the tweney review

Compare the searches for “tiananmen” on regular Google and on Google China. (via Dave Farber)

Chronicles of Narnia is a pretty good movie, with some truly beautiful visual effects (especially those to do with snow, fur, and talking animals). But Tilda Swinton as the White Witch is an awesome villain, maybe one of the greats — right up there with Darth Vader and Khan. I was cheering for her to win. Aslan who? Give me a spiffy Art Nouveau-inspired ice castle and a chariot drawn by polar bears over medieval tents and pennants any day. (more pictures)

When you install iTunes for Windows, it defaults to the setting that automatically keeps your iPod in sync with your iTunes library. That means if your computer doesn’t have much music on it, and you plug in an iPod that you’d topped off with music from another computer, all the music on your iPod will get wiped out. Worse, there’s no way to change this behavior without first plugging in an iPod. Catch-22. Stupid, stupid product design.

Steve Jobs: tightfisted rich bastard? Wired News: Jobs vs. Gates: Who’s the Star?

I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s album Chavez Ravine for about half a year now. It’s an amazing album — an impressionistic, lively, even danceable historical tour through the Chavez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles — a predominantly Mexican neighborhood that was bulldozed in the 1950s to make room for Dodger Stadium. If you only know Cooder through his work producing The Buena Vista Social Club, this album is a revalation — it spans everything from UFOs to hepcats to the McCarthy hearings, and Cooder does a great job bringing the various characters and issues to life through his music.

Listening to it this morning, I just made a connection: on one track, there’s the voice of a man speaking about how he got taken down by the anticommunists in the 1950s. Turns out this man is Frank Wilkinson, an early advocate for affordable housing, who died earlier this month. There’s a nice Wikinson obituary on NPR. After Wilkinson refused to state whether he’d been a member of the communist party, he was suspended from his job. Wilkinson took his fight to the Supreme Court and spent the rest of his life being an ardent champion of free speech. Amazing to realize that it’s actually his voice there in the tune “Don’t Call Me Red.”

More Cooder trivia: Ry Cooder once played banjo for Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys.

Here’s a good review of Chavez Ravine:
Real Roots Music / ‘The Buena Vista guy’ Ry Cooder goes home to re-create a lost moment in time

[Cooder's] answer is this complex series of mood pieces, story songs and magical-realist vignettes — cool cats on the make, a Chinese laundryman doing business in a Mexican neighborhood, young Latino boxers aspiring to greatness at the Olympic auditorium, sailors hired to beat up pachucos, maniacal developers planning to seize desirable real estate, anticommunist politicians persecuting utopian civil servants, troubadours waxing nostalgic about the old barrios, a “space vato” in a UFO observing it all and the land itself offering a final prayer in the form of a Central American “Cloud Forest Poem.

Set among the servants and masters in a huge, old Irish castle during World War II, this is a masterfully-written, very modern, short novel (published 1945) with beautiful, restrained description and pitch-perfect dialogue. There’s very little interiority–you almost never learn what the characters actually think, and some of the descriptions are even hedged, as if conditional or uncertain. But for all that writerly style, it’s also a charming, funny, and surprisingly touching love story. **** 1/2

Seven years ago, I started a company called Utipia with two other people: a fellow journalist, and a talented developer who happened to be my brother. We wrote a business plan, raised some money from friends and family, incorporated, and built a working demo to show how our clever content could be cleverly delivered to the web sites of our nonexistent partners.

Unfortunately, we knew next to nothing about business. Probably our biggest mistake was not getting somebody on board, right away, who had experience starting and running a small company. Our second biggest mistake was trying to start a content company just as the dot-com market was imploding. We burned through half of our seed funding, couldn’t raise any more money, and couldn’t get any traction in the increasingly cautious market of 2000. Bad timing! We also wasted a lot of time and money on nonessential “accoutrements” of doing business in Silicon Valley: a Delaware incorporation, a polished business plan that used all the right buzzwords, a splashy demo at Demo. All bad moves. So, after about a year of suffering, we folded it up and returned what was left of the money to our investors. I returned to consulting and journalism, sadder but wiser about the ways of business.

Now it looks like Dan Gillmor has learned a similar lesson. He had higher-profile backers than Utipia did, he had an experienced business partner, and to his credit it looks like he was able to attract a significant (if smallish) audience to his site. But he made a lot of the same mistakes we did with Utipia. Among those mistakes: Relying too much on big-name partnerships that never materialized. Getting distracted from the project’s central mission. Believing that covering business as a journalist makes you qualified to run a business. And, trying to hang on to your identity as a writer and journalist while simultaneously wearing the hat of an entrepreneur.

I wish Dan well. As for myself, I know that if I ever start a company again, I will do a few things differently. I will stay focused on a more manageable goal, expanding the scope of the mission only once we have solid enough footing to support that. I won’t incorporate unless it’s absolutely necessary (and if it is, I’ll do it myself, without engaging expensive lawyers if at all possible). I’ll focus on generating revenue — any revenue — from day one, rather than placing all my bets on partnerships that may not materialize. And I’ll bring in more expert business help earlier on.

As Esther Dyson says, “Always make new mistakes.” Actually, I prefer Samuel Beckett’s formulation: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community | Bayosphere

My story on the Sony Reader and the e-book market is the lead story on Wired News this morning. Check it out!

Wired News: Screening the Latest Bestseller

Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions.

Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wondering whether the Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.

Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book (5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it’s the 3.5-by-4.8-inch display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.

History, from the kingdom of Akkad all the way to Earl Scruggs: Banjo Ancestors: The Lutes of West Africa, By Shlomo Pestcoe

In case you were wondering what the life of a freelancer is like, here’s John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice. (Note that by “Utterly Useless” he actually means “Incredibly Long-Winded.”)