Category: Musings

Hello! This weekend we lined up twice to go see the new Borat movie at one of the few cinemas it was on in New York. Yep, twice. Once to get tickets for a showing five hours later, and then half an hour before the performance to get a reasonable seat (we were still halfway down the line). Luckily it was worth it. I’m not a great fan of Ali G, but Borat is pure genius as he travels from his home town in Kazakhstan to the west coast, via New York and all stops in between.

Be prepared to cringe and laugh out loud simultaneously as Sacha Baron Cohen continues to push the boundaries of ‘reality’ comedy: trying to welcome people with a kiss people on the streets of New York, singing a bizarre version of the US National Anthem at a rodeo after thanking the crowd for their ‘war of terror’ and bringing a prostitute to a etiquette dinner party. Oh, and the naked wrestling… The pace never lets up and you can’t quite tell where reality stops and the acting starts. Borat is an amazing character that simultaneously allows Cohen to skewer well meaning liberals and right wingers, the latter reacting strongly to his ‘terrorist’ facial hair and the first getting thrown by his open misogyny and hatred of Jews. The sequence where he accidentally ends up staying at a bed and breakfast run by this sweet old Jewish couple is amazing. Go see it – I don’t want to give anything away but you will have #1 sexy time with Borat.

Ps, Somewhat unsurprisingly, yet also surprisingly, Borat ended up being number one in the US and A box office this weekend. Is nice!

Last week I attended the TRAFFIC conference in Miami, a jam packed few days for people who own domain names to make money and those who offer services around that. You’re all seen the type of website.. you type in something random, put ‘.com’ on the end and a site full of adverts come up. Click on some of those ads and the site owner makes some money. This is also known as direct navigation, as opposed to search navigation where you search for a term and click on the results. Another variant of this is typos – misspellings of popular domain names or common words such as ‘consult‘.

The basic idea is simple, a domain name is similar to property in that it can offer great exposure to your target audience. If you own 5th Avenue property you can expect it to be worth more than the deepest darkest depths of Long Island, and the same is true of domains. The trouble is in many cases you can’t work out why a domain is so popular, in others it’s obvious – for example domain auction, where Cameras.com was sold for $1.5 million. In fact I almost accidentally became the proud owner of Sailboat.com when, as a result of the previous night’s ‘networking’ I yawned and stretched at the wrong time… my $130,000 check – the amount I almost bid – might have bounced though.

Of course if someone is prepared to offer me $1 million for MattHobbs.com then maybe I could afford it. Go on… you know you want it!

Much thanks to Andy for his lunchtime suggestion of the Margon Restaurant – just off and north of Times Square. It’s a tiny little hole in the wall place on W 46th between 6th/7th Ave that serves cuban cuisine from a small but intensely good selection. Today’s ‘healthy’ choice was roast pork – which made up for last night’s post Halloween parade healthy tofu.

On which note: the New York Halloween parade was, as usual, wonderful – as was Donna’s party. Didn’t take too many pictures myself – but here’s one someone took of me out on the street in my highly original James Bond costume.

The answer is, as revealed by Ridley Scott in this excellent Blade Runner documentary, yes. Which means I was right. Huzah!

Not sure what I mean by that paragraph? Well go read ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, by the wonderfully amazing Philip K Dick. Then go watch Blade Runner, one of my all time favourite films. Then you’ll know what question has been definitively answered.

My favourite moment in the document though was hearing that, upon watching an early show reel of the special effects of this future world, Philip K Dick turned to the special effects guy and said ‘How did you know what was in my mind?’. Beautiful.

First Steve Irwin, and now some guy in America, have been victims of stingray barbs to the heart. Once would seem unlikely but twice? Is anyone else thinking that stingrays are about to rise up and take over the world? How many ‘freak accidents’ amount to sudden world domination?

OK. No more sugary coffee for me today.

For some reason I’m aching like an achy thing today. That’ll learn me to do exercise. Maybe I should have used running machines like Ok, Go! Still the only obvious reason why Google bought youTube… and consistently smile out loud funny.

Dove have been extending their ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ with this short video showing how an average looking person is transformed into a billboard beauty model through a combination of lighting, make-up, styling and, finally, excessive PhotoShop tweaking. Scary. No wonder girls have such distorted views of their own beauty these days. One idea I had a while back about this was that beauty adverts should all have health warnings on them akin to cigarettes, explaining that these images are not real people and explaining what’s been done to them. [Thanks to metafilter]

A small plane just crashed into the side of an Upper East Side buidings… What the f*ck!

So, according to the passport they conveniently found on the road below, the plane was being flown by Cory Lidle of the New York Yankees. They found his passport? After the plane caught fire when it hit and fell down? Bizarre.

Personally I hope this means a ban on small aircraft from near New York – how hard would it be for a terrorist to load up a plane with something and fly into another building? I mean they’d have to be famous apparently to get past any kind of air security, but that can’t be too hard. Rich people on the way to the Hamptons can get the Jitney like everyone else.

Well, after a few hectic days of gossip the truth is out.. Google has actually bought youTube for a paltry $1.65 billion in shares. Wow. That means a 1 cent drop in price from the current value of $4.29 means a loss of.. ooo.. $5 million. That’s painful. Time for me to upload some more videos of my nephew singing – they must be worth something now.

What is most amazing about this, other than the flurry of internet rumour over the past few days, is that youTube only launched back in February 2005 – which makes their valuation roughly $1 billion/year. The combination of a great service and hooking into mySpace early on has accelerated them to a stage where they now have an estimated 72 million users. Oh, that and not being too fussy about letting people upload copyrighted content of course.. Their only concession to that was a while back limiting the upload length of content to three minutes – early on you could upload entire films if you wanted, and many complete episodes of brand new shows (especially South Park’s amazing scientology bashing). Now of course youTube are negotiating with many content providers to prevent law suits. As someone keeps saying to me, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

In other exciting news – the re-designed Tridias site is now live. Go check it out and buy toys from the lovely folks (if you’re in the UK). If you find any problems with the site’s HTML then let me know.

Steven Levitt, author of the wonderful Freakonomics, has a great post about the benefits of committing all when you undertake something. In the article he describes a poker game in which, due to time constraints, he suddenly announces to everyone that he is going to bet everything on every hand, whatever he’s holding…

Now this may seem like a strange decision, what if you’re holding a losing hand – surely you should bet nothing? But his point is this; you don’t know for sure if you are holding a winning or losing hand, but poker’s not all about the cards. By committing everything, showing faith and not having to split his attention on making decisions about how to play his hand, he made the game so much easier to play and confused his opponents.

Now how does this apply to real life? Think of the mental energy you save by commiting to one solution and believing in it, rather than having to decide on one of two options? Look at the entrepreneurs, who believe 110% in what they do – even if everyone around them thinks they’re crazy. That passion. That focus. It’s like the entrepreneur is totally in love with the idea – another idea might come along, but even if it’s highly attractive it’s left by the wayside. This reminds me somewhat of the concept of ‘attention economy’ – you have a limited amount of attention (intellectual, emotional, etc) that you can deploy, so the decisions we make individually and en mass cause a general economic movement. This attention economy is readily apparent in the current Web 2.0 Internet movement.

Now if you’ll excuse me.. I’m off to my local casino.