The truthiness of iPod ear: The Peter Townshend loud iPod story is going mainstream in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. First, let me fully and enthusiastically endorse the common sense notion that it is very likely to be of great harm to one’s hearing to blast one’s iPod into one’s ears. (It couldn’t have been only my Mom who was yelling, “turn down that racket or you’ll go deaf” 35 years ago when the racket was Peter Townshend’s music.)
However, the article in tomorrow’s Journal is in need of a work-over by the WSJ’s “Numbers Guy.” For example, the reporter writes the following:
Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod, and other players by iRiver, Sony and SanDisk — can hold thousands of songs and have longer-lasting batteries than older players. As a result, people are listening to the devices for much longer periods of time.
Say what? The longer-lasting battery claim is easily debunked by anyone who has ever used an iPod. But where could that other statistic possibly come from — the one about “people are listening to devices for longer periods of time” because they have more songs on them. Granted, that sounds logical, but with all the research about people’s media consumption is there any research that shows a correlation between the number of songs one has access to with the amount of time one listens to those songs during a certain period of time? If this were true, shouldn’t the exploding number of hours people spend listening to music be a trend those Pew folks should be all over? Again, the statistic that the more songs you have, the more hours a day you listen to music, may be logical, but you don’t have to be Stephen Levitt to recognize its potential freakiness.
Again, let me say on behalf of moms and dads everywhere. As anyone who has ever had their ears ring for 24 hours after a Who concert can tell you: listening to loud music for a long period of time is not good for you. Do it long enough and you’ll very likely screw up your hearing… permanently. But what is it about iPods that makes that ageless Mom-knows-best fact of life have more “truthiness” today than it did 35 years ago?
Technorati Tags: freakonomics, ipod, statistics
Dave Barry on blogging: (From Time Magazine):
“I like blogging because it’s flexible. Some days you do a lot. Some days you don’t do any. I also like the interaction. If you write an entry and let people comment on it, it’s amazing how funny it can get. The Internet is a good thing for people who write.”
He says he doubts he’ll go back to writing a newspaper column, but will keep blogging. (Lame: Time uses the wrong URL for Barry’s blog and doesn’t include a hyperlink.)
Technorati Tags: blogging
Yahoo’s acqhire strategy: It’s not just a buzzword, it’s a movement. From the Y! Music Blog:
“Webjay is visionary and fantastic, but we are also keenly interested in Lucas the individual.”
Flashbacks: rexblog definition: acqhire. Yesterday’s post on Google’s acqhire strategy.
Technorati Tags: acqhire, yahoo
How Macworld Eve is different than Christmas Eve: On Macworld Eve, there are lots of mouses stirring. (Speaking of mice: Dear Mr. Jobs, How ’bout a bluetooth version of one of these? And while I’m at it, don’t forget my perennial wish: Ala iTunes/iPod, offer a Windows version of iChat AV and the iSight camera. I promise: I’d purchase several if you’d offer them.
Technorati Tags: apple, macworld
Forrester Magazine: Forrester Magazine, a title the research company launched last year, has ceased publication. While it was sent to the firm’s clients, it was to be sold via subscription and newsstand, according to the announcements accompanying its launch. It was published internally and edited by Jimmy Gutterman.
Technorati Tags: custom publishing, magazines
Scientific proof that I’m still an adolescent? New research suggests that adolescence perhaps ends at the point when we start to go to bed progressively earlier rather than later and later.
(via: Brand Noise)
Technorati Tags: humor
Most bizarre splog ever: Curious as they are, I never point to splogs that try to draft off the rexblog for purposes I haven’t quite figured out yet. Frankly, they’re scum and I don’t want to waste my time worrying about them. However, someone or something set up a weirdly named splog that is, well, weird. Dave Winer, if you’re reading this, I guess this blows my cover (sorry, inside joke).
Technorati Tags: splogs
Hykull: “Blog expert and consultant” (and rexblog friend) Josh Hallet is featured in today’s Orlando Sentinel. Also, check out the snappy new design of his website.
Technorati Tags: blogging
Annoying anonymously: (From Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com) “Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.”
If Declan’s characterization of this law is accurate (these types of issues usually have more than one interpretation), I don’t know which is more troubling to me: Who will define what “annoy” is? Who will define “without disclosing his identity”? The language was buried in the context of a law preventing “violence against women.”
Our Constitution was written by men who advocated its passage with a series of articles they published without disclosing their identities. Those articles were very annoying to lots of people. Saying the technology were available, would the anonymous men who wrote them have been prohibited from publishing the Federalist Papers online if this law had been passed then?
Workspace porn: (No, not that kind of porn.) Dave Gray says:
“Look around you — is your work space the kind of place you look forward to going? Do you have the tools you need to be productive and inspired?”
Cool bonus link: He set up a Flickr “group” and invited people to contribute photos of their workspaces. (How to set up a Flickr group.)
Technorati Tags: design, flickr, lifehack, gtd
Survival of the bloggiest? I am not attending, but I thought the title of this one-day seminar being offered by the Magazine Publishers of America has an interesting name: “Buzz, Blogs and the Survival of Magazine Publishing.”
Technorati Tags: blogging, magazines, publishing
