Audioscrobbler :: Forums :: Official News and Announcements :: We're Hiring. Job Spec

One of the coolest web sites on the planet is looking for a developer. www.audioscrobbler.com, last.fm

And they're based in London. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wi-Fi Coverage To Get Boost | NetStumbler.com : In a move designed in part to combat its low-cost, consumer-focused image, the Deutsche Telekom arm said on Thursday it had tied up with BT Openzone to give customers access to 1,900 Wi-Fi local wireless network access points, known as hotspots.

Those numbers don't make sense given The Cloud's coverage and I think they should be much bigger. But if OpenZone customers can use T-Mobile hotspots and vice versa, that has to be a good thing for both parties. And at least in the UK it begins to make more sense to pay a a subscription rather than pay as you go.

But it's all still too expensive so I will route round it as usual. Like at the Ecademy event in the Marriott Marble Arch where I avoided STSC's extortionate rates by pointing a small antenna out the window and leaching off somebody's free AP. [from: JB Ecademy]

It's coming down to the wire.

Vote for Kerry.

Not because Kerry would make a better President than Bush. He might not.

Not because Bush is a bumbling idiot. Bush isn't actually that stupid and does have some redeeming traits.

Not because Kerry won the debates. He did well, but not that well. And it's no reason to elect the most powerful person in the world if you just do it on the basis of 3 bits of theatre.

Not because unemployment is up, poverty is up, imports are up, gas prices are up and the USA is in real danger of slipping into a period of high inflation and all that happened on the Bush watch. That may not be Bush's fault and would probably have happened anyway.

Not because American foreign policy is becoming increasingly absurd. Do you really think that it will change dramatically if Kerry gets in?

Not because Bush lied about the reasons for going into Iraq. That's realpolitique and Kerry probably would have done the same.

Not because the Bush administration looked the other way in the run up to 9/11 and ignored the warning signs. What should or could they have done even if they hadn't taken their eye off the ball?

Not because Iraq is turning to hell in a hand basket. What's Kerry going to do that won't take 4 years?

Not because Bush being defeated will hasten Blair's demise. You shouldn't vote for someone because it will change politics in another country.

But because it will keep these people out of power for 4 years.
Dick Cheney
Richard Perle
Paul Wolfowitz
Donald Rumsfeld
Condoleeza Rice

They're the really dangerous ones. Bush is just the figurehead. Some of them have been playing this game for 30 years now. It's time to stop them.

Marc's Voice: Transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere

Give me money. If I like your product I'll promote it everywhere I can. I'll write blogs about it both here and elsewhere. I'll mention it on mailing lists. I'll post about it on other people's blogs in the comments. I'll mention it in forums I belong to. I'll promote it to people I meet at networking events.

Just give me money and I'll do all these things.

But I have to like the product.

And you have to "not be evil".
[from: JB Ecademy]

Cory Doctorow to MS: Why DRM is bad for Microsoft : Here's what I'm here to convince you of:

* That DRM systems don't work
* That DRM systems are bad for society
* That DRM systems are bad for business
* That DRM systems are bad for artists
* That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

In June, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) European affairs coordinator Cory Doctorow gave a talk to the Microsoft Research Group - and other interested parties - at Microsoft's Redmond HQ. The response? "Lots of feedback from MS, all good: intrigued, provocative, etc," he says. The talk was eventually turned into a video and, "They say it's the most downloaded video on the internal training network." If DRM was a hot topic then, it's blazing now.

If you're remotely interested in DRM, the future of music and video, Microsoft's role in all this or why Steve Ballmer was both right and wrong when he said "The most common music standard on an iPod is Stolen", you need to read this article.

Oh, and the whole article is public domain. Feel free to copy, publish, cut and paste, repurpose it however you wish. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've got an NTL 600K account at home. According to the website my post code should be upgraded to 750K during September. Needless to say it hasn't happened yet.

Has anyone got their upgrade from NTL yet? [from: JB Ecademy]

A thread that's currently running in the Music Club on Ecademy.

I've been mulling this over for a few days. First some background.
- Michael Stype has taken to giving his friends fully loaded iPods with a custom music selection.
- There's a service in the USA that supplies loaded iPods to restaurants and bars for background music.
- There are people who will supply you with a complete wardrobe or a complete house furnishing as service to high net worth individuals with no taste and no time.
- There are *lots* of people out there who stopped buying music when they left University. Just look though the record collection of 30-somethings some time.
- Elvis Costello once produced a list of the 500 Albums you must own.
- Somebody is offering a service to rip all your old CDs to Mp3 and load them on an iPod. Send them a big box of CDs, plus the iPod, they send it all back with the music transferred.

So here's the deal, you supply iPods loaded up with a customised selection of music for people who want some music for their home or lifestyle but don't know what to buy or where to buy it. Include play lists for things like "New Year's Eve Party", "Dinner Party", "Relaxing with a book", "Driving".

The thing I'm unsure about is just how much you'd have to charge for the whole thing to be legal (!) I can't imagine being able to sell this for much more than £1000. So that's £750 for music. Even if you negotiated a big discount with the download services, you'd be hard pushed to get more than 150 Albums and I'm not sure if that's enough, although it is 1500 tracks. And that's without any profit margin. And you'd want to automate the whole thing. Start with a short questionaire and then generate the track lists, playlists and dump automatically.

So has this got legs? Or is it never going to work because you'd have to charge £10k, and there aren't enough musically clueless people with that kind of money?

Vladimir writes.
From experience (I have helped, free of charge, wealthier friends buy 100 'essential' CDs and frequently help others select 20 in a shopping spree where I can only allow myself 3-4) I believe that those less than fanatic about collecting music are usually happy with a fairly modest collection. For most lifestyles and tastes I would say 100 albums is a 'big' collection. Probably a mini-iPod or a solid state player are more appropriate for the pre-loaded service. Both the device and the collection size (license costs) will make the whole thing realistically priced, and therefore quite marketable.

As I think more about this, where's the package deals from the music download services. The key player in this would be Virgin, now that they have a music download store and a hardware player. Let's see a music player for £150 and a loaded music player in one of 5 styles and tastes for £250. You could take your new player to the download counter and have it filled with the Yuppie-AB mix of 50 albums while you wait.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Must read article from Robert Scoble. The key points are
- Why Corporate people are afraid of exposing themselves via public communication (like Blogging)
- Why they must, because if they don't their customers will for them
[from: JB Ecademy]

NEWS.com.au | File-swapping 'hobby' man in $500m lawsuit (October 18, 2004) : FOR six years, Stephen Cooper ran a song-sharing website from his modest brick home in Bellbowrie, in Brisbane's west, that attracted 190 million visitors a year and allegedly earned him up to $64,000 a month.

The website operated as a link to song files and Cooper said he rarely knew where they were stored on the Net. "Of course the artists have rights to protect their music, but all I was doing was connecting people to the music, I wasn't selling it," he said.

This is a landmark case, keep an eye on it. The key point here is that he was running a directory, not a music download service. He never served any files or sold them, he just pointed at them. Or rather the people who used his website pointed at them. There are similarities with the cases against Kazaa and Grokster but there's a crucial difference in that those bits of software do actually enable the download and sharing to take place while mp3s4free.net just said, "If you look over there, you'll find some free stuff".

This is the sort of thing that the discredited INDUCE act in the USA was attempting to control. Arguably his website was inducing people to break some legal restrictions even if it wasn't helping them to actually do it. That's a rocky road to go down, that has freedom of speech implications. But worst is that it acts as a severe damper on technological innovation.

But by far the most bizarre aspect of the whole case is the request for $500m in damages. Every download, of every song pointed at, is treated as a lost sale at full retail price. All that is then requested from somebody who threw a website together while between jobs and has only recently started making beer money from it. [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: del.icio.us]

Times Online - Newspaper Edition : BT's latest gig is payphones that masquerade as jukeboxes. Under plans now being drawn up, BT will offer a facility at payphones that allows users to download songs while on the move. The plan, aimed at curbing rapidly falling revenues in the group's payphone division, would see BT link up with Apple's iTunes or another content provider to transform phone boxes across Britain into music kiosks.

Let's say you have a network or public phone boxes that nobody wants any more due to the rise of the cellphone. but you have to keep them going as a public service. And you've started to convert some of them into public Internet access kiosks. What to do with them?

a) Convert them into WiFi Access points. Suggested to BT several times right here on Ecademy. Seems to be happening in NY. Not yet happening in the UK.
b) Turn them into music stores.

There's a certain logic to this. Except that I find it hard to imagine somebody waiting for their commuter train, and thinking "I absolutely must have that new single now". Then there's the danger. The infamous white eaphones of an iPod are already a mugger's magnet. What better way to increase the danger than to turn phone boxes into mugger's stations where the ipod is in plain view and connected to the kiosk with a cable.

Then there's the plain security aspects. Presumably enough control will be put in place so you can't just leach off the previous user's account if they forget to log off correctly.

Turning away from BT for a moment, this opens up a new requirement for Internet cafes and public access in places like the IoD. They ought to provide USB and Firewire ports from their PCs. And they and Apple need to sort out how to buy music and load it straight onto your iPod without going via an intermediate program. Which is going to make the DRM awkward.

Take this one further. I should be able to wander into Virgin or HMV with my iPod or similar and say "here's my credit card, fill her up".

No. It's not going to work, is it. [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: del.icio.us]

Microsoft sets aside $20bn to establish media software clout : MICROSOFT, the world%u2019s largest software company, has allocated more than $20 billion (£11.2 billion) to spend over the next six years in a drive to grab a share of the film and music entertainment market, The Times has learnt.

I have this persistent nightmare that Microsoft will buy one of the 4 remaining Music companies (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, WEA, and EMI) and 1/4 of the world's music will only be available legally in WMP with Microsoft's DRM. Tie this in with the Microsoft push into phones and the convergence of phones and MP3 players.

But then maybe this is also a black hole that will swallow Microsoft. There's real problems with owning both the content source and the music players as Sony have discovered. And MP3 rippers are so common now that MP3 is hardly going to disappear.

MSN - Music : How can I get MSN Music downloads to play on my iPod?

The iPod does not currently support the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and will not natively play any songs purchased from MSN Music, or any other Windows Media-based music service. If you are an iPod owner and would like to play MSN Music songs on your iPod, you can send feedback to Apple and ask them to change their policy and add support for the Windows Media format.

Bwahhahahhahahhahahhahahhhaaaa!

[from: del.icio.us]

[from: del.icio.us]

Cool! My p2pnet article got a mention on The P2P weblog.

Some thoughts on all this podcasting stuff. Excuse the small amount of MS Win-centricity.

- Podcasting really needs a resident, local aggregator that runs all the time in the tray or as a service so that enclosures are collected in background as well as feeds.

- An aggregator with Podcasting really ought to support BitTorrent.

- If an aggregator with Podcasting has a BitTorrent client built in, it might as well be a full BT client handling any .torrent requests from the OS, not just enclosures.

- If it's running all the time, then it will act as a BT seed all the time as well.

So which Aggregators have followed that path and done all of it? This could really help BT with implementations. I think it may be feasible to also build this as a Firefox extension where BT is running whenever the browser is open.

Now looking at a sample of podcasting feeds, very few of them are using BitTorrent. I think there are two reasons for this.

1) Everyone can read MP3, not everyone can collect BT. This means that we need a way of recommending BT but offering MP3 as an alternative in the same feed with some marker to say that the end file is the same. I'm not sure how you would code this in RSS/Atom.

2) Creating a .torrent and getting it on a BT tracker is still too hard. I imagine a tracker service with a REST/XMLRPC/SOAP API where you told it the location of a file on the public net and it created the .torrent, created the tracker entry and then returned the details for inclusion in your feed. This might also be a service that something like Feedburner could meld into your RSS feed. There'd be an HTML UI for this as well. I haven't found anything like this. If you know of one, please say. Once the service exists with the API, this could be built into blogging systems so that it happens automatically when you post a blog entry with an enclosure.

- The other alternative is that a local BT publishing tool packaged the whole .torrent creation and registration process with one of the existing public trackers.

The goal in all this is to make BT ubiquitous but also to have it fade into the background where the end user doesn't need to know any more about it than they know about http.

The top box/backrest attachment. I drilled a small hole in the mounting plate, and added a bolt to attach the plate to. [from: Flikr Photos]

The finished article. The seat height is now about 26 1/2" The bucket I'm sitting in is also a lot more comfortable. The stock seat tends to slide you forwards the whole time. Now I'm wedged in. [from: Flikr Photos]