OpenSocial API Blog: Orkut is looking for a few good apps... : The directory will go live for Orkut's user-facing launch, coming up at the end of February.

So will we see an iteration of the data API at the end of Feb? And I guess this means there'll be another rash of PR from people like Plaxo, Hi5 and Ning that all those ClosedGadgets run on their platform as well.

I don't know what all the fuss is about Waterboarding. It doesn't seem nearly as bad as some of the things the Inquisition did, like Strappado or perhaps the Iron Maiden. Or that were common punishments for treason in the 17th century such as half-hanging, drawing and quartering.

If we're going to use torture, surely we should do it properly without any half measures?

Kevin Kelly says: Cool Tool: Roku SoundBridge : Following months of ripping the thousands of CDs in my collection, I now have more gigabytes of music on my laptop than even the largest iPod can hold, so plugging an mp3 player into my stereo wasn't an option.

Oh, yes. When you get over 70Gb of MP3s you're options narrow sharply. If you get over 140Gb, you're completely stuffed. It's no longer possible to carry your entire music collection with you even if you want to.

But there's another problem too. You really need a fairly large screen and a good UI to navigate it all. Which means a PC. Have we just found another use for an eeePC? As a front end to your home NAS where all the files are actually held?

I refuse to use iTunes because it is a system hog on my Windows machine. I rely on WinAmp instead

A man after my own heart.

What no comments on his blog? I shouldn't complain really. There's no comments on this blog either. And probably for the same reason.

If Iran Were America (And We Were Iran): A Timeline by J. L. Bryan

Brutal. I weep for the world.

Christmas came and went and all gadget freaks are no doubt thinking about what to give themselves seeing as they didn't get the gadget they wanted.

So I'm in the market for a new PMP. I was seriously thinking about a shiny new 160Gb Classic iPod. But news that Rockbox doesn't work, Sync utilities have been borked by Apple and the fairly high price is putting me off.

So how about "Not an iPod" as an alternative?

- Must be >100Gb, preferably 160.
- Plain old USB mass storage, drag and drop Sync.
- Zero interest in DRM music so all I want is the ability to play MP3.

Or do I just slap another bigger disk in my ageing Zen Xtra for peanuts? So that's what I did. I got a 160Gb disk for my Zen Xtra and tried installing it.

- I had to uninstall WMP11 to reload the firmware
- Formatting the disk, it only recognised 128Gb
- Transferring tracks worked for a bit but it started throwing errors
- Stupidly persistent I re-formatted, re-initialised, re-booted several times.
- I eventually got 65Gb of music loaded before it refused to accept any more. This is less than than the 70Gb the old 80Gb disk held.
- I gave up

What's wrong here
- Creative got screwed over by Microsoft when they bet on MS PFS-MTP
- Creative got screwed by their firmware supplier (presumably outsourced) when they built in hard and soft limits on capacity
- Customers got screwed by Creative because these problems are well known but they still haven't bothered to update the firmware on old hardware
- Creative and Customers got screwed over again when MS gave up on PFS and went into competition with them with Zune
- It's time for disk drive manufacturers to stop lying. 1GB does not equal 1,000,000,000 bytes.

So 2-3 years after first hitting the requirement there still isn't anyone who makes a personal music player that I want to buy. I'm almost at the point of just going "Screw you guys, I'm going home" and buying an iPod Classic 160Gb knowing that it's only a temporary fix and it will just annoy me.

How did we get to the point where it's acceptable that a product costing £200 upwards is a disposable item? To which I'd add, "If you can't open it, break it and fix it again, you don't own it".

Andrew Orlowski intervw: IPFI chief says it's time to hose down the networks | The Register Some thoughts:

It's abundance not scarcity. There's never been so much music being created and listened to. What has happened though is the decline of the star system and the Short Head. All the interesting new music is buried down in the Fat Middle and Long Tail. This changes the game for the big music publishers. They're now in a volume of sources, algorithmic business not in a monopoly volume of product business. And their competition is also coming from artists doing all the production and distribution themselves. That puts the record companies into a very different role of being VC and Marketing consultants for artists and not owning them.

The value of music has dropped drastically. And it's not just P2P that has done this by undermining the price but also the supermarkets and online CD retailers. Music is just not worth $0.99 per track any more. (or £.0.79). However there's been no official test of how much price elasticity there is in online sales. There's really only 3 data points. Free P2P, AllOfMp3 and iTMS.

Free P2P is a misunderstanding. It's only free because you don't charge yourself for time and materials. There's significant pain in finding, downloading, tidying, renaming, re-tagging P2P music. Relief from that pain can be charged for.

So there may be a way out of this and that's for a retailer to build a site to copy the AllOfMp3 interface and pricing and then stuff it with every bit of audio that's ever been recorded. It's at least possible that selling 192Kb VBR MP3s with no DRM at $0.25 (£0.10) per track and $0.50 per track for lossless would make more money in total than the record companies currently make out of iTMS and Amazon.

OpenSocial REST API - OpenSocial API Definition | Google Groups : I am not a google employee, but I have pestered them all about this
issue.

Let me summarize the bad news:

The data api is not on the slate any time soon.

All platforms will launch with version 0.7 at least, which will not have data api.

Sigh. So I guess they won't be part of the DataPortability specs any time soon either.

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.