Paul Mawhinney spent his entire life collecting LPs.  His love for music led him to create the world's largest record collection.  Now legally blind, Mawhinney is selling the entire collection (estimated to be worth $50M) at a bargain price of $3M...but no one has made a serious offer.  This short film asks whether carrying ten-thousand digital songs in your pocket is progress or a sign that quality and novelty have been discarded in favor of convenience.


The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

Google has hundreds of products in alpha or beta mode, and occasionally they let the public test some out. Australia was chosen as a testing ground for a new do-it-yourself marketing tool that helps SMEs understand the online marketing space and pay-per-click strategies. Just because you don't live near koala bears should not preclude you from trying this great tool.  Naturally, it's designed to get you to sign up for ad-words, but it's a great educational tool/primer on digital marketing.

This is brilliant. Holton Sentivan and Gury conjured a self-promotional site that lets you design your very own pharma ad in less than 1 minute. Here's my blockbuster:

(Facebook blocks embedded videos, if nothing shows above, click on original post to view)

Let me take you on a trip down memory lane. Hit play then click the link below the player for an interactive time capsule of internet mems.

Internet Mems
Be sure to zoom in or check out the flipbook to see more detail.

Facebook VP of Technical Operations, Jonathan Heiliger, talk in this video about balancing innovation and building a stable infrastructure for rapidly growing userbase. 

...sometimes we air to aggressively on the side of innovation and iteration and put things out on the site in perhaps a small quantity that may break the site or cause the site to slow temporarily and other times we air on the side conservatism, of not releasing new functionality or new feature, and that then delays the sort of user gratification of having that feature or fixing that bug.

It's part of CNET's excellent CIO Sessions, check out all the videos here.  They don't go too dive too far down the IT stack, however they do a great job of framing many of the issues that CIOs are struggling with.

Must see presentation on running a marathon.  If you cannot see the embedded slideshow, click here.

By the time I finish this talk, everyone here will want to run a marathon

view presentation (tags: san francisco aids marat... the wall pasta glycogen)

Double linking an excellent post today from Open... about Copyright. Recently Google's top Copyright consultant closed his blog. William Patry signs off with an acerbic characterization of the state of copyright and blogs. Click through for a sumamry on Open... or go right to Patry's post.


Here's a snippit,which I believe is still ok to do under the "fair use" doctrine (another blogger makes a good case for why):

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

Image by Erik J. Hells