tedr :

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Very few people complained about iTunes DRM because they all had iPods anyway, and DRM lock-in was mostly a theoretical and ideological problem — “What if I wanted to switch away from iPods someday?” Nobody ever did.

This hasn’t been a problem yet for ebooks because the Kindle has been the only game in town. (Sony Readers have never sold well enough, or with a large enough commercial book catalog, for anyone to complain.) Now that there’s (probably) about to be real competition in the ebook-reader market, this is going to be a huge problem for long-term customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth referrals. As soon as someone mentions these new book-reading gadgets at the dinner table, Uncle Whoever is going to chime in with, “You know, those things only read their company’s books! I saw it on the news last week. You have to buy all of your books again when you get a new one! Those crooks!”

Regular people don’t know or care about what publishers demand or that they can “lend” books to each other for a few days if they happen to know more than one person with one particular type of ebook reader that currently has an installed base of zero.

Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of “First Round Capital”: hits “the nail on the head with his latest post about the “viral strategy of startups :

Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That’s why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.

A few points on this: First, I’d add that virality is also partly by chance. Second, it drives me crazy when I hear/read about entrepreneurs talking about the product as if it’s the only thing that matters. Sure it’s important, but if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear …

via tedr

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Today’s Learn Something Every Day intrigued me: “NASCAR driver, Tim Flock is the only driver in motor racing history to have to make a pit stop to remove a monkey from his car.”

The full story is over at Tim Flock’s official site . The monkey’s name was Jocko Flocko and actually drove with him for eight races as a publicity stunt. Flock explains the day he finally had to part ways with his monkey co-pilot:

Back then the cars had a trap door that we could pull open with a chain to check our tire wear. Well, during the Raleigh 300, Jocko got loose from his seat and stuck his head through the trap door, and he went berserk! Listen, it was hard enough to drive those heavy old cars back then under normal circumstances, but with a crazed monkey clawing you at the same time, it becomes nearly impossible! I had to come into the pits to put him out and ended up third. The pit stop cost me second place and a $600.00 difference in my paycheck. Jocko was retired immediately. I had to get that monkey off my back!

Awesome.

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Snarkmarket links to a very interesting On Language column and addendum about camel case. In addition to the idea that camel case has been popularized by programming languages (which makes sense), the following insight into the role of spaces between words caught my eye:

In Ireland and England during the seventh and eighth centuries, local priests had so much trouble with Latin that spaces were added to their liturgical texts as a crutch. Clerics discovered that reading became more fluent for everyone, because the eye can recognize separated words as distinctive shapes. Monks were able to copy manuscripts in silence, in accordance with many of their vows, and privacy intensified the experience of devotional reading. The innovation flourished and by the 13th century was standard in Latin everywhere. Angels in manuscript illustrations used to speak into the ears of scribes; now they presented them with books to read for themselves. Clerics tackled more complex texts, in greater numbers, and Saenger argues that silent reading seeded the flowering of medieval theology known as scholasticism.

via Snarkmarket

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Man I wrote a whole thing here and tumblr ate it. Or Verizon did. Or something. Anyway, this is all totally true – at thanksgiving I talked to 4 kids between 9 and 13. We talked about The Ramones, Nirvana, Taylor Swift, New Moon, and Britney. They were simultaneously impressed that I had seen Britney and Nirvana. It was all current to them. It was all the present.

But more odd is this ridiculous line: “PC users have learned to be careful about what they put on their computers through unhappy trial and error.” Can someone really say that with a straight face? Do you know how many Bot Nets are out there? Are you aware of how the average non-technically-inclined person relates to their PC? It’s so funny how when app-store-haters follow this line of thinking they get to this point and they suddenly pronounce the notoriously miserable experience on PCs with viruses and spam and say “look how well it turned out on PCs!”