Tag: content

What would Apple do without any content?

Post ImageImagine for a moment that the record labels restricted or entirely removed Apple’s access to their catalog of content. What would Apple do? I’m not suggesting the record labels are going to do this anytime soon, but it seems Microsoft has gotten smart and come up with a way to attack iTunes, and it’s not related to the hardware:

Nobody partners like Microsoft. The company is one of the shrewdest deal makers on the planet, when it isn’t competing with partners…There has been buzz for sometime that labels were unhappy with Apple’s single pricing and were looking for a cut of iPod sales…Seems to me: Microsoft is looking to suave labels’ hurts as it seeks to get the deals that could make table stakes for taking on Apple. After all, Apple doesn’t control the content.

When you consider Microsoft’s deal with Universal Music, the possibility of similar deals with the other record labels, and it’s recent Xbox Live Video moves, it becomes clear that access to content is at the heart of Microsoft’s new strategy.

Apple’s strength is hardware, it’s what they do best. Without any content for that hardware however, it becomes a much tougher sell.

Read: Microsoft Monitor

Laptop data worth millions

Symantec released a report today containing research that attempts to determine how much the content on a typical laptop is worth. Even if the numbers haven’t been seen before, the lessons are not new – back up your data and be cautious when it comes to security.

[The report] suggests that an ordinary notebook holds content valued at 550,000 pounds ($972,000), and that some could store as much as 5 million pounds–or $8.8 million–in commercially sensitive data and intellectual property.

The same research, commissioned by Symantec, shows that only 42 percent of companies automatically back up employees’ e-mails, where much of this critical data is stored, and 45 percent leave it to the individual to do so.

I wonder how they came to those valuations, because I’d be interested in determining how much my content is worth. Not for any real reason I suppose, just curiousity.

Read: CNET News.com

Blog Break Observations

Post ImageThere seem to be a decent number of bloggers who take “blog breaks” or “blog vacations” every now and then, usually to catch up on life and re-focus on why it is they write a blog in the first place. Famed blogger Scoble recently returned from his latest blog vacation, and noted:

See, a good blog is passionate and authoritative. Lately I’ve been going through the motions. Just blogging to keep blogging.

Over the past week I focused on rediscovering myself. What do I like to do? This is my blog. It better be fun. For me. Or else I’ll stop doing it.

I agree – it better be fun for me. Fortunately, I’ve never felt the need to take a blog break, but rather, have been forced to at least twice because of server problems (which we are doing everything possible to prevent from happening again). This last time was the longest period for me without blogging, and so I made a number of observations:

  • I realized that one of the main reasons I like posting to my blog is because I am creating content. I like the idea that people are reading what I am writing.
  • I also realized that I don’t need my blog to create content. Even though I wasn’t posting to my blog, I could still post pictures at my Flickr account, or bookmark and tag links at del.icio.us.
  • I sometimes post things here about my life, or things I have done recently. The reason I do this is so that friends, family and colleagues can easily read my blog and see what I’ve been up to, even if we don’t get the chance to talk. Some of my friends have remarked that as a result, one tends to become cut off from social interaction and thus is harmed. I am pretty confident I have reaffirmed that isn’t the case, as during the blog break, I didn’t talk to anyone more or less than normal (except that I got a lot of IM’s asking when the servers would be back up).
  • As much as I like creating content, I think I have found that the main reason this blog exists, the main reason I post to it every day, is that I like to have a “play by play” for my life – for what I am reading and finding interesting, what I am doing, and what I am thinking. What was I doing two weeks ago? It sucks that I wasn’t able to post it to my blog, because now I’ll forget it. I like the idea that if something newsworthy happens tomorrow, I can look back in two years and remember what I thought at the time. That’s pretty powerful stuff to me. For instance, I can look back and see that on August 8th of last year I didn’t post anything, but that was probably because I was busy with my parents, who were in town. How did I remember that? Because I posted on the 7th about going to see The Village with them.
  • I figured that if I wasn’t posting, I wouldn’t be reading blogs as much either. In fact, I kept reading as much as normal. Maybe it was because I could tag interesting things at del.icio.us, or maybe it was just that reading and posting to blogs aren’t as linked as I had assumed.

I guess the main observation from my little blog break is that I enjoy maintaining my blog, posting new things, and having others read them. I suppose the true test will come when I take a voluntary blog break, instead of a forced one, but for now, I’m happy to continue blogging.

Read: Robert Scoble