Duke Listens! : Weblog : So from my own perspective, it seems like Google is not just ignoring its mission to organize the world's information when it comes to music. It seems like Google is actively trying not to do music. I haven't the faintest clue why.

Put these together
- Music is one of the most searched items on Google
- Google knows about a lot of MP3s on the nets
- Google knows how to read the ID3 tags in MP3s
So Google could index all those MP3s and allow you to search on things like bitrate.

Now I can think of all sorts of reasons why Google doesn't currently do that. But somebody could. In fact somebody should.

Next stop, metadata in video leading to better video search. A which point I realized I have no idea what metadata standards there are for embedding information in anything apart from MP3. You would expect that WMA, AAC, MP4, etc etc would have a similar scheme to ID3.

There's a few private sharing systems appearing as plug ins for Skype such as Pando and SkySpace. These things allow a small group of people to share privately among themselves. What's missing in these is the ability to search for a specific file or group of files. And that's a key feature for P2P systems. It's why Soulseek works so well. It's not enough to just find a copy of John Martyn's "Sundays Child" You need to know that it's encoded with LAME -presetstandard at 192Kb VBR before knowing if it's worth downloading.

Beyond the Beyond : Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.

America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.

Hear, Hear.

This dropped across my desk today. The phrase is allegedly some of Saddam's last words.

"Is this your manhood?" « Fundamentalist Druid : The other explanation is that they actually have no fucking clue about any of this stuff, and it's simply a side-effect of staging a bit of a circus for some of their Iraqi puppets with old grudges and for their remaining drool-case supporters in the US, by demonstrating their arbitary power of life and death over uppity foreigners, just like Caligula did by throwing them to the lions.

At the end of the day though, it's certainly a great advert for the 'freedom and democracy' that Bush and Blair (don't forget our dear Prime Minister) promised to bring to Iraq isn't it?

That's the government that we invaded Iraq in order to install? That mob of guys in black balaclavas waving a noose?

That's what 'bringing freedom and democracy' to a country looks like these days?

That's what Bush and Blair lied so much and killed so many thousands of people to achieve?

Grainy footage of a chanting mob of hooded fanatics stringing up an (embarrassingly brave) old man, in what appears to be an abandoned garage?

God help us.

You know it's time to get a new laptop when the battery life drops to below one hour.

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The Man From Google Returns : Turns out search for a record PEAKS upon single release. Yup, that's the HIGHEST INTEREST EVER, when the track is first heard. But as you well know, almost always, YOU CAN'T BUY THE TRACK AT ANY PRICE! CERTAINLY NOT THE ALBUM!

3 or 4 years ago (you know, a lifetime in internet time) back when I last used to buy CDs in an actual record store, I remember being infuriated because the brilliant review in Saturday's Times was for a CD that wasn't available for another month. At the time it seemed seriously stupid. By the time the CD was released and available to actually buy, I'd completely forgotten about it.

Now the record store has shut. It's companion store in the next town has also shut. The Virgin and HMV record stores in the nearest towns with a mall have shut as well. The only place within 20 miles that actually sells CDs is Tesco and Woolworths and they only carry 30 titles. Even the WH Smiths has shut it's music area and only sells movie DVDs.

And they wonder why the traditional music biz is dying?

Julian Bond says: Interesting to see the Last.FM Extra. It seems to be largely a Flash player embedded in a Skype window. Seems like this is a fast way to develop Extras. YouTube embedded in a Skype Extra, anyone?

Julian Bond says: related: We were talking about the Google Search API being closed down. I recently wrote some code to get the top 3 results from Google from a command inside Skype. This led to thinking about why you would want that. One I came up with was Skype being free on some paid hotspots. If the only internet access you can get is Skype, (on a wifi phone perhaps), then getting web pages inside Skype makes sense. But the rest of the time, why not just use a web browser? Which then means that Skype extras only look interesting if they add some value that is only possible from inside Skype. Just embedding something available elsewhere doesn't cut it. So a Last.FM player in a Skype Extra is an interesting demonstration of example code, but I can't see the point.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: Don't you think just making the user's experience more Skype Centric is of value?

Julian Bond says: Actually no.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: Well I think it adds value to Skype Ltd and some Skype Users like me.

Julian Bond says: But we already multitask between Skype, firefox, thunderbird, googlemail. Each of these things is optimised for it's task. We're all comfortable with context switching between them. Add in uTorrent, winamp, etc etc

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: I do not disagree. I certainly would not want to browse the web via Skype. I want IE or FF for that. However I do not mind getting RSS feeds via Skype.

Julian Bond says: I've used Anothr to get alerts generated from synthetic RSS feeds. Great for PR companies and market researchers. Do a search on Google news/blogsearch or technorati for your company name, feed the RSS to Anothr, get an alert on Anothr shortly after someone mentions you.

Julian Bond says: philosophy: I've been thinking about online communications as a 3*3*3 matrix X-axis=publisher, y-axis=reader, z-axis=time. One-Few-Many publishing to one-few-many, in time, immediate-delayed-offline/permanent

Julian Bond says: So Skype is
one->one : chat, voice
few->few : group chat
mostly immediate to delayed

Julian Bond says: Blogs are One->Many, permanent
blog comments are few->many
Clubs-Tribes are few->few

Julian Bond says: In time: Phone -> IM Chat -> Email -> Mailing list-> Blog Comment discussion -> Blog -> Broadcast news progressively longer timescales

Julian Bond says: The current online world is still not very good for few->few group discussions on a niche topic. We used to use mailing lists and usenet but both have been dropping off in effectiveness. People are just not very good at that style of discussion. It's really hard to keep IRC and Skype chats going. The norm is that they fade into disuse. Blogs and Blog comments are hopeless because the discussion gets spread all over the web and it's too much like hard work to check on responses to what you write. Discussion boards work kind of OK, but the UI is mostly pretty unpleasant.

Julian Bond says: The kids use TXT but us old people have a hard time with tiny keyboards and thumbs.

Julian Bond says: Don't get me wrong. I also think public chats are great and are taking what was in IRC to a new level. But it's hard to keep chats going.

Bill Campbell | Skype Journal says: And hard to keep them focused

Julian Bond says: Rule of thumb: you need 5 noisy people. 90% lurk so you typically need 50 people for self sustaining momentum.

Julian Bond says: And when you hit 150 people, the conversation will split and new groups will bud off.

Julian Bond says: So Skype need to up the chat size limit to >150.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » Gowers Review : However, we are concerned that the report seems to make no distinction between large-scale commercial counterfeiting, and small-scale non-commercial acts carried out by individuals. Too often these vastly different acts are conflated by the music industry, and the drafters of any new intellectual property law must make the difference clear to both the courts and the rights holders.

Amazing how often arguments about one get twisted into arguments about the other. Otherwise intelligent people seem to have this problem repeatedly and can't understand how I can be in favour of prosecuting large scale commercial counterfeiters and be against prosecuting individuals giving away music for free.

ClearForest Announces Winners of the 2006 Semantic Web Services Mashup Competition: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
semantic mashups [from: del.icio.us]

Marc made me laugh this morning.

Back in the day, Stewart Alsop, Dave Winer and myself used to hang out allot and kibbitz on the industry. So we decided to start a secret organization called "The Silicon Valley Asshole's Society" - just so we could say we had our own secret organization.

Hey! Dave Winer called me an asshole once[1]. Does that mean I'm eligible to join?

ps. Shouldn't it be "arsehole"?

[1]But I don't hold it against him! I'm not an asshole, but I play one on the internet.

Zenarchery.com » Full text of the Grim Meathook Future thing : The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

It's not evenly distributed! There are other futures. But what's probably scariest for us middle class westerners who live in a provincial suburban town is that we have our own version of the meathook future. Where the oil gets ridiculously expensive, house prices spiral out of reach of our debt ridden children and we're spied on continuously by the local crazy, nanny state government motherfuckers lest we rise up and start shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more". Of course that doesn't even begin to compare with living in the Counterstrike game. But try telling that to the inhabitants of a racially mixed Paris suburb, or a Chicago Project, or a council housing estate in Leeds.

TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer
Another cool music mapping tool [from: del.icio.us]

I was at Advertising 2.0 yesterday. It was after the company Christmas lunch so if I was tired and emotional, I apologise :) Some thoughts:-

eBay are polluting the online advertising market by posting very large numbers of very generic ads. They have a huge number of potential advertisers in that every person who posts a auction is a potential advertiser. So they should turn their advertising department from a cost centre into a profit centre. Either by competing with Google AdSense or by acting as an intermediary for them and offering a cost plus service to advertise specific auctions.

The advertising industry talks a lot about Advertisers and Agencies on one side with customers and their eyeballs on the other. But this game has 3 legs and they hardly ever talk about the 3rd leg; Publishers. And frankly advertising currently sucks from the point of view of the publisher.

Consider three examples.
- Ecademy is a social network for business people. Predominantly sole traders and SMEs. It's a site solidly in the Fat Middle of the Long Tail curve. Finding and serving appropriate advertising is hard. And Google AdSense is too tightly targeted. Ecademy's members don't take kindly to advertising for their competitors on their pages.
- UK Poli Blogs is one of the best aggregators of Political blog thought in the UK. AdSense tries hard but is largely ineffective.
- This weblog is fairly focussed so why do I only get Ads for blog hosting?

Wouldn't it be nice if a publisher could click on an Ad and say "Show this Ad and ones like it on my site"

Maybe Ad Agencies should morph their offering so it's more of a partnership. They could do what they do now. But also provide Ad Serving for campaigns which the publisher sells direct at a reduced margin.

TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Putting TechCrunch UK on Hold

Sam Sethi fired from TechCrunch. More at 11.

Community management is a bitch! Which means there's a business opening for somebody who can provide a community outsourcing system for BigCorps where you take all the pain that they can't handle. BigCorps (like, say, Ford, NTL, BT) desperately need to engage with their customers but it's pretty much impossible for them to do while remaining fair and keeping the PR department happy.

Which makes this little spat all the more ironic. Here we are in the leading edge group, breaking new ground and trying to spread the word about community software and we can't even manage our own little problems of conflict of interest and criticism.

Loic, Mike and Sam could help us all in this business by taking a deep breath and staying away from the keyboard for 24 hours.

Slashdot | Liquid Terror Charges Dropped

A Pakistani judge has decided to drop terrorism charges against the man described as a "key figure" in the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London using liquid explosives. Instead of facing charges of terrorism for the plot, which forced many travelers to follow strict guidelines with respect to liquids, Rashid Raud now faces charges such as forgery. From the article: "Several commentators said the threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and that it helped to demonise British Muslims of Pakistani origin. The Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said the dropping of charges against Mr Rauf in Pakistan would "make no difference" to the case against the men charged in Britain."

So what has happened to the men charged in the UK?

Anil Dash: How Matt Haughey Beat Google :

Google doesn't have a community to leverage.

Now there's a thought. Is that what they were really buying when they bought YouTube? Because apart from Orkut, I can't think of a single Google community that actually has any community element.

digg - Kazakhstan and Russia Start Uranium Venture : Kazakhstan has 30 percent of the world's proven uranium reserves.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Wired News: Gadgets Built to Fail : Someday, much sooner than you'd like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you'll swear, you'll cry -- then you'll sigh and open your wallet. You've been here before, with the jammed Walkman, the DOA answering machine, the fritzed digicam, the blue screen of death.

Let's call it the buy-die-buy theory: Manufacturers design technology to fail so you're forced to upgrade regularly.

This is beginning to really upset me. It's one thing to have this happen with a 25 quid Walkman or a 50 quid CD Walkman. it's quite another when it's 250 quid of iPod or 1000 quid of laptop.

What ever happened to consumer durables.

Maybe if Manufacturers followed the Make manifesto, it wouldn't be so hard to take.

I've been reading a report about the UK Gower Report on Copyright. These things caught my eye.

Gowers wants to see a private copying exception written into copyright law. That was expected and will find no opposition from the UK music industry. Currently, copying from your own CD to your hard drive and MP3 player is infringement, though the music industry turns a blind eye. Gowers wants the law to reflect reality: "private copying should enable users to copy media on to different technologies for personal use," says the report.

So far so good.

What is more controversial is that Gowers sees no need for an accompanying copyright levy. In France, Germany and many other countries, private copying is allowed but compensated by a tax on blank media. The Copyright Directive says member states can choose to forbid private copying or allow it – provided there is fair compensation for right holders. Gowers believes that compensation can be won another way.

His report explains: "If rightholders know in advance of a sale of a particular work that limited copying of that work can take place, the economic cost of the right to copy can be included in the sale price. The 'fair compensation' required by the Directive can be included in the normal sale price."

Kim Walker, head of Intellectual Property with Pinsent Masons, said: "He's saying the price of CDs will go up."

It may be that music purchased as a download is less frequently burned to CD than music purchased as a CD is ripped to another device – so the price rise may not affect iTunes. Gowers also warns that any private right to copy "cannot be extended retrospectively as copies of works already sold would not include this 'fair compensation'."

Ooops! That's impossible to enforce. Either it's legal to copy to another format or it isn't. Applying it retrospectively or not doesn't work.

Walker said: "You can rip CDs bought after the law changes – which Gowers hopes will be by 2008. But you also need to pay to legalise your current collection."

The report states: "collecting societies may wish to consider making a single block licence available to allow consumers to format shift their back catalogues legitimately."

This is ridiculous! No way am I (or anyone else) going to buy a license to rip my old CDs to Mp3.

Walker says he could be deliberately provoking the music industry here. "Would it dare to hike the prices of CDs and blame this new right to make private copies?," said Walker. "Would it have the audacity to demand a lump of cash from each of us for the right to keep playing our existing collections of ripped music?"

And he knows it's ridiculous.

AIM, a trade body for independent music labels, criticised Gowers yesterday for his dismissal of levies. "The fact that these levies, across the board, may be judged to be working imperfectly and arguably may require some reform, rationalisation (possibly even replacement by some system which fulfils the objective more efficiently or imaginatively) does not detract from the essential justice of their existence," it said in a statement. It fears the change could open the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying and sharing from person to person, as well as format to format. "Once owned, however acquired, music will be passed on freely," said AIM.

I'm really quite surprised the AIM said this. I'd have thought they would understand better the natur eof the changes in the business. Apparently not and apparently they have the same attitudes as the BPI, RIAA et al.

Gowers addresses peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, but sees no need for immediate changes to the law. Some have called for a new law to make those who facilitate P2P file-sharing liable for copyright infringement.

Gowers favours self-regulation. The ISP Association is encouraging ISPs and rights owners to cooperate on a Best Common Practice document that will address P2P abuse. Gowers sees this as a good way to change public attitudes and behaviours without court action. Only if there is a failure to agree would Gowers advocate new statutory controls.

Woah, Nelly. This is a slippery road that leads to problems with Net Neutrality. I'm vehemently against drawing the ISPs into this. I believe it's better for everyone if the ISPs are treated as common carriers and are not expected to police use of their networks. We already have plenty of law that allows an organisation (or the police) that believes a crime or copyright infringement is taking place to get a court to order an ISP to provide information. We do not need to turn the ISPs into the Police. But maybe this is what Gower is actually saying. We don't need new law. If the BPI and ISP associations reach a business agreement to control P2P, the government doesn't need to step in to force it. Our beef then moves (or stays) with the BPI and the ISPs and whatever deals they do.

This particular argument is extraordinarily difficult to have with otherwise intelligent people. Repeatedly, I get accused of supporting organised crime and counterfeiting when I question whether the ISPs should automatically give up information about their customers or turn off accounts on demand. We don't seem to be able to separate criminals selling counterfeit goods over the net and private individuals sharing for free via P2P.

But really, all this is moot. We'll all go on ripping our CDs to Mp3, buying from Russian sites, and passing the Mp3s to each other via thumb drive, portable hard drive, or DVD. All that activity is already extremely widespread and completely under the radar. The question is whether the law will be changed to recognise that we're all criminals now.

First the question. Does anyone make a twin tuner Freeview recorder with a hard disk that will also record from SCART Video-In?

And now the background and perhaps the answer. Some Far East manufacturer has come up with a board and reference design that has been boxed and labelled by lots of suppliers. A classic example is the Evesham PVR160. It's a great piece of kit that's amazingly cheap at UKP150. But there's one catch that affects anyone with 3rd party content feeds (eg NTL, Sky, Telewest, old video tapes etc). It's got two scarts but they are both Video *Out* only. One's for feeding the TV, the other is for feeding a VCR or DVD-Writer for archiving recordings. What you can't do is record from either of the SCARTs. This feels really dumb to me. It would have taken only a small bit of hardware and software to do this. When did you last see a VHS or DVD recorder that *wasn't* able to record from SCART.

It seems that every low end FreeView HDD recorder uses the same board and has the same limitation. If you look at the higher end HDD recorders, as far as I can tell none of them have on board freeview and program guides. So the choice seems to be Freeview, ease of use and no external recording, or external recording but analogue tuner(s) with Videoplus.

It gets worse. Most of these low end HDD recorders have no support for topup TV. So you can only record the free to air Freeview channels.

The background to this is that I've got NTL TV as part of a package but also so I can watch the MotoGP and other motorcycle racing on Eurosport, Motors TV and Men and Motors. NTL have taken 2 years now to roll out their HDD recorder (like Sky+). The early adopters on Telewest have had big problems with theirs and NTL might be releasing it in the next 3 months. Or they might not. It's not yet on their product pages. You can kind of bet that the NTL version will be twin tuner, have an easy to use EPG but also won't be able to record from external sources. My VHS recorder has finally died. I *will* need to record Eurosport channels some time next year.

Aaaaaahhh! Why is every solution flawed?