Value destroyed

Fortune.com:

Harder to fathom is the MSN TV 2 Player's inability to play music that has been downloaded through a PC from MSN's own Music Store. The Player had no problem with PC-created MP3 files and tunes ripped into the Windows Media Audio format from CDs but choked on music bought from MSN itself. An MSN representative said the incompatibility arises from the digital rights management (DRM) copy-protection system employed by the MSN Music Store to fend off pirates.

For the Fallen

For Remembrance Day, I have a special audioblog. This is Laurence Binyon, reading For The Fallen from the British Library's splendid collection The Spoken Word – Poets

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

BBC MP3s

Tom, our man on the inside at the Beeb:

There's this show on Radio 4 called In Our Time that's concerned with the history of ideas. Each week Melvyn Bragg brings together three guests (serious guests at the top of their fields) and they have a discussion around the major themes. It's kind of awesome if you're interested in science or history... Starting from shortly after last week's episode, now you can download and listen to the whole programme in non-DRM'd, easy to understand, iPod (and other media player) -compatible MP3 format!

Finally my campaign is bearing fruit. Get that In Our Time Electricity episode now.

Counting blogged votes

Having talked about vote links for well over a year now, it was about time someone started counting them, especially with tomorrow being election day in the US, and it might as well be me.
Presenting the Technorati Blogger Vote Count.
Instructions on how to add votes to your blog are there. Note that you can vote for or against each candidate individually.

What's wrong with this picture?

David Weinberger says:

When your wifi card doesn't work under XP, after spending three hours futzing with drivers, I suggest you try this:
Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services. Look for Wireless Zero Configuration. Click on it. If it's stopped, start it. If there's no start or stop button, double click on it and change "Startup type" to "Automatic."
Or you could get a Mac which, because it is a closed environment, tends to be easier to live with.

No David, the Mac is easier to live with because it's designers don't assume they control (or should control) all networking. Stuart, who invented Zero Configuration Networking, would say on seeing that Configuration dialog:

Which part of "zero configuration" did they not understand?

Audio recording

Dave says::

This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

Dave, you should have asked, instead of searching. Here's some free code to record audio using QuickTime from any Windows device. The code dates back to 1992, and was working on Windows in 1997.
This is what AOL use to do the Audio/Video chat in the latest AIM releases (that iteroperates with iChat).

Value destroyed is not owned

Tim Oren writes on DRM as a warning sign:

Copy protection DRM always destroys end user value, in both convenience and robustness. When you see DRM in a business plan or analysis, it is always there to benefit someone other than the end user. Find out who, it will indicate where power lies in a content value chain.

The mere presence of DRM indicates a failure to deliver end user value. If the information object were to lose value when extracted from the bundle or service from it was derived, DRM would not be felt necessary. Therefore the presence of DRM suggests a vendor that is behind the curve, failing to find a new value to deliver as their chokepoint disappears in the digital world.

Tim is correct that DRM destroys value, but he is mistaken in his implication that it can just be Customer value that is destroyed. The 0th law of economics is that a trade only happens when both parties see themselves as gaining from it. If the Customers see less value, they pay less for the product, and its value is thereby reduced. This kind of short-sightedness is foolish enough with conventional goods, but is especially stupid with digital media, when you have no measurable marginal cost of goods and can carry over Customers' excitement into other goods.

How about mass video editing?

Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took something like the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which bits of action people as a whole found interesting.

Losing language sales

This weekend we attended the Home School Geography Club, which was about Viet Nam, and enjoyed it immensely. Our friends the Hamiltons hosted it and, among many other fascinating things, taught us as few words in Vietnamese, and fed us Phô .
However when writing out the Vietnamese sheets, Bich was adding the accents by hand on the printout. It turns out that the Vietnamese keyboard inclued with OS X is far too hidden for anyone but experts to find(System Preferences, International, Input Menu Tab, and check the ones you want in a scrolling list).

This reminded me of an idea I had for an Apple ad campaign to highlight OS X's language support.

What I suggest is a poster campaign, showing a localised Mac screen running Mail with large type saying

Macintosh speaks your languages

Except that you do it as a teaser.

Start with the least common (in the US) languages Apple localises to, eg Korean, and work your way up the demographic to English, changing posters once a week or more often

매킨토시는 너의 언어를 말한다
マッキントッシュは言語を話す
Macintosh говорит ваши языки
Macintosh fala suas línguas
Macintosh spricht Ihre Sprachen
Macintosh parle vos langages
Macintosh habla sus lenguajes
Macintosh speaks your languages

Each time you change a poster and add a language, you switch the outer UI (menus etc) to that language. You deliberately place the posters in non-ethnic areas, so they are cryptic to most.
(Obviously, you get native speakers to translate the slogan instead of using Sherlock like I did).

47 million Americans speak a non-English language, according to the 2000 Census. 26 million also speak English well, 21 million are less proficient. Millions more learn a foreign language in school.

Imagine the media buzz these cryptic posters would generate, and the feeling of pride the bilingual people would have when they see an ad in their language, out in public.
In other countries, you do the same thing with a different language order.

Heckling the debate in irc

Dave Winer put up an mp3 of the debate; David Weinberger organised an irc chat to heckle it.
I combined the two:

You can call this audioblogging with comments or maybe it is something else.Note that if you open it in QuickTime Player, you can search the text for keywords like 'flu' or 'bin Laden'.

Direct link: http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

Hackaton at Technorati next Wednesday

As we'll have a huge concentration of web geeks just up the road at Web 2.0 next week, we decided to have a hackathon at Technorati on Wednesday night.

Bring your laptops and brains, and hack on our API and other web code.

RSVP promptly

Getting semantic with Tantek

Tomorrow night, Tantek and I are talking at SDForum about Semantic XHTML:

Can your website be your API? - Using semantic XHTML to make your structures clear

XML formats gained popularity as a backlash against the messiness of HTML mixing structure and presentation, and leniency for sloppy markup. With XHTML+CSS now widely supported in mainstream browsers, and gaining converts even amongst those most focused on representation, these objections lose their force, and the resistance to more and more ad-hoc specialized schemas grows. How far can we get specifying structure in pure XHTML -valid XML - styling it with CSS for presentation, and making it parsable for meaning?

4 million served

Technorati just passed the 4 million blogs indexed point. We get about the same number of posts a week.

Sharks in a tank

We went to Monterey Bay Aquarium on Sunday and saw the baby Great White shark they have in the tank there - video below:

They say this is the only Great White to eat in captivity, and that the longest any lasted previously was 16 days. How annoying for the Bond villains with the shark tanks to have to restock every couple of weeks, and then to have the sharks refuse to eat when they drop victims in.

The tip if you go to see it is to go in the Members' entrance (membership is a good deal if you go even twice a year) and go straight to the 'Endangered Wildlife' section, which leads to the bottom of the Outer Bay tank, where the shark spends its time. If you go upstairs to the auditorium seating part of the Outer Bay tank upstairs you are very unlikely to see the shark clearly past the crowds.

Audio misunderstandings

IEEE Spectrum has an article on audio compression that manages to combine some useful info with sloppy misconceptions and questionable assertions. I annotated it to point these out. Do join me in correcting it for them.