Economics, live video, and The World Economic Forum at Davos

I am deeply interested in Economics, for many years now I have been researching and thinking about a Networked Theory of Economics, a goal of mine for 2008 is to write and publish my book on that topic (ideally selling it as well so it reaches a wide audience).

So at this time I am very interested in what is happening this week in Davos, Switzerland. This year, in a fairly radical move towards openness, The World Economic Forum has a YouTube channel where they are posting many videos from the press events as well as interviews with attendees and leaders at Davos. Davos has also given a number of leading bloggers full access (though some sessions are off the record, quite a few portions of the conference are on the record). Robert Scoble is wandering through Davos with his cameraphone, frequently streaming live to the web via Qik. Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington among others are also in attendance and posting about their experiences as they happen.

As I wrote this, Robert streamed live, I jumped into the live chat. Yup, we live in science fictional times.

I am up late here in San Francisco, as I go to sleep soon, the 2300+ participants at Davos will go on about their day, when I wake up they will likely be almost about to eat dinner and heading to parties (apparently tomorrow Google is having a big party). And I know that because minutes ago I watched live video from and of my friends at the forum, streamed live across the Internet. Of course that same video started by Robert observing the President of Israel recording two videos for YouTube, which are also now likely live on the web as I write this.

Truly this is amazing stuff. When I was growing up, in the 80’s and 90’s CNN and cable news was just getting started, though my family didn’t even own a TV, the impact of live news around the clock was just starting to have an impact on the globe. But the rest of the world was still fairly far away, phone calls cost money - especially overseas calls, and data rates were measured in baud (and computers showed mostly only text and very simple graphics - though that changed rapidly as I was in high school in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Now Robert’s cell phone on which he was recording and streaming live video has more computational power, I’m fairly sure, than the computers I used throughout high school and even into college. He almost certainly has multiple GB’s of storage and very rapid data connections to the web (3G I assume), a screen on his phone that is far denser than the screens we used then - and a camera that records at resolutions unheard of back then - heck nearly unheard of not all that many years ago.

And though Robert notes that not that many bloggers are at Davos this year, the impact of YouTube and bloggers is to help crack open in a fairly major way a gathering that had for years been shrouded mostly in secrecy into a far more open event. Still with a lot of secrecy and I’m sure a lot of security - but also impressively interested in engaging with the world.

In watching the video which I have embedded above, I was also struck by how interesting the group of co-chairs of the forum are - world leaders past and (near)present along side business leaders from across the globe - leaders who were not just white, anglo saxon males - but leaders of large and yes powerful companies from across the globe.

All speaking, at least in this press conference in English, and all seemingly comfortable with their roles, with each other, and for the most part with the press (though the press were for the most part mostly interested in talking to Tony Blair). Personally I was most interested in everyone else on the panel except Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger. I am encouraged by the engagement of the leaders of some of the largest companies in the world in the issues which face us as a globe.

My views on Economics, in the most simple form, is that all economics can be modeled as a network over time. What this means is that value is not fixed, not inherent but deeply and tightly embedded in the economic networks we create and participate within. I have to do more and deeper research and modeling, but in general I would thus be deeply opposed to protectionist steps - and also deeply suspicious of attempts to economically isolate countries (or other entities).

At MeshForum we talk about many types of networks and especially about interdisciplinary approaches to networks. The World Economic Forum at Davos is a prime example of the power of social networks - and the vital importance, even for the very “important and/or famous” of face-to-face interactions, of shared meals and joint experiences. But the spectacle of and around Davos also highlights that there is much more going on, there are other factors - new media old and new, political networks both within countries and globally such as the UN, economic networks both within corporations and between corporations, and newer, creative networks such as the Project(red) campaign which connects individual customers, brands, an NGO of the UN, and millions of HIV patients thoughout the world. $57 million dollars is, perhaps, a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of AIDS to Africa and the world, or to the revenues of the corporate sponsors of the project, but it is also enough to have had a very real and dramatic impact on tens of thousands of our fellow humans who were suffering and now have some measure of hope.

As I live and work here in the US, in this very expensive and deeply futuristic place called Silicon Valley, even here in San Francisco which has at least a small measure of history and culture as well, it is well worth remembering how large and diverse and complex our planet is.

And to recall how small are the links which connect us all. My friends are now there at Davos hanging out, meeting, and sharing meals with some of the people who quite literally lead this world - the leaders of large corporations, the organizers of major efforts to save lives (as well as, less fortunately some of the leaders whose decisions cost lives), and the leaders of many governments (or past leaders).

They say that we, all humans, are connected by just a few steps, but also at far too many times it seems that even in our own countries, within our own cities we exist and live in different worlds. In 2008, however, I see many signs that our common links, our common, global interests are starting to be made clearer and that technology is, in part, helping more people reach out to each other - and to engage and perhaps see the “other” as also human, also worthy of respect and engagement with - even and perhaps particularly when we do not entirely agree.

Syncing iPod on Two Computers

[this is a shortened version of my original post, that post was lost while trying to post it]

I can sync my iPod to BOTH my Vista laptop and my old XP laptop (which is now a Parallel’s virtual machine on my mac desktop).

How did I do this?

Bonus Tip: If you have playlists which depend on DATE ADDED, do a select all on the tracks in that playlist, then right click, select “get info” and add label to the Grouping ID3 tag. Then rewrite those smartplaylists to work on the Grouping ID3 tag instead of date added (assuming that you are say tracking all the music you added in 2005, not something like “music I added this past week)

Step 1. Copy files from the old computer to the new system. In my case 3/4 of my 120+ GB library was already on an external drive (so it was just a matter of getting the drive letter the same on my Vista system), but the other files I had to move over. Note: Vista does not allow you to create C:Documents and Settings which was the root of the path to user folders on XP, instead you have to use C:/Users/username/Music.

Then select Export Library inside of iTunes. Save this XML file and copy it to the new computer as well (I put it on my external drive).

Step 2.  On the new computer navigate to the iTunes folder.

Rename the file “iTunes Music Library.xml” (I add the date to the file name).

Copy the .itl file (if you want to recover). [if extensions are not showing, change that view option for this folder, will make life easier for you]

Open the .itl file with wordpad (NOT Word). It is a binary file. Select all the contents (control^a) and then delete them. Save the file (you should now have a 0 byte .itl file).

Copy the exported XML file from your old computer to the iTunes directory, rename it to “iTunes Music Library.xml”.

Open it in WordPad (again NOT Word).

Now come the tricky, detail orientated bit. Look for the file paths which point to your old file locations. Search and replace them with the new path. Make sure you get this exactly right - no extra spaces, no missing /, nothing mispelled.

Note, all the above assumes your new computer’s iTunes is a fresh, unused installation - i.e. you don’t already have any content on the new machine. If you do, you will have to first export that data and instead of copying one file with the other, you will have to combine them - which is a much trickier task - not impossible, just tricky as the file has two main sections - individual track details and playlist details and you have to merge them. I have not tested this and I suspect in some cases you might also have to watch for overlapping “unique” ID’s for tracks.

Step 3.  With all external drives attached and with the correct drive letters, open up iTunes. It will complain that the .itl file is corrupt and will rebuild it. When this completes (may take some time on a large collection), you will have iTunes with all of your old playlists, play counts, and ratings in place.

Note: this does overwrite the “Date Added” field with the time you do this import. This means that as I noted above, any playlists which depended on the date added field may now be broken.  Your tracks, however, will be in the same order as before (I kept my in date added descending order usually). If you do the trick I noted, you should have the same functionality as before.

The result is you can plug in your iPod and it will sync with your new computer without a whisper of a complaint. You will, however, have to activate your new computer with the iTunes music store before syncing any protected conten (or playing it).

I have not tested this extensively. I assume that over time if the two installations of iTunes change, each time you plug in your iPod it will “sync” with the current machine’s iTunes, but will not add files it holds not present on that machine (i.e. a podcast I download on one machine) and I’m not sure how changes to play/skip counts will be tracked.

I am also working with two Windows machines - not sure if the same solution would work across Mac & PC (since the underlying file system of the iPod might be different).

Simple features missing from iTunes

I use itunes - abuse it is perhaps the more accurate description.

But there are some really simple features MISSING from iTunes. Features which have been missing in every version of iTunes and which I have utterly no clue as to why they have not been added and why these bugs (for I think these really are bugs) have not been corrects.

Feature One: Those helpful “!” symbols showing tracks which have problems, usually meaning iTunes can’t find the file, but iTunes DOES NOT LET YOU SORT BY THAT COLUMN. Absolutely unforgivably obnoxious and beyond annoying. Every other column allows for some type of sorting (though in many cases very poorly) but this first and vital column does not.

Feature Two: There is no way to display in the main screen WHERE YOUR FILES ARE. This means, no way to SORT BY WHERE THE FILES ACTUALLY ARE. i.e. “sort and then find all the tracks which are on your external drive”. Perhaps this is a mac vs. pc thing, but I REALLY want a way to find all the tracks which are on my f: drive (and not my main internal c: drive).

Feature Three: if iTunes loses track of your files (say that f: drive is not connected), iTunes then cannot recover if you plug in the missing drive, you have to correct the files, by hand, selecting “get info” on each track with a missing file (which is then usually found without a problem).

Note: sometimes closing iTunes and restarting it will fix this problem, but that is beyond clunky

Feature Four: There is no, at least that I have found, way to export all of your play history, playlists, and ratings so you can, for example, import that data into another installation of iTunes on, for example, your new laptop. You can, of course, move those files (see above use of external hard drive), but will have to recreate your playlists - and more vitally - your play histories, skip history, ratings, history of which podcasts you have already downloaded etc.

I really need a solution to this last missing feature. Currently I have THREE installations of iTunes. One on my mac (mostly totally unused, though I do subscribe to a few video podcasts there which I don’t much care about). One on my new, Windows Vista laptop (truly unused at the moment for the most part). And my “real” installation on a Parallels  installation of my old Windows XP laptop (the hardware for which is now dead). This real installation links to an external 120GB HD which holds most of my actual media collection, this is also where my real podcast subscriptions live (both iTunes and via an external podcatcher), and this is what I use currently to sync my iPods.

I use a variety of really complex smartplaylists to accomplish my syncing with iPods. Since my collection of media is some 15500+ tracks and nearly 130GBs in size (and actually more like 200+ GB’s, I have a lot of media that instance of iTunes doesn’t yet know about), I could never sync it fully to one iPod. Instead I have various smart playlists which I sync - almost all of which are done in a two step process. First I have a playlist which takes some cut of the whole collection (a large collection I added all on one day for example). Then I have a second playlist which selects from that first playlist all the unplayed tracks, up to some fixed size (say 3 GB’s).

My actual system is more complex - I have playlists for everything which is unplayed, for new & unplayed (limited to a manageable size), playlists for songs which have been played but not yet rated, playlists for songs over a certainly file size (for management purposes), playlists of all the tracks with a given rating, a playlist which combines all the various types of media iTunes manages (so I can, in fact, see at a glance my true “full library”).

Actually that is a my Feature Five: Why oh why did the more recent versions of iTunes remove a working view that shows you ALL of your content in one view. By working view I mean a non-playlist view, where if you delete a track it is removed from your library, not just that playlist. For that matter, I do not understand why when you delete a podcast you are prompted if you want to also delete that file, but you do not (at least I don’t) get this prompt on deleting other tracks from iTunes.

I really want to be able to have a single view where I can find all of my tracks which I have rated 1 star, select them all, and delete them - and have it REALLY HAPPEN. Not just have them deleted from some playlist.

Feature Six: while I like seeing the long descriptions of podcasts on my iPod, WHY CAN’T I RATE PODCASTS ON MY iPOD!!! It seems the assumption is that you would have no reason to want to rate podcasts. But that is emphatically not the case. I have many podcast subscriptions which I routinely want to save select tracks from, the best solution for this is to make it possible for me to rank them when I am listening, so when I resync I can easily find the tracks I really liked.

Feature Seven: Why can’t I get a full list of all of the episodes of a podcast (even I have previously downloaded them and deleted them so I can re-request them if I decide at a later date that I want them. And related to this, I have often had iTunes fail to fully download a podcast - when this happens there is NO simple solution. I have to go by hand to that website (side note - impossible to cut & paste from iTunes to make this task feasible) and find the track which failed and download it by hand - and then if I’m really lucky figure out a way to get iTunes to put it where it should be.

Feature Eight: Perhaps other people use their iPods and iTunes differently than I, but the fact that ALL PODCAST SUBSCRIPTIONS have the “DO NOT SHUFFLE” option selected for them - and that there is NO way to change this default setting is really, really really annoying. I WANT TO SHUFFLE my podcasts. But more to the point, I have in the past wanted to put podcasts on my iPod shuffle something which has not been possible with tracks with this “feature” selected.

And I could go on. I use iTunes and do like my iPod (though I really wish the battery life was better - mine sucks the battery dry far far too quickly). But I am also constantly annoyed by iTunes.

My reasons to celebrate April 1st

and no it is not the many great amusements posted online today

Rather it is that today, on a more serious note, is the day that Doctor Who returns for Season Three!

Okay, so it will be a while before it is available here in the US directly (I’ll buy the DVD’s when it comes out as I have previous seasons) but let’s just hint at that I will be watching it as soon as I possibly can. Yes, technically it was broadcast on March 31st 2007 in the UK, but close enough.

I spent tonight (well last night) at the SuperHappyVlogHouse where though I missed Justin.TV’s appearance (but did see the signed copy of today’s SF Chronicle they left behind) and I then had the great pleasure of making new friends, helping out with a few vlogs (and was recorded for a possible show). A truly fun way to spend the evening.

In any case my reason to celebrate April 1st is not the silliness which will take many forms all day, but rather new friends and the return of my oldest of TV friends. All in all, what more could make for a better day?

Okay, two other things - it is likely that in a very short while, possibly even later today my new company NELA will be ready for our first beta users. And on Monday (April 2nd) my new, replacement Lenovo X60 tablet should arrive having left Shanghai China just days before - UPS Ground apparently covers the ocean rather quickly!

So all in all, a really great weekend - and it’s only halfway over.

Mobile MeshWalk March 20th in San Francisco

On March 20th here in San Francisco a Mobile MeshWalk will be held. The focus of the MeshWalk will be the future of Mobile Marketing and Media. In the morning we will have a Design Crawl of a number of SF Design firms with offices near South Park. After a group lunch (probably at the nearby Ferry Plaza) we will spend the afternoon walking through San Francisco, while having small group discussions about the role of commercial messages in a mobile context. And of course we will end the day with a party, drinks, and time to share our day’s experiences.

France Telcom (owners of Orange in Europe) has signed on as the lead sponsor - thanks to them all participants will receive breakfast, lunch  and drinks.

My interest in holding the Mobile MeshWalk arises out of two things. One, my MeshForum conference at which I first conceived the idea of this format for holding an event. And two, NELA.mobi my new mobile application startup. For NELA I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to include commercial speech inside of a mostly mobile context application. It is my strong bet with NELA that done well, such messages can be valuable to both the users of the service AND to the companies presenting their messages, brands and information. (and thus, of course, financially valuable to NELA as well).

In the next few weeks both here and at http://blog.nela.mobi and at MeshForum.org I will be exploring a range of issues related to the Mobile MeshWalk. Many of these issues I will also address on the Wiki for the MeshWalk as well.

If you are in the Bay Area (or can get here) for the MeshWalk on March 20th I encourage you to do so. It will be an amazing day of conversations and discussions.

If your company is interested in participating in the Mobile MeshWalk please contact me asap (shannon.clark AT gmail.com works well). Either as a host during the Design Crawl, as an additional sponsor, or in some other capacity.

I am also available to organize similar events - either public ones such as the Mobile MeshWalk, or private. Contact me for the details, costs etc.

Travel plans and keep March 20th open

I will be in NYC next week - flying out Monday night and returning to SF Tuesday Feb 27th.

On Tuesday, Feb 20th I will attend the Social Media Club NYC event organized by my good friend Howard Greenstein. Wednesday morning I will probably attend the Leadership Forum on Web Video.

While I am in NYC I would like to meet up many people - I may be organizing a small Pho lunch (yes, related to the Pho List though anyone will be welcome). If you are interested, leave a comment here or contact me directly via 1.800.454.4929 or my email shannon.clark AT gmail.com).

No details yet - but keep March 20th open if you are in SF or can get here. I’m organizing a one day event on the 20th and trust me, it will be worth attending - with designers, telecommunications firms, new media, and new tech firms participating. Details will follow very, very soon. (see the tags for this post for a few hints as to the topics…)

Switching from my PC to a Mac - keeping iTunes ratings

This is a first of what will likely be a series of posts documenting what I discover as I seek to make my new iMac 24″ system functional and make it and my trusty ThinkPad T40 running Windows XP play nicely together - and together make me more productive.

Yesterday I started (it ended today) the full backup process from my PC to my new iMac - migrating over the nearly 30 gbs of data (though not yet my ~8gb of mail archives) including my full media library.

Today I tried (and finally succeeded) to make my iTunes on the iMac reflect the current state of iTunes on my PC. What I first tried was importing the files (which then copied them to another directory - default behavior on the mac) and which did not keep my many playlists or even more crucially my ratings and play counts.

I found a great resource online on how to at least migrate iTunes libraries in way that preserves my ratings and playlists. However it does not, unfortunately appear to preserve playcounts - which is a field I use extensively when managing my listening - especially managing my shuffle.

Since further Apple does not (at least last I heard) allow an iPod shuffle to work with two machines (they do let regular iPods) I will probably have to keep on using my Thinkpad as the sync machine for my Shuffle.

I looked at many podcatcher clients for the mac and so far, I am not at all impressed. They look nice and have some “features” but none of them that I have found so far have the features of Doppler Radio which I have come to really appreciate and love. Specifically Doppler Radio allows me to manage each podcast feed separately and transparently (though mac podcatchers do a much better job of integrating the rss feeds and the full posts - so they are very nice as rss readers). Each feed gets a new playlist in iTunes (something I can not imagine forgoing ever again - as I rarely want to just listen to all my podcasts - rather I want to easily select between the individual episodes). One of the mac clients has the “feature” of adding podcasts to iTunes as a podcast.

However for a shuffle user in particular this feature is nearly utterly broken. By default (and I really truly do not understand why) all podcasts go into iTunes with the “do not shuffle” checkbox selected. There is no way, at least that I can tell - and I have looked, to change this default. And it has the impact of not allowing those files to be added to a shuffle. So as a result I am very, very reluctant to use iTunes to subscribe to ANY podcasts as I have to manually make that change for each and every podcast episode when they come in if I want them to get into my shuffle automagically when I next sync it. Very frustrating and nearly useless. (keep in mind that I subscribe to about 60 podcasts or so).

Also I haven’t found a podcatcher for the mac that is as simple as Doppler Radio is when it comes to managing and auto-deleting files.  On the PC I simply set for each feed what criteria I want to use (I usually say anything that is rated 1 star) and then when I decide I do not want to keep that episode I rate it one star and the next time I sync via Doppler it gets cleaned up for me automatically.

On the mac that cleanup process appears to always be separate from the process of subscribing. And further, I can’t get the very basic stuff like “update all feeds” to work smoothly.

So my plan is to migrate all my non-podcast media to the iMac and use it into the future as where I keep most of my media (non-podcast) files. This will free about 12 gbs of data from my ThinkPad (I may keep a few gb of music I listen to most often for the occasional times I’ll want it when traveling. I probably will remove most of my podcasts from the iMac - with the exception of the ones I have rated highly and want to retain. I’ll sync my shuffle with the Thinkpad and keep using Doppler until something better comes out for the mac.