Sunday, September 10, 2006

Desperate times

Desperate measures:

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

iPast?

As we build toward Tuesday, not everyone’s drinking the Kool Aid. The Guardian, for example, on why the iPod is losing its cool:

The iPod, the digital music player beloved of everyone from Coldplay’s Chris Martin to President George Bush, is in danger of losing its sheen. Sales are declining at an unprecedented rate. Industry experts talk of a ‘backlash’ and of the iPod ‘wilting away before our eyes’. Most disastrously, Apple’s signature pocket device with white earphones may simply have become too common to be cool. [...]

Analysts warn that the iPod has passed its peak. From its launch five years ago its sales graph showed a consistent upward curve, culminating in a period around last Christmas that saw a record 14 million sold. But sales fell to 8.5 million in the following quarter, and down to 8.1 million in the most recent three-month period. Wall Street is reportedly starting to worry that the bubble will burst.

Tomi Ahonen, a technology brand expert and author, said: ‘For the first time the iPod has had two consecutive falls after 17 quarters of growth. If I were the manager, I would be wanting my people to explain what is going on. The iPod is wilting away before our eyes.’

RELATED: 10 reasons not to buy an iPod.

Email’s not going away. Again.

Yesterday Fred Wilson declared email dead and blamed AOL:

Email is for old farts. And [kids] wonder why we use it.

And I blame AOL for that. Not that I think it’s a big deal. They get by just fine with other messaging systems, maybe better than I do with email.

But I am sure that AOL is the reason they don’t use email and never will.

Then today - as I was authoring this post - buzztracker Techmeme linked to his post. Fred is hot! But me, I’m disappointed in him. And not just because his email-is-for-old-farts declaration came on my 52nd birthday! Rather, it’s because I expected better of him.

I buy into Ray Kurzweil’s observations on paradigm shifts, “New communications paradigms...don’t eclipse old paradigms.” TV didn’t kill radio and movies didn’t kill theater and the Internet won’t kill newspapers and IM won’t kill email:

To hear people saying that we’re striving toward real time communications, I think that’s only half true. Many real-time communications [technologies] like the telephone evolved the store and forward capability later, because only half of the people are interested. The person placing the call wants to talk now; the person receiving the call tries to decide is this a good time or should it roll to voicemail…

I think that every communications channel really needs both a real-time and a store and forwarded component and each one grows the other. Email is store and forward and IM is real-time. Why are those two different industries? I think that’s a temporary situation.

That’s Technorati’s Dave Sifry last year at Supernova 2005. That still makes sense to me:

There are times that you want to have access to your mother right now and other times when the last person on earth you want to have access to you right now is your mother!

IM will unquestionably grow because we clutter email with what should better be instant messages. We’ll learn. But email is here to stay.

GoogleEarth/Map updates

GoogleEarth Blog reports a Huge Update to Google Earth and Maps Aerial/Satellite Photos - September 8 and 9:

This update increased high resolution coverage in a number of areas (several states in the US are now all, or nearly, completely covered). Also, new metropolitan areas are covered in a number of states or countries.

He’s got links and examples. The entire state of Georgia now has some form of high res, though the 17th Street Bridge and all of Atlantic Station are missing from Atlanta* and they don’t have the level of imagery required to zoom all the way in to my little town.

Via Thomas Hawk, who points to this satellite view of the Eiffel Tower.

* The photo is of a jet leaving Hartsfield Jackson. It must have been years ago, the new runway’s not there either.

The path FROM 9/11

Five years later, Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’:

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world—no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image—has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

“The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence” that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone “stone cold.” READ ON.

For The Path TO 9/11, see Max Blumenthal here.