Saturday, July 06, 2002

The Good Ol' Days Of Net Music Music Business - Perspectives from People in the 'Biz "Adam writes 'I finally had some time to really read the Janis Ian essay. F*cking brilliant. Isn't it amazing, how much money is being spent, legislation written and passed, technology forced to fruition in failed attempt after another to destroy the internet's capability to be exactly what the music industry needs: The Biggest Friggin' Free Radio Station ever...' Okay, I'm going to read it again.  I just hate getting frustrated.  The music business is like Mr. MaGoo." [Ernie the Attorney] I just couldn't resist posting Ernie's Mr. Magoo allusion! Actually, while reading Adam's original post, I had a flashback to a time (probably in 1996) when I was sitting in a dentist's office with a friend. She was having her wisdom teeth removed, and I was trying to distract her by describing the coolest idea I'd come across yet on the web - AudioNet and its cousin RealAudio. Even on a 28.8 modem I was hooked. I was able to listen to whole albums through their service, as well as find radio stations across the country, tune into basketball games, and listen to some audiobooks. It stoked my passion for music even further than my father, working at a radio station, and working at a record store had previously done. I searched for two years for an album by a group I heard on AN, and I never did find it. I would have plunked down money for it if I ever had. Then the record labels threatened to sue AudioNet for making songs available online without paying them. I remember one particularly vindicitive letter from someone at one of the labels to Mark Cuban (AudioNet's creator) spewing forth threats that they would shut him down forever, bankrupt him, and he'd "never work in this town again" (so-to-speak). That was my first inclination that music on the net was going to be an uphill battle against an industry that couldn't see past its cut-off nose. Of course, Cuban had to back down, even though he tried to work with them. AudioNet became Broadcast.com and Yahoo bought it and ran it into the ground. I haven't been back to the site in several years now. Hopefully the record labels will wake up soon and get a new pair of glasses, before they run into yet another brick wall. 12:43:13 PM  Permanent link here

Backlinking Backlinks elgooG "Thanks to David McDonald for this pointer to elgooG, a Google 'mirror'. Very cool." [Google Weblog] This does indeed constitute much fun, although it doesn't carry the joke all the way through to the final click. I'm pretty sure I've seen a site that renders pages backwards, something that shouldn't be too difficult for some programming genius to figure out. If you know the site of which I speak, please pipe up. Tangent: while searching for said site, I came across a paper called Surfing the Web Backwards that appears to have been written in 1999. With all of the recent hullabaloo over backlinks, RSS referers, and now TrackBack, I thought it was interesting to note how far we've come, mainly due to the blogging phenomenon. I don't pretend to understand most of this, but I do think it would be great if we could just do more with the metadata end of it. "From a user's perspective, hypertext links on the web form a directed graph between distinct information sources. We investigate the effects of discovering ``backlinks'' from web resources, namely links pointing to the resource. We describe tools for backlink navigation on both the client and server side, using an applet for the client and a module for the Apache web server. We also discuss possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web.... In the context of the world wide web, we call such a reverse citation a backlink. Backlinks are seldom used in the world wide web, but we believe that they add significant value to the process of information discovery. Through the use of our tools we have discovered many unusual 'nugget' sites that are not easily discovered by tracing forward along the edges of the web graph, but are quickly located by traversing the links in the reverse direction. Following backlinks can often lead to information that has been created more recently, and may therefore provide an important improvement to the timeliness of information discovered on the web. As the web matures over time, we expect this factor to increase in importance." 12:11:07 AM  Permanent link here