The Doc Searls Weblog :

Here's hoping the dude starts adding current stuff to his own blog, now that he's past writing his next book.

Real is a Netscape that succeeded. It wants you to pay for a client so naturally infrastructural that it not only ought to be free, but actually is free... if you can find it. Maybe Real succeeded while Netscape failed because it's better at frustrating the user into just paying for the fucking thing. It's producerism at its worst: So what if they hate you? If you can take away their choice and their money at the same time, you've got it made.

I just checked to see if it's still a bitch to find the free download. It's an Easter egg hunt, but not as bad as it used to be.

But that doesn' t mean Real cares. Every time they come out with a new player, they blow away all your old preferences while trying to take over as many of your multimedia software settings as possible. When you've spent some time assembling a nice set of webio station "favorites," as I did with the old Real G2 player, it's mighty annoying to find the settings all gone with the next forced upgrade (the old one, as with Netscape's browser, always expires suicidally, forcing an "upgrade").

The whole listening situation is pretty sucky. Right now I have my online music sources divided between Macast, Soundjam, iTunes, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer 8. I like Macast best for fun visual plugins. Soundjam drives more devices than the others. RealPlayer 8 and Windows Media Player i keep only because so many online stations use one or the other, and don't yet stream MP3 or something even better like OggVorbis. For easy use, it's hard to beat Apple's new iTunes. Compared to the others it's a model of simplicity and clean functionality. But you can't change the settings that come with its Radio Tuner, which appears to source Kerbango's master list of stations, which was once limited to Real streams, but now clearly is not (iTunes is mostly about MP3 streams, many of which come from Live365).

As it happens I'm busy writing the obituary for Kerbango, which 3Com bought last year for $70 million in stock and then killed off a few weeks ago. Executed as well was Kerbango's almost-ready radio, which we anticipated the crap out of in Embedded Linux Journal).

Since the site and the company will soon be history, here is today's sad copy from Kerbango's home page:

Lemme tell ya, Jim Gable and the other folks at Kerbango were an editor's dream of a company to cover. They always returned calls and emails. They were enthusiastic, smart, full of good ideas and still open to all kinds of feedback. They made my work easy (as with this page of print-ready photos).They were a truly clueful and conversational bunch of folks. And, like me, they really loved radio. I wonder if the Kerbango connection with iTunes bodes well for a postmortal Apple connection. Maybe. Jim and other Kerbango founders all have backgrounds with Apple and/or its clones (during the brief time that those businesses were allowed to live).

Stay tuned.

A toast to your health. May it spread to the whole market.

My friend Burton Bruggeman is a fellow happy (We're #1) Duke Basketball fan (although he actually went there) who runs ActiveWords, a sofrtware company that does some pretty neat stuff. If hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (as David Weinberger and Cluetrain (Thesis #7) say), ActiveWords looks properly radical.

But ActiveWords is a small company, so far. Which seems to call for some viral marketing, no? What's a little contagion among friends? To that end, I'll point to a nice Rafe Needleman piece that showed up today on in Red Herring.

By the way, it was Burton who discovered that Hunter S. Thompson is also gonzo about basketball. Who else would say a team blowing a 27-point lead "curled up like worms in a bonfire"?