Interesting piece from NYT about the MGM case against Grokster. Ongoing info from OutragedModerates.

Oozing with the perpetual ear candy thrust upon us by greedy record companies who think the Internet is for gamerz, if you’re like me, you’re always on the hunt for a unique new sound that excites you and makes you believe in the power of music once again. Well, I have wonderful news. I invite you to spend some time with New Zealand-based Wing.

You know, I always loved those old ABBA tunes. We had an ABBA 8-track when I was a kid. I listened to it a lot. Wing did too.

(Thanks: Xeni)

This is the first time I’ve ever blogged from my Treo. Not yet sure if I’ll make it a habit.

I was in a serious collision today. No one was hurt but fama PR colleague and pal Kyla K totaled her car. We were returning from a nice sushi lunch (as seems typical for these places around here, great sushi, awful service.) She t-boned a couple in a Volvo hard enough to make me wonder why the woman in the passenger side was completely unhurt. We hit them HARD.. textbook t-bone, our nose right into their b-pillar. We were each going about 35, so it really was a good one – or, as we Mainers say, “a doozy!” I still have that nitrogen-pyrotechnic airbag stonk in my nose. I smacked up my legs a little but just bruises, nothing bad. The people we hit were very nice and gracious.

It was Kyla’s first crash! I do wish I’d had my camera, it could have gone in her life scrapbook. It’d be sorta like “Here’s my first tooth … that was me on my first day of school … here’s Biff, my first boyfriend.. this is my first car… oh, this was my first accident!” Friends would say, “awwww, so cuuute! what a nice one! look how the car juice is sprayed all over the intersection! so impressive for your first time! you’re all grown up, gurl…”

Anyway, yeah, car accidents suck and are inconvenient. I’ve been through a lot of them – some teentsy fender benders and some very serious. It’s tempting, especially for those of us who wince every time we think we see a scratch on our car, to get bogged down in the grit and hassle and miss the important part – the reminder of how fragile and magical life is and how fucking lucky we are in those instants. How everything can change in a flash.

But for some unseeable tiny decision somewhere deep in the hum of the city – a mother bringing her kids home from school and deciding to grab a cup of coffee before heading over the bridge; a teenager forgetting her purse and turning the car around to go get it; a child spilling his milk and dad gruffly pulling the minivan over to clean up the mess…. never knowing. But for the grace of the Cosmos, we could have met them at that intersection – in their car, at their angle, at their speed. Or, I might have decided to grab a takeout menu from the restaurant on the way out… or pondered an extra moment on how shitty a tip to give … just enough to knock our timing off by a second or two. And then, who knows what kind of tragedy I might be writing about tonight, if I were writing at all.

You’ll remember a little over a week ago, after the last big storm we had here, that I mentioned seeing a robin, etc. etc. Well, my brother keenly suggested this robin may have been drunk, or misguided. Well, I have good news – yesterday I was outside working on my car and I saw at least three more – this following a few inches of slush we got Saturday. So, this is it, really this time. Now, those of you who pick on me about this – it does not mean we’ve seen the last snowflake, but the folk wisdom is that spring has sprung and we’ve seen the end of the winter cold and the snowstorms.

In 1999, my friend Jeff Richard and I started a company called BrainPaste. The product was a neat little software toolbar that sat at the bottom of your Internet Explorer window, learned about your interests and likes over time, and helped you create your own personal portal. e.g. if you got a lot of Wal-Mart stock quotes, it would remember that and keep that information closer at hand (you’d have your own personal BrainPaste.com page that had up to the minute information based on your expressed interests.) All of this was done with a high regard for privacy and basically it was a neat consumer tool that filled a usability need not yet filled.

Now, where it got very cool was in some of the back-end e-commerce stuff we could do. We were the first to use a method called “dynamic customer acquisition” which Kevin Maney wrote about in a USA Today article a few months after we kicked off. We were able to ascertain what products a consumer was considering purchasing, and present them with a competing offer in real-time, and even link them over to that item. So, if they were at Amazon.com looking at the new Nebula 2005 collection, we could say to Barnes & Noble in the background, “hey, I’ve got this guy here, I won’t tell you who he is, but he spent $2500 online in the last 9 months, he’s 35, blah blah blah – how much to link him over to you for this purchase?” We could use a portion of that referral to incent the buyer to click. “hey dude, i’ll give you $10 off that book if you get it HERE”. (No, not pop-ups, we would just change the content of the toolbar to make the offer.)

We eventually sold the company (and its four pending patents) off to a company called R3Media. R3Media had raised about $25M or so from folks like CMGi and Exodus. I became their VP communications for about 9 months – approximately the amount of time it took them to spend the $25M on cocaine and hookers, and my four-month tab at the Westin Century Plaza (I still have thousands of Starwood points from this.) They certainly didn’t spend it on legal fees because they allowed the pending patents to lapse, despite authoring four regular patent applications in support of them. Oh well.

Over the years, companies like WhenU and Claria have been doing similar stuff but not in an identical way.

The reason this is especially relevant now is because, as Jeff pointed out to me on IM overnight, Google is, with the “autolinks” feature of their new Google Toolbar 3, doing exactly what we were doing. They are mining the URLs and then linking the URLs to their partners. Their business method seems clumsy – they are almost “sneaking” the feature in – but their technical approach is the same as ours. Now, Google has the reach to make this work. I hope they clean up their business practices a bit, though, because it’s not going to be well-received in its current form. Links should not be automatically inserted. A customer should be given competing alternatives and should, when they click, get what they expected and wanted.

I am also going to dig out our patent applications and source code and release it into the public domain so anyone who wishes to do so can go to town with the stuff. Ever used IBM Sash? I didn’t think so.

There once lived a prince.

Since birth, he had never said a word, so everyone thought he was a mute. One night when he was 13, the prince was having soup for dinner. After a spoonful, he suddenly stopped and said, “The soup is too salty!”

Everyone was in shock. They asked, “Why haven’t you said anything before?”

The prince replied, “Well, everything’s been perfect until now!”

Well, I had a great time, learned more than I ever thought I could in a weekend. Even took a few pictures. I haven’t had much of a chance to sift through them and figure out which ones to clean up and share, and which ones to throw away forever (lest someone see). But, I did put a small handful online here if you want to take a look. Nighty night.

I am very, very psyched to be off to New York City tomorrow afternoon for a two-day fashion photography workshop directed by ultra-talented photographers Richard Warren and Chung Lee. It’s a small group of us amateurs learning from them for two days. It’ll be partial learning-by-watching but a large part of it is active – i.e. we will also be shooting. Sixteen models, a group of talented makeup artists, and gorgeous studio space (the 6500-square foot Proda Studios) will make for some fun. I’m hoping to learn a lot, get some nice work added to my portfolio, and return home a better photographer. I’m having lots of fun with this photography thing, but hell, as hobbies for thirtysomethings go, it’s relatively cheap…

Obviously I’ll share some images upon my return…. stay tuned.

[Update: it was awesome - here's my “shot” at some fashion photography.]

My grandmother always used to say that if you saw a robin around the time of a big winter storm, that that was the last storm of the season. She called it the “robin storm”. Well, I was driving into work this morning after clearing a foot of snow from on and around my car, and I saw a robin fluttering around in a snow-covered tree. I really wish I’d had my camera.

This might fall into the category with Punxsutawney Phil – although I guess I’d argue there’s a little more science behind the robin theory than the groundhog-seeing-his-shadow theory.

So, this is the Robin Storm! Get ready for Spring. This is also good because I’ll be able to get out and get some exercise and shed my mammalian winter blubber.