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The Weblog of Brett Singer. Bringing the world what it needs most - a blog.

Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Reinvigorating old fogies' interest in music

Lucas points to an article in the Boston Herald (Buy iTunes? Folks say bye iTunes!), in which it is written:

For the first time in 25 years, I was able to hear new music from sources that were previously unavailable to me, I had become a new music fan again - and at age 60!

This happened to me, but it wasn't iTunes. It was music sites like Webjay. I remember the day I found Archive.org's Live Music collection while surfing for audio (this was in the early days of Webjay's evolution). I was so excited to be able to dig through tons of free and legal audio, including bands I had heard of. Granted, this wasn't the Celestial Jukebox that many of us dream of, but it was still more music than I would ever be able to listen to. Now there is an explosion of music sharing sites (some with legal stuff, some not - I'm not talking about P2P, just regular web sites): OddioOverplay is a great one, and I've got a few listed here and here. Basically, you could spend all day, every day, surfing around for music, even sticking only with the legal stuff, and never run out of things to listen to.

This isn't news. The point is that my own re-interest in music started (a) with all of this new technology that the RIAA/et al wanted to kill off as soon as it appeared, and (b) with the availability of free stuff easily available online, no subscription, spyware or guilt required. I hadn't bought a CD in maybe 10 years before I began surfing around the WebNet looking for tunes, but since then I've bought many. Okay, maybe that's not news either, but since the lawsuits from big-ass content creators aren't exactly going away, perhaps it bears repeating.

(Note: The article appears to be about other things mostly, such as iTunes lack of customer service. Anyone who expects customer service from a web site, even one run by a giant company, is delusional. They may be right to expect it, but it's not gonna happen. However, that's not what I wanted to write about.)

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AJAX! (hype) IT WILL SAVE US ALL!

Through various news lists, I get an email like this at least three times a week:

Five Earth-Shattering Things You Should Know About AJAX and You Don't
Of course, you already know everything about AJAX, don't you?
Ajax is hotter right now than Nicholas Carr's backside after coming out of Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 woodshed. You have heard, haven't you? If you're not sure then go Google "Ajax" right now. You can read over 23 million detailed entries all about it. Literally. Though you will have to skim a bit.

This isn't exactly news, that AJAX is being hyped beyond belief. I just think it's funny how the tech industry, especially where this old Interweb is concerned (I think that's the hip thing to call the Web/Internet), has a need to HYPE SOMETHING AT ALL TIMES. MUST CROW LOUDLY ABOUT TECHNOLOGY OR I WILL FEEL LIKE I AM IN A LOSER BUSINESS.

Um, we're all in loser businesses at one time or another. Take a chill.

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