Quick note to pitch an upcoming concert in Winston-Salem. A friend of mine is playing at The Garage in Winston-Salem on July 31st. If you’re in the city, please drop in for a look. Also on the bill – Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey – Brett Harris – and The Tomahawks. Enjoy.

Click the poster for a larger poster.

“The DynaLine user interface was the most favored interface, ranked most preferred by 61% of users…”

Nice to see the research proves out one of the design principles for our former INTV project.

Early adopters, and early majority for online video services are now tapped out. In the following chart we see from 2008 to 2009, the number of unique viewers actually went down by around 2%. Usage rose, but uniques are flat. To take a shopping-mall analogy, sales, and foot traffic are up, but it’s the same people, and the other half of the city is ignoring the mall.

So the question is – are video products well positioned to attract the rest of the audience. And the answer is no. Your grandmother won’t watch TV on the Internet because it’s basically too much work. One could argue that by the time she breached the learning curve, web video as we know it will be an old-form curiosity – like Word Perfect for DOS.

For those companies trying to reach late majority video users, or trying to re-innovate for next-generation video services there are clear opportunities. But, for the short term YouTube has sucked the life out of web video innovation and left it stalled at the click-happy gates of our soon-to-be past.

Short attention span web-television is not the entire story. Reacting to a NYTimes article, MarketingVOX points out, longer form should not be counted out.

At INTV in 2002, and up through our current release on intv.com, Ryan Fields and I believe long form has legs. Back in the day I had an investor tell me with absolute seriousness that people would never watch television on computers. The sad fact is, that guy, like so many business people just did not understand the shifting device marketplace. It’s not television on a computer, it’s a computer controlling a video signal.

Take a look at these two charts. In the first we see, in the aggregate, almost 50% of users watch online video on a separate display device from their primary computer monitor (not including mobile). In the second, note that 70% say they’ll cut cable within 5 years because the programming they want is either only on the net, or is of better quality. These are the trends Ryan and I have been projecting now for a decade. No, we have not made the leap to be as famous as RC Cola, but at least we’re still slugging it out and trying to make a difference.

“So maybe Jackson couldn’t keep the world moving to music, and maybe he did terrible things or maybe he didn’t. But for one long, glorious moment he made the world dance. And he did it like no one ever had or probably ever will.”

– Bill Werde, Billboard Magazine in Remembering Michael Jackson

The text of this speech is here.

Will the future feel object-free, and placeless? If so, won’t we not know it when we’re there?

Joho liveblogs Bruce Sterling at reboot: “For people of your generation, objects are print-outs. Their frozen social relationships. Think of them in terms of hours of time, and volumes of space”

Zero History references a book-in-progress by William Gibson.

Opera releases Unite, and analysts rain down with run downs.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/06/why-a-centralised-web-is-here-to-stay/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/17/opera-unite
http://www.inquisitr.com/26360/oh-duncan-if-opera-unite-is-the-future-then-were-going-back-in-time/

And so on.

So it’s been done before: Microsoft Live Sync, and IRC fserve
And it’s not secure enough for some things, but is it secure enough?
Blah, blah, blah.

Ignore the chatter. The back story is this…
Opera Unite makes personal file sharing into a browser setting, instead of a mile-long process. It means I can share without uploads, and I can host without dyndns. These are milestones indeed, if for no other reason than because it’s so simple your mom can use it.