Author Archive

Wow, I think I just saw the future of music

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

EDIT: This seems to be a concept only. Click the first link and read the comments.

43 folders talks about Glenn McDonald’s iTunes customisation which allows him to auto-pay artists he listens to. This is a fascinating description of how his system works. Very elaborate, clever and balanced. This could be used as the best payment model around for paying artists for their music.

If this was plugged into the likes of Indy and any artist who submitted had to have a paypal account, then it might be a good way of sending them micropayments. It’d wreck the record labels. I wonder would IRMA survive if this idea became popular ?

Tangent:

EirePreneur suggests Ian’s Blog be added to PoTB, seems it already has been. That’s the community at work !

Indy.TV – From the creator of freenet

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

Ian Clarke Meathman and the founder of Freenet has released Indy a p2p app for listening to and finding independent music artists.

Blurb: Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you’ll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don’t like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same song, Indy guesses that you’d probably like other music that they enjoyed.

Nice application and a great way of giving artists a boost. It’d be nice to read more about it and how it works. as this grows I assume there will need to be a way of automating music submission.

It’s be handy if there was some way of going through your existing music collection and scanning in that to better predict what you like besides having to go through swathes of new music before there is somethng you like. Or else a way of submitting a list of fav bands/genres that the app is already preconfigured for. Would be a good headstart I think. Still, I’m looking forward to the growth of this.

Late to bed and early to rise…

Monday, April 18th, 2005

Social network sites gone extremely local. Social networks built around a single WiFi hotspot.

Fantastic Chris Jordan photography.

The best places in the world to get sick.

Hockey MotherFucker, do you play it ? Jules from PulpFiction does Hockey coaching.

The Marketing Industry’s coming disaster. New media gonna whip theys ass.

Listening to the new album from Rufus Wainwright. A few tracks are touching me. The opening track on the album Want Two is “Agnus Dei” (lamb of god) and really shows off his voice. I’m deffo going to see him live. Vicar street here I come. I swear to uhm er God I’d attend mass every Sunday if the church had someone sing “Lamb of God” like that.

Another track which I think could get put into my top ten is “The Art Teacher”

Rufus Explained the lyrics:
The Art Teacher – “It’s a song about a guy I met at the gym who of course was straight. He’d tell me stories about his female students who were ravenous for him. So I put myself in their shoes to write the song. I played it for him and it went totally over his head

Lyrics to The Art Teacher:


The Art Teacher

There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher.
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then.

He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was,
But never could I tell it was him.
Oh, I wish I could tell him —
Oh, I wish I could have told him.

I looked at the Reubens and Rembrandts
I liked the John Singer Sergeants
He told me he liked Turner
Never have I turned since then
No, never have I turned to any other man.

All this having been said,
I married an executive company head.
All this having been done, a Turner – I own one.
Here I am in this uniform, this pantsuit sort of thing,
Thinking of the art teacher.
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then.
No, never have I loved any other man.

Jape can do it, why can’t the rest ?

Sunday, April 17th, 2005

Jape has a new album out and I really like it. €7.95 for an mp3 copy of the album and I can download it DRM free. Or €14.95 delivered. That’s clever. I got the album from a friend. He loaned it to me. By MP3. I await the battering ram on my door when the Team IRMA World Police come bursting in for being a terrorist funder or something. I’m going to buy the album now because after a few listens I think I want this as part of my collection. I don’t see why I have to buy an album after hearing one preview of it. Same way I’m not going to buy a house my just viewing the kitchen. IRMA seriously would want to cop on and stop blaming just piracy for the drop in worldwide music sales.

From IRMA in 2005:

Massive illegal file-sharing is undermining the livelihoods of everyone in the
creative chain involved in making music, from composers and music publishers
to performers, musicians and record companies. Abuse of copyright on the
Internet has contributed to a €28 million drop in music sales in Ireland
between 2001 and 2004, a decline of 19%.

From IRMA 2003:

‘ The association, which represents the Irish music industry, says
sales in the first half of 2003 are down from the same period last
year, although official figures will not be published for another three
weeks. “It’s almost entirely attributable to piracy, between people
downloading off the Internet and people burning CDs,” said Sean
Murtagh, Irma’s head of anti-piracy. ‘

Get a grip lads.

Woah, was just about to post this and I see Bernie is talking about IRMA on his blog. I’m not cogging you Bernie I swear !

By the way Bernie, how did the EFF discussion go on Saturday ?

Mapping / tagging / Ajaxing

Sunday, April 17th, 2005

EirePreneur adds to the earlier idea of a GPS opensouce map of Ireland which got me to thinking about all the recent Ajax hacks and tweaks of services and APIs. One such example is the Google maps integration into Craigslist which even the Google folks gave kudos to. It won’t be long now before someone does the same with GeoUrl so we can see a Google Map of our area with those little balloon thingies showing local Bloggers and GPS co-ordinates.

I’m only blogging this so I can get in the Tribune

Sunday, April 17th, 2005

Bernie gives a good summary of what the Tribune is saying about IrishBlogs The BoggerSphere idea got a mention and praise was heaped on Slugger O’Toole’s election coverage and rightly so. The energy that’s put into that site is nothing short of fantasitc. Keep reading the Planet of the Blogs feeds as I’ve a feeling a whole new group of journalists are going to be poached from there in the next few months and years. If done right the could be the breeding and training ground of the new wave of journalists. as well as other forms of media and it was great to the most powerful man in media embrace the future.

Hopefully the media in Ireland will catch on too as the Tipping Point is coming. Which Irish paper will be first to embrace this and what can we do to further this ?

Free Audio download of Murdooch’s speech.

Full text of speech

I love this bit: “But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring.

To carry this one step further, some digital natives do even more than blog with text – they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting – and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well.

And with the growing proliferation of broadband, the emphasis online is shifting from text only to text with video. The future is soon upon us in this regard. ”

To catch a thief- An experiment for IrishBlogs

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

Ryan’s posted the pic of the guy that allegedly knicked his wallet. Would be nice if the people that live in the space were to manage to spread the word about this.

Don’t know how legal it is for someone to post a pic of someone online and accuse them of a crime, though the Gardai seem to do it on Crimeline.

Ryan, The other thing I’d have an issue with is slagging off the person in question. While it’s natural for you to take back power by various means when someone has done wrong to you, I didn’t like the bit where you try and humiliate him by alluding to him being a knacker, gay and has a small penis. I don’t like the implication that there is something to feel humiliated about if you’re gay.

Knacker(taking the scumbag definition) = Inferior
Small penis = Inferior
Gay = Inferior

Er, why ?

Napster DRM Hacked by iTunes hackers

Friday, April 15th, 2005

It’s the Internet folks. Hundreds of millions of people can now examine your security “features” and rip them to bits. All that’s needed is one person to find the flaw, post about it online and we’ll all find it and tell others. We’re all connected. How about allowing the people to show that they have a natural bent for being honest besides doing your best to fuck them over ?

So yes, Napster DRM has been hacked.

Google Video Redux, Participatory Culture , GMail

Friday, April 15th, 2005

Jacob has put Google Video under the microscope and come up with some interesting facts such as they may charge you for excess bandwidth and they take a 30% cut on revenue generated, plus they can package ads around your video. Still Google aren’t known for screwing people over and I guess they have to stick in worst-case scenarios in the terms and conditions just in case. be cool if they brought in tagging and made themselves into a video form of Flickr. Might prove very insightful for

Update:[ Scoble points to Vimeo, which is a bit like Flickr for video. ]

It’d be interesting comparing the Google model to the model of Participatory Culture where you create your own videos and choose your own TV. From the site:


DTV
A desktop video player application that brings internet TV to the fullscreen. Subscribe to channels: videos download in the background and the player notifies you when they’re ready to watch.

Broadcast Machine
A video publishing tool built on Blog Torrent. Publish fullscreen video to thousands with virtually no bandwidth cost. Simple, flexible, installs on a website in seconds. Easier than most blogging software. ”

In other Google news, it seems GMail will have a newsreader built into it. About time too. GMail will evolve into way more than email storage I’d wager. It’ll soon be the personal online space of many. Taking more and more power from desktop applications.

Misc linkage:

Checks Google for news and then links it to a world map. Showing where most “buzz” occurs.

Router Density World Map.

3D Fingerprint Maze. Create a 3D virtual maze from a scan of your fingerprint. Sweet.

How to make traffic cameras respect privacy.

Alfred Hitchcock’s movie trailers.

I love search logs

Friday, April 15th, 2005

2005.04.14 22:33:08 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘DENIS’
2005.04.14 22:33:21 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘GER’
2005.04.14 22:35:35 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘AIRLINE’
2005.04.14 22:35:47 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘CABIN CREW’
2005.04.14 22:36:03 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘RYANAIR’
2005.04.14 22:36:18 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘MICHAEL’
2005.04.14 22:36:27 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘MICHEAL’
2005.04.14 22:36:35 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘PAUL’
2005.04.14 22:37:07 213.94.235.9 Search: query for ‘CHRIS’