David Emery OnlineIkea Robotics
Adam Lassy has made a video that neatly sums up exactly the future Russell has been talking about. And it's as amazing and terrifying as he predicts. IMAGINE! A table that "expects feedback"
I love “the future is now” tech like this:
Visit ➔Readability’s new service
Today, they launched an entirely new Readability service: you pay a small fee each month, and they give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by using the Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways). It’s a great way for readers to support web publishers, big and small, directly and automatically.
A really interesting concept; I can never see it supporting a proper business model for publishers, but it’s better than nothing.
Visit ➔MTA.me
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.
Lovely stuff, and a great example of what you can do these days without using Flash. I’d love a London Underground version as a screensaver…
Visit ➔How much more participation can you handle?
Suddenly digital is *everything* and everyone believes that social media has the power to turn boring crap into gold. Every product and every single brand wants to 'engage' users in a massive participatory experience. Especially if they're utterly dull. Obviously, you've got a Facebook page by now so you can 'be part of the conversation', but by now you've discovered there's very little to say if you're a brand people don't care much about or a product you put on food to make it taste better, or something clean your home with, or scoop up poop.
Facebook pages are the new microsites.
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Uni' Lever Downloads
Sony and Universal’s announcement last week that new music will be released to the public as soon as its played on the radio has really put the cat among the pigeons.
Have they thought this one through?
Very interesting article by Steve Lamacq about this whole “put singles on sale digitally at the same time as you go to radio” issue. Interestingly this is the way the US market has worked for a while now, although radio works quite differently over there.
My take: I think it would be great if we move to this model, as if you hear something on the radio it’s a little silly you can’t buy it but probably can download it for free; however, I’m not sure if it will necessarily get wholly embraced by the industry.
Visit ➔Soundcloud and How Major Labels are Spoiling Things…Again
Towards the end of December I started receiving emails telling me that Soundcloud had taken down certain tracks at the request of the rights holder. Ever since they started, the emails have been trickling through a few every week or so. Three days ago I had twenty-two in one go. All of these tracks have been deleted from my account.
Now, my beef is not so much with the legality and official policy of Soundcloud, rather it is with the principle and backward nature of the major labels attempting to regain control in somewhat tyrannical and damaging ways (to Soundcloud and their own artists).
This is a complicated issue (and I’m writing from the position of someone who has asked SoundCloud to take down tracks before). I think the ideal would be the setup mentioned at the end of the article; YouTube style attribution to the label if you upload a track you don’t hold the copyright on.
However this would be very complicated the was SoundCloud is set up at the moment, as – to my knowledge – they don’t have any revenue sharing deals with labels at this time, which is what the YouTube setup hinges on. I guess the key thing to remember is that – just like a download – a streaming track has a value. Sure, it might be a lot smaller then the 79p you pay for a track download but it still exists nevertheless – it’s just that the consumer doesn’t pay it, the hosting site or service (think: YouTube, Spotify, MySpace et al) does.
Don’t get me wrong – I think there’s definitely a promotional benefit for embeding songs but it needs to be coming from a source sanctioned by the label or artist; sometimes that might be a SoundCloud player, sometimes that might be a player direct from the artist or label site (which is what we do) and sometimes that might just be a YouTube embed.
Just like uploading any MP3 you like to your blog isn’t cool, neither is uploading someone else’s track to somewhere like SoundCloud.
Visit ➔Clarity
Following the unsurprising outbreak of confusion and disappointment that this falsehood caused, the W3C have now backtracked. HTML5 means HTML5. The updated FAQ makes it very clear that CSS3 is not part of HTML5.
An update to this post. Probably for the best I guess, but there’s no doubt that HTML5 will continue to be used to refer to modern CSS and JS as well as HTML.
Visit ➔Listening Room
Listening Room is a website for listening to music with your friends. Anyone in a room can play mp3s from their computer, and everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
So simple, but really nifty.
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