Thought I’d do a little post about the project I’ve been trying to make grow for a while.
The Problem:
Some Bullet Points
My idea:
More Bullets
Idea Summary
Where we’re at with this.
Also, we have a phpbb forum installed over there if you’d like to see some of our discussion. Feel free to register and jump right in with any ideas, questions, comments etc.
Maybe this isn’t that new, but it’s fairly new to me.
I’ve been getting trackbacks from these spammer blogs that scrape a piece of my blog and post it along with a link to my original post. It seems clear that they’re run by bots because of the un-natural way in which they select text to post.
here’s an example of one such spam bot blog
EDIT: Here’s another Spam-Bot-Blog
It’s weird and annoying. I wonder if this is working for them. Do they make money with AdSense clicks? Do they come up in search results for the topics they are centered on?
This kind of gaming the system is just… Not cool!
It’s like leaving garbage on the ground at the beach. It’s an abuse of one of our shared resources, the Web.
from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Today, you can use any device you like with your television: VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, or a PC combining these functions and more. But if the broadcast flag mandate is passed, Hollywood and federal bureaucrats will get a veto over innovative devices and legitimate uses of recorded programming.
The mandate forces all future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content protection” (aka DRM) technologies. All makers of HDTV receivers will be required to build their devices to watch for a “flag” embedded in programs by copyright holders.
When it comes to digital recording, it would be Hollywood’s DRM way or the highway. Want to burn that recording digitally to a DVD to save hard drive space? Sorry, the DRM lock-box won’t allow it. How about sending it over your home network to another TV? Not unless you rip out your existing network and replace it with DRMd routers. And forget about using open source TV tools. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting a high definition digital signal, doesn’t it?
Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC had originally mandated the flag, but thanks to our court challenge, ALA v. FCC, it was thrown out. But that doesn’t mean the danger is behind us. Hollywood has headed to Congress to ask for the flag again. Take action to stop the flag now!
From the Calacanis-Cast
[un-cut] Jason Calacanis being interviewed by NPR’s show On The Media.
This is a really interesting conversation about transparency in Journalism.
Apparently, Jason Calacanis wont do interviews unless he can have the un-edited original recording for himself to post in the spirit of transparency (and/or in case he’s mis-quoted or his words are taken out of context).
This is a really interesting little conversation. If you’re interested in the changing media landscape, New Media/Old Media or Journalism/Media in general, you should give this a listen.
Even when I was playing in bands with other human musicians, it was always a really difficult thing to get past -that awkward moment that follows the question: “What kind of music do you guys play?”
Nowadays, in the age of any-one-can-promote-themselves-online-and-build-a-following-yada, there’s a whole new version of the same question. Rather than “what is it like” it’s more like “where do you want people to find it”
Usually it’s on a per-song basis which is nice because you can spread out your positioning.
The nightmare part is this:
The services usually have pre-defined genres. Look at the pic below and tell me which one of these genres I should put one of my recent tracks. Soundtracks & More? Yikes.
What good does this do me or anyone else?
This upload form is from mp3.com
What’s even worse about this is the fact that they don’t even have a link for the category ‘Soundtracks & More” at the top of their pages! May as well call the category “Trash You Don’t Want to Hear Anyway So We Wont Link To It And You Wont Find It”
Sites like this want to do more than just host media files for free. They want to be destinations where music lovers will spend their time clicking around listening to stuff and discovering new music. That’s a pretty ambitious goal (especially considering the superior music discovery tools already available and considering the fact that just down the road, in the realm of the illegal, Major label artists are side-by-side with Independents! With these sharing sites, it’s pretty much only un-signed artists, which creates a pretty high shit-density.)
And the sad thing is, despite the fact that these sharing/discovery sites do open up some possibilities to some Longtail artists, the fact that the sites want to retain traffic causes them to focus their attention on keeping the average joe (whose taste can be statistically determined to be mainstream), not fulfilling the niche demand (thus the limited number of genres and even more limited site navigation). The goal isn’t Longtail as much as thinner cut of the tail. And of course, a complete waste of my time.
Think about all the smack-talk you see in forums where people are hiding behind nicknames. It’s kind of like how some people leave Garbage on the ground at a concert. When the lights are out, the assholes take advantage. When people participate in forums anonymously, the result is often totally immature, loud, obnoxious behavior.
I got this from Jakob Lodwick’s Blog
Back in the good ol’ days, a few weeks ago, when oink was still around, there was a firefox plugin called oink plus that pulled together similar artists, MySpace and LastFM pages for the artists Etc. It was rad. Maybe this will be rad too.
From TorrentFreak:
“The Pirate Bay just rolled out a new feature to their music section that makes it easy for users to find similar artists, more albums from the same artist and upcoming concerts. The data they are using comes from the popular music community website last.fm and is fully integrated into the website.”
(I love that they used Prince as the example.)
I think one of the smartest things Yahoo! could do right now would be to soup-up del.icio.us. I’ve often thought about how easy it would be to use del.icio.us’ simple tagging infrastructure and RSS feeds to store and distribute Social Network information. But it’s too darn slow! If querying del.icio.us was lightning-fast, I bet there would already be interesting applications using del.icio.us as a backbone.
I wanted to get this idea down before I forget and also get it out so that I can get help from you with it.
The Semantic Web is all about middleman-like programming-terminologies that help different pools of information to be processed more efficiently. Taxonomies for domains of meaning.
This doesn’t mean that information necessarily will work together. It just means that if/when it is time to build software to do something with some information, additional layers of translation are less likely to be needed.
We work with databases (or at least compilations of structured data) all the time. The contacts in your cell phone, and the list of calls in your landline handsets’ caller ID history, for instance, are both basically databases. If both sets of data happen to be stored in the same way, using the same or similar terminology, it doesn’t automatically mean that your Cell will be talking to your Landline or that either will be talking to the Phone Company.*
Additional infrastructure is required in order to take advantage of two sets of data. An application is still required. And in the case above, a network and/or platform on which the Application will run is needed first also.
The fact that information is stored in an intelligent way doesn’t mean that the information is automatically available, just like how you can’t edit this post and I can, despite the fact that what you’re looking at and what I’m looking at are both just HTML and Javascript pages coming from the same server, using the same simple MySQL database.
I wanted to write something like this because of the people I talk to that seem to think that Semantic Web technology is inherently a path toward less privacy. This post needs work. I hate to post something that isn’t finished, but I need help finishing it.
Any thoughts on these ideas?
*How do you know they aren’t already?
A recent post on Mashable was talking about the reasons that podcasting hasn’t really caught on.
Some theory along the lines of
“There’s no real monetization model yet”
meets
“Only people that would podcast whether or not they make any money doing it are bothering to, aside from the mainstream (Old Media) entities, which are now taking over and killing the democracy of the platform, only the ‘Hippies’ are doing it.”
Is the basic gist of it.
I have thought about this a lot. Here’s what I posted as a comment over there:
I think one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of podcasting by the mainstream is the name “podcasting” and other misleading terminology about the technology.
It seems to me that to the average joe, podcasting is something you have to have an iPod in order to take advantage of. And if you do have an iPod, it’s scary to go to the “iTunes Store” and “Subscribe” to things. And of course, where on earth are people supposed to learn about non-apple podcast directories? It doesn’t help matters much that as mainstream radio programs increasingly plug their own podcasted versions of their shows, they generally default to using the same counterproductive lingo: “you can download our show to your ipod…” (which means you need to have an Apple mp3 player) or “Look for us in the iTunes Store” (which sounds like you’d have to pay for the content)
The average not-too-savvy user has no idea what a “feed” is.
While working with a fairly successful video podcast, it was really striking to me to find out that the majority of our regular viewers were actually “checking back” to the site for updates rather than sitting back and letting RSS do all the work for them. Seems like the public’s general lack of understanding about RSS/Atom, how podcasting works, along with a general cynicism about the Web and fear of having things download automatically (thanks to PC virus riffraff), has kept podcasting in the closet.
A feed-awareness campaign is needed if public perception is going to change. The lingo needs to change.
updated: the importance of apple and ipods or mp3 players in general needs to be separated from the idea of what Feed-Subscription is all about … So maybe calling it something other than podcasting would be a good idea!
I think this is problem for all feeds, not just ones that serve up media files via Enclosures (podcasts).
I’d love to see some real data on RSS/Atom adoption in general (mashable?). I assume feed subscription adoption in general is not distributed along with the presence of broadband connections. I would bet that mostly, feedreaders and podcast aggregators are being used by people in major cities. It’s a cultural thing. Some people know about it, most people don’t.
If you live in the suburbs, you’re less likely to use ‘live bookmarks’ subscribe to podcasts or use a feedreader than you are if you live in the city.Am I wrong? Numbers, please.
What I was trying to say is,
I’m pretty sure nobody knows what podcasting is still!
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