As others have pointed out, today marks the tenth anniversary of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Happy Birthday DF, and congratulations to John. Helluva milestone.

I gained a lot of readers here for my coverage of John’s schism with 5by5, but I hope those of you who have been around since don’t have the impression that I have any ill will toward Gruber. Daring Fireball remains a source of inspiration to me as a writer, a reader and a publisher.

Back in January, when I redesigned and refocused the candler blog, I quoted John as a means of explaining what I’d like this site to be:

I’m never trying to paint a picture of this week in tech, I’m trying to paint the big picture; like a years long tapestry. I have to do it, though, one day at a time based on what’s going on right now.

Maybe parts of the narrative change. Maybe, I’m wrong. You have to look at the story that’s being told over the course of a year.

I read Daring Fireball every day. This is perhaps the best distillation of what it is that makes Gruber’s site so honest, enjoyable and engaging. The idea of painting a big picture, a “years long tapestry,” is actually why I keep reading most of the sites that I love.

I still read it every single day. Like many other writers, too numerous to count, I owe a lot to John for pioneering this form and style of writing.¹ I would never have even considered running a site with link posts if it weren’t for Daring Fireball.

Can’t wait to see what the next decade holds for DF.

Ted Johnson at Variety:

Fox’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Friday, charges that Barrydriller.com violates its right of public performance by streaming the signal of its Los Angeles affiliate, KTTV, to subscribers without authorization.

I can’t decide if I love or hate these guys for giving their dubious service a joke name.¹ Can I do both?

YouTube lifts its skirt a bit on how a video gets to be considered popular over on its Creator Blog:

The best thing creators can do to be successful on YouTube is make videos that people want to watch. Simple, isn’t it? Unfortunately, many of the tactics we’ve heard from creators to optimize for YouTube’s discovery features may in fact backfire.

Tactics?

For example, we’ve heard from some creators who intentionally made their videos shorter in an attempt to get a higher retention rate. Unfortunately, this won’t help. While high retention on your videos is a good indication of engagement, we are actually optimizing for how a video contributes to a longer viewing session on YouTube. So your video isn’t more likely to be seen just because it’s shorter.

Well duh, try the opposite.

Conversely, we’ve also heard from some creators who intentionally made their videos longer, assuming that longer videos lead to more watch time. This also isn’t necessarily true, because it can be more challenging to keep viewers engaged through a longer video.

Once upon a time, these kinds of numbers were the business of studio or network executives who would use them to breathe down the necks of creatives. Now they’re the bread and butter of “creators.”

Bullshit.

I often wonder why Vimeo has better content than YouTube even though the latter has the vastly bigger audience. My guess is that YouTube creators want stats; Vimeo filmmakers want to share a story.

Make better content. Screw the numbers.

Since my last post I drove halfway across the country to my new home in Austin, Texas. Internet gets installed on Monday and my furniture is on a truck somewhere in the US. Next week the candler blog should return to its regularly scheduled programming.

John Zubrzycki over at the BBC Research and Development Blog has a nice piece on how, with the help of Japan’s NHK, the Olympic opening ceremony was shown to a select few in Super Hi-Vision (SHV), a video technology that makes HD look like SD and SD look like grease stains on a highway:

The SHV content has 16 times the data of HDTV, so rendering and processing time is slow, even using very powerful workstations. Even so, the NHK production team and a BBC editor are able to edit a new content package overnight ready for showing the next day.

Oh, did I forget to mention this part:

SHV has sixteen times as many pixels as HDTV making a picture with 7680 pixels across by 4320 pixels down. It was displayed on an 8-metre wide screen, accompanied by a 22.2 multichannel 3-dimensional sound system.

Yes, please.

(via James Thomson.)

Fast Company’s Austin Carr reporting on a joint venture from Verizon and Redbox on Tuesday:

The service will be launched in internal alpha testing today, followed by a beta program in the coming months before the streaming service goes live later this year. It will be branded Redbox Instant by Verizon; it will combine access to physical and digital content; and the [joint venture] will be led by newly appointed CEO Shawn Strickland, who previously worked as a vice president in Verizon’s FiOS business. Such a set up indicates the partnership will rely mostly on Redbox’s branding, which mimics competitors Netflix Instant and Amazon Instant, while taking advantage of Verizon’s network infrastructure.

Doug Stephen, commenting on the news:

More players and more popularity also means more pressure on content providers to adopt alternative distribution. These are all great things for consumers.

Competition is good for consumers, but I don’t think streaming is necessarily where we need more competition. In his excellent book, Pandora’s Digital Box, David Bordwell makes a compelling argument that the film industry is run as an oligopoly, with the studios and major theater chains acting as rulers. For some time, the theater chains were even able to stifle streaming so as not to eat into their business model. Things are changing, but slowly.

It seems to me that we now have a preponderance of streaming services to choose from which yields mostly trepidation over which horse to bet on. Yes, in some cases these services compete on price and everybody wins with lower bills or better features. However, for the most part streaming services compete for exclusive content. All of a sudden we end up with two, three, four services we need to keep paying for every month.

Competition needs to happen at the top. Filmmakers and distributors need to challenge the studio system and get work out there that isn’t tied up in the awkward gerrymandering of streaming exclusivity. We can already stream six ways to Sunday, but if we really want to move into the future, we need to challenge those who make the films. That competition would be better for consumers.

I interviewed my pal Aaron Hillis about his new venture: a brick and mortar video rental store.

Though Aaron didn’t give the store its call-to-arms name, he is clearly running with it as a theme. Video Free Brooklyn, in other words, feels like more than a store; it feels like a cause. “In comparison to Video Free Brooklyn, Netflix offers a sterile, impersonal and flat-out incomplete experience,” Hillis told me, speaking about his biggest competitor. The video store is meant to bring a certain sense of surprise, of curation and even whimsy back to the process of deciding, “What are we going to watch tonight?”

There’s a bit over a day left on his Indiegogo campaign. If you live near Cobble Hill, you’re definitely going to want to give at a level that yields some rentals.

Yesterday, Google acquired Sparrow, an excellent Mac and iOS email client that I have been using for months. The Verge later confirmed that the team does “not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.” As someone who was eagerly awaiting native push notifications for their iPhone app and the forthcoming Sparrow for iPad, I was a bit bummed¹ to hear that my favorite mail client had effectively been shut down.

Today, Matt Gemmel posted a piece that breaks down the many wrong-headed reactions to the acquisition and offers a bit of perspective on the indie dev business:

Sparrow’s acquisition is a success story. Indie devs make a great product, build a customer-base, and are rewarded with a buy-out from a big company and they get new jobs with that company. It might not be what your particular goal or end-game is, but it is a success. I’m really happy for them.

I loved every word of his piece. Spot on, Matt.

But.

I have a very awkward relationship with Google. For the longest time I was convinced the company could do no wrong and that they were the company that made tools I want to use. That all took a nosedive around the time Eric Schmidt started saying weird things about privacy. And so I’ve long tried to unhinge myself from their products, finding that I always come back to them in the end for this reason or that. When it comes to Gmail, Sparrow has been part of the reason I have stuck around.

Sparrow is really a Gmail client that also supports vanilla IMAP and POP accounts. With Sparrow, I never really had to worry about the oddities that creep up when using Apple Mail with a Gmail account. Drafts would always be saved to the right place, labels worked the way I wanted them to and archiving messages actually archived them reliably. Now I need to go back to Apple Mail and figure out how to make things work properly.

The app’s tight integration with Gmail makes Google’s acquisition a no-brainer. Yet it gives me pause. Google may use the talent at Sparrow to change Gmail’s mobile apps, or perhaps they will use them to make the web interface better. I don’t know. What I do know is that Sparrow’s current apps will depreciate fast, so I need to switch email clients. And that makes me want to reconsider why I’m sticking with Gmail anyway.

For now, I have my reasons to keep Gmail, but I’m shopping around, if you have any suggestions.

I was nearly brought to tears reading this on my commute this morning.

Movie theaters are supposed to be holy places, where we can sit together in relative silence and be enterntained, educated or enlightened (or all three) for two hours or more. I don’t want to imagine a world in which people fear gathering publicly to enjoy something they love, but I don’t have to. For the people of Aurora, Colorado, that is now a horrific reality.

My heart goes out to the victims, their families, those wounded in the attack¹ and those who witnessed it.

{::nomarkdown}

• “Less years in front of me than behind.” -00:57
• “There is no such thing as an abortion of cinema. Every fuckin’ movie counts.” -01:23
• “The high, to the low, every movie is someone’s favorite fuckin’ movie.” -1:31
• “The Unexamined life is not worth living. We’ve said that many times. Plato said that and I just re-said it.” -01:48
• “You could either sit around and be entertained, or you could go out and try to be entertaining.” -02:01
• “We live in the age of democratized media.” -03:02
• “In that world, where that’s at your fingertips, where you could be a god, you can create characters and life and shape shit.” -03:28
• “If you perceive deficit, fill that deficit yourself.” -04:06
• “That’s adding a spoke to the wheel and creating conversation, creating art.” -04:10
• “Put your dick on the table, play the game with the rest of us.” -04:51
• “Deeds, not words.” -05:02
• “That’s me voting with my wallet.” -05:43
• “There’s not enough money going around to fucking hand out free samples of the work just to have somebody shit in your mouth later on.” -05:52
• “Less years in front of me than behind.” -06:18
• “You have a parasitic existence.” -06:35
• “I can’t suffer fools gladly anymore.” -06:56
• “I’m taking a shit, I wanna read happy things.” -08:17
• “I don’t put out negativity, I don’t want negativity around me.” -08:57
• “Life’s too short, bitch, let’s go make some art.” -09:07

Dr. Phil better watch his back.

Also, Scott Weinberg nailed it.