Friday, December 4, 2009

Source: Twitter / Mediaburn; Mediaburn: RT @hongkiat: We are about a month away from 2010. Have you fulfilled your 2009 resolution?. Mediaburn: RT @hongkiat: We are about a month away from 2010. Have you fulfilled your 2009 resolution? [Twitter / Mediaburn] 6:28:41 PM

December's Remaining Days Dear MRW Readers and Subscribers, The Mediaburn Radio Weblog will be undergoing changes from now until the end of the year.  To stay tuned to this frequency, please check http://twitter.com/Mediaburn or subscribe with RSS via http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/2683031.rss News will also be available on our flagship http://www.mediaburn.net and http://soulcircuit.ning.com See you soon! GS 6:17:24 PM

OttmarLiebert.com HD Albums now available. As of this week we have two albums available in the 24/96k HD format. HDTracks carries them online: One Guitar and Up Close. The downloads are FLAC - more about the Free Lossless Audio Codec here. [Ottmar Liebert] 7:44:08 AM

Source: MobileBurn.com Dolphin Browser brings multi-touch to MOTO DROID. A new web browser, known as the Dolphin Browser, has brought multi-touch functionality to Motorola's DROID Android-powered smartphone. The browser includes many other interesting features, as well. Read the full story here. By Brian James Kirk. [MobileBurn.com] 7:42:49 AM

Notes from Scripting News We need: An open source Twitter shell. It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. In my explorations of a hypothetical decentralized Twitter, at first I thought the clients would be where decentralization would happen. But, lately I've come to realize that it probably won't happen there because as the market has evolved they've become too dependent on Twitter Corp, and are unlikely to do anything that might threaten a friendly relationship with the company. I saw this first-hand in the Mac software market in the early 90s. Even when it would have been in the interests of developers to work with each other, each of them tried to do special deals with Apple. Of course no one really got those deals, so we all went down. But it's human nature to think you're special and if you play nice with the platform vendor, they'll play nice with you. And the platform vendor may totally mean to be nice, but they can't help acting in their own self-interest and that almost always is at the expense of the developers. So if the commercial developers can't or won't break free of the platform vendor, let's create an open source client that can be repurposed in as many different ways as we, as individuals want. Some of us may want to do deals with Twitter Corp, and that's fine -- but others may wish to embark on paths that are independent of Twitter. They wouldn't try to guess what would make the platform vendor happy, and instead follow the grain of the Internet, or go where the users want to go, or some users, or to scratch their own itch. Some may want to be part of the Cathedral and others part of the Bazaar. :-) I'm not even 100 percent sure what I'm asking for, but I'll know it when I see it. Probably a JavaScript framework that comes with a Twitter timeline object. So displaying a timeline is automatic as are the user interactions. So any kind of client, one written in any language -- Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, etc -- could store data in it. It wouldn't know anything about the Twitter API. It would be up to the applications to put data in the structure. It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. It would, of course, be programmable through a user scripting language. Having this one component would let a thousand flowers bloom in exactly the place where we need them to bloom. The key thing is to find out what would happen if we could take a path that was not designed to please the platform vendor. Note I carefully did not say "to piss off the platform vendor." I really do mean to chart courses that are independent of the vendor. What would be even cooler is if one of the client vendors decided to release their code under the GPL. Or, even better would be if Twitter Corp did it. That would be hugely disruptive and would likely lead to some very serious innovation. :-) [Scripting News] 7:40:18 AM

Complex Media Updated: Marc Ecko's Complex Media Gets $12.8 Million, Spins Off Into Standalone Company. Updated: Complex Media, the on- and offline media company founded by entrepreneur and artist Marc Ecko, has raised $12.8 million in funding, per an SEC filing. The new money comes from Accel Partners and Austin Ventures, and serves as Complex Media's first round of funding as a standalone company. It is being spun-off from parent company Marc Ecko Enterprises[~]which has been struggling with debt. Complex Media will be headed up by CEO Rich Antoniello and GM Brian Kelley; Marc Ecko will remain as an owner and board member. The company includes the Complex Media Network, a group of over two dozen sites that cater to young men's interests, as well as Complex magazine. The spin-off comes on the heels of a much larger cash injection for Marc Ecko Enterprises, which encompasses multiple clothing lines, a video game company and an in-store online video network: apparel holding company Iconix Brand Group took a majority stake for $108 million, in late October (via Crain's). Related Showtime, Marc Ecko To Make The iPhone Bleed With Dexter Game [paidContent] 7:22:56 AM