The Blog
02 Sep 2005 01 Sep 2005 forum.skype.com :: View topic - What is new in Skype for Windows 1.4 API
Especially new URI schemes [from: del.icio.us] O'Reilly Radar > Geobloggers and the Y! Identity API
Hello... Flickr and hence Yahoo! have an authenticaion API? [from: del.icio.us] 30 Aug 2005 Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (plasticbag.org)
Tom Coates explains phonetags. visionary stuff [from: del.icio.us] Burningbird » Threshold
my comment:- "Google AdSense Sucks for Bloggers" Go on, shout it from the rooftops. Sure, if you set up a group of blogs with very narrow focus and then tailor the content to high paying AdSense keywords, you can make some money. But for all of the rest of us who blog about what *we* find interesting, Google is absolutely hopeless at providing interesting ads that people might actually want to click on. What's worst is when you get deluged with ads for blog hosting services. Hello? All my readers (all 5 of them!) already have a blog. Why would they want to sign up for another? And you've pointed out a key problem where the Ads from Google are ideologically unsound from the POV of the blog author. Hence the talk last year about publisher driven advertising. Me, I want Last.FM style radio buttons on each Ad that only I can see. "Love it, Ban it". Sure, Google lets me ban ads, but it's hard work, IE only and a PITA. It should be simple. And there's metadata in them thar radio button pushes. There's space here for a new Ad placement service targeting blog publishers. Open Listings anyone? 29 Aug 2005 From a comment on SuW's blog.
One of the problems with this stuff is explaining it to uninterested people in terms they can understand so it's not just us who are freaked out about it. This is a problem I have with Lessig's approach of talking about remixing. It's just too subtle compared with "pirate". We need the sound bite because the opposition are sound bite masters. Nothing to do with data retention, but I've been explaining the EFF fight in terms of VCR time shifting and skipping past the adverts. This is something that *everyone* sees as a basic right because everyone has done it even if their VCR still blinks 12:00. Now explain that their next VCR works just like their current one except that one day it refuses to record Lost or 24 or ER. Or when they do record it, it refuses to skip the ads. Or the quality is really bad until they spend another 1000 quid on a new plasma screen. Or the CD they buy won't work in the car. Or the music they thought they bought is dead because they upgraded to a new laptop or the supplier went out of business. And on and on. In terms of data retention, we need to fight with real world examples that people can relate to. Otherwise you get the sort of response that says "I wouldn't mind having an ID card, I've already got 4 in my wallet, what's one more? The government already knows everything about me, what's the problem? If it's going to stop bombings on the subway/immigrants taking my job/ID theft/benefit scroungers/teenage drunkenness/hoody hooligans/Chavs I'm all for it". 27 Aug 2005 Recording Industry vs The People
A blog covering somebody who's fighting back against the RIAA "Demanding money with menaces". Excellent. 26 Aug 2005 What do you call someone who believes in the literal truth of the old testament of the St James Bible? Did Jesus the Christ believe in the literal truth of the old testament of the St James Bible. I'm not that hot on theology but I rather think not.
So perhaps we should stop calling people who do, "Christian". They're giving the religion a bad name. Too many questions about this.
- Will it be possible to download (not share/upload) Sony *and* Non-Sony music from outside PlayLouder. If so will it be only from authorised sources? So iTunes is OK, but AllOfMp3 isn't? - Will non-Sony music be stopped when sharing outwards - Playlouder have an agreement with Sony. What if you share your whole library and 3/4 of it is non-Sony. Do you still get sued? - Which networks and ports are they watching? What if I use Soulseek, Usenet, Bittorrent, Next Greatest P2P thing? - If I use Bittorrent they probably can't fingerprint the file until they have a significant part of it. Which means they will have to run a BT client. So will they seed? - And most importantly, does Audible Magic work? And since it can't be 100%, what % false positives and negatives? - I like obscure music from obscure labels and at least some of it is non-label direct from the artist. Will they get paid too? I'm sure you can think of many more. It may be a brave experiment but ultimately this boils down to market forces and whether the market considers them to be good value. And in these days of £15 entry level broadband and cable broadband jumping shortly to 10Mb, £26 for 1Mb doesn't look competitive. I also don't feel comfortable with a centralised distribution of royalty money whihc is perhaps my biggest objection to Voluntary Collective Licencing. The obvious candidate to administer this is the Performing Rights Society. And they don't have a stellar record for getting the right money to the right people. 25 Aug 2005 23 Aug 2005 IntarWeb Warning: Rising Meme.
The first church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is growing strongly. Have you been touched by his Noodly Appendage? rAmen. ps. More here at WIkipedia. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 23-Aug-05 9:10am ] Ecademy Clubs: Skype Directory Club - Forum : It would appear Skype is miles ahead in terms of numbers and has potential to become a de facto standard for PC PC voip. Skype has a unique propriety standard that is scalable (?). However, what about competitors? It's a fairly easy game to get into and the only commitment Skype has are paying clients and the fact that my contacts use Skype too. Could a competitor deplete Skype growth? Will corp users prefer the enterprise MS product with full integration to existing MS products? Could a competitor build a Skype compatible product without calling it Skype? Perhaps Skype should move to the licensing route to rubber stamp that de facto standard?
Two things make this difficult - Installed base. It's critical with an app like this that you can call your friends who have the same system installed. - Quality. Skype have raised the bar and it's not trivial any more to compete. Scenarios that might topple them. - The SIP community come up with a communal directory, there's some common way of busting NAT and firewalls, a common standard for encrypting coalesces around Phil Zimmerman and gpg and multiple alternate clients appear that are good enough. All four tasks look pretty hard but perhaps Gizmo can lead the way. With Jabber contributing the decentralised but communal directory. - Microsoft swallow their desire to make money from partners and open up MSN again so that it can talk to any SIP partner rather than just seleceted paid services. They build NAT and firewall busting into Longhorn as a service or switch wholesale to IPv6. Don't hold your breath. I don't think they want to be a telco so they'll try and build all the Skype-out/in stuff via partners. Who will then want an exclusive, charge for everything and won't be global. - Yahoo forget about partnering with BT and make Yahoo voice work properly. Except that YM! is pretty nasty and I don't think they can assemble enough programmming smarts. - AOL work closer and closer with Apple. The clever guys at Apple extend iChat into AIM and produce a PC version on the back of the move to Intel. In some ways this actually looks the most likely. I think the question for Skype is whether they can keep innovating fast enough to move further and further ahead into a really unassailable position where the only option for the commercial scenarios is to buy them out. This is a critical time in their growth where internal process and dealmaking will be pulling the limited programming resource into poor productivity. Rapid growth in company size and hence demands on time can be a real bitch to manage. 22 Aug 2005 Boing Boing: Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music on P2P :
Cory is waxing lyrical about this. This is such stupendously good news that I frankly didn't believe it. This is what EFF has been calling for for years now, a Voluntary Collective Licensing Scheme will break the file-sharing deadlock and give the majority of Internet users who file-share today the chance to get legit while compensating rightsholders. and later PlayLouder MSP has deals with many indy labels as well as Sony, and those labels will also get a proportional cut of the money that PlayLouder MSP takes in based on their network monitoring. The ISP says that it is negotiating with other major labels and hopes they'll come into the fold soon. The thing that bothers me about this is the centralization and the dependence on deals with specific labels to get compensation at least nearer to the artist. Is there a mechanism here for truly independent artists to get paid? What about artists signed to a label that doesn't participate? And why isn't this going through the Perfoming Rights Society? But I think the biggest confusion here is going to be the relationship between the end user and the copyright owner. Can we expect the end user to be able to work out that sharing Sony tunes is OK, but sharing EMI tunes is not ok and likely to get you a law suit through the letter box? And finally there's some double think here. The EFF has been quick to debunk Audible Magic. But now they are going to be the saviour. 17 Aug 2005 MAKE: Blog: Dave Matthews DRM workaround HOW TO : which points at a description on the "Official Dave Matthews Band Website"
If this wasn't so sad it would be funny. Musicians explaining to their customers how to bypass the DRM on their CDs to get the song onto their iPod. By copying the embedded WMAs to their PC, downloading a license which then allows them to burn an audio CD copy of the original (modulo two lossy compression steps) so that they can then rip the CD to unencrypted MP3s to finally copy them to an iPod. And noting that the CD copy protection doesn't work on Macs so that a Mac can rip the original CD directly. And finally topping it off with a request to petition Apple to support WMA. And all this when the original copy protection on the CD can be bypassed by simply disabling auto-run on your windows box or holding down the shift key while mounting the CD. I mean, WTF? In the immortal words of John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious?" Just Say No To DRM and don't buy anything from the Dave Matthews Band. I'd suggest you tell them why but their website doesn't have any obvious way of talking back apart from this email address fanmail@davematthewsband.com Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog : New Identity Incubation Project at Apache
Hans Granqvist via Kim, "WSS4J's functionality overlaps TSIK's, but there are some differences. WSS4J uses Apache Axis as SOAP engine, and builds on the Apache XML-Security project. TSIK contains its own XML security engine as well as its own SOAP stack implementation." Kim: To put it slightly differently, it is my hope that by implementing the Infocard Identity Metasystem components Apache would effectively build in support for the whole gamut of identity tokens, including those used by Liberty, Sxip, Identity Commons, LID and Passel. In other words, I see InfoCards and the Metasystem as a platform, not a competitor, for these other systems. Kim: Clearly this type of involvement at Apache starts to answer some of the very legitimate questions posed to me by Julian Bond. Um. An Identity project within Apache is to be welcomed. I don't know the reasons but I wonder why an Apache project would start with a new SOAP stack when Apache Axis is probably the most well developed SOAP stack outside MS. SOAP Interop is not easy. So starting with a SOAP stack with a lot of experience of that would seem like a good idea rather than developing another from scratch. Lumping SXIP and LID in with Liberty (and missing out OpenID) as potential layers on top of the MS Identity metasystem seems odd to me. The technologies used are *so* different. And the only roadmap I can see for the MS identity metasystem to support Drupal, Wordpress et al via an Apache Java identity server is for TSIK to be very widely implemented on hosted Apache installations. This doesn't seem very likely to me in the medium term let alone the long term given that Axis is pretty rare now. So I reckon my gauntlet for Kim still lies on the floor. Pick a very popular open source web system wth very wide deployment. It doesn't matter which, but something like Drupal, phpBB, Wordpress, Movable Type, PHP-Nuke. Now try and imagine a roadmap where Infocard gets implemented on that application and gets widely deployed. I think we're beginning to see and understand MS' vision for the metasystem. "Here's all the heavy lifting done for you. now go and write something that uses it to provide end user services. BTW you'll be locked in to our platform and we'll be competing directly with you with our own end user service. We reserve the right to change the platform to suit our end user service but any changes will of course be documented." Sound familiar? Or am I being too cynical? 16 Aug 2005 Slyck News - Music Industry: Small Furry Animals Biggest Threat : Forrest creatures. Yes, forest creatures are now the number one threat to the music industry. Chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, bunnies, field mice and opossums. Each one is using its own unique talents to disrupt the music industry and cause the collapse of an American and indeed global institution. In an evidential shift in piracy techniques, physical piracy is now a greater threat than P2P. Music industry intelligence has identified the following creatures as the main culprits in the physical CD trade:
Raccoons: Responsible for raiding and pillaging music stores for original data. Bunnies: "Mules" of the underground. Their quickness is utilized for distribution to burning plants. Squirrels: Use their opposable thumbs to operate heavy machinery such as CD/DVD burners and Nero Burning Rom. Field Mice: Security. Who isn't spooked by a scurrying mouse? Opossums: Financial backers. Don't ask. It gets worse. Peter Rabbit got a 60Gb USB portable disk drive for Easter. He's got his whole music collection on it and has been walking round all his friends and relations dumping his music and sucking up their's. And there's rather a lot of P. (diddy) R@661t's friends and relations, what with all the cousins and all. Flopsy Bunny prefers to carry round a couple of DVDs of hers. But she's such a party animal. She always takes over the music at the hop and starts playing endless Goa Trance. It must be something to do with the cabbage hearts and banana skins, which is all she will eat. Quick, quick! Hide all the children! Mr MacGregor's coming! Don't let him turn you into rabbit pie (or demand money with menaces). 13 Aug 2005 Our Social World
Conference Friday 9th September 2005 The Moller Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, UK - just 45 mins from London Theme: Getting businesses into blogging and wikis! Enabling conversations with your customers and users by learning about web logs and related applications. Who should attend: All involved in business from CEO’s to receptionists, VC’s and entrepreneurs. Blogs can destroy or build a company’s reputation: Kryptonite Locks in the USA lost a $15m class action suit on issue’s first raised by a blogger. There's a stellar cast of speakers including yours truly. Anything you can do to promote this to business people (rather than geek bloggers) will be much appreciated. [from: JB Ecademy] 11 Aug 2005 
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