David Emery OnlineFriday Links XXXXVI
Thank You for Complaining.
The best thing you can ever get is actual communication from your customers, even if they’re complaining.
Publishing My Workout Music in hAudio
Note to self: start using hAudio.
No Ribbing, new record label launches today
Giving away digital music sure is popular these days.
SliceThePie Claims Will Finance More New UK Acts Than Major Labels In ‘08
Long tail etc etc.
Um, Whoops.
Mistakes happen; well done Dreamhost for having such refreshing candour and transparency.
Virtual Leopard Server Gets Legit
Nice to have, but I wonder what advantages a virtualised Mac OS X has over Linux in a server environment.
Amazon’s free shipping costing €1,000 per day in France
I find the whole concept of ‘breaking the law on purpose’ in cases like this quite intriguing. Good on Amazon for fighting for their customers.
The Macbook Air is Not a Sub-Notebook
Exactly; I just want a new 12” Powerbook, not a really thin MacBook.
MD038 – The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote (in 60 Seconds)
Actually quite amusing.
Visualising Radio
I’m very impressed with a lot of the things the BBC Radio Labs are doing at the moment.
Creating amazing music blog experiences
Interesting,...
In print
Today I’m going to grasp the chance to big myself up with both hands; it doesn’t happen that often so I feel I should make the most of it.
If next week you pop down to your local music retailer to buy a copy of the wonderful debut Adele album, ‘19’, you may notice a familiar name in the credits.
If you then turn to page 17 of the booklet you’ll see why, as one of my photos of her at the Scala in June has been used.
Obviously in person I will try and play it down, but quite honestly this is actually quite a big thing for me. I’ve always been interested in photography, but up until this year I’ve never really tried to do it in any serious way mostly because I thought I was not really very good at it. This is a real validation for me that while I’m obviously not some amazing photographer it is worth the effort.
It’s doubly special (and hence almost scary) because this isn’t some small indie album, it’s an album...
Read more ➔Vacuum
I’m a bit disappointed.
Such is the levels of hype; the frenzy that we all build ourselves up to. The reality is almost never as good. Of course, this year it was far worse because last year they managed the impossible: they delivered in the hype, with the iPhone.
What’s also worth remembering is that part of the hype is the unexpected; the notion that Apple will do something no-one has even thought of, which they managed in the iPhone and have spectacularly failed to do this time round. In fact, let’s quickly recap my predictions from yesterday:
MacBook Thin
”...although I hope it won’t be called that.” and it wasn’t, although I’m not convinced about ‘Air’ as a product name. MacBook Nano would have been better, if you ask me.
I was also right about solid-state disks being to expensive – they’re a very expensive upgrade. I was also right about them using iPod Classic disks, although I have no idea why they’re not using the larger one as well – the only thing I can think of is that it’s too big.
All in all I’m not blown away by the MacBook Air – it seems to be sacrificing too much (processor...
Read more ➔Runes and tea leaves
I am, historically, pretty rubbish at predictions. Probably no worse then anyone else, mind, but still not exactly great.
I am – of course – talking about the Macworld Expo, that yearly preach to the faithful flock. I can’t help but think that while this years cannot beat the last one, which could well go down as one of the best in history with the announcement of the iPhone, we’re still going to get something interesting.
What leads me to think that is that we really haven’t heard anything – everyone is talking about MacBook Thins and Movie rentals but there has been nothing substantial. I really get the feeling that we’re either going to be disappointed (which normally happens anyway) or going to see something entirely unexpected.
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase:
MacBook Thin
...although I hope it won’t be called that. This will be some form of small form factor laptop, which I think could start a new look for Apple’s ‘Pro’ laptop lines – something similar to the iMac and iPhone with glass, black bits and shiny bits. A lot of people are talking about it having a solid-state flash disk but I’m not convinced as it’s still a technology...
Friday Links XXXXV
How Windows Users are Conditioned
Number 143 in the ‘Most people don’t understand computers’ series.
Porn, Ning, and the Internet
Interesting points on both how you shouldn’t trust external web statistics (as they really are just made up) and how hard it is to balance free speech vs being a porn paradise.
Two years on, here’s another rant about the state of blogging
I firmly believe in posting whatever the hell you like; blogging should be about writing for yourself, not for some mythical audience.
IE7.js version 2.0 (beta)
Looks useful for keeping the IE6 stragglers up with everyone else.
The Overdub Tampering Committee: Please Allow Us To Introduce Ourselves
Utterly brilliant. I’m sure it’s not true, but the concept is amazing.
Sony BMG Confirms DRM Free Music, But Will Force Customers to Visit A Store To Buy It
I wonder who thought these things were a good idea…
Seth Godin: Music lessons
A must read, as always with Seth.
Amazon Goes (Stealth) Social
Amazon are going in a very interesting direction here, although it still seems to be quite rough at the moment.
Yahoo Is Clearly Up To Something Big Around Music
I agree – Yahoo are up...
Work for us and them
I had thought I’d posted about this already, but it turns out I haven’t so here we go: we’re hiring!
By ‘we’ I mean the rather lovely group of independent record labels that I work for, which have such bands as The White Stripes, The National, Adele, Beirut, TV On The Radio, The Strokes, British Sea Power and The Breeders. Oh, and a little band called Radiohead.
Also by ‘we’ I mean the Web Development department. We have small in-house web development team which both handles promotional sites such as artist websites and mini-sites and also internal business systems. It’s this latter side that we need help with – we’re currently building a large internal business system and we need help, so we’re looking to hire someone for a fixed term 3 month contract to work in our London office.
We’re looking for someone to help out with the back-end side of things, and the back-end in question is PHP and MySQL (shock horror!) so strength in both of those is vital. We’re using CakePHP to build the thing in, so any experience in that would be a bonus, as would experience using another MVC framework (like RoR for example).
Good knowledge of...
Read more ➔Music with moving pictures
New year, new music videos! And good ones, too:
First up is what surely will be a contender for video of the year from those fun indie popsters Vampire Weekend. If you only watch one video today watch this one for ‘A-Punk’:
Next up is something decidedly more lo-fi from Damn Shames – I’m very interested to see what these guys to next, as it’s a very impressive debut:
Nick Cave is obviously a lot more established then the last two, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a great new video. Watch closely to see where he completely fluffs his lip syncing, and see if you can spot him almost fall over:
I’m hoping for big things from Friendly Fires – the new video for ‘Paris’ really steps it up a level. Expect big things:
Finally, this isn’t really a music video – it’s actually an advert for Season 2 of Skins on Channel 4, but it uses ‘Nude’ by...
Read more ➔Data Portability Games
Google, Facebook and Plaxo join DataPortability.org
Read: Google, Facebook and Plaxo all know a good bit of PR when they see it.
Sorry for the snarky-ness, but I just can’t help but feel this is all pure hype and no substance to capitalise on that silly Facebook Vs Scoble Vs Plaxo stuff. That’s not to say that what DataPortablity.org are trying to do isn’t admirable – as it is – and it’s also not to say that having these key players on board isn’t important – the whole thing would be pointless without them – but this strikes me as yet another in the long line of recent announcements coming from this group of companies that actually mean nothing.
See OpenSocial for another example.
It will be great if we see companies like Google and Facebook (who cares about Plaxo, quite frankly?) embrace technologies like OpenID and XFN but quite frankly 1) I’ll believe it when I see it and 2) I’m not sure if anyone really cares. It’s point 2) that is of course more interesting – outside of the geeks that care about this sort of thing (and I count myself in that group) is data portability really something that the...
Read more ➔Packaging commodities
Ian Rogers from Yahoo! has just posted up a paraphrased version of the presentation he gave at the Aspen music conference, and it is not only well worth a read if you’re interested in technology but well worth some comment as well:
Talking To The Music Industry Again, The Aspen Live Conference
Now, I’m not going to go through it point by point as we’d be here all day so I’ll just pick out the really interesting bits. One of the first things he touches upon is this idea – widely discussed already, of course – that you really can’t “market” to The Kids. Obviously the definition of The Kids is going to vary a bit but it hits upon something that has been a slight bug-bear of mine recently:
Nothing else really matters if you have good content.
If you have good content, any ‘marketing’ that you do is really only the icing on the cake – as long as your distribution is good enough (i.e. as long as it gets in front of people), the content will look after the rest. Obvious but worth repeating, again and again until it maybe sinks in. This really goes hand in hand with another...
Read more ➔