Urrgh…Facebook Pages for businesses and brands, Facebook Beacon (or whatever that goofy ad-thing is called), plugins that want access to my entire account so that I can compare movie ratings with a friend. It’s beyond enough. Not that I was ever a Facebook groupie or anything, but I see a shark jump coming. It’s useful for finding high school friends, but that’s about it.
UPDATE: LOL…I just caught up with last week’s two Penny Arcades on the subject Huzzah!
So… this internet thing,
from New Music Strategies: One of the best essays I’ve read in awhile on the topic — Let’s take it back to first principles: the internet is not a promotional tool for music. Nor is it a retail platform. It’s not even a method of distribution. It’s electricity. A well-written essay by someone who groks the spew is always a pleasure. Thanks, Andrew!
PS: My Christmas present will hopefully fit the Internet appliance bill quite nicely…
I’ve not gotten around this week to commenting on Amazon’s Kindle, mostly because it doesn’t thrill me all that much. I’m chomping at the bit, OTOH, for the Chumby that Santa Claus has in a sack with my name on it. While my unconscious was working on a post explaining that, Mark Pilgrim went ahead and did it for me, and Cory stuck it on boingboing: Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy. Cory’s additional points at bb are spot on, but make sure you click through to Mark’s orginal article; it’s a great read as well.
A Good Album is More than Just a Collection of Singles — Did consumers complain? Maybe so. But at what point does any business care when a consumer complains about the money? Why do people not care how we – the people who make music – eat? If they just want the single, they gotta get the album. That was how life was. Today we should at least have that option. — LOL. True…you have that option. Is the album available w/o DRM? Reasonably priced? No? Let me know how that works out for ya!
UPDATE: Oh, the more I read, the better this is! — My book, Young, Rich and Dangerous: The Making of a Music Mogul, came out in hardcover last month, but Simon & Schuster doesn’t let the book stores tear it up and sell it chapter by chapter. A record is no different. — Yeah. OK. Whatever. Let me…oh, I already said that. *grin*
Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for the link and their analysis. Good stuff!
Well, I finally got around to making the actual hard-coded changes in my webpage templates, so that my podcast URL is showing up correctly everywhere: new RSS feed url for podcast. Note: the old one still works, and the new one has, in fact, always worked (they’re both dynamically generated based on topic tags for the episodes), but I’m properly pimping the new one everywhere now. Enjoy…and I encourage you to change if you use the old one (both of you, Steve and Lee!); it was missing quite a few podcasts for some bizarre reason. Blip.tv is supposed to be fixing the issue soon…but it’s been soon for awhile now, and it’s so trivial a change, that I said the heck with it.
One of the most interesting set of essays I’ve read recently has been a series by Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias. He writes on evolution as a process involving non-zero statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism reproduces
, rather than a magic purposefullness fairy. And in a very useful way, he clarifies how individual organisms (in particular, conscious ones), fit into the picture (or don’t). Plus, there’s a Cthulhu mythos reference for good measure! How could I not like?
Read and enjoy.
Yes! It’s for real! I got an email from Chris Dodd’s campaign, but I was holding my breath for external confirmation (I’m kinda a pessimist when it comes to these things): In Twist, Senate Judiciary Spying Bill Lacks Immunity for Telecoms. Still reading for gotchas, and this fight surely isn’t over…but it appears to be an awesome win (for now).
Wow…this is a really cool post on Jamais Cascio’s blog about a project funded by the World Bank, using data from the National Geophysicial Data Center to measure natural gas flaring
— the release and burning of natural gas released during oil drilling. The project hopes to identify prominent flaring sites (as a precursor to working toward a reduction in flaring) by analyzing nightime satellite imagery! It’s possible to tease the data out of imagery using knowledge of the phenomenon and data crunching techniques. Fascinating.
Jamais links to a longer post by Ethan Zuckerman, which describes the project in more detail. Both pages also have gorgeous data maps of the results. I love this stuff, both because of the beauty of the maps (I LOVE maps), and the powerful visualization.
Thanks for the link, Jamais!
Steve Borsch has a great post up on the wiretapping issue, and a link to an advocacy site that I wasn’t aware of: StopTheSpying. Check it out, and make some calls! Thanks for the link, Steve/
Posting this made me realize that I haven’t done all that much long-form political posting recently; I’ve thrown up some links, but with relatively little commentary. Don’t know why, really…there’s plenty of it in my head. I’m notoriously bad at multitasking, and I have been trying to spread myself a little thin recently…exocortex, machine rebuild (which includes dev env rebuild), couple new personal projects, etc. But this is another important issue…even beyond the Iraq War, I see the wiretapping situation and the Guantanamo detainments as probably the two clearest indicators to me of whether or not I can vote for someone. (Iraq gets messy because of the whole we’re there, we can’t pull out now
excuse. Actually, we can…but I’ll certainly agree that it’s messy. Now. Now that WE CREATED THE MESS. *sigh*…)
Guantanamo and the wiretapping problem are pretty straightforward IMO, however. Torture…is wrong. Period. Stripping people of habeas corpus is…wrong. Period. And asking for retroactive immunity…is pretty much ADMITTING that what you did was wrong, isn’t it? This isn’t complicated. If they broke the law, it’s because they thought they could get away with it…same as every other criminal out there. If they don’t, they get punished…you don’t retroactively just change the rules. For them. Retroactive immunity, habeas corpus abolishment, secret warrants, gag rules, torture….these are not the actions of a government based on the rule of law. I’ll always oppose those who condone this behavior; I’ve opposed this from the day after 9/11, and I will tomorrow, next year, and as long as I’m around.
If you want to help, join the EFF, and/or the ACLU, both of which I’m proud to be a member of. And don’t hesitate to speak out…and please, don’t forget to vote!
This cuts way too close for comfort…LOL: xkcd #337.
