Robert Ames (.com!)

For My Canadian Frisbee Friends…

Water Consumption in Canada During 2010 Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game.

Complexities of Airline Pricing

If the airline charges $1 per ticket of course the plane will fill, but the total revenue of $150 barely pays for an hour of a pilot’s salary. If they charge $1000 a ticket then if they could fill the plane they’d make a fortune, but only a small number of people are willing to fly at that price, so again they can’t equal the fixed costs of flying a plane. But if the airline can make those who are willing to pay it pay $1000, and others pay $800, and others $500, maybe down to $100 or so, then the sum total over all passengers is sufficient to pay for the fixed costs. In fact, some estimates put the incremental cost of flying a single passenger as low as $30 (for the meal and baggage and ticket handling), so that once the airline has committed to flying the plane it is in their interest to sell a ticket for $30 rather than let a seat go empty. But they must keep those who can pay more from buying their ticket at low prices, a tough balancing act.

[source…]

The whole paper is worth reading if you’re that kind of dork. I knew things were complicated but I didn’t realize just how complicated.

Pivot Tables - They fix everything. #protip

Youth is not a time of life…

Youth is not a time of life it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every beings heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infiniteso long are you young.

When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!

—Douglas MacArthur

Amazon is Evil (in a good way). Wait a year and don’t buy something: they’ll re-recommend it to you around the same time next year. Evil.

It’s been snowing constantly in Dallas since before 7-8am, forecasted to continue until 4am. 4”+ on roofs. Hopefully we avoid ice tomorrow.

Playing matchmaker today. Java, .NET, internal, external, old co-workers, new co-workers… Good luck everybody!

Dynamics of Internet Video Publishing

My day-to-day job deals with video on the internet. Working with video has encouraged me to seek out and use a bunch of video-sharing sites to make sure our own site(s) are working, see how other people are doing the similar things, get ideas for features, feature parity and a whole host of other reasons.

I’ve currently got video up on video.yahoo.com, YouTube, and Facebook. Missing from this list are ~~Vimeo~~ / Break, ~~Flickr~~ (just uploaded some some short videos to collect a few more data points) and I’m sure a few others.

There are a lot of ways to slice and dice online video, notably absent from my list of sites is Hulu because I am not a big media company. Facebook (for example) doesn’t tend to attract professionally produced videos because it doesn’t have as much history as a site for public videos as much as it does for private videos. YouTube is clearly dominating the “wants everybody to see it” space as well as pirate copies of last night’s funny TV clips.

My general use of online video has been to post classical guitar video clips for my own motivation of learning and improving. That makes me an “inconsistent episodic publisher” … in between the person uploading video from last night’s party and Mr. Universal Studios ticking the “internet” checkbox on their distribution channel list.

In my opinion, the future of what we now call television is going to start from “inconsistent episodic publishers”. Look at StrongBad, “It’s Amazing”, ShitMyDadSays, Cheeseburger, FailBlog, etc. and that includes video. Anybody can be entertaining once or twice, but people who consistently entertain attract an audience, and an audience (can) attract money.

Bringing things back around to video on the internet- I as a publisher get the most out of sites that give me the most feedback from my audience. Take a look at this “Video Insights / Discovery” panel from YouTube:

Contrast this with the information that I got from video.yahoo.com:

…apart from the fact that I don’t have any ratings, there’s no histogram breakdown and the only other statistic that I get is “view count”. Thanks for nothing. The other video sites (including Facebook) aren’t much better, although I would have to think that Flickr’s Pro stats would start to give you some other breakdowns.

As a publisher, given the choice between “300 views” and “Your video just went viral on mobile phones in Canada”, I’m picking option “B” please, with an extra helping of ratings breakdowns and views over time.

This is predicated on having the basics working right (video transcodes, quickly, plays back, consistently, little to no downtime, etc), which is challenging in its own right. Since we’re past the point of “the basics have to work”, if you’re planning on doing stuff with video, make real sure you have a good statistics package on the backend or the ability to provide statistics back to publishers. The super-small-timers won’t care but the medium-to-large-timers will definitely appreciate it.

The wild-card in all this to me is Facebook / “Social Media”. If we cede the point that “YouTube has the data that publishers want”, we miss out on the fact that Facebook (or Twitter or Orkut / whatever) provides you with a built-in audience of people who likely want to watch your video.

What I see as the killer combo is posting YouTube videos to Facebook because you get all the distribution and social tools (sharing, fans, comments, etc) from Facebook, but the rich viewing statistics from YouTube.

The other video sites each might have some specialty aspect that they’re better at than others, but for episodic publishers nothing beats the audience stats that YouTube can provide.

For the individual / family video publisher, it seems that Facebook video is the way to go because you get the appropriate privacy controls and comments, and you generally aren’t concerned with demographics / statistics. You could get most of the way there by adding a checkbox after viewing saying: “Joe Smith watched this video [save]” … think of it like the “Like” button but basically providing a way for me as the poster to say: “@Joe Smith should watch this video” and keeping track of who has and hasn’t seen it yet.

Bathroom Tile #ProTip - Smooth tiles allow suction cups. Non-Smooth? No suction cups. Won’t you please think of the suction cups?

One of the click and clack brothers is loaded on the day after Christmas show: http://www.cartalk.com/ct/review/show.jsp?showid=200952