Amazing, remember last night when we were all slobbering over the new 5D MKII’s video capabilities? Well, today Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, wrote that Canon had forced him to take down the videos. Why? He doesn’t quite know, but says it seems to be around the fact that SmugMug’s HD video was far better than the one Canon is able to host and SmugMug was making someone look bad at Canon. Don talked more about it on his Twitter account. Either way they took what was extremely good PR and decided to trash that for some reason. I’d sure like to know who made this decision and why.
Day: September 23, 2008
Gadget lust in times of economic troubles
Damn you Canon. Check out this post from Don MacAskill, CEO of Smugmug. It has all my photographer friends slobbering over themselves over Canon’s new $2,800 DSLR. Me too. I want one of these in the worst way.
Problem is I can’t afford one. Neither can a lot of people. I blew my gadget budget a year ago when I bought last year’s model of the same camera. My credit cards can’t take this abuse. Not while banks are getting wiped out. My friends are losing their jobs. Etc.
This is one reason why I like covering web stuff. For the most part the cool new things, like Fotonauts, a cool new photo sharing site, on the Web are free. Or pretty low cost.
But damn, look at that video. Slobber. Slobber. Slobber. Oh, sorry.
I think this is what’s wrong with our country. We get lust for new toys, or things we can’t afford, and decide to put them on our credit cards and we all get into trouble. I’m not going to do that this time. Sorry, Canon. We’ll have to earn this the old fashioned way: save, save, save.
Blogging, changing every day
Interesting to see the reactions to Technorati’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” post. My reaction matches Duncan Riley’s.
I’ve been investing nearly all of my available time on FriendFeed lately, which is why my blog has slowed down to a mere trickle compared to how often I used to update, say, four years ago (on some days back then I’d post 20 times in a day). Today I am rotating my content development between a number of places. Flickr. Dopplr. Twitter. Upcoming. Google Reader. Kyte. My blog. But mostly over on FriendFeed. (None of those existed back when I started blogging).
Most of my blogger friends think I’m nuts focusing so much effort over on FriendFeed.
But when you see co-founder Bret Taylor’s post on the growth FriendFeed has seen this year you’ll see exactly why I’m spending so much time there.
On the other hand, I’ve been missing writing longer pieces about what I’m seeing in the world.
Today, for instance, I’m off to visit Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child project, among other things here in Boston. It’ll be interesting to see what I learn there about how the project has been going (it’s been bumpy, according to my research tonight).
Oh, how else has blogging been changing? Last week I hung out at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. It was shocking to me to see just how many people were on Twitter (in the sessions I attended nearly 100% of the bloggers were on Twitter).