GMail makes me feel so good

GMail is the closest I've ever been to email nirvana. Labeling (much like tagging - a la del.icio.us) is more intuitive than foldering emails. The search is fast and sophisticated. I have a system for using my email to Get Things Done, and honestly it is much easier with GMail than it was using a desktop mail program. If I could add a few more things, it would make my GMail life much simpler.

I would like to:

• use keyboard shortcuts for "label" and "remove label."
• define "canned" searches. For example, I want to find all messages having label "a" but not label "b" just by clicking a link.
• use keyboard shortcuts to perform those "canned" searches
• define macros for repetitive operations. For example, I want to remove label "a" and apply label "b" with a menu and/or a keystroke.
• see some statistics - who am I getting the most email from? how much am I writing and to whom?
• group conversations or break up conversations by hand
• find "similar" conversations
• schedule messages to be sent (send myself an alarm later?)
  

The Golden Age of Media Production

A fascinating paper from David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD student, on the economics of P2P file-sharing concludes that it does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading.

The Long Tail: The effect of P2P file-sharing depends on popularity

"The Long Tail" is an argument about the future of media; essentially, it argues that the bottom half of the market for anything at all (book, music, movie, etc) represents a larger potential market than the upper half. I'm afraid that I cannot very well present the argument here... please read Wired: The Long Tail if you haven't done so before.

This paper from David Blackburn argues that file sharing is reducing music sales, but only for the top quarter of musicians! The rest of musicians are actually helped by the exposure. What this means for the future remains to be seen.

I have a theory: I think we live right now in a golden age of media production. Right now, there is a tremendous amount of money available for producing films and CDs. The cost to publish media has dropped to nothing as there are now free publishing sites on the net (OurMedia). Independent film and music makers can publish vast quantities of material as a free download, earning money (if necessary) through advertising. While it's unlikely that these free media can compete one-on-one with major films, it is likely that they will be interesting to someone ("The Long Tail"). It is becoming much easier to find material (DTV, FireAnt, Creative Commons Search). I believe that when this independent media becomes easy to find, it will consume a significant portion of the market. This competition for consumer's time will make major media productions less lucrative. Ultimately, competition from a wide array of sources will hurt major media productions.

Google Maps is Not Enough

Holy cow - Google Maps mashups have been taking off like mad for some time now and I was in the dark. I wish that Google would release Google Earth for Mac already! I stumbled across GoogleMapsMania for the first time a few days ago. In short order, I discovered loads of interesting map mashups.

I think this is very exciting. Location-based information is one of the first steps involved in bringing the virtual back out into the real world. It's a remarkable tool for browsing media by location. All of these mashups show a real demand for customizable, collaborative, social maps. I would love to see Google add support for maps to their Google Groups service, and perhaps to allow creating sets of public or private personal maps. The only other thing I can think to ask for is a Google directory-style browsing interface for looking up businesses (and maybe groups, or people) on the Google maps.

• vlogmap (and check out this beautiful Google Earth vlog tour)
• a map of podcasts
• Flickr photos and more on a map

• Blogs on a google map:
• Germany Blogs
• Education bloggers
• Other bloggers at Frappr
• Blogs in Spanish


• Check out international Google Maps news:
• Spain
• Germany
• France
• China
• Japan

Search for more interesting maps at GoogleMapsMania on Google. Or, if you're feeling creative, build your own Google Map with mapbuilder or YourGMap.

Google Reader Impressions

Google Reader is very very close to the perfect blog reader for me. The problem I have with reading blogs is information overload. It's great to be able to read the web in one place; it's awesome that everyone and anyone can do it; but, if you read everything that you subscribe to then you will be buried beneath it.

This is a fundamental difference between browsing the web and subscribing to it: when you browse, you do it for a limited amount of time and you miss things. When you subscribe, you don't miss anything - the less you read, the more you have to read.

Google Reader solves this nicely by introducing a recommendation system. By default, articles are sorted by relevance. Presumably, this rating is a function of links to the article and the previous items you have "starred" and who knows what-all-else. With this system, I can read for however long I feel like reading and not feel like I'm falling behind.

A few things I would really like to see on Google Reader are:

• statistics: I want to know what I'm reading, what I'm starring, who's posting, etc. from all of my subscriptions.

• time spent/posts read: while I'm reading, I want to know how much time I have been reading...

• search: I don't know what facility is there yet for searching, but this is a major boon to me. I can't even hazard a guess at the number of times I've remembered "something from a a blog" and spent hours on Google trying to find it to no avail.

Finally, wfzimmerman, at the "Unofficial Google Reader Blog" has some very good ideas to improve it:

• I've got to have a way of looking under the hood so I understand why it's giving me the articles that it does. I also want to be able to tweak my preferences to emphasize either my ostensible preferences -- give me more articles related to work -- or my actual preferences -- give me more articles related to Michigan Wolverine football.

• like this. For example, I read "Scoble on the Ray Ozzie memo". I'd have liked to have a memeorandum-like way to connect to highly networked conversations about Scoble on Ozzie.

• Recall. They need to work on adding filters or something to the 'by date' view so that Reader can also be used as a reliable current awareness tool -- something that lets you scan and evaluate every post related to a given topic. Maybe the best way to do this would be to provide an API and let people use it build monitoring tools like this new service from IBM.

• Let's program it in.

Lens: the Unofficial Google Reader Blog: Google Reader's relevance view: Trust but verify?

technorati tags: Google Reader