The WebM project hopes to solve the open video problem

A lot of the focus on HTML5 video has been on the codec, which has meant either H.264 or Ogg Theora. Each has problems – Ogg Theora doesn’t have broad support and serious performance problems, particularly on mobile devices, while H.264 is an industry standard but patented, making it philosophically untenable for Firefox.

WebM is a set of tools based on the VP8 codec, now open sourced under a BSD license, and already open source Ogg Vorbis audio encoder. Mozilla, Opera, Google and Adobe have announced their support as have a whole bunch of hardware vendors.

Two big names missing from that list are Apple and Microsoft, who already or will soon support H.264 in their browsers and mobile devices. I suspect that their absence on that isn’t because they weren’t asked but because they’re playing wait-and-see.

New video codecs aren’t trivial to build and they’re even harder to build a coalition around. Part of why H.264 enjoys the support that it does is because it works really well on mobile devices, which have dedicated hardware to support decoding H.264 streams. WebM isn’t the sort of thing your iPhone can start supporting with just a patch to the OS.

The next version of Flash will come with built in P2P streaming

Now this is interesting, particularly for big publishers. Bandwidth is hugely expensive, particularly for video, and offloading those costs to the people consuming that video has to be very attractive.

Potato/Potato, Tomato/Tomato, Slave Trade/Atlantic Triangular Trade

My girl’s wicked smart

A while ago, a screenshot was making the rounds showing what happens when you try to quit your Facebook account, how they bring up pictures of your girlfriend or grandmother to try to coerce you into staying. It’s the kind of manipulative scam you’d expect from Zuck and crew, but it’s honestly no worse than any other promotion that’s easy to sign up for but hard to leave. Just try canceling your subscription to the New York Times, where you have to actually call a number and talk to a live human being who will all but beg you to stay.

As luck would have it, someone passed along a sneak peak of the new “are you sure?” screen. It seems a touch more aggressive. (Embiggen.)

Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to help found a new startup called BankSimple

A bank that doesn’t suck sounds fascinating and Alex is a brilliant guy. I love the ambition of the idea and can’t wait to see what they build.

People who yell at the waiter

Ron Lieber, a writer for the New York Times, got kicked out of a restaurant for confronting the chef about the way he was treating his staff. I think he did the right thing and would like to think I’d have the courage to do the same.

As someone who cares about food and thinks about food a lot, I cringe when I hear these stories. I worry that we’ve elevated this basic maslovian need to cult status, that the high priests are above reproach as long as they get results. When millions of us sit down and watch Gordon Ramsay swear his way through an hour of competitive cooking, what does that do to our expectations? Did no one else at the restaurant stand up to say anything because that’s how we expect chefs to behave now? Were they even entertained by the spectacle, a bloodless gladiatorial pre-meal show complete with free dessert for anyone whose sensibilities may have been offended?

Precision and even art are worthy goals in any endeavor, cooking is no exception. When that drives us to the point where we forgo basic decency and humanity, it’s gone too far.

NativeHost is a desktop wrapper for web apps written in Cappuccino

Web apps become native apps, which feels much like Adobe AIR or any of the dozen other write once run anywhere frameworks that have cropped up through the years. Only runs on OS X for now.

Oh, but we’re very, very busy zombies. We’re reading e-mail… tweeting and retweeting…downloading apps..uploading photos…updating our status and reading our news feeds…

You know what we’re not doing? We’re not thinking. We’re processing. There’s a difference.

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catbird said: I agree with this, and it reminds me of my worry about the iPad— what Apple has launched is a device solely for consuming, with “creating” thrown right out the window. And my guess is that even typing something longer than, say, a text-message on it is a huge pain in the ass. I mean, what are you supposed to do, lay it flat on your lap, pull your elbows back then gnarl your hands into claws? That right there has gotta be strong impetus to stop “interacting” on the web and just fall back to “clicking on shit.”

I found this opinion a bit surprising, especially coming from Ryan Catbird. Or perhaps just the tone. Regardless, it’s the latest of a few pieces I’ve seen out there that single out the iPad or any other number of devices or services as responsible for dumbing us down; the linked article by Newsweek’s Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons is referring to none other than Barack Obama’s calling out the information age in a commencement speech last weekend.

Of course, aiming for the convenient soundbite or the latest fad is as much contributing to the problem of information noise as it is attempting to solve it. The iPad gets criticized time and again for being a device built solely for consuming, but I’ve already created vastly more content on my iPad than I ever will on that static, creaking piece of furniture that’s been in every living room in the world for 60 years. Twitter is easily labeled as a distraction, but nearly every new friend (and let’s not forget that wonderful, beautiful woman who makes me a better man every day) I’ve made in the past three years has started there.

Wrangling the staggering amount of information that is exponentially piling up around us may well be the great challenge of our generation, certainly for those of us who do this for a living. It’s a challenge I’d rather face.

The L5 remote dongle doodad is finally available

Remember that thing? It plugs into your iPhone and turns it into a remote control and is now shipping, only a few months late. I kinda forgot all about it until Adam was kind enough to remind me. That man is a saint I tell you.

Print’s value is increasing with its scarcity

What we thought we were paying for in newspapers was all the news that was in them. In fact, the main role of the newspaper was to decide what to leave out.

This perfectly describes the friction in the news business today. Old media doesn’t know how to scale their best asset and the technology that’s replacing it doesn’t know how to distill an editor to an algorithm. Yet. Each is hoping to get there first while paying some deference to the other just in case.

Ross is exactly spot on here, not just for his rather astute point but for the precise and eloquent way he says it. If you’re at all interested in the tectonic shifts happening in media, Ross should be at the top of your reading list.