The Power of Why
A good reminder that we follow those who inspire us. Favorite quote:
[Martin Luther King] gave the “I have a dream” speech, not the “I have a plan” speech.
Sightings 2011 Photo Calendar is up
Every year I do my best to capture enough images that I can put out a non-embarrassing calendar. This year’s version is now online here.
The price listed is my cost – this is strictly a creative outlet. I never seem to sell any copies online through Lulu, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I do order a bunch myself and give them away as Christmas presents. If you somehow do not end up getting one by that method, feel free to order one.
If you like the images, but a calendar is not your thing, you can access all the images online here for ordering prints or downloading the original for printing at home or a the lab of your choice. Again, there is no markup. All images are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Enjoy!
Nikko Waterfalls
Last weekend I spent a day in Nikko, Japan photographing waterfalls. It was my second trip to Nikko, a beautiful national park and UNESCO World Heritage site located in Tochigi Prefecture, a two hour train ride from Tokyo. You can view all of my images from both trips here. On this trip, I focused on the several waterfalls in the area.
Unfortunately, the weather was not completely cooperative, and I was fighting against cloud cover and intermittent rain throughout the day. It was also pretty cold, and I was largely on foot and on buses througout the day, making it a somewhat grueling trip. But I did some away with some interesting new shots and some fun experiences.
Kegon Falls
One of the most breathtaking waterfalls is Kegon Falls, which drops approximately 97 meters from a cliff face into a pocket canyon and then cascades down. To get to the falls, you take an elevator through the bedrock down to an observation deck on the side of the canyon.
While I was at the observation deck waiting for the fog to lift, I made some new friends. I randomly offered to take a picture for a Japanese family. As it turned out, they are fellow Latter-day Saints. The mother of the family served in the same Sapporo mission as I did but a little earlier and we did not know each other. They live in Yokohama and know the another family I know in that area. Small world.
Yu Falls
After Kegon Falls, I took another bus ride up to near the top of the park to visit Yu Falls (a.k.a. Yutaki). These falls are a long widening cascade that tumbles down a rocky mountainside.
The next stop on the return trip was Takinoue, which means “Top of the Falls.” I walked down the meandering cascade and took this panorama shot.
All the while I was descending the path, I was wondering if it would end in a location with a bus stop or if I would end up hiking back up with all my gear (Nikon D2X, 12-24mm, 18-200mm, 105mm, 50mm, Manfrotto tripod, iPad). Luckily, the path ended at Ryuzu Falls.
Ryuzu Falls
Ryuzu Falls is actually two falls that converge in a single pool. It makes for an interesting effect.
While I was leaving, I spotted a viewpoint on a ravine just below Ryuzu Falls that looked promising. I took a big risk scrambling down the mossy rocks to get there, but it was worth it in the end. Here’s the shot looking back up the ravine under the bridge to to one side of Ryuzu Falls.
My Son is an Eagle Scout
Yesterday evening, our oldest son, Ian, was awarded the Eagle rank in the Boy Scouts of America. This video is a recording of the proceedings.
I couldn’t be prouder of Ian. He is bright, kind, and hardworking, and a continual example to me and others. Look out world, here he comes!
The Awesome Power of Apple
Yesterday I did a blog post over on my Brightcove blog that got above the fold on Techmeme. It was timed with our HTML5 press announcement and it got an insane amount of coverage.
As I have looked into the origins of the traffic, it has become clear that a huge driver of the popularity of the post was the fact that it caught the eye of the global Apple customer tribe. A variety of Mac publications covered the news and linked to the story.
I had observed, but not personally experienced this phenomenon, and it is amazing. What Apple has achieved in terms of brand enthusiasm is just shocking. To have such a passionate, switched on, and articulate group of customers/fans is incredibly powerful.
I did not agree with everything that the Apple crowd had to say in their commentary on the story. Their passion was often over the top. However, I know power when I see it, and what I saw yesterday was powerful.
Talk at Brightcove Video Monetisation Summit in London
Blocking Users Who Block Online Ads
From Ars Technica:
Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn’t see our content. We tested just one way of doing this, but have devised a way to keep it rotating were we to want to permanently implement it. But we don’t. Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on.
via Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.
Everywhere I look, media companies are feeling pushed to the breaking point by their failure to monetize their content online. On the other side, users are feeling pushed to the limit by increasingly desperate online advertising schemes. Check out the following comment from the Ars Technica article:
I admit, after reading this, I felt kind of guilty for adblocking on this site. So I decided to disable Adblock, reload, and see what happened…
1 banner ad, and 1 sidebar ad.
No flashing.
No jiggling.
No audio.
No faux-error messages.
No pop-ups.
No pop-unders.
Good enough for me. Welcome to my whitelist.
/note: you’re off it as soon as the above changes
Clearly there is a lot of tension out there.
I think that 2010 is going to be a year of many fits and starts in monetization strategies. For better or worse, pay walls and authentication walls are coming to news sites and television portals near you. It will be fascinating to see how it all works out.
Long Live Adobe AIR – Macromedia Central RIP
I just came across this article over on TechCrunch:
Adobe Taps PlaySpan To Power Payments For AIR Developer Platform Shibuya.
It reminded me of one of the low points of my Macromedia career, which was presiding over the slow dismantling of Macromedia Central.
Central was the precursor to Adobe AIR, and was just three short years ahead of its time. Here are some URLs that provide background on it:
Rich Web Apps Beyond the Browser: Macromedia Central – an article by Sean Neville
Internet Applications: A New Frontier – a white paper by Kevin Lynch
You will find more than a little resemblance between Central and AIR. Central offered a runtime for offline cross-platform applications with an app store distribution with transactions and revenue sharing handled by the platform provider. This was several years before the iTunes App Store existed, and was cobbled together with payment technology provided in partnership with Yahoo.
The problem was that it was ahead of it’s time on every dimension. Flash was not powerful enough to build high performance apps. Creating apps with Flash was too hard. The payment technologies of the day were too limited and brittle. And the developer community was not conditioned to expect to pay big distribution royalties on their apps. We had to shut it down while we retooled and re-conceived the Flash Platform, and the end of life process is never a lot of fun.
AIR is fairing much better because all of the above problems have been solved. But it’s important to remember that AIR has been built over the grave of Central. Long live AIR. Central RIP.
In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.
“many phones will not support HTML5 for 7+ years”
via In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.
Richard Wong nails it in this article on mobile platform fragmentation. We’re certainly seeing this at my company, but the good news is that we’re in a position to make money by helping customers deal with the complexity of a fractured mobile world.
Extensions are the primary reason I choose to to continue to use Firefox over Chrome. Chrome doesn’t support many of the extensions that get me through the day. It also seems to be a little more CPU heavy and a little less stable on the Mac than Firefox. Now comes this article from TechCrunch:
Chrome Is Rapidly Approaching Firefox In Extension Numbers.
If the extension picture evens out, as this article suggests is happening, and if the Mac version of Chrome stabilizes a little more, I may be tempted to switch. I’d love to hear from my friends at Mozilla what their take is on the situation.
