Friday, July 05, 2002

Radio Progress Marcheth On Putting a Radio post's categories on the web page "Jake Savin [jake@userland.com] posted in his comments pointers to: a macro: Drop listCategoriesForPost.txt into your Macros folder. the code for your Item template that calls it:   <%local (adrpost = @weblogData.posts.["<%paddedItemNum%>"]); listCategoriesForPost (adrpost)%> Thanks, Jake! A better way than mine: logic pushed from the template to the macro." [a klog apart] I may try this one, too, although I'm more intrigued by liveTopics since it also builds an index of posts by category. (Speaking of which, Marc and Matt - I'll get back to trying the installations as soon as I can.) 11:48:41 PM  Permanent link here

Let's Sue The People Paying Our Bills! Yeah, That's The Ticket.... File-Trading Furor Heats Up "On Wednesday, recording industry executives pulled a similar stunt, leaking word to The Wall Street Journal that they were zeroing in on a plan to sue the most aggressive file-traders.... The problem is that it's bad business to sue the people who most want your product. That has been a lesson hard learned for music industry executives, many who believed they could control the Internet the way they controlled traditional sales outlets. Their tune changed several years ago, after an outpouring of negative publicity over individual prosecutions. Less than 24 hours after the news first leaked, officials within the industry have backed away.... While executives are putting distance between themselves and the story, they haven't denied that those specific plans are being developed. Today, those same executives who stumbled through early litigation now have four years of experience and public opinion polls to help them craft a better strategy to nab illicit swappers." [Wired News] When is the music industry going to realize that there is such a thing as bad PR? 11:37:47 PM  Permanent link here

The Heavenly Jukebox Isn't So Heavenly Yet Lots of big news while I was offline. One of the biggest stories was Listen.com Lands Last Big Five Label. As Will noted to me, it's the beginning of The Heavenly Jukebox. They even call it "The Celestial Jukebox" on their main page! (Emphasis below is mine.) "Taking a step ahead of any of the other competing music subscription services, Listen.com has won licenses to use music from all five of the major record labels. The company on Monday announced it has won rights to distribute music owned by Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, the last big label to sign on to its Rhapsody service.... Listen is talking with its label partners about just why so many individual songs and artists still aren't available, CEO Sean Ryan said. But he said having the bulk of available music would appeal to most consumers, who wouldn't spend considerable time looking for gaps in its collection. In all, Rhapsody, which costs $9.95 a month, will offer 175,000 tracks from the major labels and from independent record companies including Zomba Recording, TVT Records, Bar/None Records and Sub Pop Records.... Analysts expect most of the big services to get licenses similar to Listen's by year's end, barring insurmountable infighting between the labels. But even with such agreements, it may take some time before any paid service sees widespread adoption by consumers. A soon-to-be-released study by The Yankee Group predicts subscription services won't start eating into the volume of free trades through pirate file-swapping services until 2005.... For now, all of the major subscription services offer different limits on features such as downloads, song streams and the number of songs available per month. Listen allows subscribers to play an unlimited number of songs every month and gives some limited ability to burn CDs." [News.com] Try going to Rhapsody.com - not too smart a name for their service, is it? The fact that you can't burn all of your downloads onto a CD is still too major a barrier. It's certainly keeping me from trying the Rhapsody, and I'm an early adopter. Some other interesting things about this service: It's Windows-only. Bad. You need an "active" Internet connection (read: broadband). Duh. You can access songs from any PC. Good. They've integrated pop-up music trivia. Fun. You can create a playlist and email it to a friend. If the friend is a Rhapsody member, she can open the attachment and hear all of the songs via the service. Non-members hear 30-second clips instead. Interesting. They encourage you to hook your PC up to your stereo and outline wired and wireless options. Cool. How long do you think it will be before they encourage you to access your subscription through your smartphone or PDA? Right around the time WiFi and/or 3G hit the big time. If they'd let me keep the songs I'm paying to access, I'd sign up in a New York minute. And of course, there's no option for libraries, fair use, or lending to a friend in their setup. 10:47:36 PM  Permanent link here

Let's See How Long I Last.... Okay, let's try a little blogging from the couch tonight. My back is feeling much better, so at least something good has come from being away from the computer for so long. If you're having back pain, I highly recommend sitting in a pool for hours at a time.  Dave - try it! It might help you, too.  ;-) I will say this, too - thank heavens for my news aggregator. I never would have been able to keep up with everything by checking in only once or twice a day without it. Of course, the problem now is that I've got several days of bloggable items that I can't really get back to. I'll use Mark Paschal's Kit as best I can (doing the math for the hours), but we really need a second generation aggregator that sorts by subject and priority. Addendum: please note that all of my email from the last week is on my main PC, so you probably won't hear back from me until I can sit in front of it long enough to respond to the backload. Thanks for your patience! 9:48:54 PM  Permanent link here

Test post. Please ignore. 9:03:13 AM  Permanent link here