XBox 360 Games: Now Created by You

The "user generated media" trend is, in the Internet space, just the latest name for one small aspect of the "personal computer" revolution in an increasingly connected computing environment (or at least, the empowerment thereby afforded; remember the DTP revolution?) - the whole idea is to enable you to make and run software. Only natural that this should be fractal (i.e. running software that lets you make software...)

For example, Microsoft is now enabling user-created Xbox 360 Games - a first for a major console (AFAIK).

And its a good example of why "general" computing environments (hiccups aside) will beat application specific ones - flexiblity of content deployment.

I'm not sure I was clear with the idea in my Flash Player 9 posts - but that idea is that the "edges" will be become more and more general (data driven, generic "content" runtimes) while specificity gets pushed to the core. The browser is one instance of this, but its not clear if it will be the only (or even "final") version.

Remember, Microsoft doesn't make products for end users...

Beside the (floating) point

Nice article that puts into "laymen"-esque terms one of the computational idiosyncrancies of binary arithmetic.

I've written about some of the fun you can have exploiting floating point formats in the past, but didn't delve as deeply (or clearly) into the precision issues as I might have liked - brevity is NOT something I'm known for :)

I'd suggest that numbers are like strings: given fixed precision, you should deal with them in their "native" base/format.

AOL Video Portal and then some...

In beta, and a review - its got some very nice, high quality content.

And proving that no good deed goes unpunished: oops (and then some)... the idea was to provide the search research community access to significant data they might not otherwise have had - a good goal - and heartfelt apologies have been issued for the privacy snafu.

About Time (Warner): AOL Goes Free

Time Warner announced its earning today.... did pretty well.

Oh, and some big News: AOL software and services are now free.

One the positive consquences (for consumers :)) of our increasingly connected computing world: artificial value propositions quickly erode when distribution is ungated. You can fight it, or you can embrace it.

Just ask the RIAA.

Google Product Strategy?

Heh. From ValleyWag (following articles from Business Week and the NY Times)...

Still, while funny (and satisfying, perhaps :P) there's some small unfairness - how many new products have overtaken industry leaders in recent years? Especially when those products may have been category defining (Yahoo finance, AIM, etc.).

Perhaps the lesson is deeper - you can't win by following... cloning market leaders doesn't seem like much of a strategy.

The Long Tail, now in book form plus the Wall Street Journal bites back

I'd mentioned it before its release, but Chris Anderson's new book, the Long Tail, is out now. Its a good read - though perhaps a little long on hyperbole and projection, and a little short on connecting to business.

There's an somewhat not unfairly critical article of Chris Anderson's book from Lee Gomes, of the Wall Street Journal. He contends that the long tail is, perhaps, a bit of an industry myth, much like "Internet Time" and other Bubble economy fun.

For example (from the article):

• In the category of online music, services like Ecast, Rhapsody, are finding that 12% to 22% of songs never get played, and another 19% (or so) only get one or two plays.
• Bloglines., which has 1.2M “real” blogs (i.e. not machine generated) in its catalog finds that 10% of blogs are 88% of its subscriptions, while 35% have no subscriptions at all.
• Most condemningly, for Amazon (the quintissential "long tail" company) 2.7% of purchases account for 75% of its revenue.
• And we see even with search that 75% of user click-thrus resolve to just the top 100,000 domains (of about 50M or so).

Boy, that all sounds like the Pareto priniciple in action to me (AKA the 80/20 rule).

So what's up with that?

As Lee Gomes points out, monetization, if anything, seems to be even MORE crystalized along the 80/20 rule axis; only a few companies are really deriving financial benefit as "pure" plays.

Nevertheless, creating engagement, I'll argue, requires serving fragmentation (even if its only percieved) - and ultimately, the money follows that.