New fees for webcasting at Live365
I've been waiting today for Live365 to announce its new Royalty Administration Fee for personal broadcasters like tranquileye.radio.
June 2002
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June 28, 2002
WFMU streams in danger
One of my favorite webcasters is WFMU in Jersey City, NJ. Thanks to new record industry royalties, WFMU will probably have to stop streaming and may go off the air altogether. Writes station manager Ken Freedman: "The record industry's contention that it is only trying to receive fair compensation for their music is hard to believe, given that so many webcasters will simply go out of business. The record industry cannot collect fees from companies who cease to exist. How much will the RIAA collect now from Yahoo?"
During a July 26th phone-in show, Freedman also suggested that Broadcast.com negotiated fees with the RIAA with the objective of setting them so high that it would drive other webcasters out of business. Since that fee structure is the basis for the current royalty, the big players seem to have reached their objectives.
June 26, 2002
New Canadian Netcasting Fees
Last week I saw a posting on Metafilter (which I now cannot find) warning of the proposed royalty for Internet broadcasting in Canada; the proposed tariff can be found at the Copyright Board site. For non-commercial broadcasters ("telecommunications services that do not earn revenue from advertisements") the proposed rate is CDN$0.25 per subscriber per month. I'm a bit fuzzy on what constitutes a subscriber; the proposal defines it as "a person who accesses or is contractually entitled to access the service or content provided by the telecommunication service in a given month." Sounds like anyone who listens to a stream, whether for one minute of one week, counts as a subscriber.
My first reaction to this was that it didn't seem like much of a deal. Canadian Internet streamers have had a free ride up to this point, with US webcasters already paying similar fees. However, when I did the math I was a bit alarmed. My Live365 station, tranquileye.radio, had 530 streams launched at Live365.com. Assuming each of these was a unique "subscriber," I would have to pay CDN$132.50 to SOCAN. Yikes.
I can't help but think that if these sorts of fee structures had been in place during the birth of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, radio might not have survived.
June 23, 2002
American radio listeners are listening less
"They make their money, they pay the bank, everybody is happy... And music is very low on the totem pole." American radio listeners are listening less. In 1993, they spent an average of 23 hours per week with the radio on; last year, it was down to 20 1/2 hours, according to Arbitron numbers.
SomaFM is dead
SomaFM is dead, killed by the new American webcasting royalty fee structure: "SomaFM will have to pay about $500 a day in fees to the RIAA. Just to expose you to new music that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. Just to help you buy more records. Do they just not get it, or is the RIAA just greedy?"
We'll see what impact the proposed regs have on streaming coming out of the US, but my guess is that just about everything non-commercial will be dead by September. The Library of Congress and the RIAA should be ashamed of themselves.
June 21, 2002
Get up
Of course on my day off, I have to get up at 7:30. Umph.
June 17, 2002
The new Ghetto
I don't think of what Israel is building on the West Bank of the Jordan to be the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of China. Rather, Israel has, in part, internalized the experience of the Ghetto and is now imposing it on the Palestinians. Look at a map of the Territories and tell me otherwise.
June 16, 2002
World Cup Blog
World Cup Blog: All World Cup. All the time. All blog.
June 13, 2002
The Minstrel Show
An excellent thread at Metafilter on the beginning of American popular culture: the Minstrel Show.
June 12, 2002
Kaiju Big Battel
Damn it, I missed Kaiju Big Battel as well.
Did This Man Just Rewrite Science?
Extreme Computing 2002
Look what I missed: The NTK/Mute Festival of Inappropriate Technology. "[A] a gigantic village fete for the 21st century, an off-the-radar cyber jumble-sale, an all-day celebration of do-it-yourself technological unusualness... From home-made robots to retro video games, from Jolt Cola to commemorative web-browser tea-towels - if it's outside the mainstream, you can come along and check it out and most likely buy a piece of it to take home."
June 10, 2002
Hitchens: "Against Rationalization"
"[T]he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon." Christopher Hitchens: "Against Rationalization."
Warblog vs. tech blogs?
In a New York Times article David F. Gallagher describes "A Rift Among Bloggers". Gallagher has his own weblog at lightningfield.com and more about the article in his 6.10.2002 entry.
"Blog" is, in its essence, little more than a format -- chronological content -- that has been around in one form or another since the beginnings of the Web. Certainly the emphasis on the weblog as the anchor for a site is reasonably new, though not, of course, on news sites.
There is room for many, many different sorts of blogs. From 20,000 feet one may well see warblogs and tech blogs, but I have always found the diversity broader and more interesting than that.
And what about the (mostly teenage) everything/nothing blogs? Between Blogger and LiveJournal there must be close to a million blogs now.
Yahoo! loses it, Part 2
There is a new Yahoo! home page beta available for viewing. My initial impression: information overload.
June 9, 2002
I would like to make to make...
I would like to make the page look nicer; I just don't want to have to take a vacation to do it.
Park reading
Whistling "Brandy" and sitting in the park, really a too nice day for World Cup games online. Read the first bit of Katie Hafner's The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community and the Times book review. I promise to pick up Wolfram's A New Kind of Science at some point, though from reading the review I'm not sure what I will find.
Lewis knocks out Tyson
Lewis knocks out Tyson: "The ultimate dismantling of Mike Tyson was satisfying in only the way watching a man get what is coming to him can be."
June 8, 2002
Test Sizing
Finally: The Noodle Incident has screenshots comparing various font sizing methods (percentage, pixel, point, and so on) on numerious browsers and platforms.
June 7, 2002
Blogroots and We Blog
Blogroots is a new weblog established by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan to compliment their book We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. They write: "Since the weblog phenomena is rooted in both technical advancements and social changes, "We Blog" examines blogging through both lenses."
Yahoo Loses It
I like Yahoo. I always have. So the fact that I'm bailing on them and vowing to never, ever pay for any service from them might tell you something.
I think it was Cameron Berrett who wrote some months ago that Yahoo, that classic search portal, is little-by-little losing it. My problems with them started when my silly little Geocities site disappeared with no explanation. Had they not liked my little SSI hack? The banned Scientology literature? The vibrating maple leaf? I wrote them several times, suggesting that I would fall into line with their strange policies, but I never heard back.
I thought, maybe, Geocities wanted me to pay to break the rules. I signed up for Geocities Plus and happily uploaded a whole new site, filled with goodness. And then it disappeared again, except this time I was paying for a blank Web site. I wrote and wrote and wrote them, and like a naive but hopeful lover I thought maybe someone at Yahoo would notice what was going on and fix it.
To my horror I discovered that there was no actual Yahoo to call, toll-free or otherwise. So I sent one last, sad email, telling Yahoo Billing that unless I heard from someone, I was canceling everything, including the email forwarding service. Silence. And today I cancelled.
June 6, 2002
Truth and reconciliation
"The role of victim is seductive, and not just because it explains otherwise inexplicable missteps and failures. In the heady, angry heyday of the recovered-memory movement, it offered the opportunity to "start over" in life with a whole new identity and system of relationships." Julia Gracen on the recovered-memory craze and the attempts of one of its leaders to reconcile with her family.
OJ murder-site tour
"It's said that Los Angeles is a city with no past and no memory. Or a very short one: OJ Simpson's 1995 "Trial of the Century" (when he was acquitted of murdering his estranged wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman) has now been almost forgotten, as anyone attempting a murder-site tour around the Brentwood neighborhood soon realizes. OJ's house has been razed, and the new one has changed address (380 Rockingham Boulevard, not 360); the Mezzaluna Restaurant where Nicole was last seen is now Pete's Coffee Shop (11750 San Vincente Boulevard); and the apartment building where her throat was slit (875 South Bundy Drive) is now 879." From COLORS 49: Tours.
protect digital-television
Reuters: "Movie studios and consumer-electronics companies are close to reaching an agreement that would protect digital-television broadcasts from being copied and traded Napster-style over the Internet, negotiators said on Monday." Sure they are.
Building the semantic web?
A few months ago i tried Radio Userland and became obsessed with the idea of using it to notify a number of aggregation sites and services -- including Radio, Blogger, Weblogs.com, including Blo.gs. It didn't work, although I am sure code to perform the function could be written easily enough in PHP or Perl. But now I see the idea popping up in other ways with the concept of a weblog's neighborhood.
By their nature weblogs have always created networks: at least knowledge networks of ideas and social networks of people who know each other, or at least each other's work. (Perhaps they are the same thing, but that's another idea to come back to later.) Up until the past few months the substance of these networks wasn't being captured, but something happened recently and now there is a huge interest in it.
As I once wrote, the World Wide Web is wonderful, but it isn't really full hypertext. If someone is linking to you, you won't know about it without checking your log files, and certainly a visitor to your site isn't aware of the link. You also have no easy way of knowing the context of the link to you; who is making the link, and who are they connected to?
One way to think of this: a knowledge object exists in a context and we can get some idea of where did it came from, who cares about it, and what do other people think of it. It goes back to Barthe's notion of a piece of writing extending out beyond the boundaries of the page.
So here are the approaches:
Backlinks: I'm using Sean Nolan's Link Feedback script on tranquileye right now, mostly because it was the easiest to set up. Writes Sean:
I thought it'd be fun to do an experiment. I put together a very simple set of links that you can insert into your pages to automatically track incoming links and echo them back to people who visit your site. Basically it's automated link-exchanging, but hopefully with more interesting results.
Blogrolling is as old as the Web itself: a prominent list of other blogs that one reads on a regular basis. My various "Further" boxes are all blogrolls. Tools for tracking blogrolling include PHPblogroll and Blogrolling.com: a master database of various blogrolls.
Meta linking places a chunk of knowledge you've created into context with other weblog entries. In the case of Meta Linker every time you put a link on your blog Meta Linker adds a link to the page on blogdex that lists other people who have mentioned that link.
Syndication: RSS is another gizmo that's been around for awhile, now used in a difference context. Radio Userland has taken a lead here, putting an emphasis in the software on sharing items from other RSS-enabled sites.
Oh! Now we need hackers.
What happens when the only person who knows the password for an important database dies? It's happened at Norway's National Centre of Language and Culture with a technicial who managed some of the centre's most important historical documents. The centre's director has sent out an appeal for hackers to crack the database.
Which raises an interesting point: If you lost the key to your house, and needed access, you'd call a locksmith, not a burgler, right? Aren't hackers bad?
June 5, 2002
Desire for self-organization
Yikes! I was supposed to stay offline today, what with my maddening sinus, but I started poking around in blogspace and was a bit surprised at what I saw. Yeah, I've been too busy the past few months to really realize what was going on, so it's a shock to see so much desire for self-organization.
I chalk it up in part to Stephen Johnson's excellent book Emergence, in which was stated that the Web alone doesn't show any self-organizing behavior because it's missing feedback: all the links are one-way.
Triumph the Insult Dog
I finally allowed D to share in what was my favorite goofy netfile moment: Triumph the Insult Dog visiting the Star Wars line in New York. These people are not actors -- they are actual people waiting to see a movie.
Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails
Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails: "dedicated to the Gin Fizz, the Widow's Kiss, and the Singapore Sling, the drinks our mothers and grandmothers drank, and the drinks we strive to save from extinction as a small measure of remembering those great women and their great cocktail parties."
June 4, 2002
A Simple Character Entity Chart
Adrian Roselli: A Simple Character Entity Chart. Both entity names and entity numbers are listed, along with the representation of the character (so you can test for compatibility by loading this page in your browser).
When 300 baud was the bomb
N.Z. Bear writes about BBS culture, the pre-Web cyberspace: "Back in the day, there were boards. Bulletin Board Systems. BBS's. No Net, no Web, no cyberspace, nothing. Just boards, and their ugly stepchildren, D-Dials. All strung together with phone lines, hand-rolled software, and 8-bit computers. No backbone, no hubs, no routers, no DNS tables. Just one computer picking up the phone, calling another, and having a little chat."
June 3, 2002
Wikiblog
I spent many hours this weekend trying out server-side apps that combine the functionalities of blogs and Wiki. In my cursory study of wikiblogs, I found only three that seemed mature enough to allow one to focus on communication as opposed to coding: Vanilla, PikiePikie, and Erik Benson's Salieri. Each is impressive and, at the same time, frustrating.
First off, there doesn't seem to be any way to get the source for Salieri. I've written Erik about this a couple of times, but he's busy writing and I haven't heard back.
The other two platforms, Vanilla and PikiePikie, are written in Rebol and Python respectively, languages that I am not familiar with. I've been able to get them both running, but it was non-trivial and certainly too much for the turnkey Blogger crowd.
They both have an unfinished feel to them, mostly because of the lack of clear documentation. Installation is actually quite straight-forward, but one with Pikie, for example, one has to try to determine why the config file suggests a directory structure different from the instructions.
My feeling is still that Wiki could and should be quite popular as an extension of current blog platforms. From what I can see, adding wiki capabilities to the main blog platforms (Blogger, Movable Type, Radio Userland, etc.) would be fairly straightforward.
Satellite Radio
One of the running jokes between Caro and I concerns the Canadian radio industry's endless promotion of "digital radio," a technology that they have promoted as being "five years away" for the past fifteen. Now a real digital radio is coming not from the mainstream of the radio business, but from car manufacturers and home satellite providers. Heather Newman of the Detroit Free Press has an excellent review of the two main providers, Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Radio. Neither available in Canada at this point, and requiring receivers that go in your car, not on your hip.
blogrollfinder.py
Mark Pilgrim at dive into mark writes: "So I wrote this Python script (blogrollfinder.py, currently a mess) that takes a URL of a weblog and returns the weblog's blogroll, by analyzing the HTML source and extracting lists of links separated only by HTML tags and whitespace. Then I got all funky and recursive and made the script compile a meta-blogroll of all the blogrolls of the sites on my blogroll, and then a meta-meta-blogroll of all of those sites' blogrolls. And then it tallied up all the sites and sorted them by total number of links and compared it to my original blogroll and spit out a list of people whom my community is reading that I'm not."
I can't get it to work (yet) but soon.
