Want to sign my YearBook?

An interesting article yesterday on students that are rejecting traditional yearbooks for online alternatives. MyYearBook.com is one of the leading websites offering an alternative to printed yearbooks.

In my opinion this is a wonderful idea – and an idea who’s time has come. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. The article quotes Rich Stoebe, director of communications for Jostens Inc. as saying

After all, will anyone want to haul a laptop to the 25th class reunion? And what happens if the technology changes, or something happens to the dot-com?

I had to chuckle when I read this. Currently I can buy a laptop that’s not much bigger than my high school yearbook. I can’t imagine that in 25 years everyone won’t have a device that is much smaller and impressive. This appears to just be another corporate case of burying your head in the sand. Jostens stands to lose their $348 million dollar empire to a couple of high school kids that put up a website on a whim all because they fail to embrace technology.

Risk Management

In the wake of Ben Roethlisberger’s motorcycle accident I have been getting more static than usual about riding my bike. My sister and I had a heated discussion today on the topic. I like to ride, but she thinks I shouldn’t because it’s dangerous.

This discussion brings up some interesting (at least for me) philisophical issues. The first concerns risk management. How do we, as semi-rational people, come to a concensus on what is safe and what is dangerous. As a motorcycle rider, I believe the problem is with the traffic. Perhaps motorcycles would be safer if there was better awareness, better training and perhaps stiffer penalties on people that cause accidents with their 3000+ lbs automobiles. My sister believes that anyone that engages in what she believes is the high risk behavior of motorcycle riding is at fault for participating in an activity that exceeds her acceptable risk threshold. My question is, where do we draw the line? Is motorcycle riding an acceptable risk? If not, is bicycle riding? Should we get up every morning, slather ourselves with sunscreen and strap on a helmet just in case we go out in the sun or fall down? Should we eat only organic food? Should we lysol bomb our whole house so we don’t get infections? Should we, like Ben Stiller’s character in Along Came Polly, enter every activity we engage in into a computer and live based on the results?

It definitely seems like we all live in a world of our own little construction when it comes to managing risk. One of the largest areas where this is evident is in parenting. I am at the age that, while I don’t have children myself, many of my friends and family are having babies. Nearly everyone seems to rationalize decisions they make for their children based on some kind of internal risk calculation. I won’t go into any specific details right here, but I’m guessing you know what I mean. Things like the amount of supervision they are given, car seats, food they eat, vaccines, where they are allowed to play etc… ect… One parent might be fanatical about having they latest and greatest car seats and helmets while another is ridiculous about only eating certain types of foods? Who is right? Who is wrong? How do we make this judgement?

Nasty FIFA World Cup letter

Two days ago boing boing posted an article about a nasty letter they got from Baker & McKenzie, legal council for Infront Sports & Media, exclusive brodcasters of this year’s World Cup.

Dave Taylor wrote a pointed critique of boing boing’s flippant response. He poses the question

…it’s hard to deny that this is actively defrauding the copyright holders and if you had just bid hundreds of millions for the broadcast and later Internet rights to a major event how would YOU work to defend those rights and ensure that you could later monetize that content?

The question here is not if the copyright holders are defrauded, the question is how could it possibly be stopped. How can copyright holders possibly hope to defend their ‘rights’ against a worldwide conspiracy? All sending nasty letters out has accomplished is to make a few Internet sites angry, cause a lot of discussion, and further cast anyone attempting to defend the copyrights in a negative light. It is unlikely that their actions will actually protect those ‘rights’. I expect that within hours of the completion any given World Cup game the broadcast will be available on a sever located in South America, China – any country that has little regard for foreign intellectual property. Sending letters to American blog sites (who, by the way, really aren’t interested in the World Cup) is like peeing into the wind.

The economic world that has existed for the last 150 years is changing. Copyright is quickly becoming a piece of history. The whole concept of Intellectual Property will end up as an odd blip in the history books. It will eventually fade into obscurity as have so many obscure legal concepts before it. Boing Boing was right to casually dismiss the legal threats with the attitude they ed. The threats are a facade designed to give the impression that Intellectual Property still exists and can be protected. In reality Infront paid millions for the right to provide World Cup coverage once. After the content is out in the wild I’m confident it will be replicated, letters or no letters.

Cover girl

Model Veronica Varekova is upset about Maxim magzine using her photo on their cover. Maxim licensed the photo from Corbis Outline for use in their magazine but did not have Ms. Varekova’s permission to use it on the cover. Veronica has consistently turned down covers of men’s magazines, and is upset Maxim put her on the cover without telling her.

I am a Maxim subscriber, and when I recieved this month’s magazine I knew something funny was up with the article on Veronica Varekova. Anyone familiar with Maxim knows that they typically do a large interview with their cover girls, generally several pages of Q&A. The article on Veronica had about 5 quotes scattered through the layout. No Q&A and the same content was repeated twice in the article. It was fairly obvious that either Veronica was really dull (which is doubtful since she’s trilingual and has two degrees) or she never actually did a photo shoot/interview with Maxim.

My guess is this is all a publicity stunt for Maxim. They figure the ‘exposure’ will be worth the lawsuit.

Selling Out

There’s an interesting article over on the Whitespace blog about the changes to TechCrunch and his inclusion of way too many advertisements. The post is quite critical of the new design, and accuses TechCrunch of being greedy.

This is an interesting topic, I’ve seen articles with a similar tone several times this week, probably due to the 200+ point hit the DOW took. Everyone’s concerned that this web 2.0 nonsense is a bubble and greedy people are going to cause a crash.

This whole topic is very similar to a conversation I had last night. As an NFL fan, we were discussing the offseason player movements, specifically guys like Edgerin James and Antwaan Randle El. Both high profile players have caught a lot of flack for leaving thier teams. Thing is, how do you turn down $30 million dollar contracts? Football is a sport where your career could end tomorrow in a car crash or during a tackle. Who can blame guys like James and Randel El for selling out, especially in Antwaan’s case where he has already won a Super Bowl ring with Pittsburgh. As a fan I would love to see guys stay with a team, but as a person I understand how difficult it would be to turn down a big contract like that.

Blogs are currently a similar phenomenon. Web 2.0, $20,000 monthly ad revenue and all of they hype are probably not going to last forever. If you can make money, you better do it. If it’s out there on the table, guys like TechCrunch would be foolish not to pick it up.

Beer and Popcorn

Nextnc has an article about the decline of movie attendance in the US. One of the tactics theatre are using to pull people back in is to serve alcoholic beverages. Now here is an idea who’s time has come. Having beer in a movie theatre should send attendence through the roof. Think about it, now, when your significant other asks you to take her to see that romantic comedy what she’s really offering is her services as a DD. How much better is the latest Lindsay Lohan, Kate Hudson or Jessica Simpson movie going to be when you have 3 or 4 Buds in you?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Bob, I don’t drink. How does this help me”. The other great benefit of having alcohol in the theater is the entertainment value of the drunks. Currently I rarely go to the theater. Who wants to pay $9.00 to go see poor acting, a poor plot and have to listen to some schub behind you yammer for two hours. I can get that for free at my brother-in-law’s HOME theater. Once the beer in the theater is widely available, a few well placed popcorn tosses will be enough to start a cinematic brawl.

This wll make a great mastercard commercial

Movie – $10
Beer – $14
Getting hauled away by the cops while your whole family watches – Priceless

It just makes me happy to see the movie industry do something. Instead of addressing real problems like poor quality films, high prices (both at the ticket counter and the concession stands), cheesey commercials (that I just paid $10 to watch) and noisy theaters they focus on things like beer and wine or reserved seating. How inventive of them.

Coming soon to your home town – the Internet

Seems like local businesses are finally waking up to the realities of the Internet and if local media doesn’t wake up too they are going to be left in the dust. This is something I’ve personally expected for the last year, ever since I setup my Greeley Search directory. Local businesses have been losing market share to companies that are doing business on the Internet. With Google (and now MSN and Yahoo’s) reasonable priced keyword ads advertising to local customers has become much more attainable to the small business.

This is good news, but local media outlets better step up to the plate or this will be just another area where big companies like Google will dominate.