Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Any designers out there?

A friend of mine is offering a $150 cash prize for someone to design the cover for her new book about how to conduct empirical social science research, called "Research Confidential."  So if you like to play with graphics... more information here.  Check it out.

Gladwell

Great piece from The New Republic explaining why Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, is pretty weak.  Gladwell tells great stories, but it's the leap from story to rule that bothers me.  You can find lots of stories, but they don't all illustrate a greater point, and nothing is as easily explainable as he ever makes it seem.

Pudding

More interesting post soon, I promise, but:

Growing up, my mom often made pudding, using My-T-Fine powdered mix -- add milk, boil on the stove, eat some of it when it's nice and hot, refrigerate the rest for later.  Better than the packaged already-made stuff in the refrigerator section of the supermarket (although that's OK if you want pudding in a hurry), and much better than the already-made non-refrigerated stuff (Hunt's Pudding?  Awful.).  Anyway, I was in the supermarket the other day and had a craving for pudding... apparently My-T-Fine doesn't exist on the West Coast, or at least not in the Von's Supermarket I was in... so I bought some Jell-O pudding mix.  First of all, what's the deal with instant pudding mix, where you don't even need to heat anything up?  According to the ingredients on the back, it's basically some sodium compound that does the trick there, but adds a ton of sodium to the pudding... so I went with the Jell-O cook on the stove kind.  Just made it.  And My-T-Fine puts this product to shame, seriously.  This is some really lackluster pudding.  I don't know what the ingredient difference is, because the powder looks pretty much the same, but My-T-Fine is Mighty Fine indeed, and this Jell-O stuff is just OK.  So if you have only eaten Jell-O pudding, I urge you to seek out My-T-Fine instead.  You will be justly rewarded.

Fire In The Toaster

Tonight's the first time that's ever happened to me!  I put half an eggplant parmesan hero (the other half was a delicious lunch) into the toaster to reheat it, and a few minutes later when I went to check on it... it was in flames!  I did what it said on the toaster -- unplugged it and kept the door closed -- but the bread continued to burn.  My fiancee, on the phone with me at the time, asked if I had tongs.  I found tongs.  I carefully opened the toaster door, pulled out the sandwich and ran some cold water on it.  Fire extinguished.  (I feel like I know that water is actually the wrong thing to use for a fire, but it worked, so I won't try to puzzle out the science.)  Sandwich innards survived (and were still cold...!?), even though the bread did not.  Scary!  And my kitchen smells like fire now.  Also, I think I should replace the smoke detector batteries, because if it doesn't go off when there's a fire in the toaster, I don't know when it's going to go off.  Black and Decker Toast-R-Oven gets my official "I don't like fire" unrecommendation.

Yeah, yeah, I know this story is totally lame because nothing bad actually happened.  It's a slow week, this counts as real drama.

Silly Headline

"Obama Renovates WhiteHouse.gov"

Really?  He did that?  So this morning, before the inauguration, Barack Obama was busy coding html?  Something tells me that's not quite how it happened.  I mean, if it is, then maybe Barack Obama is actually the reason for all the layoffs in this economy -- he's doing everyone's job for them.  

The Best They Can Do?

OK, The New York Times has an op-ed by Roger Cohen rewriting Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire for the current generation and Obama's election.  Honestly, I think it's pretty crappy.  A lot of the rhymes don't rhyme (American Beauty / Oprah Winfrey ??  Paris Hilton / Bin Laden ??) and the syllable emphasis is really off in so many places.  Plus the original was actually chronological and this is all muddled together in no discernable sequence (Bill Clinton / Tina Fey ??) If the Times is going to bother publishing something like this, shouldn't it at least be well-crafted and carefully done? 

...the (completely justified) comment to this post should be, "if you're going to criticize, at least prove that you can do it better."  OK, I will.  Here goes:

(1994) 

Tonya Harding, Northridge Quake, Menendez brothers' big mistake

Lorena Bobbitt, Schindler's List, NAFTA in effect

(1995)

Ripken's streak, Sarin gas, OJ Simpson gets a pass

Oklahoma City bombing, Kobe Japan wrecked

(1996)

Jon Benet, Deep Blue, Clinton gets term number two

Bulls win, sheep clone, Unabomber's cover blown

(1997)

Promise Keepers, Princess Di, Hale-Bopp passes through the sky

Blair elected, Heaven's Gate, market's dropping like a stone

[Chorus]

(1998)

Monica Lewinsky, "vast right-wing conspiracy"

Antitrust, George Michael bust, Google is born

(1999)

Napster, The Euro, Hugo Chavez, Kosovo

JFK plane crash, Columbine we mourn

(2000)

Elian, Y2K, Gore wins, Bush wins, who can say

Civil unions, Peanuts ends, Bush and Putin become friends

(2001)

Stem cells, Enron, in an instant Towers gone

air attacks, anthrax, Taliban, Bin Laden

[Chorus]

(2002)

Daniel Pearl, Afghanistan, and the Iraq War began

Milosevic is in a bind, No Child Left Behind

(2003)

Martha Stewart, Phnom Penh, Concorde never flies again

Schwarzenegger, SARS fear, Ferry crash into a pier

(2004)

Abu Ghraib, Reagan dies, Jim McGreevey's quick demise

Big tsunami, Red Sox win, Bush elected once again

(2005)

YouTube, new Pope, New Orleans is forced to cope

Hurricane, London bomb, start the trial of Saddam

[Chorus]

(2006)

Bird Flu, Java quake, gels on airplanes you can't take

(2007)

Writers' strike, Bhutto, wildfires grow and grow

(2008)

Gas price soars, Michael Phelps, markets plunge and nothing helps

Election Day, and now we say, Obama gives his speech today...

[Chorus]

----

You be the judge: me, or the Times?  ;)

Cake Tasting

Been meaning to blog about this for the past couple of weeks.  My fiancee and I did some wedding cake tasting when I was back in New York over the holidays.  The caterer we're using can make the wedding cake for an additional cost, but it's pretty expensive and we figured we might be able to do better -- on price and on quality -- if we just get the cake through a bakery elsewhere.  So we set up appointments to taste the caterer's cake, and taste the bakery's cake.  I expected the kind of thing I think I've seen on TV or in the movies -- a little plate with some tiny bites of cake on it.  We get to the caterer's office -- and he hands us an entire cake.  For us to take home and eat.  I thought this was strange.  Not just a bite, but a whole cake for free.  I guess they figure if we pick them, they easily make up the cost of the cake (and how much is the raw cost of a cake to someone baking tons of them anyway), but still, I was very surprised.  Then we get to the bakery, and the woman had cut slices of two different cakes for us to try.  We tried them, and liked them.  And then as we got up to leave, she boxed up the rest of both of the cakes for us to take with us.  So we ended up with three entire cakes.  This has the potential to be an excellent scam for someone bold and hungry for cake.  We didn't have to prove we were engaged or that we needed a cake, we just called and told them we were getting married and wanted to know if we could taste their cakes.  In theory, we could call ten more bakeries and do the same thing, and perhaps get ten more cakes.  It's insane.  Free cake.  Homeless people who are not worried about their blood sugar should just pretend they're getting married to other homeless people and they can go to bakeries and eat free cake.

The bakery, incidentally, told us their wedding cakes can come in 6 different choices of cake base -- vanilla cake, chocolate cake, mocha cake, banana cake, apple cake, and carrot cake.  And then there's space for up to 2 different fillings -- chocolate, vanilla, mocha, lemon, raspberry, strawberry, etc (she didn't give us the whole list of fillings).  I have to wonder -- I like carrot cake as much as the next person, but has anyone in the history of weddings ever chosen a carrot cake as their wedding cake?  Or a banana cake?

If it were up to me entirely, I'd like to have a wedding pie.  I like pie better than cake.  More fruit, less bread, not so heavy.  Maybe it's just me.  Strawberry-rhubarb wedding pie?  Would be seasonal, colorful....  

Anyway, the cakes were very good (although not so much after three days of being in the fridge) and we think we picked one.  I recommend cake tasting as my favorite of all of the pre-wedding chores so far (it beats registry shopping and band website browsing).

Neat!

I was just following a link to the list of the cast members on this season's Survivor, and turns out I worked with one of them at Trilogy, the software company I worked at before law school.  Neat.  I didn't know him that well, but he always seemed like a good guy, smart, decent.

Link to his CBS profile here.

A Quick Theory About Paying For Stuff On The Internet, Part 2

Imagine the following two scenarios.

A: "My Terrible Dentist" is an award-winning web series streaming online at TerribleDentist.com.  I just watched it, it's really funny.  It's fifteen six-minute episodes.  It costs $2.50 to watch.  You should check it out.  It's totally worth it.

B: "My Terrible Dentist" is an award-winning 90-minute feature that just came out on DVD.  I just watched it, it's really funny.  The DVD costs $25 (you can order it at TerribleDentist.com), but for a limited time they're streaming the whole thing online and you can watch it for just $2.50. You should check it out.  It's totally worth it.

Real survey here (post in the comments): do you feel the same difference I do between these two, or is it all in my head?  I feel like there's a greater chance I'd spend $2.50 on B than A, even though I'm talking about exactly the same thing.  That the problem with paying for videos on the Internet is (1) we have no idea how to value them, and (2) they never seem like a bargain, since there's so much out there that's free.  But we totally know how to think about the price of a DVD.  It's the iTunes model -- we know what CDs cost, so we can judge how much is "fair" to spend on a music file.  But how are we supposed to know what we should spend on a web series, and why would we want to spend any money on it anyway?  If the anchor point is "video on the Internet," anything above $0 is overpriced.  But if we're able to change the anchor point to "actual real DVD," suddenly $1 seems like a huge bargain.  Pitching something as random garbage that streams online makes it feel like it should be free.  But a piece of content that's really a DVD but happens to be streaming online, especially for a "limited time"?  Value.  Maybe.  I think.  I don't know.

And if I'm right?  There's even more potential for upside because if anyone in scenario B were to order the $25 DVD, that's pure profit because someone just dumps the files onto a DVD and burns it themselves and sends it.

The other piece that I think makes it hard for web series to find an audience is that we aren't used to watching things broken up into 4 minute or 6 minute or 8 minute chunks, and they don't feel as satisfying to our brains as 22-minute sitcoms or 44-minute dramas.  I don't get the same reward.  And yet watching a 22-minute original sitcom on the web isn't something I want either.  But for instance -- I read something about Rob Corddry's new series, Children's Hospital, on TheWB.com.  It's sort of a spoof of medical shows, broken up into 10 5-minute episodes.  I watched the first one.  It was decently funny.  Then I watched #2 and #3.  They were decently funny too.  And then I stopped.  I'd seen enough, I didn't really care anymore or feel any motivation to watch the rest.  If it was two 22-minute episodes, I don't know if I would have watched them both, but I think I might have.  I think I would have preferred it.  But having to "start over" every 5 minutes -- click on something new, watch the credits again, start a new story -- it feels less rewarding than getting to really know the characters in a longer-form piece.  But that's not really on point with my A and B thought experiment above.

In any case, just a theory I wanted to throw out there.

A Quick Theory About Paying For Stuff On The Internet, Part 1

A friend and I were talking the other day about a series of web videos he's thinking about putting together, and whether it seems reasonable that anyone might pay to watch them, and whether a video is even the right format for what he's trying to do. 

My knee-jerk set of opinions in this area:

-- No one, to my (incomplete) knowledge, has cracked the code on a series of web videos that people really care about in the same way that there's a whole set of blogs that have built up from nothing and have either become established things everyone is at least aware of -- Gawker, etc -- or launched careers for people. 

-- The one exception I think of is Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible series last year, which somehow rose above the mass of video out there and was watched by tons and tons of people and got tons and tons of press.  But I feel like this is a legitimate exception because Whedon is reasonably famous with an already-established fan base, and he used famous actors.  In fact, I think the reality that more people haven't been able to replicate Whedon's success supports my point -- it's really, really hard, even with all sorts of fame and celebrity advantages, to put together some sort of web video thing that people will care about.

-- I would rather read something on the Internet than watch something, and it isn't even close.  I think a big part of that is time and efficiency.  If you send me a link to a thing to read, I can click and skim and decide whether it's worth it in a lot less time than it takes to let a video load and watch the first few seconds.  I can also skim text in a way I can't skim a video.  Even when I actively decide to watch something online, I usually end up finding myself clicking on other things when I get bored and suddenly I realize the video has been running for three minutes in the background and I've been vaguely listening, not watching, and I have no idea what's going on.  This holds true for podcasts as well, unless I am listening on my iPod without any distractions.  This may be an idiosyncratic thing about the way I best process information, but I get more out of spending ten seconds scrolling quickly through a New York Times article than five minutes of someone reading it to me out loud in an audio file.

-- I'm failing so far to make a distinction between two kinds of videos on the web: pure entertainment and business-related.  By business-related, I mean information that can potentially make someone money or that they feel compelled to watch in some sort of information-seeking way.  The way that the Wall Street Journal can charge for content but Sports Illustrated can't -- in theory, people make money using the kinds of information the WSJ provides but not SI -- WSJ is necessary but SI is pure entertainment, with a billion alternatives out there.

-- On the pure entertainment side, because watching, say, a series of 10 4-minute episodes of a web series is a much greater investment of time and energy than skimming a piece on McSweeney's, I am much more reluctant to bother checking something out if it's a video.

-- Part of this, in my head, is because of relevance.  Even if I watch something awesome, I still think it's pretty unlikely anyone I know will have seen it, and also unlikely that me sending a link to a video will get anyone to watch it.  There's probably nothing much on the Internet written about it either.  So who can I share this with?  It is not that much fun to watch something cool if you can't really talk to anyone about it.  At least if I watch something on regular TV, I know other people who've seen it, I know people who I can convince to check it out, and there's probably a message board about it somewhere that I can read for validation.  It feels like part of the actual world, something legitimate and decently relevant, not like something 400 people might have stumbled on.  For whatever reason my brain only thinks about stuff like this as related to video, not text.  If I read something awesome, I assume other people have found or will find it, or if I link to it on my blog or in an e-mail, people may check it out.  I assume no one watches videos that people suggest they do, because I don't.

-- I cannot really explain why my brain thinks the previous point makes any sense, especially because I can probably count on two hands the number of times I've ever sent someone the link to something awesome I've read or watched online.  There is perhaps nothing actually more relevant about random text on the Internet than random video on the Internet, it just feels more relevant in my head.

OK.  So these are my built-in biases and assumptions.  I thought writing them down would lead more directly into the actual point of what I wanted to write about, which is why I think people don't pay for videos on the Internet, and how I think they might.  But it seems silly to bury that at the end of a post no one's going to scroll down to read, so I'm going call it Part 2 and make it a separate post.  I should have outlined my thoughts before typing them.  Oops.