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The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ... which was discussed on /. last week.

Anil also wrote a followup titled "Rebuilding the Web We Lost" that may be worth reading.

Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)

The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ... which was discussed on /. last week.

Anil also wrote a followup titled "Rebuilding the Web We Lost" that may be worth reading.

Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)

Anil Dash is a developer? Uh, no he's not. From his own website, he's "a blogger, entrepreneur and geek living in NYC." Nothing about being a developer. So, a blogger posted something about Apple that will get the geeks all a-tizzy and it made it to the front page of Slashdot and will drive viewers to his site, generating ad revenue while being based on nothing informative and wiping people into a flamewar frenzy on slashdot. In other words, business as usual.

Please, feel free to discuss this FUD and base your thoughts on this Anil Dash fellow. He is, after all, a blogger "who's written over half a million words" so his opinion must be really important.

I have to agree with you, and further unload on this topic.

On and around the time Six Apart released MT3, they proved they had nothing but disdain for their loyal MT2 users. Let me count the ways:

1. They always said there would always be a full-featured free version of Movable Type. Then, as they worked on MT3 in the year or so preceding its release, they assumed complete radio silence on the topic. They said nothing, indicated in no way that there was a shift in their mentality of any kind. Then, on MT3 release day, BOOM: the two most important features, number of users and number of weblogs, are limited for free users. You may say those aren't really "features," but their Features page disagreed; even after MT3's release, two of the top features on the page were "Unlimited users" and "Unlimited weblogs".

   Many people called the people who complained about that freeloaders and cheapskates, but the fact was that most people weren't mad about 6A charging for Movable Type; they were mad that they went back on their word without a prior hint.

   But that wouldn't've been so bad, if it weren't for a couple of other things:

2. When MT3 came out, the license explicitly stated that you could only create one weblog in the software with the free version. People were upset with this, because one of the most common MT hacks is to create a weblog for your articles, one for your links, and maybe a couple of others, and then combine them all into one website.

   So there was a furor over that particular change. A couple of weeks or so later, 6A changed the license to say you could create unlimited software-weblogs as long as they were confined to a single web site.

   But they didn't say they changed their license. Oh no. They said "We've just posted a clarification to our free license, to clarify that you can have unlimited software-weblogs on one web site."

   This was weasel-speak, plain and simple. They didn't have the dignity or the respect for their users to admit they had to change their minds. And finally,

3. There's a guy who works at Six Apart by the name of Anil Dash. He has a weblog. At the time, his weblog had a special links section in the sidebar.

   On the day of MT3's release, he posted a link to the MT3 website in that sidebar. The text around the link said something to the effect of "Movable Type 3 is released. [Something something something something.] Let the complaints begin!"

   That's right. A vice-president (or whatever he was at the time) of the company made a snarky remark about his users' reaction to his company going back on its word on his weblog. (He Orwellized it away shortly thereafter.)

That last one especially indicates the mindset inside 6A at the time. They slowly stopped seeing their users, the people who got them where they were, as their lifeblood, and started seeing them as complaining cheapskate freeloaders. At some point between MT 2.6 and MT3, they lost their respect for their loyal base, and replaced it with respect only for their corporate customers. Going back on their word, not talking straight with us, and making snarky comments about us seem to pretty clearly indicate disdain for us, not respect.

So I don't really care about MT being open source, because I don't think their attitude has probably changed one bit. It's simply gotten to the point where the "cheapskate freeloaders" can help their corporate mission better if MT is Free.

You think Microsoft is happy they had to pour a gazillion dollars into some cockeyed DRM scheme dreamed up by coke snorting clowns?

The question is so flawed that there's no way to answer it. It's like asking, "If you could create something with no volume and no surface area, what color would you paint it?"

It has been proven that DRM cannot disallow redistribution, let alone make a distinction between unauthorized distribution and fair use.

http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.h tml

The question is whether or not the additional income from increased ticket sales at live shows and merchandise sold (even additional recordings) to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of the band more than compensates for the potential income lost from sales of DRM-protected recordings to people who have already heard of the band. My own personal belief is that those people who have tried it (like Janis Ian) have found that it does. In any case, as Cory Doctorow put it in a speech to Microsoft:

No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music."

"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer." Jean Jacques Rousseau. A lot of charged language has been flying around over the past four days or so with regards to Flickr and what rights their users ought or ought not to have with regards to their content. It started off with a thread in Flickr Central when Google launched their new Picasa photo sharing app and has escalated from there to Digg, TechCrunch and now Slashdot. As I've been involved in the recent debate since it started I wanted to offer up my thoughts on the matter at hand. It's important to note that yesterday I joined Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr. I've kept quiet on the posts over the weekend because I wanted to announce that before offering up anything more on the subject than I already have. As one of Flickr's heaviest users I feel that I have a decent understanding of the situation and problem at present. A number of months back Anil Dash wrote a post called "The Interesting Economy." In this post Anil posed the most basic question of all from a Flickr user's perspective, "what's in it for me?" From Anil: "But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange." Caterina Fake responded to Anil with the following: "Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it." At the time, and still today, I agree with Caterina Fake. I have always felt that I've gotten much more out of Flickr than money could ever provide and thus I've felt it more than a fair deal. I don't need to be paid by Flickr. I enjoy the generosity that Caterina speaks of and love the share and share alike spirt of Flickr. And over the past year I've spent hours and hours and hours working away at my flickrstream. Uploading new photos every day, meticulously documenting my images with detailed tags, building friends and making contacts, enjoying and sharing with everyone I meet, and participating actively in many different groups and conversations on the site. But lately I've been having some second thoughts. The central issue around the recent debate is not whether or not you can get your photographs out of Flickr. Slashdot got this really wrong when they wrote, "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting." There are several tools that have already been developed to allow exporting out of Flickr. Downloadr and Slickr come to mind immediately. You absolutely can get your photographs out of Flickr your photos are not locked up. Flickr is not the roach motel that others have been making it out to be. What is at issue is not your photos, but the metadata associated with your photos. At present Flickr does

Quote from Anil Dash, VP of Six Apart

Read how Anil Dash got a picture of himself in the New York Times wearing a GOATSE T-shirt - he doesn't seem to have done so bad for himself ... ;-)

every time we talk of DRM, someone (rightly) notices that, in the past, each and any protection scheme was defeated; (and indeed C Doctorow of EFF claims that the failure of DRM is inevitable); the common say is "some clever hacker in a garage will find a way 'round it".
And then... Samsung... ?!? This is really funny! LOL! ()
Of all the places and ways to defeat DRM... Samsung !?! (me is rolling and laughing)

Buncha people said this already, but: they'll become mainstream when they're not burdened down by cumbersome features that nobody wants, chief among them being oppressive DRM. Cory Doctorow's got some very nice words on the general subject of unwanted features in section 5 of the talk he gave at Microsoft, and he talks about e-books specifically in section 4: "The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. ...when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby."

1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

"The companies are planning to work together on technology that will secure this content, she said."

Here is a clue, if I can view it then it is not secure nor will it ever be secure enough.

DRM is the crazy idea of giving me the content, and also the key to view it, but though obfuscation somehow hide the decrypt process. It won't work in the long run.

When they bought the cool Outlook searching tool Lookout it looks as though they bought into some open source components as well.

It's not even a piggyback ride. It's some alternachick in a black shirt with Megway printed on the front walking around with some knucklehead in a bicycle helmet following her. There's a completely stupid movie here just in case you really want to see what I'm talking about.

There are some ideas that just need to be killed in the crib. This is one of them.

"Cheap" in this kind of situation usually means non mainframe. In any case, rack machines don't cost that much more than a regular desktop PC. A 1U rack case+PSU costs about $200-300. That's only about 3x more than a regular mid range server tower (and about the same as a monster double wide server case), and that's what I would pay for one -- volume discounts are going to cut that down. Now consider how much it's going to cost them to have enough space to have desktops instead of racks. The "cheap" solution is going to be the rack one, not the desktop one. It's the same reason everybody uses racks for servers.

As for disk, who cares? Google caches everything in ram anyway.

Sounds like they're taking heed of Google's success in attaining blazing search speeds by holding all the data in RAM.

See here.

Doing a bit of Googling for people with similar ideas I came across the following blogs:
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/07/17/theGoo gleBrowser
and http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/0067 26.php

If you like this idea (or even if you don't) blog about it and give your views on it. Let as many people see the idea so we can get the pros and cons discussed.

This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger. The licensing deal gives Pyra Ltd. the money to continue to maintain (and scale) its servers, upgrade the technology, and possibly work on a more viable business model (like selling Blogger Pro, or finally completing the underlying architecture, the project-management software simply called Pyra).

Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.

For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers, from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc, basically invented the spreadsheet program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.

And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.

Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at /. you may be interested in hacking code anyway. In that case there are certainly alternatives -- LiveJournal and Greymatter among them, and sliding up to the big boys like Slashcode, Zope and PHP Nuke. (There are also the hosted solutions, like Pitas or Dave Winer's Manila, itself the center of an interesting tangential experiment in content-management, Radio.) Those are certainly better for managing a wide-ranging site, and they allow membership and member content creation as well.

I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.

Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
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lake effect weblog