What a great rant.

Marc%u2019s Voice » Blog Archive » Open Letter to Dave McClure: "Where are the open social networking panels at Web 2.0 & Social Graphing?" :

I particularly like this about OpenSocial

Why don't they just call it OpenGadget - or even better 'ClosedGadget' - cause where's the open?

I'm withholding further judgment on OpenSocial until the Data APIs get firmed up and they get implemented on a Google property and at least one other 3rd party site. I've actually already implemented my interpretation of the People Data API on Ecademy but took it down again when it became clear that the Data Apis are works in progress likely to change radically soon.

I do hope DataPortability comes to something and doesn't turn out to be another nude but sunburnt emperor.

A placeholder link to the DataPortability.Public documentation pages.

Sony BMG Exec Talks Nonsense At MidemNet :

"As we all know, the technical price given to individual music tracks and/or albums transferred over the Internet is for all practical purposes, nil."

I take issue with this. The price for free music off the net is your time. Time spent finding, downloading, renaming filenames, fixing tags, organising your library, syncing your iPod. As I think Steve J said, it's only free because you pay yourself minimum wage.

Which means there is actually a market for processes that take the pain out of this. I think this is the real message from iTMS and iTunes (much as I hate them) that the people who purchase from that route are actually buying convenience not music. That $0.99 is not a reflection of the value of the music, but of the value of our time.

This makes me think that there is a sustainable market for downloaded music with a real price and value but that the price per track is more like $0.10 than $0.99 for 128Kbps and perhaps a bit more for 192 and upwards to lossless compression. In other words the old AllOfMp3.com model. Which in turn means that a music retailer should appear that exactly copies the AllOfMp3 website and pricing, is supported by the labels and is packed with every piece of audio ever recorded.

I know, I know, its not going to happen. Unless. Unless a full on features and price war breaks out between iTMS, Amazon and anyone else that sells non-DRM music online.

Oh, Yeah. "Just Say No To DRM" m'kay?

My honourable friend Dave Winer says A decentralized Twitter? (Scripting News) : We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages.

To which I say "Nice", what an interesting thought experiment.

So here goes.

The core of Twitter is micro-blogging. This is well handled already by a subset of RSS. Or rather RSS with an etiquette imposed. Let's call it TSS.
- No Titles
- Limited length description. I find 160chars, not quite enough so let's say 255.
- A Channel name and thumbnail image.

The next bit is the Following, Followed by social graph. We can do following with OPML because it's basically a set of TSS feeds.

Followed by is harder though. This is where one or more aggregators needs to step in and collect all the OPML files so that you can answer the question "Who follows this person". This is the same problem as aggregating FOAF to answer "Who says they know this person".

Now we need a simple micro-blogging engine some thing like a cut down wordpress that understands all this. Enterprising people could provide this as a hosted solution. It needs to both display the incoming feeds and make it really easy to post. And it could copy the Twitter API so that you could use developments of your favourite Twitter helper program

So far so good. Now since Twitter already has RSS feeds this same system could pull in your Twitter like feeds not just from Twitter, but also from all the other Twitter like status systems. Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, Jaiku et al. At which point it becomes obvious that we've already got a decentralised system. It's just that we're not very good yet about grouping them all together.

The bit missing in here is SMS. So there's another opportunity for someone to provide service to the cloud.

What's interesting here is that I'm already doing this by using Twitterfeed and Twitter to gather feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku and Ecademy Status updates. There's quite a few other similar systems. But that's all too geeky for most people. There's already a need for a simpler system to do that.

I used to get my Facebook's Status updates fed into a dummy Twitter account using Twitterfeed which I then follow from my main account. It seemed to stop working some time in December. When I went to check the Twitterfeed setup, the authentication for the dummy account was failing. And it had been dropped from the accounts I was following. Even stranger was that the account was read only, although there's no indication of that on the screen. You can still type in your tweet and hit submit but it's not saved.

So here's what happened. Somebody complained to Twitterfeed and then to Twitter that their Facebook Status updates were escaping out into the web. Twitter then made my dummy account read only. So I've dumped that account, created a new one, made that protected updates, followed it from my main account and started again. Twitterfeed now works again and I'm getting a flow of FB status updates again. As the dummy account is Protected and so not visible, hopefully whoever it was won't notice.

This is the problem with web based systems, especially when they have RSS feeds but even with scraping. Once it gets posted to a public website, it doesn't stay private for long or at least it's hard to keep it private.

And it's made worse because Facebook likes to present this facade that only your friends can see what's happening. If it was all open, people would be a bit more guarded about what they posted.

Speed reading my RSS, I come across a story titled "Vast Cloud of Antimatter Traced to Binary Stars", my mind actually sees "Vast Cloud of Antimatter Traced to Britney Spears". Scary that the society of the spectacle has so pervaded my mind.

At last So here's some predictions for 2008

- Apple announce that iTMS is 100% DRM free.
- Amazon drop prices, iTMS drops prices, Amazon drops prices.
- 192Kb VBR reaches $0.25 per track by year end. Lossless drops to $0.50 by year end.
- Amazon announces "One World Price" Opens store to global customers.
- MP3Sparks finds a way for customers to give them money. Does deal with Paypal.
- Despite all this, overall track sales and CD Sales continue to fall. P2P sharing in all it's forms continues to rise.
- Record Biz survives another year. (Except for EMI which goes specactularly bust)

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

Everex CLoudbook coming to US 25th Jan. $399 - UMPC News - News - UMPCPortal.com : The Cloudbook sets a new standard by offering a 30GB hard drive

VIA's reference design for a tiny motherboard is spawning a features and price war. First was the eeePC, then the Everex Cloudbook, then the Belinea S.Book. The latter two have 1.8" drives in 30 and 80Gb.

There's just about room in the current designs for a 1024 10" LCD. That's the one thing that's holding me back as I really like the idea of a 1Kg tiny notebook for road warrior duties.

The Eco-Effective Future (II) | AlwaysOn : As it turns out, cities can be much more biodiverse than the surrounding countryside. As Claude Levi Strauss said, "The city has elements at once of biological procreation, organic evolution, and esthetic creation. It is both a natural object and a thing to be cultivated; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed."

The two articles here (this is the second) are a fascinating view of an eco-design approach where everything is seen in renewable terms. As he puts it "Waste in-Food out".

Although I've been pretty rude about it, this resonates for me with Bruce Sterling's opening post in The State of the World discussion. Mid sized cities are actually an appropriate way to organize humanity and society. They make more sense than either nations or agricultural villages. Which makes me wonder if we're coming to the end of a relatively brief (in history of mankind terms) era of the nation state.

The other idea that keeps interesting me is the switch from a command and control approach to directing society to an emergent behaviour, hive mind approach. I wonder if I can work all this into something coherent. My last two tweets come from this.

Is the collapse of the Music industry's Short Head a metaphor for other changes in 2008?

How do you disintermediate Governments?

Seth Godin explains the music business :

0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it's going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don't fool yourself into believing it's going to be here forever. It won't.

You've heard it all before but Seth does a good job of laying it out in a way that applies to many many industries, not just the Music Biz.

I'm really enjoying The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008 :

But then he exposes himself as one of those many, many middle aged people who say things like

*I never imagined I'd be the kinda guy who says "kids these days have music that sucks." In fact pretty much ALL AND EVERY aspect of popular culture has suffered under the Bush Administration, but music, especially so.

Quite apart from some strange linkage between popular culture and Bush, compare and contrast this with
this article from The Guardian about teen and early 20s and what they're doing with musical culture on MySpace. What Bruce is commenting on is the decline of the star system and the middle ground of mainstream culture. But just as that's happening we're also seeing a huge upsurge in music by and for the people in ever smaller fragmented groups. The kids are becoming completely separated from the record companies. making and listening to music outside the system.

It reminds me of 1976/77 and the rise of punk and independent record labels. But that got absorbed by the mainstream real fast. This time around its mutating too fast to absorb.

One of the great pleasures at this time of year is to read the discussion going on at The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008

This year it's taken on a decidedly distopian and apocalyptic feel. $100/barrel oil and $5/gallon gas seems to have woken something in the American talking heads. But I'm afraid I'm getting grumpy again about even intelligent American's inability to think about the rest of the world. Bruce has moved from Belgrade to Torino and his opening remarks are all about the growth of City states and the decline of the Nation state from a world view and yet the conversation keeps drifting back to what this or that means to the USA, what this or that will happen or did happen in the USA, What about the USA, the USA, USA, USA. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it's happening on The Well out of SF in Kalifornia, USA.

There was a short piece on Mashable about changes in the way Bloggers are seen in the USA and I posted this.

I hate to pour cold water on this because it's mostly to be applauded. But consider this. The USA now makes it most unpleasant to be a foreign journalist who wants to visit the USA. There have been numerous examples of journalists being locked up, deported or worse because the border officials didn't like the look of them or because they tried to use a visitor Visa waiver for a tourism trip. What happens when we're all citizen journalists? Does that mean we all have to get a formal Visa and declare our informal journalist credentials?

This won't affect me because I plan never to visit the USA again. ;)

The next thing I know I'm being taken to task on my last.fm profile for that last throw away line as though the previous paragraph had happened to me. So I spewed forth another anti-USA rant. viz.

You're making assumptions. I haven't personally been through that experience. I have had the 3rd degree from Boston immigration and came through it, but that was about pushing the visa limits and asking to stay for 90 days. My reasons for never wanting to visit the USA again are personal and a reaction to what the USA now represents in the world, not about what I feel about individual Americans. In small numbers I've always found them charming with very few exceptions. Just as long as they weren't in any sort of official capacity. The other reason is that actually getting to the USA is now a horrible experience. About the only sane way to do it is to fly to Canada and then drive.

And finally, as a Brit, it's perfectly acceptable to just not like the USA very much. Mostly we hate the way you dominate our culture. We hate your over-bearing consumerism. We hate the way your brands dominate our high streets. We hate the way so many of you seem to have no conception of what the rest of the world is like. And then we hate the way Blair felt he had to support Bush. On the net, we hate the way Americans in an international forum say "In this country...". Us Geeks hate the way Silicon Valley VC seems to dominate the tech sphere. Need I go on?

Rush to judgement? Nah, it's 30 years since I first visited the USA. I've had plenty of time to form my opinion.

And there lies the problem. I like Americans in small numbers and when they're not wearing uniforms. But I really wish that collectively they would just shut up, go away and withdraw back to within their borders. In the classic French phrase "Yankee go home!".

Which brings up one more comment which I've mentioned before. Starbucks is everywhere worldwide and everywhere it's exactly the same. (Same goes for Coke, Disney and half a dozen other global, American brands). There's also a Chinese restaurant in every town in the world. They're all exactly different. American imperialism is largely cultural and corporate and regimented on a Roman Military, pyramid structured, command and control model. Chinese imperialism is anarchic, hive structured, and uses and and embrace and absorb model. So here's Tom Jennings on the effect of the China Olympics on the world and China itself.

They could get all rigid and freak out over transgressions as they've often done, but there's changes afoot, like all the small business deals in Africa etc show actual deep changes in approach, and there seems to be a desire to take substantial part in planetary business and culture.

Marc talks about the Scoble-Facebook debacle in Marc%u2019s Voice » Blog Archive » Opt-in controls for allowing your info to be Exported :

I find this interesting in the context of LinkedIn and Webmail services like GMail. And particularly interesting because Plaxo is involved. We would be horrified if Mail *didn’t* allow us access to the email addresses of our friends. So it’s common to have CSV export and an API for getting them. This in turn leads to libraries like Octazen that enable the “find my friends on this service” function in every new YASN. LinkedIn sit in the middle of the spectrum. They’ve had a CSV export of email addresses for a long time. Nobody bat’s an eye at this despite the fact that there’s no opt in. Meanwhile Plaxo have built a business on syncing all this data between your different data stores of emails. And yet, they don’t have a formal API for querying the data, perhaps because their business is built on selling you the tools. Which leads to Octazen being unable to get *your* contact data out of Plaxo. This wasn’t a problem until Plaxo started being a YASN as well. By the time we cross the spectrum into MyOrkutFace territory we’re seriously into (Bat Country!) VC funded member growth at all costs. Now it’s not in their interests to allow any export ever. The only thing that matters is viral growth[1], stickiness and page impressions.

Over on my tiny site, Ecademy, we took the decision a long time ago to provide as many APIs as we could and to expose any data that was available as HTML in machine readable formats. If you choose to show your email address on your profile, you must expect it to be available in FOAF, VCard, CSV and whatever else I can support. So the opt in is “Am I visible” and “which of my contact details are visible”. Once that’s done, the rest follows.

[1]I’m afraid I now hate Facebook. Every function in there is a poor copy of better functions provided by single purpose applications elsewhere. eg Twitter, Upcoming, phpBB, Flickr, Wordpress, etc etc. The one and only thing it’s good at is being viral. The one thing going for it is that there’s lots of people there. The real trick in 2008 is going to be interop between all the special purpose sites so we don’t have to do the “Am I Your Friend? Y/N” dance on each shiny new Social Site we sign up to.

A year in the life of Apple

Jan: Apple announces that the SDK and toolchain for the iPhone and iTouch are free and available to everyone. Skype announce Skype4iPhone

Feb: Apple announces MacTablet, an eeePC competitor with a rotatable tablet style screen for $499.

Mar: iTMS music goes DRM free. All tracks available at 192kbps with zero DRM for $0.89 iTMS goes worldwide so anyone from anywhere can buy the same tracks at the same dollar price. Amazon announce the exact same thing but tracks are priced at $0.79

Apr: iTouch 160 announced. An iTouch with a 160Gb hard disk, a microphone and Bluetooth. Skype announce Skype4iTouch

May: iTMS offer FLAC Lossless music at $0.99. Amazon reacts by offering the same thing for $0.89 dropping MP3s to $0.49

Jun: 1000th iPhone/iTouch application announced on Mashable

Jul: iPhone Plus announced with 3G and built in GPS. First Android goes on sale. Slashdot announce hacked port of iPhone-OSX to Android

Aug: Commentators predict that Apple's new open-ness will fail and APPL will hit $200 by year end.

Sep: Apple offers official SIM-Free iPhone in all countries. Sales of high end Nokia and Blackberry go through the floor.

Oct: New MacBook Pro announced. The old MacBook Pro becomes the Macbook at $599. MacTablet Pro appears with 160Gb hard disk. MacTablet dropped to $399

Nov: In the iTMS-Amazon price war, music tracks are now down to $0.24 each. Wired announces "The End of P2P" as file sharing drops away and both iTMS and Amazon are selling record numbers of tracks. MPAA sees this and allows iTMS to go zero-DRM on video and drop video prices.

Dec: APPL hits $600

The 5 most annoying programs on your PC - Download Squad

I wonder how many geeks had to help friends who had a new iPod for Xmas and cursed iTunes on Windows. Strongly recommend Sharepod as an alternative to move tracks on and off an iPod.

Outlook is a difficult one. Many business people use it as an all purpose information manager as well as for Email. And Thunderbird isn't yet at the stage where it's a replacement. It's just a shame that it leads to so many bad email habits.

Battelle%u2019s 2008: No Time For Hippie Advertisers : in which Battelle talks about the state of advertising.

Something that always seems to be forgotten with AdSense/AdWords is that Google is it's own main inventory. They play both Agency and Publisher in the three cornered advertising game of Advertiser-Agency-Publisher. This almost inevitably means that while it's great for advertisers, it's not good for small to medium sized Publishers. It is possible to make good money from AdSense but only really by using dodgy SEO.

ISTM that there's still a big gap in the market for an advertising system aimed as a revenue generator for Small to Medium publishers. The sort of sites that are getting 1M impressions a month but are too small to work with the big brand agencies. I thought Adify were going this way but I've ended up being disappointed.

This also reflects a one-sided-ness in conversations around advertising. Every one wants to talk about Advertisers and Agencies need and want. Nobody wants to talk about Publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark. We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.

If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you can't see the checkbox, click on "Advanced". The default is off, so if your Skype icon shows the gray question mark. you need to change it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Freecom 160Gb USB Portable hard drive for sale.

I had a cunning plan. I'd buy a 160Gb 2.5" USB hard drive. Take the drive out and put it in my portable audio player, put its 80Gb into the hard drive case and have more room for music. So I bought a Freecom for UKP69.99. Got it home, took it apart and found that it's a SATA disk and not IDE.

So does anyone want it for UKP60? email julian_bond at voidstar.com

Dear Google,

Could you build me a very tightly targeted feed of adverts that I really want to see? Can I help you build one by providing simple "Love, skip, ban" feedback on how well you're doing?