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Friday, January 19, 2007
Learning Lakoff 
Tail under
| | Comet McNaught is spectacular, but only visible in the southern hemisphere. Those lucky in geography can find guidance here. |
Fee market politics
| | The weird angle on this is that she's selling out the netroots scene that helped get her party a majority in Congress. If she gets it passed, the database marketing crowd gets to control politics in the USA again, and she's back in the minority. |
| | This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. Such devices would be able to include "reasonable recording" features, but that excludes choosing and playing back selections based on song title, artist, or genre. Want to freely move recordings around your home network or copy them to the portable player of your choice? You'll be out of luck if PERFORM passes. |
| | This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later. |
| | If congress would do some research and quit letting the RIAA make the laws, maybe internet radio could grow as an industry, but they are pretty successfully forcing internet radio into the realm of hobby and making the costs prohibitive for even that. We have done and continue to do everything that congress asks of us and we still get accused of enabling theft, when it is the legislation that they write that is actually enabling the theft. They were better off when it was filesharing, but due to ignorance, they have made it a lot worse for everybody involved and this is the next move to destroy the internet radio that the RIAA can neither influence nor control. |
iPhone competition
| | Michael Robertson: The iPhone will ultimately stumble because it's crippled, closed and costly. |
| | Michael does have a horse in the race. In fact, it's already running: |
| | There are mobile phone companies that are committed to open architectures which put the consumer in charge and implement unrestricted WiFi in their devices. The leader is Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer in the world. Nokia is not a darling with the PowerBook carrying press, but they should be because their open approach to the mobile market makes them consumer and net friendly. Check out how the iPhone compares to Nokia's N80ie device... (a table follows) |
| | * Nokia is working with MP3tunes to enable out of the box streaming audio of MP3 on their devices without additional software required. |
| | [Disclosure: My company SIPphone is the carrier on Nokia's WiFi phones meaning that calls going over WiFi, instead of the mobile carrier, use our systems which lets consumers avoid exorbitant roaming fees and airtime charges. This also provides local numbers in more than 30 countries for inbound calls.] |
| | Michael is a smart dude and a great hustler. Be interesting to see how he does with this. |
| | As I said on the CalcanisCast the other day, it's not smart to bet against Steve Jobs. (I'm talking about betting here, not what we like or dislike.) Apple, like Pixar (Steve's other company, now part of Disney), has relatively few SKUs (new products). They're not a Panasonic or a Sony that can throw thousands of SKUs against the wall like spaghetti and see what sticks. They try to make a very few, very appealing, products. If you'd asked the pundits, including the many of us here in the 'sphere, what the chances were of Apple stores being a success were back when they started, what would we say? Those stores were radically new and different and well-thought-out and — it turned out — very successful. In spite of the expecations of many, especially in the retailing business. But... they worked out. Personally, I think the iPhone is up against huge competition and is not likely to be a slam-dunk. But I wouldn't put money on that. |
Quote du jour
| | Craig Smith: The highlight of the program is when Leana Orsua, the News-Press reporter assigned to cover the hearing, talks to the videographers about how she was told to report what happened at the hearing but acknowledges that she doesn't know much about the case because the newspaper hasn't covered it. |
| | Unfortunately, the video isn't on the Net. It's on local cable channel 17, which means even locals such as we can't get it. |
If blogs are outlawed, only outlaws will have blogs
| | Rex Hammock: No lawmaker in America will want to be on record suggesting individual citizens be required to register as a lobbyst if more than 500 readers come to their weblog. The suggestion that a lawmaker would want to pass a law requiring individuals to register as lobbyists for having a personal blog just doesn¹t pass the smell test. |
| | That's in response to this, by way of this. |
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