A number of recent events in the digital music space has made me start coming around to Cory Doctorow's way of thinking on DRM. Specifically, I've been debating on whether to get a Zune as my next digital music player once I'm done with my current music player. One of the issues that has come to mind is highlighted in Charles Miller's post entitled The greatest trick where he states

Meanwhile, once you’ve started buying music on iTunes, unless you start illegally breaking the DRM locks, your next DAP is going to have to be an iPod, and the one after, and the one after.

Remember when the iTunes Music Store was launched, and Apple’s public line on FairPlay was: “Yes, it’s DRM, but we fought so hard with the recording industry to make sure we can let you burn CDs and play music on multiple devices!”

The greatest trick Apple pulled was to build a market where lock-in is mandated, but convince the world that this was something they did reluctantly, at the behest of the villainous recording industry.

Like most iPod users, I don't have a ton of music that was purchased from the iTunes music store but I still don't want to end up losing that music once I switch devices. Thanks to proprietary DRM, a portion of my music library is forever tied to Apple's family of digital audio players.

On a related note, I just noticed that Napster is for sale which isn't a good sign. Before this is all over, it is likely that one or more online music services will disappear as a natural effect of competition in the marketplace. In this case, what happens to the music libraries of all the people who have purchased DRMed music from these services? When I buy a CD, I don't have to worry about losing my music if the record label goes out of business. Thanks to DRM, I now have to worry about the long term viability of the company's products before buying music. I now have to make music purchasing decisions based on whether I think iPod/iTunes or Zune/Zune Marketplace will be around in 5 years. That sucks.

I'm definitely not buying DRMed music anymore. Ripping from CDs is the way to go.

Twice this week I've had someone mention that even though they like Windows Live Local, they can never remember the URL. I have to admit that I sometimes end up typing http://live.local.com instead of http://local.live.com. It wasn't until this morning that I remembered that there is an easier to remember URL for accessing the site

http://maps.live.com

Brilliant. Now if only we could change the product name to Windows Live Maps. After all, Google renamed Google Local to Google Maps because of end user confusion. Anyway, kudos to the team for building such an awesome site. I've been playing with the recently released people search feature and I it's pretty sweet. This continues to be my favorite Windows Live service.

From the press release entitled MSN Launches Beta of Soapbox on MSN Video we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 18, 2006 — MSN today announced the U.S. beta release of Soapbox on MSN^® Video, a user-uploaded video service that makes it easy for people to express themselves by uploading, discovering and sharing personal videos with the Soapbox community and others around the world. Soapbox will be available on MSN Video and will be deeply integrated throughout Microsoft Corp.’s portfolio of online services, including Windows Live™ Spaces and Windows Live Messenger.

“Soapbox delivers on a critical component of the MSN growth strategy of deepening audience engagement by enabling people to participate in the content experience,” said Rob Bennett, general manager of Entertainment and Video Services for MSN. “By adding a user-uploaded video service, we are rounding out our existing investments in commercially produced and original content on MSN Video.”
...
Availability

The beta of Soapbox on MSN Video is available on an invitation-only basis in the U.S. Those interested in participating in the beta can sign up for the waiting list now at http://soapbox.msn.com. Access to the beta will expand over time by enabling existing beta testers to invite a limited number of friends.

I'm on the invite list for the beta but I haven't tried out the site yet. However there is a brief overview of the site at TechCrunch in the post Microsoft SoapBox Just Launched by Mike Arrington. He writes

Om Malik says, via a commenter, that “Soapbox autodetects your browser + platform and streams WM for IE/Windows users, but Flash for Firefox/Windows and Firefox+Safari on Mac.” LiveSide says videos up to 100 MB in size can be uploaded in AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP, DV file formats

I'll try out the service myself later this week and see if I can get any invites to share with folks who are interested in giving it a shot once they give us invites.

I saw the following entry entitled Premiere Cancelled on Weird Al Yankovic's MySpace page where he writes

I'm very sorry to say that the AOL "First View" Premiere of the "White & Nerdy" video has been cancelled.

Apparently, the video has already leaked online, and AOL doesn't feel comfortable doing a "World Premiere" promotion for a video that a number of people have seen already. (I can understand songs leaking, but a video? How'd THAT happen?)

Anyway, it's really a bummer... it would have been great promotion for the album... but hey, life goes on.

I was just watching the video on YouTube which now seems to have been taken down. It sucks that Weird Al is losing a promotional opportunity because his video leaked onto YouTube. I just might go ahead and pickup this CD as a show of solidarity.

The song is sweet, you can hear it for yourself at http://www.myspace.com/weirdal.

Niall Kennedy has a blog post entitled Authenticated and private feeds where he writes

Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract. Data in the wrong hands could be dangerous, and many companies will stay away from the feed syndication space until they feel their users' personal data is secure.

A private feed's data could be exposed in a variety of ways. A desktop aggregator's feed content might be available to other users on the same computer, either through directory access or desktop search. An online aggregator might expose a feed and its content in search results or a preview mode.
...
A feed publisher could whitelist the user-agents it knows comply with its access policies. SSL encryption might not be a bad idea either as shared aggregation spaces might not store content requested over HTTPS. It would place extra load on the server as each request requires extra processing, but if the alternative is placing your customer's data in the Yahoo! search index then that's not such a bad thing.

I believe large publishers such as Salesforce.com or eBay would produce more feed content if they knew their customers' data was kept private and secure. There's a definite demand for more content transmitted over feed syndication formats but it will take the cooperation and collaboration of security formats and consistent aggregation practices to really move the needle in the right direction.

How to properly support private and authenticated feeds is a big problem which Niall highlights but fails to go into much detail on why it is hard. The main problem is that the sites providing the feed have to be sure that the application consuming the feed is secure. At the end of the day, can Bank of America trust that RSS Bandit or Bloglines is doing a good job of adequately protecting the feed from spyware or malicious hackers?

More importantly, even if they certify these applications in some way how can they verify that the applications are the ones accessing the feed? Niall mentions white listing user agents but those are trivial to spoof. With Web-based readers, one can whitelist their IP range but there isn't a good way to verify that the desktop application accessing your web server is really who the user agent string says it is.

This seems to be yet another example of where Web-based software trumps desktop software.

Via Shelley Powers, I stumbled on a post entitled The Future of White Boy clubs which has the following graphic

Lack of intellectual diversity is one of the reasons I decided to stop attending technology conferences about 'Web 2.0'. I attended the Web 2.0 conference last year and the last two ETechs. After the last ETech, I realized I was seeing the same faces and hearing the same things over and over again. More importantly, I noticed that the demographics of the speaker lists for these conferences don't match the software industry as a whole let alone the users who we are supposed to be building the software for.

There were lots of little bits of ignorance by the speakers and audience which added up in a way that rubbed me wrong. For example, at last year's Web 2.0 conference a lot of people were ignorant of Skype except as 'that startup that got a bunch of money from eBay'. Given that there are a significant amount of foreigners in the U.S. software industry who use Skype to keep in touch with folks back home, it was surprising to see so much ignorance about it at a supposedly leading edge technology conference. The same thing goes for how suprised people were by how teenagers used the Web and computers, then again the demographics of these conferences are skewed towards a younger crowd. There are just as many women using social software such as photo sharing, instant messaging, social networking, etc as men yet you rarely see their perspectives presented at any of these conferences. 

When I think of diversity, I expect diversity of perspectives. People's perspectives are often shaped by their background and experiences. When you have a conference about an industry which is filled with people of diverse backgrounds building software for people of diverse backgrounds, it is a disservice to have the conversation and perspectives be homogenous. The software industry isn't just young white males in their mid-20s to mid-30s not is that the primary demographic of Web users. However if you look at the speaker lists of the various Web 2.0 conferences that seem to show up on a monthly basis (e.g. Office 2.0, The Future of Web Apps, ).

As a service to future conference organizers, I'm going to provide a handy dandy table to help in diversifying your conference. Next time you want to organize a conference and you realize that you've filled it with a bunch of people who look and think just like you, try replacing the names in the left column of this table with those on the right, at the very least it'll make your speaker list look like that of O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference which not only has people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and gender, but also people with different professional experiences

You get the idea. Diversifying your conference speaker list doesn't mean reducing the quality of speakers as many racist and sexist motherfuckers tend to state whenever this comes up. 

PS: I'm interested in talking to folks at startups that are building micro applications like widgets for MySpace, any idea what a good conference to meet such folks would be?

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a blog post entitled Citizendium: a more civilized Wikipedia? where he writes

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that his new knowledge sharing wiki project called Citizendium will launch at the end of this month or earlier. The defining characteristic of the site is that topic experts will have final, enforceable authority to “resolve” controversy and kick out trolls. Citizendium will be a progressive fork of Wikipedia, allowing its own community to change Wikipedia articles but also offering Wikipedia’s version of those that haven’t been edited in Citizendium. Sanger says the topic experts will function like village elders or college professors - they’ll simply make the wiki a civilized place.

There are definitely problems with Wikipedia, however I don't see how coming up with a defined set of 'experts' will solve some of these problems. My main problem with Wikipedia is that it is quite common for the experts on a particular subject to be dismissed until some verifiable source can be used as a reference, of course the definition of verifiable source is usually mainstream media.  Here are a couple of examples

1. In a blog post entitled on being notable in Wikipedia Danah Boyd writes

   As the conversation progressed, people started editing my profile. While the earlier profile felt weird, the current profile is downright problematic. There are little mistakes (examples: my name is capitalized; there is an extra 'l' in my middle name; i was born in 1977; my blog is called Apophenia). There are other mistakes because mainstream media wrote something inaccurate and Wikipedia is unable to correct it (examples: i was on Epix not Compuserv and my mother didn't have an account; i was not associated with the people at Friendster; i didn't take the name Boyd immediately after Mattas and it didn't happen right after my mother's divorce; i didn't transfer to MIT - i went to grad school at the MIT Media Lab; i'm not a cultural anthropologist). Then there are also disconcerting framing issues - apparently my notability rests on my presence in mainstream media and i'm a cultural anthropologist because it said so on TV. Good grief.

   Why does mainstream media play such a significant role in the Wikipedia validation process? We know damn well that mainstream media is often wrong. In the midst of this, the reference to my fuzzy hat had to be removed because it couldn't be substantiated by the press and because i didn't wear it on O'Reilly. Of course i didn't wear it on Fox - i was trying to get across to parents, not be myself. As much as i don't think of the hat as core to my identity, i'm very well aware that others do. Hell, just last week, John Seely Brown decided to start his keynote wearing my hat, talking about how the hat is the source of all of my brilliance while i turned beet red and scrunched down in my seat. As embarrassing as that was, it's more embarrassing that Wikipedia is relying on Fox over JSB for authority.

2. In a blog post entitled Does Wikipedia need to be fixed? Mike Arrington writes

   And I’ve also seen people be attacked for making changes that appear to be factual and correct. The TechCrunch listing on wikipedia has a number of errors. But there is no way in hell I’d ever think about fixing those errors. The wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable.

3. And finally, from the discussion page for the entry on "Dare Obasanjo"

   Well, Someone may doubt Dare Obasanjo's claim that he is the son of Olusegun Obasanjo. It may seem unduly self-serving and self-aggrandizing to make such a claim. That there is no verification from a reliable independent third party is bothersome. His own blog cannot be considered a reliable source in this case.

The third item above is the one that is amazing to me on a number of levels. I'm impressed by the fact that someone dug up an old blog entry where I talked about my dad running in elections. I'm more impressed that according to Wikipedia, my own blog cannot be considered an authority on who my own father is. Perhaps I should take a picture with him when I see him later this week or will someone claim Photoshop is the culprit and we'll have to wait until he mentions me on CNN or Fox News? 

Wikipedia is going to become more and more of a problem especially now that it seems that search engines such as live.com consider it more authoritative than people's blogs or official websites. Try searching for Tim Bray, Sam Ruby or Dave Winer on Windows Live or MSN and see whether their blogs show up before their Wikipedia entries do. 

Scary.

A BBC article entitled iPod fans 'shunning iTunes store' states

The Jupiter Research report says that, on average, only 20 of the tracks on an iPod will be from the iTunes shop.

Far more important to iPod owners, said the study, was free music ripped from CDs someone already owned or acquired from file-sharing sites.

The report's authors claimed their findings had profound implications for the future of the online music market.
...
However, the report into the habits of iPod users reveals that 83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly. The minority, 17%, buy and download music, usually single tracks, at least once per month.

On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites.

This jibes with the anecdotal evidence from my usage of the iPod and that of others I know who own iPods. This means that Apple made the right call by overcharging for the hardware and taking a hit on the price of the music as opposed to a strategy of subsidizing the hardware with the intent of making up the difference from the sale of music from the iTunes Music Store. Someone should send a memo to Jonathan Schwartz (who's suggested that car companies give away cars and make up the difference in subscription services) letting him know that this isn't always a brilliant strategy.

As others have pointed out, people have been buying CDs for about 20 years and only been using iTunes for the past 3 or so years. Thus it is to be expected that people have more music that they've ripped from CD than they got via the iTunes store. Once you throw in all the music have gotten over the years from file sharing networks like Napster, Kazaa & even just network shares in college dorms the percentage of music purchased from the iTunes Music Store on an iPod seems reasonable. It's also quite interesting that the article ends on the following note

Perhaps the only salient characteristic shared by all owners of portable music players was that they were more likely to buy more music - especially CDs.

"Digital music purchasing has not yet fundamentally changed the way in which digital music customers buy music," read the report.

Again, this also jibes with my experience with my iPod as well. I spend a lot more time listening to music from the same device now that I have my iPod. I listen to it while working out, while in the car and while working at my desk. Since I now spend more time listening to music from the same source as opposed to having to haul around CDs from place to place if I want to listen to the same music in my car and at my desk, I consume more music. The portable MP3 player is probably the best thing to happen to the music industry in decades.

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft’s Zune Delivers Connected Music and Entertainment Experience we learn

The Zune Experience

Available this holiday season in the United States, Zune includes a 30GB digital media player, the Zune Marketplace music service and a foundation for an online community that will enable music fans to discover new music. The Zune device features wireless technology, a built-in FM tuner and a bright, 3-inch screen that allows users to not only show off music, pictures and video, but also to customize the experience with personal pictures or themes to truly make the device their own. Zune comes in three colors: black, brown and white.

Every Zune device creates an opportunity for connection. Wireless Zune-to-Zune sharing lets consumers spontaneously share full-length sample tracks of select songs, homemade recordings, playlists or pictures with friends between Zune devices. Listen to the full track of any song you receive up to three times over three days. If you like a song you hear and want to buy it, you can flag it right on your device and easily purchase it from the Zune Marketplace.

Zune makes it easy to find music you love — whether it’s songs in your existing library or new music from the Zune Marketplace. Easily import your existing music, pictures and videos in many popular formats and browse millions of songs on Zune Marketplace, where you can choose to purchase tracks individually or to buy a Zune Pass subscription to download as many songs as you want for a flat fee.

To get started with great music and videos out of the box, every Zune device is preloaded with content from record labels such as DTS, EMI Music’s Astralwerks Records and Virgin Records, Ninja Tune, Playlouderecordings, Quango Music Group, Sub Pop Records, and V2/Artemis Records.

Nice. The ability to share songs with friends so they can try before they buy is quite nice. I don't know about coming preloaded with music if it's going to be the kind of stuff you see pimped in the blogs of Zune insiders like Cesar Menendez and Richard Winn. What would be sweet, would be getting themed preloaded music (e.g. hip hop, heavy metal, or pretentious emo music preloads). I'd prefer that to a one size fits all approach to preloading music on the devices.

You can also find more information about Zune devices including pictures in Cesar Menendez's blog post entitled Zune Details Revealed.

According to Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch in the blog post entitled Major Google/Intuit Partnership there has been yet another major distribution/bundling deal between Google and a major software distributor. Mike writes

The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only.

I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off.

Update: Notes from Analyst call:

Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.

Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).

Google has been on a impressive rampage of distribution deals over the past year. It's made deals with AOL, Sun, Adobe, MySpace, Dell and now Intuit to distribute its software and services. This means it'll be even tougher for competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft to gain marketshare from it since it is buying up all the defaults and entry points into search and related services it can find.

A cunning yet expensive strategy. It'll be interesting to see how many more deals they'll make before their done locking up all the defaults they want.