I am happy and amazed to announce the addition of myself and Webjay to the fighting force of extraordinary magnitude at Yahoo!

Yahoo! Music Blog > Yahoo! Music Welcomes Webjay and Lucas Gonze

It's with great pleasure that I announce the addition of Lucas Gonze and Webjay to the Yahoo! Music family.

We're building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.

Yahoo! Acquires Webjay, Launches Yahoo! Music Blog (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I know that Steve Rubel outed the Yahoo! Music Blog back when it was... in beta (yeah, that's it!). But today it's officially there. And it brings news of the Webjay acquisition.

Yahoo! Acquires Webjay, Launches Yahoo! Music Blog (by Jeremy Zawodny)

# Jeremy Wright said: Geezus... I totally didn't see that coming (largely because I think Webjay is crap, sorry).

Yahoo! Acquires Webjay, Launches Yahoo! Music Blog (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Mark Papadakis said: I seriously doubt the playlist is the next frontier in digital media. At least, that feature alone. In other words, imagine yourself in your apartment, 20 years from now. What would differentiate your digital experience (entertainment-wise) from today? Playlists? Recommendations? Other personalization features? Quality? The list could go on. So, ideally, this system would know you so well that it could adjust based on your mood and all that.

Yahoo! acquires WebJay

It turns out that when they sign up new people, y! makes them put on this pointy hat that sorts them into "houses". This makes no sense to me, but it turns out that I am "hufflepuff"

TNL: Tell me the reason for this acquisition.

Lucas Gonze: The point of it is playlists. It's a sign that Y! takes playlists seriously. The point of playlists is that they are to internet media what RSS is to weblogs and HTML is to browsing.

O'Reilly Radar > Webjay Acquired by Yahoo!

Kudos to Yahoo! for recognizing once again the importance of the remix culture.

I thought that when the deal was finally done I would write the mother of all long posts, but now that I'm here I'm too tired. The point that kept coming to mind when I imagined what I would write is that I owe a lot to my friends, and I'm really grateful.

Thanks, friends.

Flash back to my new years blog post, when my wife and I popped a bottle of fancy beer on the beach to celebrate the deal:

Coming Soon to TV Land: The Internet, Actually - New York Times

In the battle for the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an array of content in video-on-demand programs. But fending off the Internet's openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago. At the onset of the dot-com era, large online service companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN tried to lock customers into electronic walled gardens of digital information. But it quickly became apparent that no single company could compete with the vast variety of information and entertainment sources provided on the Web.

The threat is not appropriation of tightly-held content, it's about competition from loosely-held content.

Tristan Louis has a good collation of news about internet video.

Portals and Video - An Overview

on one side, you have companies that are looking to offer advertising supported content to the masses and charge a premium for some of the content. The charging model on the premium content is also divergent from player to player: Apple is looking at a fixed per unit price, while AOL and Microsoft are looking at an all you can eat price for a larger fee. Although Yahoo! has not announced much in this space, they look primarily to the advertising supported model as the way to go. Google, on the other hand, is going to try to create a marketplace based on variable rates, and will probably use something similar to an AdWord for Video type of program to subsidize their own free content.

Wired News: Google Goes for Web Video Gold

Google is upping the ante in the online video gold rush, allowing content owners to set their own prices

Priceline for video? Whatever. Where's the internet in this? It's being used to enforce DRM:

In instances where the content provider adopts Google's copy protection scheme, watching a video sold through Google will require users to be online so they can log on and view it via the company's video player.

Even though I pooh-pooh'd Google's pricing scheme, I'd like to see a mathematician's or mathematical economist's view on it.

RubyForge: Armangil's podcatcher: Project Info

Armangil's podcatcher is a podcast client for the command line. It provides several download strategies, supports BitTorrent, offers cache management, and generates playlists for MP3 player applications.

That's the first Ruby implementation of XSPF as far as I know; I wonder if a support library could be cannibalized out of his code?

Apropos of nothing, my main reblogging tool these days is a modified version of Alf Eaton's cite bookmarklet, which is itself a modified version of this and this. The difference is in the layout of the HTML created; the source attribution is below the quote in Alf's bookmarklet and above it in mine.

Here it is: cyte. (Add that to your bookmark bar, then select some text on a web page and hit the button).

evilutionary virtual log > Blog Archive > greynet vlog stuff issue

(01:32:20) admnory: you see if someone has style
(01:32:25) admnory: just by glancing his collection
(01:32:28) admnory: the random shitheads
(01:32:33) admnory: just downloaded all kinds of stuff
(01:32:38) admnory: and shared it all
(01:32:41) mmeiser01: cool
(01:32:42) admnory: while others went for a genre
(01:32:47) admnory: or a couple of genres
(01:32:50) admnory: built their profile
(01:32:57) admnory: im using this approach to the lightnet
(01:33:03) admnory: making a collection on my ipod is the goal
(01:33:05) mmeiser01: cool
(01:33:10) admnory: 60 gigs of videoblogs
(01:33:11) mmeiser01: very cool
(01:33:12) admnory: and podcasts
(01:33:15) admnory: collections
(01:33:17) admnory: from the very beginning
(01:33:21) mmeiser01: I archive all sorts of viral media
(01:33:22) admnory: of ryanne
(01:33:23) mmeiser01: or did
(01:33:26) mmeiser01: it's exploded
(01:33:28) admnory: or kristina
(01:33:29) admnory: or whatever
(01:33:32) mmeiser01: OH!

(admnory is talking about private filesharing networks, which are also known as darknets).

Wired 13.11: Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone

The technology to make a cell phone do double duty as an MP3 player is readily available. Motorola and other companies have been selling phones that play music in Europe and Asia for a couple of years now - handsets with lots of memory and serious audio capabilities. And with the iPod, Apple showed how to turn an ordinary MP3 player into a great one. Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched?

multineedia >> Blog Archive >> Motorola Launches iRadio Music Service

Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 cell-phone maker, on Tuesday revealed details of its plans for iRadio, a subscription music service that will go on sale this year. It also unveiled a new home phone that consumers could link with cell-phone and Web phone services.

Wired 13.11: Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone

For a carrier, the whole point of putting music on a cell phone is to make money on data traffic from songs downloaded wirelessly. Carriers also like to make money handling the billing for those downloads. Yet the ROKR puts Apple's iTunes in charge. The only way to load music onto the phone is to sync it with your computer; to buy new music, you have to access the iTunes store through your computer, bypassing the carrier's network and billing service. Even worse from the carriers' point of view, iTunes would compete with the music stores they themselves are setting up. Never mind that iTunes has far more name recognition than a carrier's brand could ever hope to achieve, and thus would lure new subscribers. For companies that live off their monopoly on spectrum, it's hard to view competition as good.

PC Magazine: Motorola Launches iRadio Music Service

Motorola's iRadio service will first run on the Rokr E2 cell phone, which, unlike the first Rokr phone, will not include Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes music software.

multineedia > Blog Archive > Motorola Launches iRadio Music Service

I'm telling you, people - get me Webjay on my cell phone, and I'm a happy guy.

I'm not quoting that Webjay bit to flatter myself, I'm doing it to show the reason why I have collected these links and quotes: because I am trying to find the passage the internet is taking onto cell phones. For now the cell industry is locked up so tightly that the true internet simply does not exist there.

The obvious question: is it possible to abandon the carriers completely? This would be a disruptive strategy where the user loses important things like a reliable dial tone but gains even more important things like, well, something so great that not getting a reliable dial tone is worthwhile.

Is that what's happening with wifi smartphones like the Nokia N9x series?

Preview: Nokia N91 - infoSync World

First and foremost a music phone, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that Nokia has managed to integrate a 3.5 mm stereo headset jack directly into the handset itself, negating the need for any cumbersome dongles. Audio quality is superb, and although perhaps not as intuitive as Apple's ipod products, the user interface and dedicated menu keys placed in front of the sliding keypad cover is more than good enough.

Format support is reasonably comprehensive with MP3, AAC, WMA and M4A on the slate, and there's also an included stereo headset with remote control - the quality of which could be better, but remains a nice touch. Getting music on the handset should be a breeze; it will show up as a USB 2.0 mass storage device to which users can drag and drop files when connected to a compatible computer, and Nokia will also provide a dedicated application for music management. Incidentally, the USB connector is a plain, non-proprietary mini USB port: bravo, Nokia.

Music playback appears to be quite well integrated with phone functionality, with the N91 among other things pausing playback when receiving incoming calls - and, importantly, resuming playback when hanging up. Also present are dedicated volume controls, as well as an 8-band equalizer and the ability to download music over the air, or alternatively record it directly through a line in connector or from the built-in stereo FM radio of the handset - which also supports Nokia's Visual Radio concept.

Connectivity is abundant in the N91, which offers up GSM/GPRS/EDGE 900/1800/1900 MHz connectivity along with 3G for WAN scenarios. More impressively, Nokia has also managed to cram not only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11b into the N91, but also 802.11g; a previously unseen feat what regards mobile devices.

Note that, as always, this is not about wanting phone companies to be nice. It is just as possible for them to be assholes on the internet. For example, notice the accretion of deliberately fudgy undefined fees on my current Vonage bill:

Charges Detail:		
	
International Calls for 1-(xxx)-xxx-xxxx (05/Dec-04/Jan)	$0.24
Premium Unlimited Plan for 1-(xxx)-xxx-xxx (05/Jan-04/Feb)	$24.99
FET Tax		  $0.76
Regulatory Recovery Fee		$1.50
Total Amount	    $27.49

Q: What's an FET Tax? How about a Regulatory Recovery Fee?

A: A made-up word for extracting more money without admitting that prices are going up.

The difference between internet cell and the thing we have right now is that the self-interest of dominant vendors won't have as much collateral damage. In particular, it will be possible for a decentralized media ecology to exist, and hence for things like Webjay to help navigate it.

I had been laptopping at a cafe for a couple hours. Somebody sat down next to me and set up an identical computer. I looked around and saw that (1) all laptops in my corner of the room were the same make and model, and (2) all computers of that make and model were in my corner of the room. Brand identification appeared to be creating a gravitational effect, and this new person had been pulled into the center of the brand-mass, potentially causing brand-density to increase without limit!

I realized that my hands were shaking slightly from the amount of caffeine I had taken in, and I thought: Thank God! It was all a dream!

This is third in a series of blog entries quoting from members of the video blogging subculture; see also Andreas Pedersen and Adrian Miles.

Steve Garfield says:

Here's my distinction between video blogging and video podcasting.

RSS feeds that don't have an accessible Video blog, where you can watch a video, are not video blogs, they are just video podcasts.

I'm starting to see web pages that have NO VIDEO on them. They aren't even blogs. Just static web pages. These pages require you to subscribe via iTunes to watch the videos. No blog there. So it's not a videoblog, just a videopodcast.

What I think he's saying -->

How can internet media be substantially different from offline media when it is played in a disconnected and passive context like an iPod? From this perspective the iPod is a bad thing, not a sexy one, since it doesn't support comments, reblogging, remixing, URL sharing, or any of the rich information content of a typical blog. The interactivity, interlinking and easy mutability which you find in blogs amounts to a new art form, one which can't be rendered by an iPod.

I edited Steve's comment for brevity. Just like on the past few days, I'm not saying what I think, just reblogging what others have said.

...and surely Steve Garfield's video blog is wicked relevant to this conversation.

Courtesy of David Grant, there is now an XSPF package in the PEAR PHP repository. This both browses and generates XSPF, and it is capable of outputting M3U and SMIL from XSPF inputs.

I was impressed when I browsed the source code and acceptance process. It is a serious and professional-level piece of work.

On the XSPF mail list, milosz derezynski proposes that we take it with a grain of salt until the output XML is shown to be valid, even under stress. This is a good place to use the set of testcases for XSPF parsers that I created last week.

David had to jump through a lot of quality-control hoops to make it happen, and that's a good thing. For web developers the result is that they can have a high-quality XSPF parser and generator just by running the command

pear install channel://pear.php.net/File_XSPF-0.0.1 

To follow up on this Andreas Pedersen comment that I reblogged yesterday --

I am talking about videoblogging. A blog entry is *not* the frames that make up the video. It is also the surrounding blog post, the comments, the title, the sidebar, the entire network around it (inbound and outbound links).

-- this is a second reblogging, this time of Adrian Miles: TV Killed Vogging's Star:

Blogs are the first online popular media to have recognised that relations between parts are an immanent quality to a properly networked practice, and while audio and video remains closed to the network audio and video blogging can be little more than audio and video in a blog, rather than audio and video blogging.

A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog.

Andreas Pedersen draws a line between blogging and iPod casting :

There are two kinds of "videoblogging" - for the sake of the argument we can call one videoblogging and the other video podcasting. The first includes aspects of the blog. It's a remediation of the blog and tv (among others). Think McLuhan. The latter is a transparent remediation of tv. It's faithful to tv.

When I say embedded video gives the best reading experience for web video, I am talking about videoblogging. A blog entry is *not* the frames that make up the video. It is also the surrounding blog post, the comments, the title, the sidebar, the entire network around it (inbound and outbound links). That is what makes blogging different from old media. When you take the video and move it to an iPod it may be the same frames, but it is not the same Work - it is the same video, but a new media and different content.

I don't know yet what I think of this argument; I'm reblogging it because I want to talk about it more.

Myspace video requires both Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player: (I have WMP 10)

MSNBC ditto, and since this can't be good for NBC you have to wonder what they're getting from MS:

Reuters is fiddling with a program to allow third parties to embed a player for Reuters video in their web pages. This is a great idea and I hope they make a lot of money on it.

Reuters Labs - Blog:

The Affiliate Network lets website owners use the latest Reuters news or business video directly on their site, giving them some of the same video stories that television news editors use. There are no pop-ups and no software installation, it works in Windows and on Macs, and it takes just a few minutes to add to a site. Visitors can watch full news stories right on your page. It's free (there may be ads in between stories to pay the bills), fast, and easy to add video news to any site. Maybe you've blogged about news? Now your visitors can watch the news without leaving your site.

The catch is that they want you to register as an affiliate to do it. This is not un-retarded because it discourages people from showing their ads for them, and why should Reuters care who does them a favor?

This David Carr item in the NYTimes...

Taken to a New Place, by a TV in the Palm - New York Times:

I am paying a so-called convenience charge. I could go to BitTorrrent or some other place where video content is there for the taking, but I'm not interested in the moral and technological somersaults required to get free - I think the technical, legal term is "stolen" - programming for my iPod. Instead, I have become the gift that keeps on giving for Apple.

New Media Musings: Free video isn't stealing:

Earth to Carr: There are hundreds of sites containing tens of thousands of video -- much of it high quality -- that's free for the taking and the watching, because the creator has made his or her works available for free. Hollywood is not the only place that produces video.

> Free video downloads for the iPod:
> 
> Mefeedia.com
> Ourmedia.org
> Blip.tv
> iTunes Podcast directory
> Vimeo

New Media Musings: Free video isn't stealing:

The only video worth watching is created by the professional elties like me.

But I wouldn't put it that way, because it's true that the only video worth watching is created by professional elites like David Carr. The free stuff only comes into its own when you want participatory media.

JD, Adam and myself all used quotes from David as a part of our own writing. If the thread starter was one of the television episodes that Carr bought via iTunes, we would have been locked out. If Carr had posted his piece as video on television, JD, Adam and myself would all have been out of luck.

In Technologies of control, technologies of use, Jon Udell argued that the reason we can use David Carr's text but not his video is that the underlying tools aren't ready:

In the realm of text, most of the words we read and write aren't subject to micro-control and arguably don't need to be. We often choose to control access, of course, but except for commercial or highly confidential texts we normally don't need or want to control use. Instead we are mostly concerned to facilitate and expand use, and as we build out the two-way textual web we are learning how to do that.

In the realm of rich media, though, we start from a different place. Most of the audio and video that we consume today is commercial in nature. That's true because the more specialized tools of audio and video production have yet to be fully democratized.

> wrote imprecisely and you are right to call me on it. I should
> have clearly stated that there is abundant free programming to be
> had -- much of it glorious -- but that if I ripped Lost or other
> network programming, that would be a kind of theft.

(n.b.: if I reblog private email without permission, I'll say so).

I got a couple emails today about whether downloading stuff linked on Webjay is illegal. One person said:

I was wondering if it is legal to right click and save the music to a folder and then later transfer that music to my ipod from webjay.

I was wondering if it is legal to download from webjay or if it is just for listening.

The word download has dirty or naughty associations. Everybody wants to do it, but nobody can talk about it in public. Year in and year out people do it on Saturday night and confess it on Sunday morning. Download is the new fuck.

I couldn't even begin to answer these people's questions. The only true answer is that downloading, in the sense they're using it in, is a meaningless term, but that would be a hopelessly abstract thing to say. I guess that growing up post-Napster means being bombarded with loaded messages about how computers work.

After struggling with an answer I said to the first guy: ask yourself what the artists want. He wrote back and said that he wouldn't do it (downloading) then. For him downloading and ripping off artists were floating around together in a cloud of guilt and sin.