Accumulative Effect

I actually only discovered this extremely recently, so good timing for me because I don't have to wait. But lol, you have to check this out. A must see for all Buffy, Angel and Firefly flans.

http://drhorrible.com/act_III.html

For those who have never heard of this, I got this explanation from Wikipedia:

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a 40-minute, 3-part musical comedy produced for the Internet, telling the story of a low-rent supervillain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to. The movie was written by Joss Whedon and his brothers Zack Whedon (a television writer), Jed Whedon (a composer) and Jed's fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen (an actress). The writing team penned the musical during the WGA Writer's Strike. The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike.

Articles like this really piss me off!
Media Companies (records ones in particular) make up a major part of the wealthiest companies in the world.

They are also the first ones to cry foul when something goes "wrong".

If they would stop releasing shit music, perhaps people would buy the albums. Also notice, that they do not count LEGALLY downloaded tunes in the figure. Sure album sales may have dropped howevermuch%, but how many magnitudes of 10 did legal music downloads go up? The media companies get a slice of these! As media becomes more diversified in nature, people have to shift the focus of their disposable income. How many people bought DVDs in 1996?

I believe in free-market. If the market likes your product - they will buy it. It's really that simple. Most people understand that the advantages of purcahsing media speak for themselves. No mess! No fuss!

If I like something, I will consume it. And, pay for it. But, like most people, I only have so many dollars to go around and once it's gone - it's gone. No matter how much the media companies complain, it will not make me spend anymore money. It's (for most people) a finite resource.

So, before people start accusing the 'net for the drop in album sales, perhaps they should check reality first!

I often complain about Apple products. The recent launch of the iPhone 3G is merely just another example of this. Not only is the Apple Reality Distortion Field at full strength again, and now apparently the field has grown so strong that Apple doesn't even have to advertise with it's own cash anymore!

Is this honest to god "frontpage news"? Or have they considered making Apple pay for its own advertising, rather than letting it replace actual news content?

Update: Firstly I'd like to point out that I do understand the irony of posting this, since I am effectively providing free advertising to Apple as well. Secondly, I think the iPhone is just another phone; however I do think that the web browsing on it is second to none.

Update II: Thanks to Ben for pointing out this sweet clip from YouTube:

In the ongoing copyright litigation between Google and Viacom, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google (PDF) to hand over data on every YouTube user, including username, the associated IP address, and a list of all the the videos that user ever watched.

In this lawsuit, Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube.

(Source: ReadWriteWeb, Frederic Lardinois, July 3, 2008 9:53 AM)

This is truly shocking. England's Statute of Anne (1710) is widely regarded as the first copyright law. The statute's full title was "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." This statute first accorded exclusive rights to authors (i.e., creators) rather than publishers, and it included protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years.

You see, the point is that copyright laws have been bastardized and twisted so much, that instead of protecting the creators of works, they exist (almost solely) to protect the investment of publishers. In fact in many developed nations in the world (most notably the UK and US) lobby groups are pressuring the governments to increase the current cap on copyright from 50 - to 100+ years!

I think that while it's important for companies to protect their Intellectual Property, copyright is becoming more and more difficult to define; and more importantly, in an age where the barrier to produce new and creative works is so low - the original needs of "copyright" to protect creators is almost needless.

Like many things, I turn to the internet.  It gives me great comfort to know that people can protect and define copyright themselves with a simple little license.txt file outlining the wishes of the author., and I think we have the Open Source community to thank for this.  Creative Commons, under which nearly every blog operates, is an example of this.

But, as far as Viacom lawsuit is concerned - when any company violates the privacy and rights of users, it really pisses me off. What will be next? Google for indexing CNN.com? No I don't think so, and I think we all know why!

If you have a Media Center PC, and you use Skype, then you really need to see this!

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

A recent Techcrunch article struck me today. Someone created a Windows Mobile iPhone skin:

Today Apple is engaging in similar [legal] tactics against a number of bloggers who simply reported on the fact that someone created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks exactly like the new iPhone user interface [...] If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter.Now, at the risk of dragging Touchstone into a cease and desist land mine, obvious bullying tactics like this are simply ridiculous. It's not the first time Apple has been so aggresive with the community. There was the Apple Rumor mill Wars, the more recent demanding that YouTube videos be removed from sites and various issues with the use of the iPod brand. Can I even say Podcast now?

This is the latest in a long line of over-the-top legal war-mongering. Apple has earned a lot of respect and loyalty from it's fan and not only does this irritate me, it may well kill one of their key stratigic advantages by acting this way.

Which is why I posting it here.

My theory is that if a company is going to actively and aggressively try to stop the blogosphere (which is largely only opinion anyway) then I will add to the news. What are they going to do if several million people post about it? Sue everyone? I don't think so.

So here it is!

You can't stop the signal.

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

As many of you are probably aware, the Touchstone Team are avid Firefly fans. I was recently reading my feeds (from gateworld.net incidentally) and noticed that Jewel Staite has a blog! Yay I thought, now THATS something I have to read.

Alas, look, no feed!

It took several minutes for Chris to calm me down, obviously, this was very uncool. Even now, I am still confused as to how and why an excellent actor like Jewel could have a website which a) looks worse then a teenage girls MySpace page and b) doesn't have an RSS feed. 5 minutes and I would have a blogger blog publishing to her website looking smick, easy to update and feeds for all to burn.

Bah. I almost wished I'd never found the site in the first place.

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

Chris and I often converse with each other about a fantasy world where we would happily live. In this world, internet connections are high bandwidth, always on, and free for everyone to use, wherever you are. Sadly, “reality” just hasn’t caught up with us yet. Must be because it has a strong Liberal bias.

Because we don’t have this free-for-use subspace ulra-wideband connection, Web 2.0 only works so far. It’s something that we feel sets Touchstone apart, but also means that we have this constant balancing act between the value we add into the cloud and the value we add onto the client.

It’s something which I am afraid to admit has always perplexed me about the Web 2.0 world – the plethora of diverse and spectacular applications available is staggering and inspiring; so long as I am connected when I want to use them. It’s one of the reasons I seem to be slightly more pessimistic about web-based apps than Chris.

We feel that it’s very important for Touchstone to bridge this gap by persisting information for Web 2.0 apps when the user is intermittently connected.

Filter the noise, whether you’re online or off!

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

I know this isn't really anything to get excited about, but I have to say that I’m really excited about us getting ranked 1 and 2 on Google. I think I really want to get ranked 1 for "rss gadget" but I guess we have to start somewhere.

BTW, TouchStone pre Alpha is running at the moment with Chris' FeedDemon OPML file and "The Office - Email Scandal..." - apparently.

I also had an argument with a person I work closely with (in the real world - as opposed to the 'TouchStone' world I seem to have found myself in recently) about the intrinsic value of blogs and other personalised content on the web. They were claiming that blogging is just as bad as the old days of the internet when every second person had a dodgy website made from Word saying "Under Construction" or "this is my website and i have 2 cats and a dog".

I disagree with this. Passionately! I argued the virtues of blogging and RSS. Blogging is the long tail of publishing. And on the internet, nothing is as important as the long tail. If you think something - and write it down - then the odds are other people in the world feel the same way. It's a way for us to connect to other people we otherwise never would/could.