DRM Protection Racket: PC World has the run down on what the new DRM-infestation free iTunes means for you. It doesn’t mean squat to me, because I buy my music via Amazon, who will almost certainly take this opportunity to raise its prices too.
Deacon Blues Department: I pull for Yahoo, I really do- as a Wake Forest college sports fan I am well conditioned to pull for the underdog. But much of the time I think the train has left the station while Yahoo was looking for its ticket. Yahoo has launched a new version of its music site. Candidly, I didn’t know it had a music site. I took a quick look at the new Yahoo Music design tonight and, well, I don’t see anything all that great about it. A DBT search resulted in a lot of links to buy music via Rhapsody- and that simply ain’t going to happen. There were a couple of music videos at the top, and then a link to more on YouTube, including this version of the most rocking Women Without Whiskey.
Of course, if I wanted to see DBT videos, I’d go straight to YouTube (like I had to do to get the embed code for that video). Supposedly, you can play songs courtesy of Rhapsody via a box on the right hand side, but I couldn’t get it to work on the DBT page. I was able to play some Elliott Smith songs from the Elliott Smith page, but many of the songs were only 30 second clips. I have much less than no interest in playing 30 second clips. And even then, the media player indicates that you can only play 25 songs, presumably a month. In sum, I guess this is an improvement over whatever was there before, but I’m not seeing anything that will keep me coming back for more (or less). Read/WriteWeb seems to agree. AppScout, on the other hand, says at least the Yahoo Music pages suck less than many band pages.
Round 2: Google responded to the vague chest beating by the AP yesterday, basically saying that Google complies with the Fair Use Doctrine and reminding all the angry newspapers that Google will remove their snippets from Google’s database upon request. If I were Google, I’d take any paper that even thinks about complaining out of the database and then make it pay to get back in. But that’s just me.
LSD and Unix Department: Here are 20 amazing coincidences. Reminds me of a quote I read once: “There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.”
Disclaiming Molasses: I’ve been wondering whether the glacier-like speed we’ve been suffering through at Twitter is caused by Amazon’s S3 web service, the site that hosts some Twitter data. No, says Amazon in a preemptive PR strike.
On the Road with Biff and Muffy: BMW has a car that, like a Model B-9, Class M-3 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot, can sense danger. I wonder if it can sense the yuppies that drive around in it looking for a Starbucks?
Call Me Omega Man: Am I the only person on the planet who doesn’t know or care what Boxee is? I deeply hope that no one ever inadvertently explains it to me. Because I really, really don’t care.
Newsome.Org 