In a press release, Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

Well hoo bloody ray!

Now for the downside and implications.

- $1.29 per song for 256Kbps? So that's $12.90 for an album (ish). What's a CD cost now at Walmart? $10? And let's not forget they're competing with free.

[edited to add]. OK I didn't read all the article. Full albums are $9.99 at 256K and with no DRM.

- So iTunes can support selling alternate prices and non-DRMed tracks side by side with DRMed tracks. So when people reacted to Steve's "DRM is bad" statement by saying that he should sell on-DRM where the artist requested it have a point. And all the Apple Fanboys who used the argument that it was too hard will have to change their (i)tune.

And I'm still sad that AllOfMp3 has effectively gone.

I'll repeat that. let's not forget they're competing with free. What happens when sales *don't* take off. Is that when we start seeing the price go into free fall?

Boing Boing: DRM is Killing Music parody of "Home Taping is Killing Music"
[from: del.icio.us]

Properly Chilled - Downtempo Music & Culture
What it says! So chilled, it's positively Arctic. [from: del.icio.us]

Boing Boing: DRM is Killing Music parody of "Home Taping is Killing Music"
[from: del.icio.us]

InformationWeek | DRM | Opinion: Apple's Copy-Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business | July 26, 2006
Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. [from: del.icio.us]

Music via Google
Another nail in the coffin [from: del.icio.us]

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

Twitter has an awkward UI, it's horribly slow and having terrible scaling problems (The Curse of Success). But it's proving to be a mind bullet that is throwing off a load of ideas.

As I said yesterday, I find it interesting that the UI has produced a set of behaviours. Everybody's looking at Twitter as Micro-Blogging. The displays are all LIFO, latest at the top. People are using it to broadcast their thoughts not to have conversations. The Personal Twitter page encourages this by showing just your posts as if it's a blog.

Now imagine that we actually used it for conversations the way we use IRC or Skype Group Chats. A Personal page of just my posts would make no sense at all. And we'd want to have displays with latest at the bottom scrolling up.

But trying to duplicate IRC using purely web technology is never going to work because you're never going to make it responsive enough. IRC (and IM) is architected for this kind of real time conversation.The web just isn't.

But Twitter has still got a new idea. And the new idea is that you can build a Group Chat Channel from the social networking interaction of saying "This person is my friend" or "I want to follow this person".

So the next question is how to build a Group chat system with that core idea at it's heart. Get rid of the concept of Channel or Club or Yahoogroup and base the grouping purely on people's social networks.

At this point I turn to Skype. A Skype Mood is quite like a Tweet. Skype already broadcasts your mood to all your contacts. We can prototype this by building a tray application or Skype Extra that displays the last N changes in Skype Mood from all your contacts with a simple text box to change yours. We can use Moodgeist to produce the global time line. We'd base the UI on Twitteroo just reversing the display so it's more IRC like. It's a horrible hack on something not designed to do this but it would let us prototype the idea. To do it properly would mean getting Skype to do it inside the application and properly and it's some way off their core competency.

I could do something like this in Ecademy. If I can get the indexed queries right it should scale OK within Ecademy's limited community. Well at least this year anyway. But a web interface isn't responsive enough.

Doing it on a really big scale I think needs some new architectures both at the server and at the client. What we're looking at is some web2-IM hybrid.

See Twitter. It's really pretty horrible but the A-List bloggers are all over it. And it's got me thinking. ;)

There are two actions/questions that are very, very common on the net

- What are my friends doing? This is Few to One and typically relies on aggregating all your friends attention streams into one place. Typical of this are things like Skype Presence, Plazes, MySpace, Facebook, Last.FM, and now Twitter.

- Hey Look At This! Telling your friends about what you've found, what you've done or what you think. One To Few. Examples are Digg!, Twitter, Blogs, del.icio.us, Stumble, Skype, Flickr, Last.FM

There's some clear overlap here which results in Few to Few community. I find it interesting the way that most communities are set up with the COMMUNITY as an object around a topic and then people join them. Twitter has reversed this with it's friends and followers to create overlapping communities on the fly. But in the process they've lost the feeling of belonging and it's too damn hard to see where the boundaries are or to add to an existing conversation and maintain it over time. The best description I've come up with is that Twitter is 10,000 Alpha Geeks standing on soap boxes and howling into the wind. But there's no sense that anyone is listening!

The parallel with IRC is actually prompted by Skype. Skype public chats have re-invented IRC with some improvements but some downside mainly about scaling. Twitter feels as lightweight as IRC with the same message type of short bursts of text. But since there's no there, there, you can't maintain the conversation.

Writing web based systems to handle very large quantities of short bursts of text is very hard. Server based Shoutboxes and Chat systems typically don't work very well and don't scale very well. IRC was architected from the ground up to handle scaling. Skype handles scaling by using P2P and limiting the size of any one chat. Twitter is clearly having trouble scaling as it's wilting at the moment.

Somewhere in here is my continuing frustration with the state of Few To Few systems. I really, really like the idea of instant chat forums created on the fly from people defining their own groupings of friends and followers. I'm deeply disappointed that Twitter doesn't contain more to foster longer term conversations.

I'm bored with 2007. Isn't it 2008 yet?

I'm bored with this decade. Isn't it 2010[1] yet?

I'm bored with this Millenium. Isn't it 3000 yet?

[1]Can't wait for 2012 when the novelty curve goes vertical and the Timewave 0 Singularity.

Here's a challenge. How do you find the most popular (or any) UK Based blogs that cover technology, Web2, and startups?

I'm not really sure how to start.

Answers on a postcard to julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond

Totally awesome piece by Marc on thoughts brought on by showing an Indian round California.

Marc's Voice » Blog Archive » Incredible Cultural differences and the global divide

I have to be careful how I think and talk about this. So I'll just toss in two thoughts.

1) Travel broadens the mind. And sometimes in the process it broadens other people's as well.

2) Some times you have to work at seeing the good in both your culture and other people's. Being ironic and negative about both your culture and other people's is the easy option.

We had a hardware problem early this morning and again this afternoon around 4 to 5pm that meant that the Ecademy site was running very slowly. We're temporarily sorted this out and are currently investigating the cause to prevent it happening again.

Although this coincided with the new functions and changes going live, it was not actually related.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why do we find it so hard to build an insanely great Few To Few communication system? Conversations within a group of like minded people is fundamental to what it means to be human. From the 3-25 people eating together to the couple of hundred people worldwide that share an interest in some obscure form of motorcycle to the local golf club, small groups of people getting together to socialize is very very common.

The geek world has tried all these:-
- Mailing lists
- IRC
- Usenet
- Skype Public chats
- Web Forums (phpBB etc)
- Tribes, Orkut Groups, Ecademy Clubs

And for various reasons, they've all failed, been discarded or at least haven't reached their potential. Often this is due to poisonous people (The Fuckwad problem) or it's because the technology is too hard (IRC) or too unstandardised (email client threading).

But then we get a whole series of technologies that are supposed to be better and are promoted as if they provide a real alternative. So we have:-
- Blogging - Actually a monologue, One to Few.
- Blog Comments - One to Few and impossible to track across the blogosphere.
- Twitter - Another monologue, One To Many. With almost no feedback and response.

So here's Danah Boyd talking about Twitter. I'm reading between the lines but Danah seems to be complaining that there's no back channel and Twitter is broadcast only. "The techno-geek users keep telling me that it’s a conversation. ... But i don’t think that either are typically conversations. More often, they are individuals standing on their soap boxes who enjoy people responding to them and may wander around to others soap boxes looking for interesting bits of data."

I've thought about and actually written the code to Tweet, whenever I get a new entry in the RSS feeds from last.fm (what am I listening to), my blog (what have I just said), Librarything (what have I started reading), Amazon Wishlist (What do I want), Flickr (What have I just posted). But I've decided not to enable it. Not because I want to be secret, but because I don't want to pollute the Twitter stream with hundreds of posts per day.

Meanwhile, we still need a better Few-To-Few conversation medium.

P2P File-Sharing Ruins Physical Piracy Business | TorrentFreak : If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It's true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they're called "physical pirates" and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.

The story is about a Brit who made CDs and DVDs of music, games, movies and software and sold them for up to 10 quid at car boot sales. His (illegal) business has collapsed as he can't even give them away now. The combination of P2P file sharing and cheap DVD burners mean that there's no market for cheap ripoffs any more.

So let's get this straight. If you can't even sell cheap pirated copies what hope is there for selling the real thing?

I do have to take the story with a pinch of salt. I understand there is still a big market dominated by the Chinese in London for pirated disks. And I seem to remember seeing people selling bootleg tapes and CDs last time I was in Camden Market. Perhaps this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. Or maybe it's that you have to offer something unavailable elsewhere such as bootleg concert/mix performances.

A comment I posted a few days ago.

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site : "They're just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them."

Something to understand here. The big labels are not involved in direct retail sales. In fact they have a huge channel conflict problem which prevents them from doing due to the risk of upsetting their existing customers which are the big retail outlets.

So the only way for anything to change is for somebody (like Apple, say) to come to them with a new business model. But when that happens, the lawyers, middle managers, and all sorts of other interests tie the negotiations up in endless powerpoint and chocolate biscuit meetings while they debate how the business model can't possibly work for them without this that and the other restriction, the most obvious of which is DRM.

So it's not really that the big labels aren't doing anything. It's because they can't do anything due to their history.

Which is what makes the death of AllOfMp3 all the more galling. Here was a positive new approach to selling music that is being killed by short sightedness as they've successfully cut off it's income. What the labels ought to do is to buy (or encourage someone to buy) the assets of AllOfMp3 and transplant it into the west.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » links for 2007-02-13 : DRM systems are broken so quickly because they are grounded on some thing that is scientifically bankrupt, the idea that you can keep a secret from some one from whom you have told the secret.

I'm not sure I should suggest this to anyone but I can't be the first to see this. There is a way for DRM to work and to be effectively unbreakable. Use PKI. But it relies on the customer having a unique key pair. The provider encrypts the content using the customer's unique public key. The content is then decrypted with the customer's secret key. This could be encapsulated in the player software (iTunes say) and made pretty much transparent. On installation the player software would report it's newly generated public key back to the provider who would then use it when the provider created the file for download. In addition the encoded file could be signed by the provider and the signature checked against the Provider's public key.

This could all be open sourced and the algorithms published. Just as with SSL, the same scheme could be used by multiple providers and with player software from multiple sources.

The downside of course is that the provider has to uniquely encrypt each file for a specific customer.

There's a catch though. There's always a catch. Once the software has done it's job, and created the plain text version, this now sits on the customer's PC waiting to be captured and turned into a DRM-free version.

So what we've done is to prevent the customer from stealing a file meant for somebody else. Or distributing the encrypted file because it won't work for anyone else. But we've failed to stop the plain text version from being captured and distributed. And there lies the rub. it's not so much that you can't keep a secret from someone who you've told the secret as that you can't dictate what a customer does with the decrypted file once it's decrypted.

Slashdot | No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance :

This sceptred isle
I used to be very proud of being English. I believed Britain to be a light in the darkness and a bastion of freedom. I believed that the U.K., along with the U.S., stood as examples to the rest of the world as to what was possible when freedom won out over fear. But today, I no longer feel that way. I see freedoms being given up for illusory safety, and an unprecedented level of control being given to a government that has never proven itself even remotely worthy or capable of such a responsibility. Mostly, I feel anger and sadness, and a sense of frustration that the proverbial shining city on the hill has become so horribly tarnished with the shit of misinformation, misdirection, fear-mongering, and mediocre talking-heads proclaiming that just a few more liberties need to go to make us all safe.

Me too. We were never as good as we thought we were, but we were never as pathetic as we are now.

Gizmodo's Anti-RIAA Manifesto - Gizmodo

Digital Rights^H^H^H^H Restrictions Management, or DRM, is the software that makes it so music you buy from the iTunes Music Store can't play on any other player other than the iPod, such as a Zune or Sansa. Right. DRM is not about paying the struggling artist. It's about filling the coffers of Apple and Microsoft (and Macrovision and the other DRM vendors)

Apple - QuickTime - Download - Standalone QuickTime Player
It's been really annoying me that you couldn't install or upgrade Quicktime without also installing iTunes. So it was good to finally discover the page for the standalone player. [from: del.icio.us]