Technovia

links for 2007-12-29

• David Carrington » UK SMS to Jaiku gateway
  Want to send SMS's to Jaiku from the UK - but don't want to be charged international SMS rates? David has brilliantly set up a gateway, which is a UK number which forwards SMS's on.
  (tags: jaiku sms uk)

Music industry claims personal use ripping isn't legal

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com:

"In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer."

I'm not even going to be begin to describe the many and varied ways in which this is a very poor argument for the music industry. They should start to remember that copyright is privilege which society confers upon them because it benefits society as a whole, rather than an inalienable right which they can continue to extend ad infinitum.

Why I back Lane Hartwell

Because the other side includes people who make comments like this:

"mons 12.26.07 / 5am: eat shit and die lanie. you’re a stupid ass bitch"

Should you be worried about the FlickrFan license?

One of the bad habits I have is checking licenses for any crazy stuff, and I found something interesting in the license for Dave Winer's new product, FlickrFan.

"You acknowledge that SNI or third parties own all right, title and interest in and to FlickrFan, portions thereof, or software or content provided through or in conjunction with FlickrFan, including without limitation all Intellectual Property Rights."

So are the photos that FlickrFan downloads from Flickr "provided through... FlickrFan"? It certainly sounds like it to me. And, if that's correct, it means that the license demands that you grant "all right, title and interest" in content which you do not own.

I'm certain that this isn't the intention of the license, but it certainly raises some interesting questions. After all, copying a bunch of images from Flickr to your hard drive, while easy to do, will almost certainly violate a fair-few copyrights too.

And incidentally, I've seen quite a few comments around the web that FlickrFan is "open source". It is not. As Dave puts it:

"The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004... And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can."

While the platform is "open" and the product is built on some open source code (Frontier, if I'm not much mistaken) the product itself is not open source.

Technorati Tags:
Dave Winer, Flickr, FlickrFan, Open Source

The hype machine swings behind FlickrFan

I know that analysts are sometimes in the hyperbole business, but this, from Michael Gartenberg, really is ridiculous:

"That's why Dave Winer's FlickrFan is so important. While there are plenty of solutions that let you view photos from your PC on your TV, FlickrFan takes the next logical step and allows me to not only get my own content on a the TV screen but rather lets me also subscribe to new content from others and let others get access to mine. That's a killer feature and totally changes the game."

First of all, it's worth noting that FlickrFan does exactly the thing that Michael notes there are "plenty of solutions for" - viewing photos which live on your PC on TV. FlickrFan downloads the photos it grabs from Flickr into a folder, and then uses the built-in screensaver on the Mac to turn them into a display.

This, of course, is exactly what you can already do with the Mac's screensaver, which allows you put in RSS feeds of your choice and displays the photos from them. This works not only with Flickr, but with .Mac slideshows or any other RSS feed that carries pictures.

What Dave's code does - I think, it's not really explained - is use the Flickr API to grab the largest-available resolution image for anything which crops up in the RSS feed. This means it's more likely to look pretty good on an HDTV. Given that the resolution of 1080p is 1920×1080 - and most "HD ready" TV's aren't 1080p anyway - I don't think that's a big deal.

Downloading pictures automatically and showing them on a TV using a PC isn't really a big deal. What would have been a big deal - and, to use Michael's phrase, "totally change the game" - would have been something that DIDN'T download images but used them directly from the cloud, where the data lives. Yes, that requires an always-on connection - but a computer which is equipped with Dave's software is pretty likely to have that anyway.

Of course, Dave's software has some other neat little tricks, like the ability to back up your own Flickr stream (handy if, like me, you send images direct to Flickr from a phone). It's nice, although for anyone non-technical the whole OPML Editor interface is a complete nightmare. But game changer? No.

Technorati Tags:
Dave Winer, FlickrFan, Flickr, Michael Gartenberg

links for 2007-12-27

• Google ruining Christmas? Get a grip - - mathewingram.com/work
  Matthew is completely right: the meaning of "shared" was perfectly clear all along. What part of "shared" didn't people understand?
  (tags: google reader rss idiocy)
• Details of Apple's Mysterious New Portable Device - Seeking Alpha
  Another "larger format iPhone-style device" rumour.
  (tags: apple ipod iphone pda)

Die, Adobe, die!

Back in the mid-1990's, everyone in the design world hated one company with a passion: Quark. If you wanted to do professional print publishing, you had to use QuarkXPress. And Quark knew it, fleecing its customers with absurd pricing, adding on onerous conditions, and even at one point dongling its products.

Then along came Adobe InDesign. InDesign 1.0 wasn't as good as QuarkXPress, but to print publishers who were fed up with Quark's attitude to its customers, it didn't matter: they switched, as soon as they could. Quark realised that it no longer had its customers in an arm-lock too late, and despite getting its act together, lost a lot of sales.

There's an old saying that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes, and this is as true for software publishers as anyone else. And it appears Adobe, of all companies, simply doesn't understand the lesson that it taught Quark.

How much do you think Photoshop costs? The answer, if you're an American customer, is a whopping $649. It gets worse if you're a European customer. In the UK - and without even taking into account VAT - you will pay nearly $1000 more for a copy of Creative Suite Premium compared to the US. Just the difference between the US and UK versions equates to the price of two copies of Logic Studio ($499 each) or nearly the cost of Final Cut Studio 2. If anyone from Adobe would care to explain why it costs more for me to download a product in the UK than it does to download the same code from the same servers in the US then I'd love to hear about it.

In other words, Adobe is simply gouging its customers because it knows that, if you want to do professional image manipulation, you have to use Photoshop. Like Quark, it knows that there isn't another option and is pricing accordingly.

But, of course, this means that the first company which comes along with an alternate - even if it doesn't quite match up to Photoshop's feature set - is likely to clean up. And Adobe will deserve it. Roll on the Photoshop alternatives.

links for 2007-12-23

• The Metaverse: Aleister Kronos on the Colgate "build"
  Colgate has created a build/campaign in Second Life which, so far, doesn't look promising.
  (tags: secondlife marketing)
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: He with the most data wins
  "In many cases, one can hypothesize, Google can afford to operate services at a loss simply because the data it collects about users, their preferences, and their patterns of activity is so valuable to its core business."
  (tags: google nicholascarr)
• Bad Science » Epistemological Indulgences
  Ben Goldacre wallops the myth of antioxidents.
  (tags: science nutrition antioxidents)

links for 2007-12-22

• The Metaverse: Death of Second Life? Nope
  Researched predicts "the death of Second Life". Except he doesn't, but what he does predict doesn't make as good a headline.
  (tags: secondlife)

Jobs accepts my offer, launches blogger amnesty program

Well, it's not a personal email, but it seems like at least Fake Steve is listening. Apple launches a blogger amnesty program, and I'm going to be second in the queue, after David Pogue (who must really be tired of writing about Apple by now).