Linked List: September 3, 2007

Monday, 3 September 2007

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Cory Shields’, Executive Vice President of Communications for NBC Universal, Response to Apple’s Press Release Regarding NBC’s Pricing Demands on the iTunes Store 

“I am high as a kite.”

Quote of the Week 

Michael Gartenberg on NBC: “Sometimes I think God put video content guys on the planet to make the music guys look progressive and visionary.”

More Idiocy From NBC 

John Bergmayer, back on July 17, on NBC Universal’s push for the U.S. government to establish content-based filters on Internet traffic:

NBC’s comments (read them here) are filled with ludicrous claims. Art already blogged about its position that file-sharing hurts the American farmer. It also claimed that the open Internet is like a FedEx or UPS delivery service for contraband—wouldn’t the government do something, they ask, if 70% of FedEx’s payload was stolen goods or illegal drugs?

Music Subscriptions, DRM, and iPods 

Music producer and would-be savior of the record industry Rick Rubin, in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

“You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home.”

The iPod as we know it might be obsolete in such a world, but why couldn’t the Walkman-like device that plays the subscription music be an iPod? I’ve been saying this for years: just because Apple hasn’t engaged in subscription-based plans for music yet doesn’t mean they couldn’t. And if they did it now, theirs would be more popular than all existing ones combined.

But here’s the problem with subscription-based music: you can’t have it without DRM. Because without DRM, what’s to stop someone from subscribing for one month, downloading every song they might ever want, then unsubscribing but keeping the music? And the thing with DRM is that people hate it, because it restricts what they can do and where they can play their music. To argue that subscriptions are the future of music is to argue that DRM is the future of music, and the evidence points to the contrary.

Using del.icio.us as a Writing Summarization Tool 

Jeremy Zawodny:

It occurs to me that with a sufficient number of people bookmarking an article and selecting a short passage from it, I have a useful way to figure out what statement(s) most resonated with those readers (and possibly a much larger audience). It’s almost like a human powered version of Microsoft Word’s document summarization feature.

I’ve noticed the same thing: When something I write gets linked to by enough people, a consensus usually forms regarding which is the best or core passage. And it’s often not what I would have chosen myself.

iPhoneSIMfree Supposedly Set to Begin Fulfilling Orders, But Only to ‘Resellers’ 

This iPhoneSIMfree thing is smelling scammier and scammier, if you ask me. Minimum order is $1,800 (50 licenses at $36 each). No guarantee that it won’t break with the next software update from Apple. Plus, no one other than confirmed dimwit Ryan Block has verified that this thing even works. Update: CNN vouches for it in this unbylined story, but it isn’t clear whether the unlocked iPhone was provided by CNN’s reporters.

A Toot and a Snore 

Fantastic find: bootleg recordings from a 1974 jam session with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Xtorrent 1.1 

Performance and UI tweaks to David Watanabe’s excellent $24 BitTorrent client.

Fake Steve on the TV Networks 

Fake Steve:

In the second half of the twentieth century you had the great good fortune to be granted a kind of limited monopoly over the distribution of a very valuable commodity. There were only so many airwaves, hence only so many networks. There were way more advertisers than there were channels to carry their advertising. So you sat there with your choke-hold on the garden hose, controlling the flow of programming and getting fatter and fatter and fatter.

First Beta Release of Eudora/Penelope 

I hope it’s awesome. I suspect it’s going to blow.