Yankee desperation versus the Red Sox

Annonymous photo remix
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

Spreading through the Internet... a slightly modified photo of the infamous play that required deployment of New York riot police to restore order.

In Game 6 of Red Sox versus Yankees 2004, Yankee base runner Alex Rodriguez attempted to reach first safely by swatting the ball out of the out-stretched glove of the Red Sox pitcher. The first base umpire called 'safe' in part because his line of sight was blocked by the Red Sox first baseman, enabling another Yankee base runner to score. Sensing something amiss, the umpires huddled, corrected their mistake, called Rodriguez out for interference and brought the scoring runner back to first base. In the ensuing confusion, New York fans pelted the field with baseballs in protest and New York Police in riot gear were called onto the field to restore order. The Red Sox eventually prevailed in Game 6, to tie the series 3-3. The following day, they won Game 7 as well for the championship and became the first baseball team to come back in post-season play from an 0-3 deficit.

As for the dainty fashion accessory composited onto Rodriguez' forearm in this photo... it appears someone is calling him a "girlie-man" -- some harmless digital imaging humor, and a timely example of the "remix culture" championed by Larry Lessig

Google SMS

yet another Google revenue stream on deck...

Colleague P.T. Withington brought an interesting new Google SMS service to my attention. It looks like a very interesting market test.

If Google finds positive user feedback and usage, I suspect they would have very good leverage in negotiations with cellular carriers to incorporate Google SMS into default menus of shipping cell phones. This would make money for the carriers, and I would guess Google could extract payment for co-marketing activity. Anything that increases SMS queries would look pretty good to the carrriers. Often times, SMS sends cost money while SMS receives are free.

If Google accepts payment for priority listing submission or priority order in the response SMS, then they have a revenue opportunity for local business information directory services to the mobile device market. That possible future is hinted at on the HowToUse page. This could bring the yellow-pages style revenue model to SMS -- Google could incent carriers to provide Google SMS sends and receives for free by sharing listing services revenue with them, and increase two-way SMS usage all around.

Impressive.

Permission Culture versus Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig's remarks at Web 2.0 in San Francisco

Earlier this afternoon, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig delivered an eloquent plea for the need to rethink our notions of content copyrights. He observes that digital technology has made the 'remix' a viable activity for the many. Using examples of network television audio and video creatively repurposed to form political satire, Lessig makes the case that remixing is a way of expressing important ideas and not simply theft as our current laws imply. He draws a parallel to the text media type, where writers must be free to quote others and create variations on phrases in order to convey and advance ideas. What some consider a battle against piracy in the name of property, Lessig redefines as a campaign for liberty in the name of human progress. In so doing, he extends into new realms the lessons of the Open Source movement and Richard Stahlman's defense of "Free Software".

Lessig's ovation-worthy talk was part of a reinvigorating O'Reilly Conference called Web 2.0.

Announcing OpenLaszlo at Web 2.0

Laszlo's contribution to the Web 2.0 diaspora

At the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference, we announced the open source release of the Laszlo platform, and launched the associated OpenLaszlo Project(which I set up, wrote and coded in substantial part with my own hands). This has created a stir in the developer community, and swampd Laszlo's servers. Thank goodness we put our sites on the Akamai network on the day prior to the announcement.

Web 2.0 was a thoroughly stimulating event. For three days at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco, luminaries of the Internet Boom pondered the future of information technology and society. It was nice to run into familiar faces, including a few former executives from ExciteAtHome whom I had not seen in a couple of years. I even had the good fortune to win one of twenty Apple iPod Minis Jerry Yang gave away in his conference-closing session on the past and future of Yahoo.

In a fitting conclusion to an eventful week, I'm going to 'rip' a few favorite music cd's and relax with my nifty new iPod MP3 player.