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He has just a slight vested interest in pimping his wares, here.

I did not claim otherwise. I find the business model he's using for the physical media fantastic and a great step forward. In that sense, art does sell and he's setting a great example.

The example he's not setting very well is on the digital download front. While $5 for 36 tracks is a great deal compared to what is common today, it still relies on the old and broken consumer-cost business model for digital downloads. A model which has been torn down time and time again by numerous economists - see articles like The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Toward Free, or the one I wrote, or one several others.

In a slight step backward from the NiggyTardust release, maybe because of disappointment surrounding it's profitability, despite licensing all of Ghosts under Creative Commons, Trent this time not only refuses to provide a free download on his own servers (for the whole album) but has failed to monetize the freeloaders. This is the same mistake he made with the NiggyTardust release all over again. His business model seems to rely on shaming his fans into paying $5; hardly a viable business model.

If I were him, I'd have ran my own torrent tracker and put ads on it. That way he'd make greater than $0 off the freeloaders and wouldn't look like a hypocrite by licensing the album under creative commons but refusing to provide a free download personally.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/16/engadget-knocks-4-billion-of-apple-market-cap-on-bogus-iphone-email/

...while they're at it. Just take a look at their idea of selling music.

Firefox will take up crap-tons of memory and then make my X server soak up the remainder (often hitting over a gigabyte).

The sad part is, whatever they do to make FF 3 better, WebKit's already got them beat..

Obama has been very clear about support for major increases in science and technology:
    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/14/barack-obamas-google-friendly-technology-platform/
But the media hardly mentions it; focusing instead on Hillary's tear.

Okay lets talk about Tech issues then since it would be on topic

Here are two sites take on tech positions for canidates.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/29/the-techcrunch-tech-president-endorsements-barack-obama-and-john-mccain/

http://www.itconsulting.com/features/technology-presidential-vote-candidate-positions-020507/

Not much support for net neutrality legistation on the republicain side.
As the conservative position of "let the market decide" is the general consensus. i'll let you decide wether thats pro or con for techies.

On the plus side making the internet tax free and keeping the fed out of cell phone bills is definately a strong republicain position.

What we can be sure of none of these issues are on the map for the canidates or the mainstream media - unless some brain cells fire
and the "it's the economy, stupid" people realize that tech is a huge driver of the current US ecomony.

So virtually no canidates are talking about these issues and only Ron Paul and McCain have any track record to look at.

I'm from Texas so I don't have much say. We're too late in the game to affect the republican primary and the state will go
republicain in the national election unless something drastic happens ie: Democrats come to Jesus, go pro-gun, pro-life, anti-tax, limited government

At the risk of talking on topic. How about tech issues?

Here are two sites take on tech positions for canidates.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/29/the-techcrunch-tech-president-endorsements-barack-obama-and-john-mccain/

http://www.itconsulting.com/features/technology-presidential-vote-candidate-positions-020507/

Not much support for net neutrality legistation on the republicain side.
As the conservative position of "let the market decide" is the general consensus. i'll let you decide wether thats pro or con for techies.

On the plus side making the internet tax free and keeping the fed out of cell phone bills is definately a strong republicain position.

What we can be sure of none of these issues are on the map for the canidates or the mainstream media - unless some brain cells fire
and the "it's the economy, stupid" people realize that tech is a huge driver of the current US ecomony.

So virtually no canidates are talking about these issues and only Ron Paul and McCain have any track record to look at.

I'm from Texas so I don't have much say. We're too late in the game to affect the republican primary and the state will go
republicain in the national election unless something drastic happens ie: Democrats come to Jesus, go pro-gun, pro-life, anti-tax, limited government

The thing that impressed me the most was when I heard his podcast on Net Neutrality back in mid 2006: http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/

And I thought "Wow, this guy gets it!" I had semi-followed him since the 2004 DNC speech, and in everything I read about him I like him that much more.

There is also an interview with TechCrunch that goes into a lot of details: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/26/qa-with-senator-barack-obama-on-key-technology-issues/
(a shorter summary is here: http://www.techpolicycentral.com/2007/11/barack-obamas-take-on-tech.php)

Also I LOVE the fact that his entire campaign is supported by individual donations (of which I am one of them, and it's also the first time I've ever given money to a politician). He's not beholden to any special interest group once he gets in.

There is a new iteration of delicious in development/testing:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/exclusive-screen-shots-and-feature-overview-of-delicious-20-preview/

Its at delicious.com too:

http://preview.delicious.com/

(that second link doesn't really go anywhere useful unless you have been selected for the preview, I haven't...)

So they haven't changed it *yet*.

With an astonishing 62% premium price of its current stock price, Microsoft sent this proposal to the Yahoo! Board of Directors. Here's the . Actually, part of the premium price is explainable by the recent sunk of Yahoo! stock.

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft's closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use - EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices - this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!'s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft's share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

Microsoft's consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that "now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discus

In the mobile market, Safari is killing the competition by being bundled with the iPhone. When Mozilla 2 comes out, "Mobile Firefox" will compete in the mobile market, too. The competition is tough and getting tougher even in the mobile market where Opera has traditionally done best.

As an insider I can attest to the fact that the online world has been nailed by one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns ever waged in a digital format war. An unnamed company (or three) got together before the recent announcement by Warner Bros in the weeks before CES to orchestrate this domino effect. The game plan was, in a nutshell, that Warner Bros would announce their support for Blu-Ray (even though they will continue to make HD-DVD for some time) and their subsidiaries would follow closely with announcements. Then it was revealed that Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment would reaffirm their commitment to the format. This information was fed into the biggest gadget blogs with the underlying message that the war is over. This was parroted near verbatim by submissions to all of the major technology and social bookmarking sites. Major audio video forums had been primed with posters working for the viral marketing firms employed to pull this off. Overnight every major site on the internet along with mainstream media was singing the Blu-Ray song. To make sure the statistics following CES would confirm the "Blu-Ray has won" story manufacturers were heavily discounting Blu-Ray players. This week, much to no ones surprise, this came true.

So why am I sharing this? I am firmly in the Blu-Ray camp but the techniques employed in this war have been rather unethical. Which blog or news agency will be the first to hunt down the facts in this story to confirm my story?

Don't buy it? Then read this article on TechChrunch which describes the same techniques used to market viral videos.

You need to read some of Jimmy's comments on one of the blogs linked in the summary, especially the one I have copy/pasted below... The most important part is the second paragraph and while I am no Wikipedia fan and certainly agree with your comments that protections need to occur from what I assume you mean by "editors running wild," I think what he says below is very important for this new project!

From here:

January 6th, 2008 at 10:50 pm

Release early, release often.

It's a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We've been telling everyone that constantly. I'm sorry Michael's disappointed, but having said that, we didn't build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What's this? There's nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn't launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn't have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren't even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that's not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

Release early, release often.

It's a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We've been telling everyone that constantly. I'm sorry Michael's disappointed, but having said that, we didn't build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What's this? There's nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn't launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn't have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren't even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that's not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.

Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.

There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.

As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.

Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.

It's probably not a good idea to get totally trashed, strip naked, and broadcast yourself all over the internet?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/29/jim-chomas-career-joins-the-deadpool-maybe/

Better tell that dude.

Obama's entire qualifications are 1) he's not GWB, and 2) he's not Hillary.

Even if you parse some particular meanings of (1) and (2) -- that he's likely to be considerably more thoughtful and effective than the current president, and he doesn't have a 16 years of culture war political baggage which Clinton has -- this doesn't seem like an apt summary to me.

Once you get past those admittedly great points in his favor, all you have left is an utterly conventional politician.

If nothing else, one reason people are already attracted to him is that his politicking is already notably different:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

But there are some indications his positions, say, on a number of technical issues are hardly Washington DC business as usual:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/26/qa-with-senator-barack-obama-on-key-technology-issues/

In what other line of work does principal construction begin before the customer has defined what it is they are ordering?

One place is in art. Especially collaborative art, like plays and movies. For serial TV shows, it is impossible to define it up front. And for improvisational theater, by definition you don't define it.

See the great book Artful Making if you'd like to learn more about that kind of work, and why modern knowledge work is much more like that than the industrial approach you're following.

Changing to a structured approach to working is costly, but the benifits are bountiful [...]

This is plausible in very specific problem domains where people a) know what they want, and b) what they want won't change. But it is fundamentally impossible in domains that are poorly understood or continuously shifting. It is also impossible if your product development process uses user feedback for planning. All three of these characteristics apply to a lot of web startups.

Take Flickr as an example. In under two years, they went from a side project to a $20m sale. (If they had held out until now, they could have been a $100m sale.) Their initial ideas were ok, but not great. But they released early and often, pushing to production every few hours. And then they listened to their users intently, continuously improving Flickr's fit to their audience's need. That relationship is only possible with an agile approach.

And before people jump on me about anecdotes versus data, I'll point at a VC's look back on companies he funded. Two thirds of his winners significantly reinvented their businesses between funding and success. That's not to say you have to use an agile approach for that. But agile methods are much cheaper in changing circumstances than structured ones, so you'll have to have much deeper pockets to survive.

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the chaos of code n' fix here. I'm talking about highly disciplined agile methods, where you include practices like test-driven development, acceptance testing, pair programming, collocated teams, in-room product management, aggressive refactoring, short iterations (like a week), and frequent releases (daily to monthly, no more).

If people would log onto IRC for 5 seconds, this wouldn't be such big news.

If people would log onto IRC for 5 seconds, this wouldn't be such big news.

the only thing that changed was the number! I'm not sure if I should be flattered or mad!

this was interesting, and i think it is accurate: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/04/the-inevitable-march-of-recorded-music-towards-free/

As president, I will strengthen privacy protections for the digital age and will harness the power of technology to hold government and business accountable for violations of personal privacy.

It's noticeable that concerns about organizations which don't respect relevant laws or ignore privacy issues didn't rank highly with you. Technical concerns seem to take top priority, social concerns and legal responsibilities are almost absent from the discussion. And I don't think you're alone in this.

Do you have any concerns about the mismatch between the interests of a state-run educational facility (like a state college) which isn't (ostensibly) a for-profit institution and a commercial for-profit service provider? It wasn't long ago that a search provider thought it okay to 'anonymize' some search data and release search data. The anonymization process meant generating new IDs for the searches, but still allowed anyone who has the data to put together searches (so you had a pretty good idea that the same person made a particular set of searches) and find them based on what they searched for, which is what a couple reporters did.

Who takes responsibility when the private contractor screws up? Is part of the contract that the state is no longer at fault, despite that the deal couldn't have gone through without their approval? Are we just headed to another trip toward legalizing the unethical (like the US seems to be doing with legalizing the warrantless searches)? The harm that can come from releasing sensitive information is not easily repaired. I certainly hope it's not routine for students who see the college nurse to be emailed with their test results indicating they're overweight and at risk for a host of health problems (problems future employers might use against them when they seek a job). To frame these issues in terms of administrative hassle and college cost seems incomplete at best.

But even with technical concerns, what about locking you into software? Microsoft in particular, though this comes from many other proprietors as well, is widely known for using technical schemes to lock people into software that best serves the interests of the proprietor instead of the user. This didn't seem to rank highly in your concerns either, and I don't think that this concern registers with people until it is adversely affecting them (and then only some have the motivation to get out from under that trap; as Eben Moglen said a couple years ago at an FSF talk, it's hard to get people to change their word processor).

Seeing the discussion here and asking a few students in the building where I work about this, makes me think of how much more work there is to do to teach people to identify and value certain freedoms, consider privacy issues, corruption, and learn enough about how things work (in a purely non-technical sense) so that they can see past the glitzy ads promising handy features at low prices.

If you read the actual details, they *were* ordered to by a court when the blogger failed to contest the ruling.
See, e.g., google's response at http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/27/google-voluntarily-provides-details-of-anonymous-blogger-in-israel/

This looks like just a bad translation of israeli news sources, which make it clear this is the first time google has been *ordered* to turn over an ip address of a blogger in israel.

Off the top of my head I'd say Dennis Kucinich wouldn't be afraid of protecting free speech on the internet. That said, I don't see anything on his site about it (but look, there's his wife!). Amongst candidates who are more likely to win the primary, Barack Obama has said he'd protect the internet as an open network that benefits our democracy (albeit in the context of a net neutrality question here).

On the Republican side, as much as I like hearing from Ron Paul, I don't think he would protect the internet, because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to regulate networks, so any such activity would be up to the states. I respect this ... but I wouldn't want it in practice.

Because of my experience following the whole ODF vs Microsoft debate in my home state of Massachusetts, I had suspected that Mitt Romney would have a favorable position on many technology issues, so I went to his site. It took me forever to find the actual issues (you know, those things we're supposed to be voting about?). As a comparison, the second you get to his home page you get treated to a YouTube video about illegal immigration and a nice page about his wife. But when you find the Issue Watch section there's nothing about the internet at all.

Guiliani knows that terrorists are allowed to use the internet, and there are objectionable things there that he doesn't like. So it needs to be controlled by a powerful executive. Who isn't you.

The interviews cover a variety of technology topics. Here is an example of a question asked to Barack Obama: Should the government involve itself in protecting personal privacy online? Since current measures are doing little to solve the problem, what do you think can be done to address the issue?

Barack Obama
John Edwards
Mitt Romney
John McCain

I know how you feel. I also didn't get an offer.

otoh, I'm an older guy and while they would have worked me to the bone, a year or two later I could probably count on the brian reid treatment ;(

thanks but no thanks. the cat is out of the bag and no way I'd want to work for a known discriminator/employer.

...I think that this particular post happens to be particularly insightful. If I was betting money on the reason for him getting fired, it'd be on that.

Advertisers battling to the death?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/ok-heres-at-least-part-of-what-facebook-is-announcing-on-tuesday/

Looks like there's gonna be a Face-On/Face-Off...

So says this article - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/first-opensocial-application-hacked-within-45-minutes/

Seems it's official: MySpace is joining Google OpenSocial . This is a huge boost for OpenSocial API. I'm looking forward to see all the great 3rd party applications from Facebook also on MySpace. Obviously there is a huge incentive for these application providers to embrace the OpenSocial API: Millions of MySpace users are joining in!

No, it's not a tidal wave yet. But the water is drawing back from the shore, and the labels had better recognize that and head for higher ground before wave does hit.

AOL will be saved by World of Warcraft as long as they don't take another 9 years to develop WoW.com http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/aol-finds-an-obvious-use-for-wowcom-world-of-warcraft-social-network/

The internet allows more direct attacks on other candidates possible too, as John McCain, Republican presidential candidate hopeful, discovered. His MySpace page used an image hosted on another person's site. When that person switched the image to one stating McCain had reversed his position on gay marriage, the change was reflected on McCain's page and he was left red-faced. Although people who saw this probably realised it was a prank, it illustrates the ease with which campaign material can be altered with little chance of being caught.

I would say that due to the fact that we're approaching the end of 2007 and Thunderbird still doesn't have integrated calendaring (not in beta, that's a copout), then yes, Thunderbird is in crisis.

Until feature-for-feature Thunderbird can equal or beat Outlook it will never have people flocking to it like Firefox did.

Look at Firefox versus IE 6 - heck, Firefox basically "inspired" IE 7 (tabs, search bar on the top right, extensions, etc. etc.) That's what led to the huge masses adopting it.

The fact that Zimbra has released a cross-platform offline client instead of extending Thunderbird to fit their needs speaks volumes.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/26/zimbra-to-lauch-desktop-application-with-full-offline-functionality/

Facebook Marketplace launched on May 13, while Facebook Platform launched on May 24th. The developer would've have completed two rounds of time travel to show it (for reasons unknown) to Facebook.

Facebook apps have only existed since May 2007. You have a funny definition of "ages."

a quick search for PlaySpan turned up a few links: techcrunch.com and Yahoo Biz

What happens if he uses a browser to access a WebOS like one of these? Doesn't this entire scheme fall apart if the monitoring is anything less than a complete key- and mouse-logger?

yahoo map is the best mapping service according to http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/17/comparing-the -mapping-services/. Google has been copying many ideas from yahoo mapping lately, including the live traffic, memorizable locations, zooming with scroll wheel, and etc.

While I'm not saying I'm "Mr. Backup" I do feel pretty good about my backup procedures over Google's for now. Remeber this little event? Now to be fair they worked hard with people and admitted responsibilty right up front but in the end there was data that they simpy could not recover.

The only advantage here over doing it yourself that I can see is the geographic seperation between yuo and your backups. If your building burns down but all the backup tapes are in the office then you're screwed. Smarter plans include taking the backups offsite but for personal data that's a pain.

If I were to use this at all it would be in conjunction with my own personal backup and storage plan. The google storage would be relegated to the status of safety net. Without bothering to link to any for now I would guess that there are cheaper solutions out there for this scenario.

There was a post on techcrunch about this http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/09/blockbuster-d esperate-to-do-something-buys-a-loser/ The summary: "But Movielink certainly isn't going to be a silver bullet for Blockbuster. We looked at all of the players in Movielink's space last October. Their competitors include, besides Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, CinemaNow and Guba (and, let's be honest, BitTorrent). Movielink has a very deep library of movies, but they are DRM'd to the hilt and the studios force them to price downloads at higher-than-dvd prices. Blockbuster's salad days ended in 2002, and the stock has slid steadily since then. It is no longer profitable. There are just too many options for consumers who want to watch movies at home. The company's biggest asset, and biggest problem, are the long term leases it has on its 9,000 retail stores. It needs to defocus on Netflix and think about how to use those stores to its advantage. Otherwise, its long term prognosis is clear - deadpool."

Where did you get the number 700,000?

Techcrunch thinks it is a hot job by the big three credit agencies. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/17/the-hit-job-o n-lifelock/

They ruined their TV listings this year too:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/03/yahoo-gets-tr ashed-by-users/

If you're really associated with Roughly Drafted then I would like to congratulate you on creating a website that actually makes me wince when someone quotes it. I have never seen a website so full of pro-Apple fanboyism and baseless FUD as yours. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, so I'll wait until I give you any further kudos.

In response to your comment, the key words there are "engineer the impression". They did not. They were fully open about the fact that these bloggers were paid to write what they did, and it was the bloggers themselves who failed to notify their readership that they were advertising on Microsoft's behalf.

I guess you're not used to a company asking bloggers to help instead of suing them, huh.

Pandora, Yahoo music and many others are participating except for CBS-owned Last.fm