Monday, December 17, 2007

Interesting Array

Well, I have a couple of unrelated items to blog about today. The only way I see them as related, is that I came across them today.

So the first thing was my excitement over email. Now, I know what you may be thinking..."Excitement over email?" "Who gets excited over email?" and "Has this guy been cryogenically frozen for the past decade or something?" Well, despite any evidence to the contrary, no I have not been frozen physically or mentally for the last decade.

No my excitement come in the form of a presentation about email I watched today. I actually came across this presentation back in July on Lifehacker. At the time - I looked at it and saw it was an hour-long video...and decided to watch it later. Well today, I came across another Lifehacker post and the page it linked to referenced Merlin Mann's video. So it came to pass that I decided to devote the time, bite the bullet, and watch it.

It really isn't as bad as giving up an entire hour. In fact, the actual talk is only about 30 minutes and the rest is Q & A. But the content is fabulous. I am one of those corporate workers, who at work used to pride himself in having two years of email archives, and at least 1,000 messages in my inbox at all time. As of this afternoon, I had zero. I can't say much more without rambling on forever, but watch it. It's good stuff! I may have to devote more time to it on another date.

The second thing I found really interesting was a cnet blog entry about Piracy as a leading indicator of sales. The long and short of it, is that some companies look at whether or not a show or movie or song is being pirated, as an indication consumer interest in Buying those products. So instead of being angry that people are ripping them off, they see it as market research. The theory is that if no one is willing to steal it, no one would be willing to pay for it. Wow, what a brave new world we live in.

Of course this brought to mind a story of a grandparent being
sued for $600,000 because his grandson downloaded 4 movies at his house. I found with a quick search on Google a blog post about it with almost 200 comments about the issue. Interesting eh?

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