David Emery OnlineGoogle Chrome, Google’s Browser Project
Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
I don’t see anything here that excites me in any way – I have no faith that Google can design a better application UI then Apple can (in Safari), and I don’t see what new features this brings to the table. Also, I hope no one with a Mac gets too interested in this – Google have yet to ship a Mac app with a decent interface.
However, anything that broadens the usage of WebKit has got to be a good thing – I dream for the day when most people are using it…
Visit ➔25 x 5
Last weekend saw the annual trek down the M4 to that ode to concrete that is Reading. The festival – as ever – was brilliant; the weather held out and the music was wonderful. I treat Reading a little different to most people, I think – there are just too many bands to pursue the “normal” festival experience (i.e. drinking copious amounts of bear, mainly). I have a schedule, and I stick to it.
It’s fun, honest.
To that end this year I saw a whopping 25 bands, which I think is pretty good going. Now, I’m not going to bore you with 25 full on reviews of all those bands – I don’t think you want to read that and I certainly don’t want to write it. Instead, I’m going to do 5 word reviews of each – I think you’ll get the idea a lot quicker that way.
So, here’s my Reading Festival 2008 in 125 words:
Pete And The Pirates
Practically perfect pop home coming.
Blood Red Shoes
Great noisy boy – girl indie.
These New Puritans
Sparkly dancy prog. Yes, prog.
Dizzee Rascal
Really got the crowd going.
Read more ➔Interfacing With Habari
This looks so much better then pretty much any other blog engine interface I’ve seen – I still need to be convinced that it’ll have both the simplicity and flexibility Textpattern allows though.
Visit ➔Tastes Like Selling Out? Mountain Dew Launches Singles-Only Label
We’re going to see big brand after big brand trying their hand at music over the next few years I think, until people realise that putting out singles doesn’t sell more soda.
That’s the problem here, of course – not the potential conflict between music and ‘selling out’ which has never been a real issue (they’ve never had a problem getting musicians to pimp Pepsi, have they?).
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Like your hair is on fire
In the US, the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays… you get the idea.
What if you and your team went against type? What if you spend the two weeks while your competition (and the forces for the status quo) are snoozing—and turn it into a completed project?
Or, how about you don’t do that and take some time off, which is far more important then yet another project and exactly what I’m doing right now.
Visit ➔Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.
Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…
Visit ➔Designer Peter Saville: 'The Album Cover Is Dead'
Peter Saville, who was responsible for the cover art on albums by New Order and Roxy Music, has declared the artistic medium dead.
Saville blamed technological advances, such as iPods, for the decline in popularity of cover art.
I noticed the other day that with the way I have iTunes configured – using coverflow view – I actually get album artwork larger then a CD, so I hardly think the medium is dying. Also, I think the possibilities of things like individual artwork for each track and websites-as-album-booklets (like minotaurshock.com) mean there’s scope for a lot more innovation now in this medium.
Visit ➔Photocopy
Today I’d like to talk a little about copyright, Flickr, fair use and thumbnails.
On the XL Recordings website that we launched back in March we pull in news, videos and photos from a variety of sources in a tumblelog-style. Most of these are from sources we run or control like band websites, myspaces, youtube profiles or from sites we have good relationships with. The only exception of that is the photos we pull in from Flickr, which mostly come in from the main Flickr groups for each artist (here’s Radiohead’s one, for example).
When we designed the site I was very wary about making some kind of semi-official spam-blog – a spam-blog being a blog packed with advertising that passes off someone else’s content as their own, normally using an RSS feed. So, to that end we made sure that it was really obvious where the content was coming from and added prominent links back to the original sources. In the case of photos, we only use 75×75 pixel thumbnail, each of which links back to the original photo on Flickr. I thought we had stuck a good balance between respecting the authors of the original content and...
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