That great group blog Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder and guests) has been having hosting problems recently. You can get them for the moment at a direct IP address, here http://216.126.84.59 .
Those who cannot remember the past…
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece about the rush of venture capital money into social-software companies, triggered by the popularity of Friendster.
Viewed from the perspective of a technologist or an anthropologist, social software — tools that help people meet each other and work and play together online — is fascinating and hot. And maybe a handful of entrepreneurs will even figure out how to turn it into an actual profitable business.
In the meantime, though, it seems like tens of millions of dollars are being poured into businesses as a matter of blind faith. This is not bitter words from a grizzled veteran of the dot-com bubble; it’s what the venture investors are saying themselves. Robert Kagle of Benchmark Capital calls his investment in Friendster “a leap of faith” and says, “If you’ve got this level of engagement, and people spending upwards of an hour at a time [on the site], that will translate into a set of economics that will support this business model.”
Somewhere around the end of 2000 I thought we’d collectively given up the notion that site traffic, unique visitors, page views and “time on the site” were in themselves financially significant, even in the absence of a careful and sensible plan to derive revenue from said traffic. Of course, maybe such a plan is sitting within Friendster’s prospectus. But then it wouldn’t be a “leap of faith” at all.
Radio Radio
If you are a Salon blogger (or any other kind of blogger) using Radio Userland as your blogging software you may want to know about Rogers Cadenhead‘s new book about the software, “Radio Userland Kickstart.”
Rogers is a smart guy who has been immersed in this stuff — both software and blogging — for a long time. If you want to get more out of this versatile but sometimes confusing software, I recommend the book (based on the three sample chapters Rogers has posted online, which are also highly useful in themselves).
Life in hell
After two days in hardware hell I’m finally back in business.
It began with an apparently dead motherboard on Monday morning. Since Radio Userland is a client-side tool I couldn’t just move to my laptop and not worry about things. I had to get this box fixed. The quest involved swapping out the motherboard; buying new memory because I failed to account for the fact that the new mobo used DDR memory (but thank god memory’s cheap these days); then throwing my hands up in despair as the new hardware exhibited the same apparent symptoms as the old (no video out, no BIOS “beep” on startup).
Thanks to the amazing support resources on the Net I eventually figured out that what I had to do was hold a paper clip to a pair of solder points on the motherboard in order to reset the CMOS. I am not kidding. It’s 2003 and we’re still poking paper clips into our computers to get them to work.
In any case the computer is up again, Radio is running once more, and all I have to do is spend hours now reinstalling the rest of my life onto this new computer (I had to reinstall the OS too — the hardware transition was too much for the old Win2K installation).
Farewell to Emusic
I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.
Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.
It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.
The perils of the paperless ballot
If you haven’t been keeping up to date on this stuff, as Salon’s Farhad Manjoo has, you will find his interview today with voting-machine whistle-blower Bev Harris a must-read.
It seems that the people who built Diebold’s electronic voting systems just didn’t think security was critical, nor did they think maintaining the integrity of auditing was a big deal. Well, gee, they’re just elections, right? They’re not, like, something important.
Faux Windows patch
There’s a grotesque new virus out there masquerading as a Microsoft Windows software patch. When I received it in my own email it took one look at it and laughed. But it’s easy to see where less careful (or jaded) eyes might be fooled. Here’s a screenshot. Here are the gory details. Be warned: Microsoft isn’t sending out operating system patches as attachments in email! Just as Ebay isn’t really asking you to update your account info. Caveat e-mail-ptor.
Music to our ears
My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry’s “Pie Rats” occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon’s technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: “Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it’s not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that’s worth knowing about as well.”
And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher’s proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA’s critics are not simply saying “to hell with the artists” or “to hell with business models.” We’re saying, online distribution — and redistribution — of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?
There’s more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.
The music industry’s pie rats strike back
My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)
I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.
As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.
These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)
This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.
I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!
Outlook is bleak
Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!
I got back last night from a two-day vacation to over 2000 emails in my inbox. Over 1300 were spams correctly tagged as such by our server’s Spam Assassin. Of the remaining mail, several hundred were” real” messages, and another several hundred were debris resulting from the latest round of Outlook viruses.
The good news is that that debris is coming to me as the result of *other* people’s being infected by the virus and trying to send mail forged under one of my (or Salon’s) addresses. I get the bouncebacks because of that forgery. But I don’t worry about being infected myself because (a) of course I never click on spam attachments — most spam never gets opened or even seen; and (b) I don’t ever go near Microsoft e-mail software.
Outlook is a joke. No sane computer user today should use it. If your company makes you use it, go to your CEO and explain how much time and money his company is losing by using it. I use Eudora; there are several other good non-Microsoft products depending on what platform you’re on. Both Mozilla and the Open Source Applications Foundation are developing or already offer free e-mail clients as well.
Kevin Werbach writes, “Either email is broken, Microsoft’s email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” I don’t believe they’re the same at all. Microsoft email is broken, and it’s time for people to wake up and move on.