Microsoft’s partnership with Loudeye will allow third parties to develop Apple Music Store style services: “But the Digital Music Store lets any company interested in starting an iTunes-style service do so for a fraction of the cost, said Loudeye President Jeff Cavins”
Meta-files proposed for legal music sharing “The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group and backed by technology companies including Microsoft, released the first specifications for the standard this week. Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself” Shouldn’t this be RSS? Does anyone know the people involved in CRF?
Search for ‘Linux Windows’ on MSN and Google respectively: MSN Search: Results 1-15 of about 18 containing “linux windows” Google Search: linux windows, results 1 – 10 of about 8,990,000 A slight discrepancy in the numbers. Update: see comments, MSN does in fact return lots of resuls if you view the second page.
This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Steve Malkmus at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. This dance hall has one of the last remaining sprung floors in the US and was built at a time when the Tango was illegal in Portland. A city ordinance proclaimed a standard dance position be adopted so that ‘no undue familiarity between partners shall be permitted’.
Hmm, it seems that Google has a limit on the size of words it will index – 128 characters. So mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm returns 30 results, but one more m and nothing. Hmmmmmm.
Gazetteer: Census Info, Physical and Cultural Features, Aerial Photos, Maps, Zip Code Data Location information for 1.8 million physical and cultural features with links to maps and aerial photos. via Research Buzz
Although the US has received most of the flak for not ratifying the Kyoto treaty, it is Russia that has effectively buried it. “Russia said it would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world treaty on global warming. Russian ratification is necessary for the treaty to take effect.” Kyoto treaty
Marc Canter links to Peter Van Dijck’s excellent illustrated semantic web debate. This is a really captivating interface idea. Basically it is a set of quotes in the endless pedantic [sic] web debate next to pictures of people. It reads very much like a cartoon with speech bubbles next to faces and somehow comes to life much better than a threaded discussion. I would like to see the inclusion of a picture (and one-line-bio) of someone next to a trackback item so that you could better follow a distributed discussion that linked to an original posting via trackback.
Microsoft is working on search integrated into the OS: “The tools could also permit Microsoft to undermine the utility of commercial search engines such as Google by making its own software the easiest place to initiate an investigation. Spell-checkers, after all, were once independent applications too.” This is no surprise, building search into the desktop is something that Microsoft will allways have an advantage with. But it does raise an important issue: given that documents on your hard drive contain personal and sometimes confidential data, it would be alarming to see ads based upon the contents of these documents served alongside searches results on your hard drive. Without an ad based revenue model for desktop search, Microsoft would have to either make web search separate with a Google competitor via MSN or subsidise a hybrid web/desktop search as part of the OS. Google would be up against a free product…
Clay Shirky is continuing to set himself up as the anti-semantic web guy. Its an easy target and good for spin. But, after all, what is anti-semantic if it isn’t meaningless. Clay on the Yahoo ontology: “it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.” Well, three things: Google is a search engine, and does pretty much what Altavista did 5 years ago, before they stopped being just a search engine. They sensibly ignore meta tags, but that was largely to do with people deliberately entering false information. Yahoo’s category search (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) is becoming a search engine ‘Yase’ because its difficult to impose ontologies on the web as a whole. Things that aren’t really search engines, like Amazon and…
Ken Rinaldo’s amazing ‘augmented reality robotic fish tanks’ will have their first showing in Lille on the 6th Dec: “Augmented Fish Reality is an in process installation of rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures designed to explore interspecies and transpecies communication. These could best be termed as “biocybernetic” sculptures that allow Siamese Fighting fish to use intelligent hardware and software to move their robotic fish bowls…
Two thirds of all the worlds Bengal tigers are thought to live in backyards and basements in the US. BBC NEWS | Magazine | 10 things we didn’t know this time last week