Yahoo’s new brand strategy feels all wrong. Repurposing content? What will differentiate this from any other aggregating website?

This is all based on the faux idea that this content is somehow “theirs”, because they “own” Flickr etc. But they don’t (the users do), and it’s not (it’s out there in RSS and other formats). I could duplicate their brand platforms in an afternoon (ok, a few weeks of work perhaps), and so can anyone else. You don’t build a destination on aggregation. Aggregation without value add is not a viable strategy.

Instead, Yahoo should build more tools to let people easily create and aggregate content themselves. I’m pretty sure that this initiative will fade away within a year and will mean more opportunity cost incurred for Yahoo.

Another note on editing interviews: with English interviews, I can increase the playback speed to 1.5, in Spanish interviews (my Spanish isn’t as good), I can’t, I need to play things at speed 1.0 to understand everything.

The 5 smallest countries in the world. Vatican City is the size of a golf course. I always felt one of the reasons the Catolics became so powerful is that they pulled off starting their own country (in 1929, in a deal with Mussolini). What other religion can say that?

Of course, their first pull to power was to act as a multinational and own property worldwide. That tends to make organizations long-lasting (I have this plan for a whole book on why organizations/ideas become long-lasting or not, and the catholic church would be a great case study). But then they pulled of the country. Pay yourself taxes. Make your own laws. Plus, all power in the country is centralized in a dictator (the pope has legislative, executive and judiciary power). It’s brilliant.

While editing the interviews for the Colombia Migration Project, I’ve learnt a few simple things about editing. Even when you simply string a bunch of statements together (the simplest form of editing), the last statement in the interview (the one before the closing credits) has a kind of extra, lingering power, just because it’s the last. I guess because that’s when the new stuff stops, it kind of frames everything that came before. The viewer takes that last statement and reviews everything that came before and perhaps that’s when they store it in their memory, I don’t know. In any case, there’s power there. So if you choose that last bit wisely you can give an extra twist or meaning to the interview.

A PHP Amazon S3 class.

Update: This one looks even better, can handle large uploads without putting everything in memory, and handles Amazon’s other services too.

I plugged in my iPod for the first time in a while and the newest iTunes is really getting better.

Still no links back to podcasters though. Damn Apple!

Sull follows up with his personal history of videoblogging.

I like personal histories. At least there’s not the presumption of being *the* history, it’s just a personal account. And by reading various ones you can kind of make an infered overal history. I encourage others to chime in too.