 20060428  747-400 cargo full of computer parts from China, via Nick. Overheard at CV
BEGIN SCENE: Phone company representative drops off 12 phone books to our front door.Ricky: Great, thanks -- I'll go put these by the time-machine. END SCENE We're live, local — and more lurid than ever.
My friend Nancy Nall Derringer wrote a piece for SmartMoney today: 10 Things Your Local News Won't Tell You.Terry Heaton, a former TV news director now working as a Nashville-based consultant to the industry, recalls being promo-teased one night with "40 DEAD ON I-65," only to discover the casualties were pigs, killed when a livestock truck overturned. "Nothing makes viewers more resentful," he says. Re-released
I redesigned Vimeo's homepage for unregistered users. Many thanks to Andrew for animating the activity log, which now shows live updates of what users are doing on the site (inspired by Digg Spy).
My co-worker Neel Shah wrote a piece for Gawker about Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore who, after receiving $500K for a two-book deal, has been accused of plagiarizing passages in her debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.
20060424
Flickr Auction
 My friend Meg is using Flickr to give away 17 paintings that together form one piece. Tonight, at Midnight EST, you can mark a section you want with a Flickr Note and she will send it to you. You only have to pay for shipping! First come, first serve. Personally, I think she is overly generous -- she is a fantastic artist, trying to make a living on painting in Portland, and her work deserves fair compensation. Compromising, she said she would accept donations, of which she will use a portion to come to New York to work at USA, amongst other things. Meg's pretty cool. Here's the art! Vimeo Search Plugin for Firefox
I realize this is my third Vimeo post in a week, but it's getting very exciting over here as more and more people use it, and word spreads. I can't help thinking about it.Anyway, today, Mickey over at Basic Function made a plugin to add Vimeo to your your Firefox search bar. Cool! Veoh?
Random Culture reports on Vimeo: There's been some buzz this week about Veoh Networks, a start up that's positioned itself to compete with YouTube. In fact, former Disney chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner is SO convinced that he put his own money into a recent $12.5 million second round of funding for Veoh. Vimeo 4.0 is live!
 Finally, after 16 weeks of development, we relaunched Vimeo today. It's an incredible thrill -- and relief -- because now my family and friends will have a better idea of how I spent the last quarter-year. Also, I hope they now understand my stretches of late night mania when I couldn't think or talk about anything other than it, and I would often choose to stay at the office rather than go out. Having launched only minutes ago, I can already say that it was all worth it. I am proud of what we made. I feel it's the best site I've designed. Vimeo began in late 2004 as Jakob's side-project. Originally, the site provided a way for people to create automatic movies. By tagging individual clips, you could then create a movie by entering a string of words, and out would pop a montage assembled with clips associated with the terms you entered. Months later, as similar websites sprouted up, we began to understand just how quickly the personal video-sharing trend would spark. At the time, CV was still a 6-person company, managing and developing several businesses, and so, subsequently, Vimeo took a backburner to bigger projects already in the pipeline. Over the year that followed, our company grew to 18 employees, and Jake and I hired two brilliant programmers, Kunal Shah and Andrew Pile. They assumed a huge chunk of our regular workload and helped make it possible for Vimeo to become an official CV project in November 2005. Andrew and Kunal have also contributed tremendously to Vimeo itself. Kunal developed the Flash player and some of the interactive programming, and Andrew built several sections of functionality. Most importantly, Jakob's imagination and obsession made it all possible, and for this we owe him. Now, a year and half since its first form, Vimeo is an easy way to share video clips with people you know, or, often, people you meet. I encourage you to try it out, if only to do me a favor and help me track down one of the 1000+ quirks that must still exist in the design and programming. Whether you plan to upload clips or not, the site is most fun if you're a registered user. The signup takes less than 15 seconds, so I suggest you start there. Afterwards, check out my profile for an example or just start watching clips. Oh, one note here: Vimeo is different from sites like YouTube because we encourage users to upload personal clips that are interesting to, say, their family and friends. We don't intend for Vimeo to become filled with viral internet clips. We want to stay close and personal. With that preface, I would like to share some of my favorite clips:
Enjoy. PS. In related news, 10 video-sharing websites were reviewed and Vimeo was named best site to post your clips.
Universal Connections: A group of five German industrial designers riff with USB concepts. via Amit.
20060414
Sufjan Stevens announces The Avalanche
 Sufjan Stevens will officially release most of the unused material from the Illinois album. The disc named after the title track, The Avalanche, will be released July 11th and feature 21 songs, instrumentals, interludes and demos, including three alternate versions of Chicago.
The Associated Press lists the 10 Greatest Moments in College Humor.
CollegeHumor.com claims #7 and #10.
Sub Pop Records posted a free Band of Horses mp3 from their recently released album Everything All The Time, which I think is great great great.
20060410
Download: Band of Horses - The Funeral. via Matt Butterworth
ABC offering shows for free online:
ABC is going to offer online streams of some of its most popular television shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free the day after they first air on broadcast TV. Some analysts said the move has the potential to dramatically impact the way viewers watch TV -- but the key could be whether advertisers are willing to sign up. The Scout's here.
 The running joke amongst my friends is that I don't possibly have big enough muscles to own this truck. My next-door neighbor, Noah Kalina, photographed the parody. Aside, if the truck ever goes kaput, it will make a great prop. Noah brought his light kit out to the street and shot the Scout for an hour or so. It looks very neat in the setting of warehousey Williamsburg. Last Thursday morning, I received a phonecall from Dependable Auto Shippers, the company eBay recommended to transport my truck from Oklahoma to NYC. The guy on the phone told me the Scout would be delivered the next morning, 3 days early. It made me hyper, since this news culminated with the excitement of our book being released that day. A few hours later, I received a call from the shipper again -- but, this time, not such good news. The woman said that she's very sorry, but the truck had been damaged. "The cab blew off the truck, and it's lost somewhere on the highway." I asked her to send me pictures, and she did -- they were confused, the cab hadn't blown off (they didn't realize the Scout was part-pickup), but instead the roll-bar (keeps you safe when you flip over), which was bolted to the bed of the truck, was crushed and torn out, leaving a gaping hole in its place. There is no way it could have been 'blown off', as they suggested. More likely: it was smashed on the truck trailer when they were loading/unloading a car above. The worst part is that when I ordered the service, I declined the optional insurance ($250) after the sales person told me their damage rate is 'almost non-existent'. The process of the roll-bar being crushed also bent the frame of the truck out-of-whack leaving me with a body-repair bill of at least a thousand or two to fix it. DAS will only give me $150 -- and won't even refund me the cost of shipping the vehicle ($750). My contract with them protects them from incidental damage, but I think what happened to my truck falls under the category of gross negligence, which should qualify me for some more conciliatory liability coverage. I am just not sure how to move forward. Their original communications with me were clear that will not offer anything more than $150 -- and their customer service is abominable: several phonecalls have only led me to an voicemail box. I would hate to have to throw around the word "sue" because I think that would just be a massive waste of time and money for everyone involved. I hope they would simply take the high road and accept fault, but more likely I'll probably be left pissing and moaning about it. Still, I'm glad it's finally here. It's a total monster. I spent most of Sunday fixing the easy stuff like the door-lock mechanism and the window regulators. I need to find a mechanic in Brooklyn to help me with brakes, which are lousy. Vimeo: Ricky took a short clip of Pete and me driving up Kent Street. Aftermath
 Last night, we hosted a book release party for everyone at CV, the publishers, those close to the company, and other industry types. I imagined it would be a pretty tame gathering since it was supposed to be a 6:30-9pm thing. BUT -- everyone, decked out in business casual, came to rage. It was as college! as ever. I left at 11pm to go grab late-night burgers and came back late to find one of my co-workers passed out in my room, shamed with permanent marking drawings all over his face and arms. I suspect the Penguin Books team. They were out of control. This morning, I mistook my apartment for a bomb scene with one sole victim (the guy passed out on my couch). Even better, I woke up to find the book #44 on Amazon. Thanks again to every one who made this happen. It's very exciting for me to be along for the ride. Wild Weather
Follow-up to our Scarlett Snowhansson report:Dave Trawin took two pictures from our office window yesterday. One at noon, the other at 5pm. See the difference! NOW ON SALE!
 Our book officially goes on sale today! It's 12:40am, and already it's Amazon Sales Rank is #844. It will be exciting to see how it performs through the rest of the day. Besides Amazon, it's available at nearly every major bookstore. Congrats to the major contributors: Ethan, Ricky, Amir, Jeff, Sarah, Streeter, Bill, and Patrick. It's really really funny. UPDATE Amir, Jeff, and Streeter made a commercial for the book: New Neighbor
Scarlett Johansson purchased a condo on my block, across the street. 1,400-square-foot for $1.95 million, the Times reports. Vimeo: Jake and I file a news report. ElleGirl
Some us CollegeHumor boys appear in this month's ElleGirl magazine, in their Total Boy! section (May 2006, pg 151).Given that the shoot lasted 3-4 hours with Elle's photo and styling team, I was surprised that this was the best image turned in. I guess it was chosen for editorial reasons, to illustrate how wild and funny we are ... but, holding pool balls? WE'RE SO CRAZY!!! I had higher hopes -- they had even given me a cool Thom Browne jacket to wear, too. In other news, ElleGirl's publisher announced today that the magazine is folding! Jeff joked, "I knew they should have put me in a different shirt!" Watch: Video from the shoot.
The New York Times launched their redesign late last night, which resembles the style of their sister publication International Herald Tribune (famous for its columned articles. see sample). Also, it's another big site to go 1024.
The facelift was outsourced, but implemented in-house by their new design director Khoi Vinh, who joined in January after leaving Behavior, the successful design studio he helped found in 2001. Both Vinh and Behavior impressed me with their redesign of The Onion back in August. I am very much influenced by the traditional newspaper-styled layout principles that Vinh has masterfully adapted to the web. Read: Khoi Vinh's post, The Awesome Redesign I Didn't Do.
37 Signals Book: $120,000 revenue in 30 days from self-published PDF. via Jakob.
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 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt  June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007  Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |