BlogRolling: “I’m writing this today to let you all know that Blogrolling has been acquired by the great folks at Tucows and this will be my last news posting.” Congrats to Jason DeFillippo.
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technology
Om Malik has a great roundup of the tragedy of the information commons debate stimulated by Jeff Jarvis What if an infomation economy is necessarily deflationary? “for information, although the tragedy of the commons has been removed, it means that all ground might as well be common. In the short term this all sounds great, all the things that the US is famous for, from Rock and Roll to Software become cheap and plentiful. Software necessarily becomes open source, the radio spectrum open and music free. But if food and clothing can’t become free and if it only pays for western economies to outsource unsubsidized production to poorer countries, then how do the domestic proletariat earn money to feed and cloth themselves?”
iTunes wishlist: 1. Ability to create a list of personal favorite songs as playlists/wishlists and publish on a weblog with links to iTunes (newsblogger for iTunes). 2. Affiliate program for above playlists (an Amazon style affiliate program with no physical product to deliver). 3. Ability to send someone a gift of a song with a picture and message (a value added online greetings card). 4. iTunes Music Store API. 5. Publication of aggregated affiliate playlists from weblogs on the iTunes site (iTunes celebrity playlists, but for everyone). 6. iTunes charts by song instead of by album, with cut and paste adsense like code to publish on affiliate sites. I guess the problem is that the iTunes model is the reverse of the Gillette Razor model i.e. Apple makes money on the handle (the iPod) rather than the blades (songs). But the fact that the songs are a loss leader is…
Aaron Swartz: “Libraries and video stores (neither of which pay per rental) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?” The library angle is interesting. If one applies the current logic of the RIAA stance to libraries then if libraries were to lend digital information, this would be indistinguishable from filesharing and therefore illegal. Most rational people think that libraries are a good thing, yet they cannot logically exist in a world of digital content governed by traditional attitudes to content distribution. As more information becomes available in digital form then a library can clearly offer better services such as online delivery. A library becomes a more exciting and valuable community resource. So is it really conceivable that as media like CDs go the way of 8 tracks that libraries will be forced with a choice to become repositories of information stored on obsolete media, or exist underground as…
Have been trying out the Vonage softphone with some success. My Laptop (IBM T40), like most, has built in speakers and microphone, and I don’t want to have to bother with a headset. The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of controlling the echo that the person I am calling hears when the mic. picks up the sound of their own voice from the laptop speakers feeding back into it. I can’t find any third party, echo cancelling, software to turn the laptop into a decent hands free phone. Another question that springs to mind is why the softphone software is better than the reliability and ease of use of voice conversations via an IM client – why are these so unreliable? In general it seems that IM clients switch to peer-to-peer when dealing with file transfers or voice and this is often screwy, but there…
Salesforce.com files for IPO After ditching its Salesforce.com rival, Sales.com, Siebel is now doing a complete U-turn with its own Salesforce-like ASP tool. Call me old-fashioned but most Enterprise software seems to suck. When will it go the way of mainframe computers? The whole notion of spending millions for software that is ‘bespoke’ tailored to your needs, but requires you to do that tailoring yourself for more millions, based on a Return On Investment that has a minus sign in front of it, seems like, well, old-fashioned. The tool I am using to write this is a more elegant solution to web publishing than the raft of Jurassic CMS systems that are waiting for an enormous meteorite to hit them. ASP software is a car and enterprise software is a steam train. When the .com bubble burst people tried to make steam driven cars out of the remnants and that…
Anniversary of first flight – Dec. 17, 2003 Exactly 100 years ago today: flying made possible. This year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 1350mph Next year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 650mph Computers, the Net, telephones and air travel all make the world a smaller place, but exactly 100 years after the invention of flight that is no longer the case. Moore’s law applied to computing and the spread of the net, arguably shows the world shrinking by half its size every year and a half. For travel, the plane shrank the apparent size of the earth to one tenth over 50 years, it then shrank by half again over the next 20 years; 20 years later it shrank by another half with supersonic passenger travel. This year it didn’t merely stop shrinking, but it doubled in size.
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”
The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0): Semantic Web An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy
Sam Ruby seems to be having some interesting ideas about how XPath/XQuery fits into the whole Atom equation. I must admit I’m not fully up on what’s happening here (if someone could give me a brief digest I’d be eternally grateful). However, my 2c: An XML database is the logical backend for a weblog publishing or aggregation system. Whatever the back end, XQuery is the logical front end for rendering weblog style content metadata – as XHTML, ATOM, RSS whatever – it can do so on the fly. If you have a weblog application layer written in XQuery it is human readable and extensible. Plus you can have an entire weblog style content management system written in XQuery. If you have XQuery you don’t need SOAP or XML-RPC – or Atom for that matter, unless… the Atom API can be expressed in XQuery directly. So my question is, can Atom,…
Sean Neville is on a roll with some great ideas: Project Atom, Amazon, Mobile Web Services, and Fireflies at REST via Jeremy Allaire. “