David Emery OnlineTease
At some point I may return to posting more then one coherent post in a row.
That day is sadly not quite yet upon us, I fear.
You and I both know this thing works a lot better when I’ve got a theme, a topic, yet-another-tech-whatever to write about. And something to write about sadly (again for both of us) requires a bit of free brain space.
I’m most definitely short of a bit of brain space right now.
The head equivalent of too many cooks spoiling the broth, except the cooks are things needing doing and the broth is the thing trying to do them.
I’d rather not just stop posting, as if I did that I fear I might never quite find the time again, so you’re just going to have to put up with a load of rambling rubbish instead. Er, sorry about that.
On a slightly different note, the thing I vaguely teased last week in a similarly rambling way now looks like it’s going to happen next week. However if I get a bit of luck I might have something else to show you, slightly closer to home.
Consider yourselves teased further.
Read more ➔Friday Links XLVIII
FAQ Magazine
I really like this, although I feel that maybe I shouldn’t.
Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move
Very interesting – still pondering the best use for it…
Amazon MP3 store to spread DRM-free love global in 2008
I’m very interested to know what prices that go for over here – it feels like there’s more room in the UK for them to undercut iTunes then there is in the US.
Must Watch: Michel Gondry’s Sweded Be Kind Rewind Movie Trailer
You’ve got to love Gondry, although Be Kind Rewind doesn’t look as good as The Science of Sleep (which was great, but odd).
iPhone’s CPU: Still Irrelevant
I couldn’t care less how fast the CPU is in my iPhone – its fast enough to do what it’s supposed to do flawlessly and that’s all that matters.
Shape It Like a Polaroid Picture
It’s exactly these things that are hard to explain, but are oh-so important.
2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist!
Nice work from the Hype Machine guys.
Breaking: MySpace Developer Platform Launching on February 5th
I’m still not convinced that MySpace has any real long term future in this space, but at least they’re still bothering to...
Photo pass
Last night I got my first opportunity to enter that dead-zone that occupies the space between the most enthusiastic fans and a band performing their heart out; I am of course talking about the photographers pit.
Now, I’ve been right at the front taking photos at many gigs before – in fact, most of the gigs I go to these days don’t even have a gap between the band and the crowd – but being in the pit is a completely different experience. It’s a rush, quite frankly; you’re so close to the action but also aware of the immense crowd behind you, and there’s an implied pressure to take really good photos that you don’t get if you’re just standing near the front snapping away.
The band in question was the brilliant British Sea Power who were even better then I thought they would be. On their latest record, ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’, the songs sound epic and live they’re simply immense. As an added bonus I totally lucked out in that the security didn’t turf us out into the crowd after 3 songs (which is the norm, I think) so I got to witness the entire set sitting...
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Busy / Assorted
I am officially too busy. This week is one of those weeks.
Instead of proper writing, here’s some miscellaneous points of vague interest:
Pete & The Pirates played the Borderline this evening, and were very good. Photos are (of course) on my Flickr although I took far too many as this was the first gig I took my 50mm 1.8f lens to. Look out for their album which is out on the 18th.
That Adele album which I talked about last week is sitting very comfortably at number 1 in the chart midweeks, which is nice.
In more nice news, the Foals Blog has been nominated for an NME Award which is pretty silly, but I’m not complaining in the slightest.
We’ve re-launched the I Was A Cub Scout site, which now looks lovely and features a fun little Flickr integration, music player and street-team-type-thing. I cannot claim any credit though, this is all James-that-still-doesn’t-have-a-website’s work and jolly good it is too!
And finally, we’ve got something really fun and interesting to (hopefully) launch next week, but I can’t say anything more about it otherwise I’d have to kill you. Stay tuned…
Read more ➔Failing to fail
No time for full length rambling today. Short and sweet.
You’ve heard of Qtrax by now, I guess? The concept is fairly simple: you download a player, based on Songbird, which gives you access to millions of legal tracks using a P2P system, with revenue coming from adverts in the player.
It’s going to fail, and I find it slightly depressing.
To ensure that people see adverts when they download the tracks all the tracks are DRM’d (I’m hearing it’s WMA) so they will only play in the Qtrax player. Not on any portable device. I had thought that we’d got past this, folks – if you are selling music (even if the payment is in eyeballs) you have to be iPod compatible. It’s a waste of everyone’s time just reading the press release.
Of course, there’s another sting in tail (or should that be tale?) in that it turns out that Qtrax announced before they’d signed on with the labels that they were claiming to have done deals with.
These Qtrax guys really seem to be smart people, doing good business.
More reading:
Qtrax Launches: Free and Legal Music Downloads Have Arrived
WMG, Universal Deny Qtrax Deals plus Commentary
Qtrax...
Friday Links XXXXVII
The iPhone’s long-missing two-pane email client
I’d totally forgotten about this – it looks lovely.
EA pushes ad-backed video games
I think advertising-funded games make a lot of sense; much more so then for music.
OpenID heading mainstream? Daily Telegraph to be an OpenID provider
How odd, considering the Telegraph has a fairly uninspiring website.
Five whys
A good read from Joel (as always).
Evolution of a Header
Nice work.
Mucking Up the Fireworks
I live in Photoshop, but the idea of a purpose-built web design app sounds very appealing.
Django People
I love the map strip on individual profile pages.
BBC Three – Rebranded
I don’t see why they felt the need to rebrand BBC 3 in the first place, let alone with something so inferior.
Apple First Quarter 2008 Results
I find it amazing that Apple are already shipping more ‘OS X’-based machines (iPhones and iPod Touches) then Macs.
The Betamax Doctrine
I’m not sure if anyone would bother recording streams off Last.fm – they’re bound to be fairly low quality, and P2P is so much easier.
My Top Feature Request for All Feed Readers
I really don’t agree – the whole point off RSS is that...
Last but with potential
With much fanfare and self congratulation, Last.fm have announced the availability of full length tracks on their site. They’ve made out that this is some form of revolution, but it’s really not.
For a start, they we beaten to the punch by American social network imeem who announced a similar deal over a month ago. Both of them have all four major labels on board, and a clutch of indies (but by no means all of them) – a brief check with bands like Arctic Monkeys and The White Stripes shows that ironically for a site that emphasises its music credibility it has more mainstream pop then it does independent music.
Also, unlike imeem there is a strict 3 play limit on how often you can listen to songs, which seems odd considering the labels would still get paid for each of those additional listens. I assume that they’re worried that people would just give up buying music altogether and only listen to Last.fm, which is crazy; Last.fm in its current form is a lousy way of listening to music – while playing one track or album is easy doing anything more complicated like playlists is...
Read more ➔Standard storm
First read this (although you probably have already):
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
Then take a look at these:
Broken (If you only read one of these, make it this one)
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey
Has Internet Explorer Just Shot Itself in the Foot?
Predicting the Past
Not your father’s standards switch
The versioning switch is not a browser detect
Code Happy
Best Standards Support
In defense of version targeting
Standards mode is the new quirks mode
The Internet Explorer lock-in
META HTTP-EQUIV=”X-BALL-CHAIN”
Who loses out to X-UA-Compatible?
IE8 and the future of the web
Versioning, Compatibility and Standards (from the Safari/WebKit devs)
Needless to say I’m not sure if this concept of version targeting has gone down too well.
I’m firmly on the side of those saying this is a bad idea. It strikes me that this is Microsoft trying to push something that solves a problem specific to them (namely that IE6 was so bad that when IE7 came out lots of things broke) onto the shoulders of web developers. While it’s not particularly pragmatic to say, I think this is...
Read more ➔Die EMI, die
Of course, the title actually means ‘The EMI, the’. It’s in German.
As a self-titled ‘industry watcher’ the slow but inevitable death of EMI brings up a whole host of conflicting emotions. First and foremost – obviously – is that this is a fundamentally bad thing to happen for the industry as a whole; it causes instability (in an industry that causes enough of that day-to-day) and the laying off of thousands of people is never a good thing. I know people at EMI, and the whole situation is a horrible one to be in.
But… in the long term, looking at the bigger picture maybe this is a good thing. The world, and the music industry, does not need either record companies or businesses as a whole that do business like EMI has been doing recently. Huge upfront advances to artists is not doing anyone, other then the artist, any favours what so ever. Similarly, the scatter-gun approach to signings could do with dying a death – where even small bands, that obviously aren’t going to sell a massive quantity (not that that should be an issue), get put through the same marketing wringer as Coldplay.
We are talking a death, here...
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