RIAA says “EFF You iPod rippers!”

EFF the RIAAMan oh man oh man.

Man oh man!

Seriously, could the RIAA make it any easier for us?

Listen fellas, yeah, youze guys with the stogies up in your crystal palace puffin away and chucklin’ to each other about how you’re going to ‘crush’ those ‘infringers’… Yeah, seriously, ya know what, we’re sick of being abused by you. We’re sick of being fed your garbage — of the idea that you think that you control everything and can dictate the rules of my use of your “product” long after I’ve bought and paid for it.

Look, I dunno what planet you guys think you’re on and what legal system is going to end up supporting your stilted worldview, but it doesn’t even matter. Because you’re irrelevant. You’re meaningless. What you’re doing is like a slow train wreck euthanasia; we’re all watching you pen your own demise, over months and months of screwing your best customers. I mean — it’s so painfully clear to us! Why is this not obvious to you?

Oh oh, okay, I know — you’re saying “well, we can afford to be the bad guys and get everyone’s hate-ons directed as us because we’ve got players in bed with us that could smite you without even thinking about it.”

And you know what, while that’s true, you’re still not getting it. Because I’m just one paucitous individual. Get rid of me, two will fall in line to replace me. Take them out, four more. And on and on. That’s what you don’t get. And when you start screwing with people who own iPods, holy crap!, you’re unleashing a wrath far more powerful than the DOJ or your own fatcat legal hegemons: the MySpaceXangaLiveJournalOrkut kids and their parents.

So don’t say we didn’t warn you. Since, yeah, it’ll be our eyes that you’ll be staring up into questioningly as you realize that you’ve taken yourself out.

The Acquisition Economy

It does seem as though Web 2.0 is not really about attempting to go-it-alone and making independent success (as was the apparent trend in Web 1.0) more about greek-alphabet soup acquisitions and buy-outs.

Anyway, I’m not the first to make this point, but it does seem that most end up being picked up in beta.. or alpha. Etc: Measure Map gets acquired by Google in something like the Alpha phase. Delicious was probably in gamma, flickr said beta but was more like delta.

Anyway, now we’ve got an arms race between Google and Yahoo for my soul. Microsoft is trying to catch up, but remains mostly irrelevant.

Kind of makes you wonder: is there room for the independent in The Acquisition Economy 2.0?

…Especially when you can buy just an employee and leave his company behind?

Going raw; a cleanse

Raw FoodSo the resolution coming out of our Raw Food (cookbook) V-day dinner is to go raw… and go on a 10-day “cleanse” (inspired by our outing at Pure Food in New York). Been feeling way too much anger and animosity lately about things I can’t control anyway… so why not?

Also been reading Lance Armstrong’s book and well, it’s always good to push yourself beyond your usual limits.

Y’know, perhaps serenity can come from pulverized cashews and extra virgin olive oil. 10 days to go. No coffee. No wheat. No cheese. And so on. Let’s see how this goes.

And yeah yeah, dang hippies and all that.

Out of Towner V: Scott Kveton redux

Scott KvetonScott’s coming back to town for OSBC and wants to meet up to discuss the work we’ve been doing on creating a new open source foundation as well as a new open-identity/open-auth project that might actually kick start Rhyzomatic and create a vehicle for an independent identity system… (yes yes, there are already a million solutions out there but we’re hoping to figure out an open source approach to get them all to play nice with each other).

So, tonight, February 13 at 8pm; the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. Totally last minute, but if you’re in for some hot and fast brainstorming on these issues — and to welcome our out-of-towner guest — be there!

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Proof that guns don’t kill people, they only maim

The Right to Bear Arms

Apparently our Robot-in-Chief, Cheney, shot his friend while he was hunting yesterday.

No, not hunting his friend. He was hunting quail. Geez.

But he still sprayed Mr Whittington with shotgun pellets in the cheek, neck and chest.

This followed an address by Cheney on the importance of shooting your friends while hunting, which pleased his base of NRA-backed Free Hunters. You’ll recall that he tried to shoot his friend, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, this time last year, but failed to hit him.

Ok, so I just made all that up. Except the part about Cheney shooting the dude. That really did happen. I just wanted to promote a cool tshirt design.

Qumana 3.0 Beta out; state of the blogtoolosphere

Qumana LogoQumana has released the 3.0 beta of their blog editor, touting the following features:

  • a “blog manager” that locally stores your drafts and published posts
  • support for trackbacks and pinging
  • improved editor with valid XHTML, plus ability to view and edit code
  • a way to refresh the editor (‘New Post’) – to clear away published material and start a new post instantly
  • improved image dialogue, including preview and auto upload trigger from Drag & Drop

Looking through their Tour, there’s some remarkable similarities in their workflows to how we’ve solved similar issues in Flock (adding a blog, tagging). This suggests to me that there is some consolidation and consensus emerging in client-side blogging apps. MarsEdit 1.1 similarly added tags late last year and some other niceties.

Some things are still pretty unique to each editor… like Qumana’s Adgenta program or the DropPad feature that enables drag and drop blogging from the desktop (Ecto has something like this as well). Ecto also features email integration with the Mac Address Book to notify your friends of updated posts.

But so besides pimping Qumana’s release (hey, more choice is a good thing!), I also wanted to point out that we’re starting to see at the least the beginnings of some standard features in blogging apps, including a kludge for consistently adding tags to posts. As I use the excellent Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my posts (when composing via the web interface), I’m hoping that tags will soon become something represented in the standard blogging APIs (I know Matt‘s already done some work on this that we’ll be taking advantage of soon). Once that happens, tools like Flock, Performancing, Ecto, MarsEdit, Qumana and so on will be able to offer native tag support and not just append that extra data to the body of the posts.

Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

An Amazon plogWhat the eff is a plog™?! Oh oh, I see….! It’s a trademarked word that you made up that means “reverse blog”! How stupid is that!

Ok, here’s how you explain it:

Your Amazon.com Plog™ is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog™ is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog™ is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog™ will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” — if that’s really the best you could come up with — and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage — should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

I mean, hey, great, I like the idea. In general. But don’t call them “plogs™”. Call them “authors’ blogs” and let me subscribe to them when it’s contextually relevant — i.e. when I’m on one of the author’s book pages! Or call it what it really is: “The Personalized Amazon Feed Reader”. I know that’s not as sexy and doesn’t relate to the “authoring” connotation of “plogging”, but y’know, you’re only one consonant away from offering what might otherwise be considered “™”.