Imagine a wiki that is set up to document a topic area (like online social networking tools). It has a a page for each tool or item in that topic. Now add tagging. Anyone can add their own tags to each page. Then there's a del.icio.us or flickr style secondary navigation where lists of pages can be browsed via tag links.

So is anyone good at hacking wiki code? Could this be fed into the Wikipedia-Mediawiki development?

marv on record, archive : Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

Inspired by this, I can imagine a bit of clever scripting that downloaded from Napster, played to Wav and then encoded the Wav with LAME to MP3 all in real time assuming that you can download them at faster than real time. So why bother burning the CDs?

The Sound of Russian Music

Gosh. A whole article about me and buying music from AllOfMp3.com. Well actually it's about a Wall Street Journal piece, but fully 50% of the article is quoting my words.

Yet another awesome tool from the MySociety people [from: del.icio.us]

Slashdot FAQ - Accounts : My RSS Headline Reader Tells me I Was Banned!

I'm getting really tired of this. I share an NTL web proxy server with thousands of users. Every so often enough of us try to get Slashdot via RSS that we all get banned. And yet my RSS reader plays very nicely with them and only fetches every 4 hours while I'm awake.

Come on Slashdot, get your act together. You could get my real IP if you tried. And then you wouldn't ban me because of the aggregation of users on a single IP.

I'm looking for sponsorship to go to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference - March 14-17, 2005

I'll be writing it up and I promise to promote you to anyone I meet.

Somewhere on the net in the dim and distant past I've seen an essay on how to be an online guru in your chosen field. But I can't find it again. Anyone got any ideas?

It's something like
- Post copiously
- Join all the mailing lists, BBS and Usenet groups in your field
- Start your own mailing list and newsletter
- Attend conferences and seminars
- Get speaking engagements at those seminars
- Start a blog on the subject
- Write the book
- Declare yourself "The Expert"
- ???
- PROFIT!

What else should you do?
[from: JB Ecademy]

Backing Blair :: FAQ :

What exactly is it that you want from me?
We want you to register to vote. Then, when the election comes around, we want people who live in 'safe' Labour seats or marginal ones to vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Labour candidate. Not the anti-war-person, or the seems-like-a-nice-person, but the candidate most likely to beat the Labour candidate.

But your group is called 'Backing Blair'! What's all that about?
We're using satire with an Orwellian tone to reach people. We realise some folks may be challenged/confused by this; that's why we have an FAQ.

OK, so why do you want us to do this?
People involved in this campaign pretty much want to get rid of Blair and bring a halt to his style of government. We hope that includes you. Common beefs include Iraq, the erosion of civil liberties, Blair's almost unquestioning loyalty to the Bush administration and the Blair government's ongoing swing to the right.

Our ultimate goal is to significantly reduce Labour's majority. We hope this will weaken Blair's position within the Labour party and lead to a viable leadership challenge.

But for a protest vote to be effective, it must be visible and damaging.

[from: del.icio.us]

[from: del.icio.us]

We've now got a Flickr style way of walking round the member database at Ecademy. This started when I realized that the 50 words (keyword bios) were the same as tags in flickr and del.icio.us.

Start here with a list of the most popular keywords. From there you can browse the database by walking round related tags based on clustering.

I'm going to write up how I did this over the weekend and some of the implications.

A key factor I'm grappling with at the moment is the relationship between folksonomy tagging and the soft metadata that generates and relatively hard metadata like Geolocation. My gut feel is that it's a mistake to use a folksonomy for geolocation. But maybe I'm repeating the old mistakes of trying to build hard categories before the event. And note here that Craigslist geolocation categories suck. Badly. More on that later.

Big Champagne have just released "illegal" download figures for last week. They think the top track was downloaded more than 5 million times. That's 250 million a year, times the number of tracks and include direct copying and we're 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than iTunes if not more. The ease of ripping, the analog hole and the relatively small size (6Mb) mean that audio is essentially a free commodity. Digital distribution and especially P2P distribution just ain't going to go away. You can kick and scream all you want about freeloaders, parasites, the poor artist and so on. The industry can attempt to prosecute students and dead people but it won't change a thing. Deal with it.

We've got a thread running on Ecademy, about alternate business models for the music industry. Here's my latest.

How is there no distributor in an online model? The majors (with the possible exception of Sony) can't sell direct due to channel conflict. So there has to be a 3rd party (like Apple) in the chain.

The big saving in the digital world is from all the manufacturing, shipping, distribution, warehousing and retailing costs. The actual cost of the CD is tiny these days, but the manufacturing setup is still fairly large and has to be spread across the production run. The equivalent costs online of all this are ripping the analog to digital which can be automated. And the cost of running the online site (bandwidth, servers, programming) which is spread across the entire catalogue.

So the key to getting the online costs down looks like size of catalogue and volume. Even if we keep the current model of "selling" individual tracks or small groups of tracks (the album), there should be enough savings in the process to get the price 30% down from the CD equivalent and still pay the artists and record company the same gross.

I think the next 30% comes from amortizing the original marketing, promotion and production costs. The vast majority of the catalogue is more than 1 year old and most of it is more than 5 years old. The production and marketing of that huge back catalogue of every bit of audio ever recorded has long since been paid for. So now we're left with a cut for the rights holder, the artist and the online site and that's it.
It certainly looks to me as though those three could make just as much money per track at an online price of 20cents as they do on back catalogue CDs via HMV or Amazon at $9.99 per CD. And quite a bit more than they make from royalties on 3rd party "best of" CDs (all that crud in Woolworths!).

But all this is still based on the trad model of "selling" individual "product". I think Napster will fail hopelessly. And not due to the model but to the execution. But at least they're exploring a new model where you rent the right to listen to an unlimited supply.

The truly radical approach here is to treat mid-fi downloads (less than 128kb) as pure marketing, no different from radio play and then make the money from a premium product (DVDs) and live performance. At the moment, the industry demands that online sites that provide previews can't play more than 30 secs of lo-fi. Why not actually give away the full track but as 32k or 64k MP3s? Nasty, crackly AM radio level. Now we can start doing things like 50% filling of an iPod at point of sale.

And so on.

[from: del.icio.us]

Have you got any photos of Ecademy Events? Please post them to Flickr with a tag of "Ecademy". Then they'll turn up here as well. Once there's enough coming in, I'll provide a link on Ecademy to them. [from: JB Ecademy]

This is so Cool! Find friends based on your usage of del.icio.us. The more shared bookmarks, the more likely you are to be friends. [from: del.icio.us]

I intend to stay in Ecademy chat all day today. Join me at

irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy

or if you don't have an IRC client, we have a web interface at

http://www.ecademy.com/chat.php

If you use Firefox, I can recommend the Chatzilla extension as one of the easiest to use IRC clients. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bloggerheads has an intriguing theory that Kilroy Silk's new far right UK political party is funded by Veritas the software maker. Given that Veritas has now merged with Symantec, customers of either company may want to question whether they wish to support such a party.

Personally I've never like Symantec's products (or Veritas) or what they've done with the various companies they've absorbed. So I have no problem in deciding to never buy any of their products again.

17th Feb meeting [from: del.icio.us]

In the spirit of today's theme.

I want to like Apple. I really do. The Macintosh and OSX look like the perfect marriage of open source software and a professionally designed UI. Some of their software like iLife, GarageBand, iChat is truly amazing. And if I want access to all that Linux software, it's just a compile away. And with it's base of unix it has all the protection from abuse that you get with OSS. And the drivers work (as long as it's Apple hardware). No messing around with re-compiling the kernel to use a third party driver that is unfinished. And that white plastic is just so elegant. Dear.

But underneath all that there's some worms.
- Is Apple the new Sony? Pay a premium for the name, no matter what the product or competition?
- Apple just love to lock you in. Way too often the hardware you want to use is an over priced, return to factory, upgrade. Why can't I just swap the disk out for a generic item. Or add memory with a couple of Dimms from Overclockers?
- Apple are not just playing along with the entertainment industry, but pushing further. So I'm not allowed to play the Japanese import DVDs I bought in the USA?
- The best 3rd party software appears on Windows first. If you're really, really lucky it turns up on Macintosh later. For instance, it's nice to see that Mac Skype is now out of beta. Only a year after Windows Skype.
- Nobody likes to talk about it but Apple hardware doesn't have a stellar reputation for reliability. Remember those iPod batteries and iBook screens?

So I'll continue with my iProduct envy. But walk away and use a generic PC with Win XP for my desktop and Linux for all my servers. [from: JB Ecademy]

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