Que es?
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.
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Mon, 20 Feb 2006
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.)
Fri, 20 Jan 2006Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways. That's the kind of sentence that confuses my mother.
Thu, 19 Jan 2006
Web irritation of the day - email edition
People who send email with no subject. This is usually folks with AOL accounts, but not always. The main problem from a practical standpoint is that my spam filter frequently tags such mail as spam, because, you know, it has no subject, so who the hell is sending it? I understand that this may be unfair, but the truth is, JUST ADD A SUBJECT. It'll take you, what, four seconds? This is especially true of someone I don't know who is sending me mail. That is, people I know tend to (a) put a subject on the message and (b) if they don't, they are likely to be whitelisted and won't get tagged as spam, PLUS (c) I know them, so it's not such a big deal that they aren't putting in a subject line. Someone who I don't know, they should be MORE inclined to put in a subject line, not less. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Oy.
Fri, 04 Nov 2005
I need VIDEO PLAYER? Really? I have several installed. Which one you stupid *&#&@#@#?
Turns out this is nothing more than a flash animation, once you get there (which involves switching to IE, turning off pop-up blockers, and generally becoming uninterested in the video before you even get to see it). COME ON, people! Why are you making this harder than it needs to be?
Mon, 13 Jun 2005ZDNet is reporting that the software maker has warned.
A security vulnerability in the Adobe License Management Service, a component used for product activation, "can lead to an unauthorized person gaining access to the user's computer," Adobe said in a security advisory posted to its Web site late last week. That's not DRM per se, but it is an attempt to keep people from doing something with their PCs that Adobe doesn't want them to do, and it turns out it's potentially dangerous. This isn't as bad (yet) as TurboTax's DRM fiasco, but it's still a stupid way to get people to not steal your software. Especially because odds are someone will beat it like Michael Jackson.
Wed, 11 May 2005
No Linkin Park? Jimmy Page is okay
Page played ''Whole Lotta Love'' for the traders and guests assembled at the stock exchange.
An earlier story in the Times talked about how Warner asked Linkin Park to do it but they said no. I guess LP is cooler than Jimmy Page. It's funny when a band that has made as much money as Linkin Park has gets on a high horse about something like this. They're entitled, but "It doesn't make any sense to us why we would play a show at the New York Stock Exchange. I don't know what was going through their minds." (so sayeth the band.) I don't know, they thought you had benefited greatly from being part of a corporate entity and they wanted to use you to bump up their stock price for their coming IPO? They do seem to have some legitimate business gripes about where the money from the IPO is going, but that's a separate issue. The invitation to play at the stock exchange "just exemplifies how out of touch the ownership of the Warner Music Group is with our band," said Brad Delson, the group's guitarist and primary spokesman, in his first interview since the Grammy-winning band issued its demand in a written statement that criticized the company. Oh PLEASE Brad. When I read that sentence I thought it said "out of touch with our brand" instead of "band". That would have made more sense, in a way. If you want to be a scrappy little underground band, go for it. Once you hit the level that you're at, you can't claim street cred anymore. One thing I'll say for rappers is that they don't pretend that they're NOT about the bling-bling. I suppose it doesn't matter, but it does feel dishonest. Gosh, a corporate rock band pretending to be something they're not. Who knew?
Fri, 06 May 2005From Verizon.com, whilst I attempted to order DSL service:
Gateway Timeout
The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.
The title of the page is "Gateway Timeout - In read"
Excellent work. Stuff like that always makes me feel better about the occassional mistake on a site I manage.
Fri, 01 Apr 2005
Steve Case admits he screwed up
Here's a rare case (no pun intended) of a high-profile business leader admitting he made mistakes. It's not the mea culpa of the century, but it's better than average. His new thing is apparently health related, sounds more informational than anything else. He's worth $825 million. Wow.
Goofy Kitten Animation = MTV Bypass?
John Dvorak points to a Flash video of a ska song that he says is how bands can get around MTV.
Mixversation
This looks like fun. Via Gonze.com.
Can you give me an idea of what a more peer-to-peer, savvy operating system might do?
Ozzie: Let me do that by a simple example. One of the functions of the current Groove offerings is a thing we refer to is as Groove Folder Synchronization. Right from the Windows Explorer on any folder, you can just right-click on it, and it turns that folder into a synchronized…workspace, where multiple people can work from a folder on your computer to a folder on their computer.
From the user's perspective, that's integrated into the operating system. And that's natural for people. I can't comment on where things will go in the future, but from a user's perspective how these technologies (are) applied at the operating system can be very useful.
So how will Microsoft keep users from using this feature to share media files? My guess is total system lockdown. Windows is getting to that point - with the new "no updates unless we know you're legal" policy, Windows Media Player desperate to check for licenses and push you towards Microsoft's online music store, and crap popping up in your system tray all the time, Windows users have less and less control over their system. They have a superificial kind of control: over the desktop, how the folders look, whether or not you can view photos as thumbnails, that sort of thing. But if you want to view your music files by date modified, you have to dig through menus. So you the OS will have built-in P2P collaboration tools and the like, but Microsoft getes to decide what you can do with your data. You won't really own the files you've created, they will. How? It'll be buried in a license agreement (if it isn't already). Linux looks better every day.
Mon, 07 Mar 2005
AMD and Multiple OS'
According to ZDNet, AMD is going to introduce a chip architecture that makes it easier for computers to run multiple operating systems. I wonder if all of the momentum Firefox has is helping this along at all.
RSS ads are comin'
Firm eyes RSS feeds as ad vehicle, from ZDNet. It's not exactly a revolutionary idea, and it'll happen even if this company (called Kanoodle - very late 90's) doesn't make it work. In theory, it seems to be that anyone could serve up ads via RSS. Like this:
Obviously it's not fancy, but as far as I can tell, it will be delivered to an RSS reader. As more and more people use Bloglines or Kinja or Sage or whatever to read RSS feeds and they stop looking at the sites directly, this will become a very important "advertising space".
It could also become important as more and more people start browsing the web on lower-bandwidth (and smaller-screened) wireless devices. I just got a Treo 600, which, with VerizonWireless service, can browse the web at roughly 56k. So I turn off images most of the time, just so the pages load quicker (note: I'm talking about regular web sites, not 'mobile' or WML sites, although those have started having images on them as well). So most of the time, ads are blocked. Text ads, though, would come through.
Fri, 18 Feb 2005
HP Fires Carly, Then Posts Higher Profits
Maybe she shouldn't have been fired? Obviously, there's no connection between the higher profits in this report and the canning of Carly. It's sort of like when ABC fired Lloyd Braun and Susan Lyne only to discover that the programs they picked became major hits that turned the network around. Lloyd is now Yahoo figuring out how to kill off traditional media (okay, I made the killing part up). Obviously it'll take more time to see whether or not firing Fiorina was a good move or not, but I imagine whatever supporters she had are smiling derisively today.
The guy on this graphic from Chase.com is the same guy I used on the first website I ever created, which I made using Microsoft Publisher 97. There's something strange about the fact that Chase, a huge banking organization, is using clip-art that Microsoft gives away with their low-end graphics program.
Sat, 22 Jan 2005
Music Creation As Marketing Tool
Jack Daniels is getting on the make-yer-own-music tip. This is getting sort of interesting. Obviously, music has been used to sell crap for years. Now, thanks to mashups, remixes and the like, everyone wants to be a DJ and large corporations are happy to help you out. What I find funny about this is the fact at some point a subsidiary of Sony, or some other huge corporation that makes everything from batteries to beat-matching software, is going to sponsor a contest or do something marketing-department generated that will butt heads with the buttheads who are suing teenagers for playing with unauthorized music samples (Grey Album, etc). Hopefully that's clear. What I mean is that you can't have it both ways. You can't use something cool (remixing) to sell me something (liquor), and then turn around and sue my ass (RIAA, MPAA) when I don't use your DRM'd Flash-based widget to mix some of your content. Doesn't work. It'll bite you in the ass. At least, I hope so.
eBay to MS Passport - Sayonara
eBay to Retire Microsoft Passport Sign In and .NET Alerts: it doesn't say why exactly, although I think that Passport didn't catch on the way Microsoft wanted it to. The idea that a company that is involved in as many lawsuits as MS is having access to all of your passwords and accounts never sounded like a good idea to me.
Music suggestions
From the Archive.org message boards.
Forget Google's Gmail - for privacy invasions, Walmart's got 'em all beat. From the NY Times: By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts. I wonder where they got that figure on the size of the 'net. No matter what, 460 terabytes is a LOT of data.
460 terabytes = 471040 gigabytes; the biggest hard drive I own is 250 gigabytes. I would need 1884 of them. Oof.
Mon, 25 Oct 2004
Ballmer: We need a hundred dollar PC
Steve Ballmer needs to get out more.
Has it occurred to him that one of the main costs of the PC is installing Windows? There are super-cheap PCs at Walmart (see below), some of them don't include an OS at all. Hello? Stevie-boy? We don't have all have a billion-damn dollars like you.
Big Savings on Dorm Furnishings, Computers and More at Wal-Mart
Blogexplosion
Some new viral marketing scheme.
And I don't mean their stock that I don't have any of.
In my business, I keep a website with a lot of information on it. Rather than remove the old information when it becomes obsolete, I leave it up
there for reference purposes. What happens, and it's starting to happen too often, is that some vague mention of a person or an organization leads the
casual reader to assume that I am the contact for that person or organization, even if, you know, I'm not, and a more careful reading of the document in
question would illuminate this fact. I'm as guilty of skimming web pages as anyone, but I usually don't ACT on that information. It used to happen once
or twice a year, but now it's starting to happen once or twice a week. There are a couple of possibilities:
- People are getting stupider.
- Google's information is getting lamer.
- My website has too much crap on it.
I vote all of the above, although the first two are more relevant.