Hi, I’m Mike DiBenedetto

Google Voice Allows Voicemail Embedding

Here’s an interesting little feature of Google Voice: it allows you to embed voicemails you receive onto other sites.  I’m surprised that this hasn’t raised any privacy concerns yet.

Making private messages easily shareable will inevitably lead to some pretty sticky situations.  Think about email.  We can share emails with the click of a button.  And worse yet, people can forward the emails we send them.  Before email, we would never worry that people would photocopy our letters and share them with the world because that would have been a hassle.  But every business in the world instructs their employees to watch what they write via email because they know that those words could easily get forwarded around (remember this story?) or end up on Consumerist.com.

Before Google Voice, one could certainly make a sound file of a voicemail and put it on the internet, but the process wasn’t simple.  It wasn’t as easy as clicking a few links.  (Let’s all thank God that this woman went through the trouble of posting this voicemail.)  However, now it is.  This newfound ability got me thinking.  Who should own the intellectual property of a voicemail?  Probably the receiver of the voicemail.  But is that the correct legal answer?  I don’t know.  Perhaps leaving someone a voicemail is akin to granting them a temporary license.  Should it be?  When you call a company’s call center, they tell you that the call may be recorded.  Do they do that because they have to or do they do it out of the goodness of their hearts?  I wonder.  If they have a legal obligation to do it, should all Google Voice users tell their contacts that their messages may be posted to the internet?

On a somewhat related note, Google Voice is hilariously terrible at transcribing voicemails.  They are so off the mark that the transcribing service is more of a joke than a service.  Check out GV’s transcription of the voicemail embedded above.  It turns a simple request into a borderline scandalous proposition.  “I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind.”

Hey Mike, It’s knowing how you doing. I am the looking for like an old pair of shoes or sandals for tomorrow and I thought maybe I’d be able to like 5 there, but I can’t find any because I was just order close to go to shopping at 3 o’clock on. That’s it for me and but I’m going to go to rethinking and I thought cross my mind that perhaps you would have an older see that you wouldn’t care about. I know we would just wanted to touch and you wouldn’t mind. Let me give me for a day and I know that’s a lot of the way and that you would actually be at home on Friday night and that I could find a way to stop by my pick it up so I’m making like a lot of group for the about the possibility here, but I’m just trying to think if there’s any way that I can find after 2 for this river to bring thing then I’m going on tomorrow, I’m, and so it’s at at all of these things happen to be true, all at once and you would like to this message. I guess it’s another thing that has to be true if calls. I happen. Let me know and if anything else, so I’ll come tried had take about an event at any of the are not true. I will not be surprised and and or send it at all, so i’m yet so give me a call. Let me know and enjoy your party tomorrow. And sorry I can’t make it alright. Bye.

Helpful? Didn’t think so.

Not actually my girlfriend

I received an email this morning from my girlfriend with the subject: “This morning…” Here is the text of the email:

I was so out of it that I took the sugar that I was going to put into my coffee, I opened it then opened the garbage can and promptly poured the entire packet in. I think that a day off is needed.

I wonder if people in the Middle Ages did things like feed their kids the cow food by accident or whether this is an effect of all of our iPods, DVRs and smartphones.

On July 14th, my girlfriend and I boarded a plane to Dublin, Ireland. One of her best friends, a lovely Irish girl named Emma, was getting married in Wexford, in the south of Ireland, on the 18th to a great guy named Garret. We planned to spend a few days in Dublin and then head down south for the ceremony and party.

I decided to use the trip as a little experiment in travel documentation. While my girlfriend would document our travels (okay, okay, our visits to Irish pubs) with her very nice digital camera, I would only bring along a Flip Video camera. She would take nice, well composed, well lit photos of people, places and things. I would capture short videos of action or moving panoramas of vistas that were too difficult to capture in one frame.  I did my best to keep the videos short (under 20 seconds when possible).  I also took certain videos for certain people based on jokes or stories we’ve shared.

Now that we’ve returned home, I’m uploading all of the videos to YouTube and she’s putting her photos up on Picassa. I plan on sending the respective links to our family and friends to see how people react and which medium they like better for vicariously experiencing our travels. Once I get feedback, I will post again here with the results along with sample photos and videos.

My suspicion is that as long as a particular person’s broadband connection and computer are fast enough they will get a kick out of the video and will really enjoy seeing us in action traveling.  I think that this type of recording and sharing will become more common as the tools get better and people learn that videos that don’t tell stories but merely show something need to be very very very short.  I know this is happening now.  But perhaps one day, a majority of travelers will leave their still cameras at home.

If you want to drive something as powerful as a car, you need a license.  You need to prove to society that you know how to operate it in such a way that innocent civilians will not be endangered.  If you want to drive something as big and dangerous as a bus, you need yet another license on top of that.

In the world of image editing, Photoshop is roughly the equivalent of a 747 with side mounted nuclear missile launchers.  And yet, we let any old designer get his or her hands on it for less than 200 bucks.  This is dangerous.  As if Photoshop Disasters wasn’t proof enough, I present the following evidence:

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the Union Square Subway station in NYC and I saw this anti-smoking ad.

Ok. Smoking is pretty dangerous. This is a good cause. Weird language but whatever…I can deal with that. But check out this detail.

Apparently cigarettes let you keep your right hand.

Photoshop is obviously too powerful a tool to let mere mortals near it. Erasing someone out of a picture should be so hard that there are only a few people on earth who can do it and those people would never let something like this happen.

It is interesting that when something like photo-editing becomes this simple, we will have to recalibrate our expectations. Making complicated tasks simple will always have a downside. I just hope that we don’t make passenger planes as easy to drive as Photoshop is easy to use.

I have been playing around with 8tracks.com today and I am really digging it.  8tracks.com is a site where you can arrange mixes of 8 or more songs and then share them with friends.

It’s a bit hard to write reviews of legal music services on the web because they are so often hamstrung by their licensing deals from the music labels.  When you think about the hoops that services like Last.fm, Lala.com and 8tracks.com have to jump through to give users a legal and free music experience on the web, it is amazing that any of them can even exist.

While I have often made clear my love of Lala.com (mostly on Twitter but also on this blog), I think I’ll start using 8tracks.com a lot more in the coming days.  But for a very different purpose than I use Lala.   Like most people, I don’t have access to my full music collection at the office.  Lala has helped me get a good portion of it into the cloud for remote listening.  However,  I often find myself streaming music from places like Pandora and Last.fm.  Those sites are pretty good at playing similar music to what I listen to at home.  And they can give you a fairly uninterrupted listening experience for hours on end.   That is fantastic.  Since the mixes on 8tracks.com are often only eight songs long, you typically need to find a new set of songs every half hour.  That might make it hard for 8tracks.com to compete with some of the aforementioned services when it comes to getting people to listen to hours of music at a time.

Where 8tracks blows those competing services out of the water is in social music sharing.  People in my generation grew up making and listening to mixes.  And while we’re somewhat out of the habit, as soon as I started making mixes on the site, I began to love the experience of mix-arranging like a 17 year old in 1998 who just discovered Modest Mouse.  (Yeah, that was me.)  And now that I am creating mixes, I want my friends to listen to them.  8tracks has made mix-making so easy that I want to make a mix for every person I have ever known.  One for my girlfriend.  One for my college roommate.  One for my co-worker.  And since I made the mixes, they are going to listen to them.  Because knowing that I made it for them will make the experience more meaningful than listening to songs picked by a computer program.

Think about this: you have an hour left in the day.  Do you fire up Last.fm or Pandora and type in Pixies to listen to some Pixies-ish rock?  Or do you open the mix I made you and attached with a note saying: “Hey man, remember when we used to jam out to these songs?”  Yeah, thought so.

With that clearly powerful and emotional use-case in mind, I’d plan for it directly if I was in charge.  I would create an option to “Make someone a mix” and make it stand out as distinct from making a general mix.  Furthermore, I’d add a final step to the mix making process in which a user is prompted for the recipient’s email address.  When making a mix is positioned like that, it feels more meaningful than making a mix for the general population who probably don’t care about how I put Pavement right next to a song from my old band.  I’d even make adding a password to these personal mixes optional.  This would make the whole experience more intimate.  I’d focus on intimacy as one of the core values the service delivers.   Along the same line, I’d make it easy for me as a recipient to purchase the whole mix with one click.  While I am hesitant to buy music online in general, I just might spend ten dollars to own every song that my cousin picked out for me on this rainy Wednesday.

Here’s a mix I made of the type of smooth summer sounds that I am slightly embarrassed to like:

Weird, I know

There are some things you do and you tell everyone about them. When funny youtube videos come up in conversation, I tell people about mikedibenedetto.posterous.com where I post the funny vids I find. And there are some things you do that are better kept private. And then there are other things that start out as private but eventually deserve a little coming out party. This post is one of those parties.

Beware of visiting my apartment. You might end up on DiBekedeko.com!

For the past six months or so, I have kept a strange photo blog on tumblr consisting entirely of photos with the mirror effect taken on my macbook pro’s iSight camera. The site is called DiBekedeko and can be found at www.dibekedeko.com. The name comes from a short-lived nickname my long time friend (22 year friendship in a 28 year life = impressive) Max Porter gave me. As if the photos that you take with Photobooth’s mirror effect aren’t creepy enough, I’ve been experimenting with taking series of photos with the effect to tell mini, pointless visual stories. Occasionally, when a friend visits, we’ll do an impromptu session. Granted, such a minimal concept can get repetitive, but there is something really satisfying, and I think interesting, in taking an idea to such an absurd length.

Set all colors to black

To fully maximize the creepy factor of the photoblog, I messed with Tumblr’s settings to make all of the text and background black. And I altered the HTML of the theme to eliminate the search box.  Now, all you see are these weird photos and black. If you hit “Select All” (Control + A on a PC and Cmd + A on a Mac), you can see some text and links. [I'm working on eliminating all of the text entirely and the Tumblr links at the top right. I'll update the post when that is complete.] But overall, I think the effect is pretty cool.

Keeping this photoblog has been a fun little past time because early on, I set it up so my computer would automatically upload all new photos taken with Photobooth to Flickr. I used a cool little tool called FlickrBooth.  And then I set up the Tumblog to import the RSS feed of my Flickr account. Now I just take 15 photos at a time with Photobooth and I have a new creepy little visual story.

I have had my Mac for two years. And I have been playing guitar and bass for fifteen. And while I’m not a programmer or a professional musician, I certainly think about music and technology a lot. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how my own playing and rudimentary songwriting has been influenced by technology. I’m not talking about electronic music here. I’m just talking about how different musical technologies have changed the types of music I write even though I’ve never done more than write guitar and bass parts for very straightforward rock songs. Here are three songs – in the order that I wrote them – that provide a visceral illustration of how my exploration of Apple’s Garageband has evolved my songwriting. Keep in mind that these are more sketches of songs than real complete works.
1. This brief snippet is a simple chord progression with a few different parts all recorded with the same guitar. None of them have any loops nor any effects. Total simplicity.

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2. This song shows me learning how to add electronic sounds to approximate other instruments that I didn’t have laying around, such as drums and organs. However, all the guitar sounds I used had no effects on them.

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3. This song snippet is me going nuts. It’s very layered with weird sounds but every single sound (except for the drum loop) was created by an acoustic guitar and then sent through some sort of effect processor.

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I can only imagine the strange sounds and songs I’ll be writing in the coming months.

Two years ago, I worked on the triple Webby-Award winning series Hometown Baghdad.  I spent an inordinate amount of time working on the production, managing the online release including all press and marketing and becoming friends with the Iraqi guys who helped us make the documentary.  It was hands down the best experience of my life.

While cleaning up some files on my computer today, I discovered this mp3 of an interview Laurie Meadoff and I did with NPR’s All Things Considered.  Give it a listen.

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Note: The mp3 is preceded by 7 seconds of silence.

I am in the process of making a life-changing decision.  As a result, I have been extremely interested in models, tools and tricks that can be used to help you come to a satisfying conclusion.  Two of these methods have piqued my interest in the past month – one is the product of a web startup and one is decidedly low-tech.

High Tech Decision Making: Hunch

Hunch is a decision-making web app

Hunch is a web application, founded by Caterina Fake of Flickr fame, that helps users make decisions.  When a user logs in, they pick a question that they are struggling with and then answer a series of ten multiple questions that probe their opinions on issues relevant to the decision.  Hunch then draws upon its knowledge of you and its knowledge of users with similiar feelings and gives you a suggestion. The decision questions that Hunch can help you with are all submitted and the relevant side questions are workshopped by Hunch users.  Only the most helpful decision questions are promoted by the Hunch to the community at large.

My thoughts: Hunch does a good job of presenting you with relevant things to consider when you’re making a decision.  For example, when I was looking for an answer to the question “Should I get an MBA?”, Hunch asked me the following question:

Hunch asks very relevant questions to help you figure out what you want.

Drawbacks to Hunch mostly center around its immaturity as a community.  For example, there is a limited number of questions.  The results aren’t always so helpful.  (Hunch said there was a 34% chance I should skip B school and get a certification even though there is no professional certification that would help me achieve my professional goals.)   Addtionally, Hunch will always have a hard time when its users don’t have clear cut answers to its side questions.  Many people are conflicted about the factors that lead to a decision and a web tool will never be able to probe the depths of complex emotions.  However, the service is getting better and will continually give you new things to think about as you struggle with a hard decision.

Low Tech Decision Making: Index Cards

My good friend David was recently deciding between graduate school in Texas, where he was from, and San Diego, where he had never been.  He was torn because studying in his home state was attractive and safe but California was nevertheless tempting.

After much agonizing over the decision, he turned to his fiance Oona for help.  She got out two index cards and wrote out the names of the schools down on the cards.  Oona then mixed the cards up and held them in front of David so that he couldn’t see what school each card represented.  At that point she said:

“There’s obviously no clear cut choice for what the best answer is.  So we’re going to have to leave it up to chance.  Pick one of these cards and we’re going to go wherever it says.”

Feeling the pressure mount, David picked one and waited for Oona to show it to him.  But she didn’t.  She said: “What do you want this card to say?”  They talked about it for a while but David still wasn’t able to answer the question.

Oona then flipped card, revealing that it said San Diego, and immediately asked, “Did you just feel a rush in your blood or a sinking feeling in your stomach?”  David had felt a rush of excitement.    They are now moving to California in August.

I love this technique because it brings the decision out of the conscious realm.  It can be very hard to decide with your gut when you have an active intellect that is constantly weighing options and consequences.  However, this technique obviously requires a bit of suspension of disbelief.  Would Oona really insist upon living in Texas if the cards dictated that decision of David’s sinking stomach?  Obviously not.  But in that immediate moment, David believed it enough to experience a visceral reaction upon hearing that they were going to San Diego.

Inertia is the only thing more powerful than self interest.  As a result, default settings on the programs and web services we use are among the most powerful influencers of our behavior when we use computers.  These defaults often have interesting unintended consequences.

Consider this: when Microsoft changes the default font in MS Office, the lives of thousands, nay millions, of trees hang in the balance.  One page of Times New Roman 12 point text can hold 3,726 characters, or 292 words in a sample page of text.

Substitute Arial for Times New Roman and you can fit 2,944 characters, 252 words of sample text, which is roughly 79% of the total for Times New Roman.

Now try Calibri, which Microsoft just made the standard in MS Office 2007, and you can fit 3,300 characters, or 276 words, which is about 88% as much as Times New Roman.

Now think about a few consequences:

Millions of students around the world write papers every week whose length is determined not by word count but by page number.  With Microsoft’s recent default switch, the majority of students who don’t ever change the default font in Word will now be writing papers that are around 90% as long as those turned in a few years ago.  That means that a substantial number of trees will not be needed for papers and that students will have more time to do things like get in trouble or start billion dollar companies.