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links for 2006-11-02

• Color Palette Generator
  Creates a color palette based on a photo
  (tags: webdesign color)
• How iTunes saved ‘The Office’
  (tags: itunes theoffice television)
• Raw Thought: The Aftermath
  A co-founder of Reddit reflects on their recent sale to Conde Nast. “So it’s just a list of links?” he said. “And you don’t even write them yourselves?” I nodded. “But there’s nothing to it!” he insisted. “Why is it so popular?”
  (tags: startup entrepreneurship web2.0)
• Social sites become too much of a good thing
  Caro kept an online cat diary for six months and hooked up her cats with about 50 friends each. “At that point, I thought, ‘Who cares?’ ” she said. “Who cares if my cats have friends?”
  (tags: socialsoftware bubble myspace trends)

Digg Effect

This is what it looks like when a low-traffic blog like mine ends up on the front page of Digg.com. This happened last Sunday evening with the iTunes sales graph. By Wednesday, the traffic was back to the usual numbers.

Filed under: Digg Effect, Digg.com

Matt Pond PA, 3/5 at Slim’s

Matt Pond PA is playing in SF this weekend at Slim’s. Photo by flickr user chriswarren.

Matt Pond PA – Grave’s Disease (MP3) (temporary link)

iPod Hi-Fi – no thanks

I’m going to pass on the Apple Hi-Fi and stick with my Sonos system. And $99 for a leather iPod case? Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that too. Here’s a sample reaction from the comments section of the Engadget livecast.

how can jobs say he’s an audiophile when iTunes sells crap lo-fi music and he drops a turd like the “ipod hifi” on the market?!??!? boo apple…was hoping it would be something like the soundbridge or something and maybe lossless music on itunes….. 😦

The new Intel-based Mac Mini, on the other hand, looks promising. How much longer until HD content is available on iTunes?

Skype Registered Users Graph

For those of you saw my iTunes Sales Graph, make sure to check out a similar graph that I did a couple of months ago showing the growth of Skype registered users. I’ll be updating that graph in a month or so when eBay reports Q1 2006 earnings.

iTunes Song Purchases plotted on a graph

Apple recently announced 1 billion songs purchased on iTunes. I dug around the Apple press releases and tracked down some of the major iTunes milestones over the last few years. It’s amazing that there have been 500 million songs purchased since July 2005. That’s 500 million songs purchased in 7 months for an average of 71 million songs purchased per month!

2/26/06 Update:

Additional data point: 850 million on Jan 10, 2006 (announced at Macworld)

Date	Songs Purchased (millions)	Source
05/15/2003	1	Apple
06/23/2003	5	Apple
09/8/2003	10	Apple
12/15/2003	25	Apple
03/15/2004	50	Apple
07/12/2004	100	CNN
12/16/2004	200	Apple
07/17/2005	500	Apple
02/24/2006	1000	Apple

graph created using NCES Create a Graph

Filed under: Apple, iTunes

Diggnation at Beach Chalet

Diggnation did a live show at Beach Chalet last night. More photos here.

Trying out the new Google Page Creator

I tested out the new Google Page Creator and, I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the WYSIWYG tool, but I’m not really sure where they are going with this. I was able to build this page in about 20 minutes. I just worry that this is going to be Google’s version of Geocities. This one-line review pretty much sums it up: “No RSS? What is this for, cat photos?”.

Filed under: Google, Google Page Creator

Craig Newmark / Edgeio

Craig Newmark from craigslist brings up some good points about the soon-to-be-launched Edgeio service in the comments section of this post on BuzzMachine. It will be interesting to see how Edgeio deals with these issues.

Mr. Newmark’s comments:

“…I act as full time customer service rep, there’s a few of us, only a few, because with flagging, our community removes most questionable ads.

Using the tagging approach, how are bogus ads removed? Considering that spam blogs are already a huge problem, and how easy it’ll be to falsely tag viagra ads, the volume of bad ads will be tremendous.

That will also be true of blogs that do things like tagging photos that you’d prefer not to see, but they’d be in search results anyway. (You really don’t want to know.)

Also, how will ads be removed (by the poster) or expired?

When there’re other problems, like defamation, how are they handled?

I’m guessing that many customer service reps will be needed, good jobs, but then,
you risk being a “publisher” which means that you have to monitor ads.”