we’re talking.

CafePress whiffed badly on book pricing. The base fee is five bucks per book for saddle stitch or wirebound, and six bucks per book for perfect bound. On top of that, they’re charging six cents per page, and that’s printed page rather than physical page.

A 250 page paperback would have a base cost of $21. A 32 page comic book would have a base cost of $6.60. (Er. $6.92. I dunno where I went wrong.) Profit margins are optional. I don’t think this’ll take off.

Addendum: it’s not actually so bad for RPG books. Note that you could print that 250 page paperback in 8.5×11 format, retail it at $25, and make four bucks a book. But RPG books are a small market form.

Another addendum: those prices dropped quick. Now your $25 RPG has a profit margin of around 10 bucks.