Lucas Chan :: Weblog

Digg is dead.

So is email.

Kthxbye.

For Tom. Because he reckons I haven’t updated my weblog in ages. (11 days man, what the hell?)

I’m going to South By South West next year. I’m so excited I think I might cry. Aussie web nerds please keep in touch so that we can assimilate Texas, Web Directions stylie.

Moving house was as painful as I’d imagined but well worth it. Unfortunately one of the neighbours is a fruit-cake. They left a letter on my car asking me not to park out the front of their house. It’s neither a permit zone or a busy street, they just don’t like walking too far to their front door apparently.

New Years Day (Eat The Beat) at the Espy will be bigger and better than ever. Action kicks off around 2pm. I’m playing some time around 8pm. Get in touch if you need reduced-price tickets.

I finished work on a soundtrack for a short film. It’s showing at ACMI soon. More details as they come to hand.

Finally, it’s the Critical Mass 11th birthday ride tonight. Bicycle advocates and the environmentally-aware; meet at the State Library at 5:30pm.

I figured I should give this YouTube thing a go.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present, me, tooling around at the train station.

There’s lots of banter going around today about Google acquiring YouTube. Jason Calcanis reckons it makes perfect sense, I’m still not convinced.

Google’s search business makes so much money that they could leave the YouTube service the way it is and make back their $1.6B in 6-7 years just by putting Google search boxes all over the site.

I think the main reason that no one has sued the pants of YouTube yet is that they don’t have any money. As soon as there’s money to be made from suing them they’ll start being hit with litigation. If someone is going to buy YouTube they’re also buying into a legal time-bomb, which is going to take a lot more than 6-7 years of search/adsense revenue to recover.

So anway, let’s see what happens, I may be chowing down on humble pie yet. :)

Update: I was wrong.  So very, very wrong.  I’ll take cream with that pie, thank you.

I found a full page ad for the new SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 player in Beat Magazine today. It was somewhat colourful and inviting, but all I was able to determine from it was that it had 20 hours of battery life. There was no mention of storage capacity, cost, supported formats, or anything else that one might consider a useful feature or accessory.

While flipping through the in-flight magazine on the way to Sydney I came across a multi-page ad for a new Nokia phone. Again, no mention of any kind of features, just a compellingly beautiful photo.

It seems that print media has finally gone the way of billboard advertising where these products are concerned. All they want to sell you is the brand and the lifestyle, the rest is not so important. Have we really reached the point where we don’t care what our mobile devices are capable of? I’m not sure I agree.

I had a fantastic time at Web Directions this year.

• Jeremy Keith’s presentations were top-notch and really entertaining; Hijax is cool, damnit.
• Derek Featherstone has given me a much different perspective on accessibility (both online and off).
• Andy Clarke’s talk on creating inspired design was spot on. Borrow (good) design ideas from everywhere. Does that man know how to dress or what?
• Mark Pesce’s You-biquity talk was totally not what I expected, but is one that I will remember for a really (really) long time. Keep your eye (ear) out for the podcast.
• And of course, I was very glad to be a part of Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank’s presentation. Payback really is as a bitch.

I always feel super inspired after attendng events like this. When you’re snowed under with work (and life) it’s really easy to lose that enthusiasm you once had. Just being surrounded by like-minded people that are passionate about what they do is always a really refreshing thing for me.

It seems like we’ve been talking about this for a long time, but now it’s finally here. Web Directions starts this week. I think there are still tickets available so hop to it! Cam and I will be playing records at the SitePoint party on the final night so pop on by for some beverages and fun times.

I used to love CitySearch, way back in the day. Their content was always good, accurate and up to date and everything was relatively easy to find. Such was their dedication to content they even listed drum ‘n’ bass and breakbeat events in their gig guide. I even remember using their Bay Area and NYC sites extensively to plan my trip overseas six years ago.

But it’s been all downhill since then. When they started using questionable advertising techniques I would only frequent their site for restaurant reviews and gallery info. Over the past year or so I’ve only visited a handful of times because their TV guide is still bookmarked in my browser. But now… I feel so strongly about this that I just have to blog about it: Their latest redesign is horrible.

The colour scheme is horrendous and the tabbed navigation is clumsy. The front page looks like it’s been given the old “make everything stand out” treatment. Where’s the search box? And I don’t mean the annoying Sensis one in the top right corner. I mean the one that used to return half-decent CitySearch results. You know, the results that people expect to find when they search the site.

CitySearch, it’s not me, it’s you. We can’t go on like this any more. I loved you once but we’ve grown apart and now it must end. Goodbye.

Don’t worry about the breakup-box, I won’t be coming back to collect it.

DefectiveByDesign.org announces Anti-DRM Day.

Fight for non-crippled audio and CDs without rootkits.

Cameron Adams is never short of a good idea.