4orty2wo Entertainment event tonight

Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewartson 4orty2wo Entertainment are speaking tonight at the San Francisco International Game Developers Association about alternate reality games and I Love Bees, the highly successful marketing campaign created for the launch of Halo 2. The hype around Halo 2 led to over $125 million in sales on its first day in stores.

I am really looking forward to this event. The website says free booze, so if you are in San Francisco and are interested in viral marketing and engaging users in very creative ways you should come!

Redefined Nintendo a cappella medley

It recently came to my attention that some people have not seen the video of a cappella group Redefined of the University of Wisconsin performing a Nintendo medley. The group’s original enhanced CD recently sold for $81 on eBay after a lot of publicity.

The movie features the following songs:

  1. Mario Bros. “Flag/Stage Clear”
  2. Super Mario Bros. Main Theme
  3. Dr. Mario
  4. Mario Bros. 3
  5. Mario Bros. “Star”
  6. Tetris
  7. Mortal Kombat
  8. Mario Bros. “Dungeon”
  9. The Legend of Zelda
  10. Mario Bros. “Game Over”

The acting and singing is a hilarious combination. Zelda seems to be the crowd favorite. I love it!

Adding an 11 megabyte video object to my post is a new experiment for me. The video loads every time you view my feed in NetNewsWire or view a page containing the post in a web browser such as Safari or Opera. I’ll be watching the bandwidth and appreciate any comments about objects such as audio or video included in post text.

Reviews microformat call for implementors

The microformats community is currently working on a reviews microformat and is interested in collecting feedback and acquired knowledge from implementers. We have collected some of the existing reviews formats present on the web today, but may not have represented the entire corpus.

Microformats allow authors to markup content with a specific format and structure for discovery by others using XHTML. You control the content but make that structured content discoverable by others through a microformat such as hCalendar, hCard, XFN, or tags. A review microformat will utilize the existing elements and attributes of XHTML to define the essential components of a review for use by authors and tool builders for easy identification, discovery and retrieval with the the flexibility to publish to your own site, a community site, or both.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about gathering community reviews through my experiences at shopping comparison sites PriceGrabber and NexTag. Consumers want the best information available about a company or product before making a decision, but the best information is difficult to discover and strewn across the entire web. I sometimes turn to specialist sites such as Digital Photography Review for camera reviews, Chowhound or Zagat for restaurants and Amazon for book reviews. I am fortunate to know about some passionate experts in the world of weblogs and check Russell Beattie’s blog for information about Series 60 cell phones and Slashdot for reviews of programming books from people who should know.

What if all these research resources could be brought together? What if you could publish select content to multiple locations for discovery by large communities? It’s exciting and empowering to think about all the possibilities of the semantic web.

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New York Times receives 5.9 million March page views from RSS

The New York Times issued a press release yesterday about the growth of its online readership. RSS feeds generated by The New York Times generated 5.9 million pageviews on NYTimes.com in March, an increase of 39% from February and a 342% increase from March 2004.

The New York Times serves advertisements on each page and generates a significant amount of additional revenue by producing RSS feeds of its content.

Blogger dinner this Friday in Redwood City

Ira Glass

Ira Glass, host and producer of public radio show This American Life, is speaking at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City this Friday night at 8 p.m. Doug Kaye and I are attending, and we want to have all the local bloggers and audio geeks meet for dinner before the talk. We will meet at Johnny Rockets in the Sequoia Station shopping center at 6 p.m.

Johnny Rockets is located at 1111 El Camino Real in Redwood City, a short walk from the Redwood City Caltrain station and less than half a mile from the Fox Theatre.

I hope you can join us this Friday at 6 p.m. in Redwood City for some IT conversations.

Movable Type 3.16 now available

Movable Type 3.16 is now available for download. Mena’s Corner explains some of the behind-the-scenes motivation and corporate changes for this point release.

In retrospect, in our desire to get 3.0 and 3.1 out to market, we lost track of our commitment to quality. We learned through this process that shiny features aren’t worth a damn unless they work well. With Movable Type 3.16, we believe that we’re getting back to the quality of code that our users had grown to expect. Even though it’s just a point release, I believe it’s a turning point for Movable Type as a professional product.

You must log in to your Six Apart account to download the new version. Now featuring more commented code!

New York Times on employer weblog intervention

Tom Zeller Jr. of the The New York Times wrote an article published in Monday’s business section on employer intervention over employee weblogs. I am featured in the article. I will pick up a hard copy of the paper in the morning.

I first want to give Gordon Mohr credit for the poster pictured in the article. I hope he was contacted about the use of his work.

Mr. Kennedy’s employer, having received some complaints about the artwork, stepped in and asked him to reconsider the posting and Mr. Kennedy complied, taking the image down.

Partially true. David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, received some complaints about allowing his employee to create this type of work. One particular CEO was particularly upset over the use of one of his product’s logo in the poster. He communicated his dissatisfaction to Dave, Dave told me, I took down the image. I purposely omit this executive’s name from my weblog; I’ve never met the guy.

The article does a good job covering different aspects of the divide between employers and their employees over weblogs. I am glad to see the voice of a law expert and the voice of a personal freedoms expert included in the piece.

When I first loaded the page there was a New York Times archive image of Cesar Chavez beneath my photograph.

Legal tidbits on blogging while an employee

Simpsons legal reference

I have written some form of a weblog since 1994. A lot has changed in my life over the last 11 years, but I always have claimed my personal Web space as my own and free of paycheck influence. Most companies are not used to employees having outside endeavors such as a weblog so I attempt to raise the issue with each of my employers using a language they understand: employment law.

Most employment contracts contain a provision where the employee must waive the right to any invention developed while an employee of the corporation. It’s a not so nice provision that basically says “we own you” and everything you do and is standard boilerplate in all of the templated employment contracts used so prevalently throughout the business world.

California law protects against an employer owning all of your work and all of your waking hours. California Labor Code section 2870 provides some basic employee rights regarding intellectual property. if your outside work at its conception is unrelated to your employer’s business and done on your own time (nights, weekends, etc.) it belongs to you. Due to restrictions over employee assignment inventions each employee has the opportunity to claim previous and ongoing inventions at the time of employment. I claim my weblog as a previous invention.

Why claim a weblog as a previous invention? It forces a conversation within the corporate machine. The employer must review the document and take action. I want to separate the writing of my weblog from my day job. I also do not want my employer to view my weblog as a marketing vehicle.

I also believe a California employer restricting an employee from having a personal weblog is in violation of California Business and Professions Code section 16600 but that case of non-compete has yet to be proven. I have considered placing advertisements on my weblog if only to generate enough revenue to have my weblog considered a part-time job by the legal system. Bloggers gain industry reputation through their weblogs through their knowledge and passion. Is this moonlighting? I do not think so. An employer preventing an employee from writing a weblog could be seen as preventing the employee from engaging in a trade or profession.

Enough of the legal talk. In the end law is largely up to interpretation requires someone to act on its violations. Employers usually have enough money to prove you are, as Johnnie Cochran liked to say, “innocent until proven broke.”

Your mileage may vary, I am not a legal expert, but I love to see free expression. More conversations need to happen and the world needs more cultures of trust. Maybe the avenues provided by the law can help get you there.