But Erika.net plays such a high percentage of music that is interesting to me that I end up seeking out music I hear on Erika probably about as frequently as three times per hour!  And the rest of the music I hear on erika.net is almost always totally welcomed.

So in a nutshell, I think these people, whomever they are, have awesome taste in music.  From their homepage:

erika.net has been broadcasting a 24 hour mp3 stream since 1999. We hand-pick music and organize it freeform style: all types of music at all times of the day. Our goal is to bring you music you can’t hear on other radio stations, presented in a unique style. …[can be found] in the ‘Eclectic’ section of iTunes radio.

If you have more conventional taste in music, try erika.net when you’re recovering from surgery or, for whatever reason, under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.

The page that displays what they are currently playing and what has recently played is HERE

(about as eclectic as it could possibly be)

erika.net is a serious improvement to my quality of life.  I am listening to them frequently now.  I wish I could stream them while driving.

erika.net people: If you read this, thanks!  You are awesome.

Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

How backward-ass!!

As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.

I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization.  Maybe not.

PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure.  I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something.  Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like).  Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.

In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.

On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.

The music industry is a mess.  The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).

And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.

Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that.  I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.

OH!  If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google.  Hmmm…

Google has these two initiatives that keep getting mentioned: Android, a “mobile OS,” and “Chrome (an OS allegedly coming out in a year or two),” which has been announced after all of us are already aware of the Chrome browser, which is pretty awesome in my opinion.

Here’s what I think practically everyone is missing about  this.

Linux Distros are all frankensteins.  I’m most familiar with Ubuntu, but I think anyone that knows about Linux would back me up in saying that Linux is an open-ended compilation of source-code.  And if you have a given distro and need some additional software, you very likely are going to be using add-on code that users of other distros are also using.

For this reason, Android and Chrome OS are not necessarily different initiatives on Google’s part.

And to go even further, I don’t believe that Android and Web OS from Palm are competitors.  I think it’s completely reasonable to assume that a Web OS front-end for Android is likely (as long as Android and WebOS continue to be released to consumers).  They’re both just Linux with different front-ends.  And with Linux Boxes, as they used to be called, the GUI is itself just an add-on.

Back to Google Chrome and Android.

I suspect that as an afterthought, Google realized that it should choose “Chrome”as it’s brand for NetBook sales because “Android” is not as friendly a name to the average buyer of a low-end laptop.

Along with that, banking on the fact that Mobile Data Connections are only going to get better, while WiFi only becomes more ubiquitous over the next two years, the idea of a machine that, for instance, has a music player that’s basically Pandora or Last.FM starts to make a lot of sense. (remember the FT article where the teenager says streaming music preferable owning it? I don’t know that we’ll even need to download mp3′s in 2 years, just stream!)

In order to make as many apps cloud-based as possible, Google Chrome could come to us with small API-based developments that take advantage of services like Yahoo!’s Flickr or Delicious or even news and entertainment services that plug right into the struggling corporate content businesses we keep hearing about in the tech news.

Perhaps the Chrome-loaded Asus laptop will be a direct Kindle competitor (or even an additional revenue model for amazon).

Meanwhile, mobile (pocket sized) devices aren’t going to stop getting smarter.  Android is just a catchy ‘band name’ for what’s ultimately the result of Google seeing that it’s in their best interest to get the OS market out of the hands of Microsoft and Apple.

Chrome is the same thing, but with a better name, and a wider appeal as long as the NetBook trend keeps up.

And at this point, I don’t think Google is risking much on its campaign to popularize Linux.  I personally believe that Linux is finally mature enough to begin competing with Mac OS and Windows so Google is just helping it along.  They’re jumping on the bandwagon because it serves them to do so.

In case I didn’t make it clear enough, Chrome and Android are the same thing or at the very least they’re both just Linux with different default drivers and GUI coding.

You can run Linux on a toaster.

Short answer: People. 

What the Semantic Web (now officially called any number of other things besides that) needs in order to become mainstream, in my opinion, is people and the connections between them. The phrase “The Social Graph” comes to mind a la Brad Fitzpatrick‘s once famous, but now all but forgotten manifesto which even Tim Berners-Lee eventually commented on. 

The Semantic Web would catch on if it was seen as even remotely useful by the young people who are most likely going to be building the next big thing on the web.

The beautiful thing about the Web2 era is that highly useful tools can sprout up overnight simply because of the desires of more or less ordinary people with no credentials or affiliation with a company. Everyone knows someone who’s a programmer.  The next big social software application just might come from the bedroom of a teenager.  There is hardly any barrier to access anymore.  This is why Web 2.0 happened.  A new tool or service doesn’t need a business plan and a data center to launch and go viral.

The trajectory of innovation throughout the last five years or so, the “Web 2.0″ years, has been around capitalizing on people, the content they create, their interests, and the value added by crowd-sourcing.  The benefits in the social media space are clear from both the perspective of normal end-users, as well as giant companies. Mostly, these benefits are about filtering noise and finding relevance on the user-side and on the giant company side, gathering metrics, targeting messages and acquiring free content.   The SemWeb standards have a lot to offer the Social Media realm, dare I say, probably even more than CSS with rounded corners does (I hope I’m not offending anyone here).  

But the way things are today, for most programmers, implementing SemWeb standards is a lot of extra work with no immediate benefit. Why not just use MySQL or cook up a new XML format?  

So why are these standards being completely ignored by the coders on the street?   RSS took off.  Why not FOAF? I think it’s because there’s no useful directory of URIs for people.  There are lots of SEmWeb geeks who have URIs, but the kids on MySpace and FaceBook don’t have URIs or FOAF files.  And those kids’ eyeballs and participation are worth real money!

One fine day, back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee came down from the mountain and gave us a commandment (or at least he logged into his blog and made a suggestion):

“Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.”

Then, apparently fifteen minutes after the first post was published, Berners-Lee really got at the importance of URIs in a post called Backward and Forward links in RDF just as important:

“One meme of RDF ethos is that the direction one choses for a given property is arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether one defines “parent” or “child”; “employee” or “employer”. This philosophy (from the Enquire design of 1980) is that one should not favor one way over another. One day, you may be interested in following the link one way, another day, or somene else, the other way.”

For those of you who don’t yet understand the idea of the Semantic Web, here’s the deal.  If there’s one web-address that represents each person, place thing or idea, it becomes possible to crawl the Web (documents as well as databases) looking for links to that person place or thing. And if those links contain tags which specify the meaning of the links, the web-at-large begins to look more like a giant database.  This is the “Web of Data” (in contrast to the “Web of Documents” we know and love).  This is what people call The Semantic Web. So what’s stopping people from being in the “Web of Data” (AKA Semantic Web)?  Like Tim Berners-Lee suggested, we need URIs for people.  That’s where it all starts.  Once there are URIs for people, and there are semantic links (ones that contain tags explaining what they mean) pointing at the those URIs, we can start making tools that use that data.

This is a fairly simple concept.  And Berners-Lee makes it sound simple enough.  Sure, we’ll all just give ourselves URIs and viala, the Social Graph will go Semantic.  That sounds great but there are a few problems with leaving it at that.

• Most ordinary people do not have websites or hosting of their own and instead rely on Social Networking Services’ profile pages for their web presence.  This means that most people have no way of easily publishing themselves to the Web of Data.
• For-Profit Social Networking services have a conflict of interest with regard to providing the Web-at-large with useful, granular “Social Graph” data. Instead we see APIs that give approved developers limited access to data.  No love for the average joe like me that is not a programmer.     
• The Web currently has no trustworthy repository for facts about ordinary people.  Trustworthy means not-for-profit at the very least.  The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not allow entries on ordinary, non-notable people.  (keep in mind that the Wikipedia publishes the facts in its ‘info boxes’ in RDF one of the core Standards of what we have been calling ‘The Semantic Web’)  

We need to start thinking of the Web more like we think of a Public Library, but completely decentralized and with infinite shelf-space.  I think WikiMedia, the organization behind the Wikipedia is the best bet for a trusted librarian for all the information about normal people.

I think what is really needed right now is a non-profit run directory of people, possibly even modeled after the Wikipedia, especially when it comes to the concurrent DBPedia project, which publishes the contents of  Wikipedia facts to the Semantic Web.  Really I think because of WikiMedia’s established trust, they would be the ideal organization to do this.  Wikipedia could simply have another layer which reveals non-notable results or ‘all results.’

The guest Andy Singleton talks about ‘distributed’ software development teams and some of the common ways they get it wrong.

[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]

Andy Singleton is an entrepreneur who has long studied and practiced the art of distributed software development. Influenced by the open source and agile movements, he has arrived at some startling conclusions about how to manage commercial projects…

A few of the surprising Conclusions Singleton has made [excerpted from Jon Udell's Blog]:

Don’t interview. Just pay people to join a project, pull a task from the queue, and find out what they can do.

Don’t divide work geographically. You’re not making best use of your distributed team if you impose that artificial constraint.

Don’t do phone conference calls. “I’ve never had someone tell me: ‘I worked on a project with lots of conference calls, and it worked great, so your thesis is disproved.’”

Don’t estimate. It’s just extra work. If you know your tasks and priorities, go after them in order. Estimation won’t help, and will cost 10% of your time.

Pile on developers early. It enables people to self-sort, and yields a stronger and more flexible team at the two-week mark.

[Excerpted from IT Conversations:]

In this conversation [Andy Singleton] explains why not to do these things, and what to do instead.

At first, it’s very simple:

EtherPad is a Collaborative Text-Editing environment. It’s real-time though, so it’s not as much like Google Docs (remember Writely?) as it is like IM.  Yes, it’s like Instant Messaging only more instant.  Every character typed or removed by anyone working on the text is seen in real-time by everyone else editing the document.  The page never has to reload or anything!  Ah, the beauty of Javascript.

Be warned though, this means that the people you’re working with can see how slow you type!  And as of yet, there’s no spellcheck, so you’re basically letting it all hang out. 

I heard about this from the Technometria Podcast, and it’s clear to me that, as they discussed in the show, for students taking notes during a lecture, nothing I’ve ever seen in my life could ever be as valuable as this technology is, even in its youngest form, that is, as long as the students in question have computers and friends.

Before I go any further, I should mention that my techie friends are all telling me about JQuery… I’m not a programmer, so that doesn’t mean anything to me (yet)… Also, EtherPad is only one of several spotlight applications running on a new platform called AppJet, which I guess is a Javascript-based development platform that’s really visual/browser-oriented.  Maybe even a sort of WordPress for Ajax?  

Well whatever. I’m not a dev so I’m not qualified to criticise that stuff, but the mention of JQuery seems timely given what I’ve been hearing, all-hype though, as far as I’m qualified to say, as a non-programmer.  The use of Javascript in general,  is not all-hype, my instincts tell me… We better move on because I don’t know shit about Javascript. But I do think it’s the future, if you’re asking my nose.

I would like to see EtherPad with TinyMCE because at the very least, UL’s and OL’s (un-ordered and ordered lists), Bold and Italics, Links Etc, would make the collaboration so much more useful! 

Beyond that, I’d love to see an app that can be installed anywhere that allows people to run controlled instances of ET, while controlling certain parameters like the maximum number of characters or lines per document… Etc…

I have a lot of ideas about the possibilities of this kind of real-time text-editing.  Big ideas.

Hey AppJet! Wanna talk?

Availability Notes:
Hulu can provide five episodes of this series at a time. We’ll add a new episode each week as we take down an older one, following the same schedule as the official site.  

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost. On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we’ve added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well. 

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ”Sunny” episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

1. I clicked to “Follow” Weekend Edition.
2. I got a weird impersonal messages sent “to me” via an “@ Reply” about how they’re getting the next episode of their show ready etc.  (why would they send that to me?  Smells like a strategy: “When someone starts to ‘follow’ us, respond to them with the latest tweet…” …a lot like automated thanks-for-the-add comments on MySpace, right?)
3. I responded suggesting they aren’t really using Twitter correctly.  
4. I gave it a day thinking I’d get a little response from their Team… Nope.  (What’s even worse than misinterpreting a medium, is not paying attention when people try to help.  Hello?)

Why would I want to be getting “personal,” direct messages from a media brand that wont respond to my own “personal” messages, when all of this is taking place via a platform in which I‘m already subscribing to a stream of anything that brand wants to say???  

Arghh!!

We could get a few people together to take turns reading and recording interesting articles from the Wikipedia and release the audio as a weekly podcast.

A sort of audio-book version of the wikipedia.  Maybe it could be five or ten articles at a time, that way it could be a one-hour program.  Maybe they’d be related in some way.  

This is just a midnight harebrained scheme, so if it’s a stupid idea, I don’t really care.  Seems like a natural progression to me though, at least at 5am it does.

I think it would only work if it was for a general audience.  Let’s say we focus it on the public radio audience, so the topics are all things that your average consumer of liberal information would enjoy.

The entry on the Electoral College might be a good example.  It could be coupled with others loosely about Democracy and the founding of the USA, for example.

Maybe instead of putting multiple readings together topically, it could be a reading of one article followed by a discussion by some invited experts via skype etc?  

This would also be a good place for new VO talent to cut their teeth and get out there and build some resume material.

I’m not interested in doing VO myself, but I’d be willing to commit to one article per month. 

Anyone?

Maybe Wikipedia articles are just too crude to read in an enjoyable way.

Maybe we need to re-write them for audio?  All just random late-night ideas.