Month: January 2006

iPod Killer on the Loose?

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Tom Foremski over at ZDNet asks if Yahoo Music could become the iPod killer. He digs the way Yahoo Music lets you access a ton of music from all of your computers.

Like Tom, I grew weary of administering my CD collection years ago. I ripped all of my CDs to my music server back in the late nineties. Actually I did it twice. First just the “good songs” when hard drive space actually cost something and later all of the songs once it didn’t. And while my music server works great when I’m at home, it’s certainly true that I can’t (easily) access my music from the road (I can get song files using FolderShare if I really need to, but getting a file or two is not the same thing as having access to my entire library).

Tom likes the way Yahoo Music lets you explore for new music via its recommendation engine. Yeah, that’s pretty cool and all, but here’s a suggestion for Tom: go try Pandora. Fill in just one band you really like and you’ll discover more good new music than you thought existed. I have over 25,000 songs (all paid for; none stolen) on my music server and within 3 minutes of firing up Pandora I was hearing great music from artists I’d never heard of.

Tom also likes Yahoo Music because it’s not the dying on the vine, ad-infested over the air radio. I certainly agree with that. Between Pandora, MusicMatch (my service of choice, which is owned by Yahoo) and XM, I haven’t listened to a second of over the air radio in years.

I’ve never owned an iPod and I’ve never used iTunes. Both seem too proprietary for my open source tastes.

I guess my thing is that you have to do both. If you have an older and/or extensive music collection, the services are simply not going to have all of your music in their online libraries. Plus, I like to load my legally acquired, DRM-free MP3s onto CD-Rs or DVD-Rs to take on the road, and I’m just not willing to capitulate to the DRM extortions of the record label cartel. But I do like to listen to ad free radio and to access at least some music I enjoy on the road. So I have a networked music server at home and a MusicMatch subscription for the road.

That’s my recipe for musical happiness.

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Podzinger – Making Podcasts Searchable

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Podzinger, a new service that may revolutionize the way we search for podcasts of interest, launched this week.

It uses the same voice recognition technology used by the CIA, but instead of finding bad guys, it helps find good podcasts. By turning speech into searchable text, Podzinger will allow users to perform deeper searches and view results by relevance, much the way Google does for web searches. Once you find a promising podcast, you can listen to it from the search results page or subscribe to the RSS feed.

What the big deal?

Here’s the big deal according to the Podzinger FAQ:

Most podcast search sites provide directories of podcasts by subject, category, or they search only the metadata provided by the creator of the podcast. Podzinger takes search a step further by searching the spoken words inside the podcast in order to find more specific and relevant results. The text-based search results include snippets from the audio to help you figure out if the result is relevant. You can even click on the words to listen to the audio from that point.

But what about music?

Note that the blurb above talks about “spoken words.” I will be curious to see how the search AI distinguishes between speech and the vocals in music tracks. If there’s some way to extract the spoken parts between songs, it would pick up artist names, song titles, etc. That would be truly revolutionary.

Podzinger will be ad-supported, so there’s no charge to use to service. I’ve already submitted my RanchoCasts to Podzinger and will report again once they are available via Podzinger.

Here’s some more discussion on Podzinger from:

TechCrunch
Marketing VOX
Harry Chen

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Battlestar Galactica

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I’ve talked about what a phenomenal show this is before. Many times. I’m about to make a bold statement, but one that I now feel certain about.

This is not only the most well written show on TV now- it’s the most well written show on TV ever.

Tonight’s show set a new high for good writing and edge of your seat tension. When Adama and Cain were deciding whether or not to kill each other, I thought I was going to pass out. If you haven’t seen this show, consider yourself lucky because you have a treat in store.

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ScobleFeeds A-Z: The M’s

This is part thirteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this group, so we have our first three-way tie:

Maryamie (RSS Feed)

Manufactured Environments (RSS Feed)

Marc’s Voice (RSS Feed)

Maryamie is Scoble’s better half, and she may even be the better blogger as well. She blogs on a varied range of topics from why you should date geeks to movies (she and I would not be good movie buddies because she didn’t like Million Dollar Baby and can tolerate light hearted comedies) to tech to politics. I like well rounded blogs from genuine people and this is a great example of that. After reading her blog for a few days, I think Scoble might have married over his head about as much as I did.

Manufactured Environments is a blog that has a lot of music stuff and a lot of tech stuff. Those are my two favorite topics, so it’s an easy add to this list.

Marc’s Voice a/k/a Broadband Mechanics is Marc Canter’s blog. He is one of the founders of the move to the edge movement I talk about so often. His blog has good web 2.0 stuff as well as a lot of other interesting topics. If you want one blog to read to keep current on all web developments, this would be it.

Honorable Mention:

Memeorandum (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I read it daily, even though for some reason my posts stopped showing up in the discussion links and that makes me sad)

Micro Persuasion (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it)

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Return of the Gatekeeper?

postedBusiness Week has an interesting, if troubling, article today, wondering if big media such as Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal and The New York Times might decide to fire a shot across Google’s bow and created a closed search database for their content in an effort to preserve their place as gatekeepers. I can imagine why big media might think about doing just that, but here’s why it won’t work.

The whole move to the edge movement is about knocking down these walls and removing the gatekeeper altogether. I don’t think the hordes of developers and users who are embracing this move to the edge would react positively to an attempt to build another wall as the outer wall is being knocked down. I think the end result would be that the content secured behind this new wall would simply lose some of its relevance. The record label cartel has lost a lot of goodwill and probably a lot of customers by suing dead people and grandmothers in a futile attempt to stuff the cat back into the bag. Hopefully someone at these big media companies has been paying attention and will stop this proposed madness before it starts.

Rather than follow the record label cartel off the cliff, these companies should try to swim with the current and figure out another way to protect their business model via partnerships and licensing deals.

Hurting Google is not a sound business strategy if it hurts them too. And it will. If they try to swim upstream, they will drown in a sea of bad karma and blog rants.

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The Sad Tragic Death of Norton Utilities

Get out your crying towels, because I’m going to tell you a sad story.

Way back in the days of DOS there was this great suite of programs created by a genius named Peter Norton. They were called Norton Utilities. These programs helped maintain your computer by diagnosing and fixing problems and defragmenting the hard drive. The suite also included a disk editor, which I used all the time. In sum, most computer experts used Norton Utilities all the time back in the day.

nortonad-747951

In 1990 Norton sold his products, including Norton Utilities, to Symantec. Symantec kept the Norton brand and issued new versions of Norton Utilities and released new programs under the well respected Norton name, including Norton Antivirus. I used Norton Utilities up until Windows XP and still use Norton Antivirus. But that’s about to change, for three reasons.

Reason Number One: Conflicts and Resource Hogging

Symantec continues to load too many features into both Norton Utilities and Norton Antivirus that I don’t need and that I don’t want. Both programs have been notorious for years for creating conflicts with other programs and for causing startup and shutdown problems. All of that is irritating, but, given my historical loyalty to the Norton brand, I have thus far overlooked these problems. In the newest version of Norton Antivirus, however, Symantec has added the incredibly annoying Norton Protection Center. This bloatware takes up system tray space and generally seems to be yet another unnecessary resource hog. I don’t want this program, and if I’d known about it before I installed the new version, I would have taken the box back and found another antivirus program. After spending 10 minutes on the net trying unsuccessfully to find out how to remove or disable Norton Protection Center, I gave up and uninstalled Norton Antivirus completely. Simple is better, and with this unwelcome addition, Symantec has finally waddled across the bloatware line.

Reason Number Two: Shameless Upselling

Not only is the Norton Protection Center a blight on my computer in and of itself, it also seems to be nothing more than a thinly disguised ad for other Symantec products. C|Net had this to say about the Norton Protection Center:

[W]ith this year’s debut of the Norton Protection Center, Norton AntiVirus 2006 has lost that uncluttered usability. The Norton Protection Center appears both as a separate icon in the system tray as well as a separate window within the software’s control console. Most of the Protection Center’s functions are useful, such as the alerts it sends if you don’t have the latest virus definitions or haven’t run a system scan in a while and the bar graph in the Status window. However the Protection Center is focused on upselling Symantec’s other products to you rather than providing any new, useful security information. For instance, if you ask to learn more about data recovery, you’re taken directly to the Norton SystemWorks 2006 product page on Symantec’s Web site.

Reason Number Three: Rootkit, Round 2

eWeek reported yesterday that, on the heels of the Sony rootkit fiasco, Symantec has admitted using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. Symantec, of all people, should know better than this.

It took 15 years, but Symantec has managed to ruin what was once a great set of utilities. I am in the market for a new antivirus program and would love some suggestions in the Comments.

If you want to see more neat old ads like the one above, check out this page.

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Why Google Has to Win the Technorati Race

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Lots of talk at TechCrunch, Squash, and The Blog Herald today about the possibility of Yahoo buying Technorati, as I suggested weeks ago and predicted here last month.

If Yahoo combines Technorati with Flickr and Delicious, it will have a commanding and perhaps insurmountable lead in the Web 2.0 race. Which I why I believe you can’t count Google out of this race. If Google buys Technorati, it’s still a two horse race. If I know that, Google knows that.

Look for Google to be the winner in the Technorati race. Why? Because it has no choice.

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Flickr: Photo Books and Prints

I couldn’t post this before Christmas, because it was one of Raina’s presents, but I ordered one of the photo books Flickr sells in partnership with Qoop, and it looks great. Here’s how easy it is to do.

First I made a new set of my Flickr photos and included all the photos I uploaded in 2005. Then I reordered them from oldest to newest so they’d be in chronological order. Then I clicked on the set to get to my Flickr page for that set and selected “Make Stuff” in the menu bar. That took me to the Qoop page where I selected an 8×10, 2 photos to a page, two sided, glossy photo album. I refreshed the cover page selection until I got a mix I liked and titled the book “Newsome Family Photos 2005.” I bought 2 115 page, professionally bound photo books for a hair over $100 each. I gave one to Raina and one to my sister. These books are reasonably priced and look great. I can’t recommend them highly enough. I can’t believe you can actually buy something like this- and for only $100!

Yesterday I decided to print some photos of Luke to send to people back home. I selected the photos I wanted to print via the “Order Prints” link on the menu bar of the photo page, and went to checkout, where I was again amazed by Flickr. I paid 20 cents a piece for the prints, and was given the option of having the prints mailed or picking them up at my neighborhood Target store in one hour- that’s right, in one hour. I decided to pick them up, which was easy and fast. And the prints look great. Plus, you must get a number of prints free, since I ordered 10 and my total price was $0.

Flickr continues to amaze me. What a great site and what great service.

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