Day: February 23, 2005

Forbes.com: Stopping The Presses
Good commentary by Paul Maidment, editor at Forbes.com, on the state of affairs in the newspaper industry. Thanks to Mark Cahill at Atex for the pointer.

MP3s for pennies? Russian cops say no | CNET News.com

In the “Oops, blogged too soon department …” In my daily dump below, I promised to dig a little deeper into allofmp3.com’s copyright status. Looks like the Russian music seller is in the deep doo-doo with the IP cops. From CNET:

“A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.

“AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.”

I see French People

“I’m color-blind … I don’t see French people. I just see smart people who are creating value and innovation.”

What has the global economy come to? Full page ads in the NYT (c-20) touting the benefits of doing business in France? I thought the era of despising the French as a pack of concessionary socialists went out with “freedom-fries” and the vitriol of the barking heads at Fox News. But no. Now Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, is proclaiming he’s color-blind to the Frenchness of the French. So what if its employment-for-life in the United States of Europe? As Ed tells us: “Great food, great wine!”

WordPress 1.5
This is like a newspaper publisher telling the readers that he’s just bought a new press. Big whoop. How about a writer upgrade? The power of upgrades compells me to disprove the famous “WordPress 5-minute install” and trash my blog later today in the interests of being current. I get twitchy if I’m not running in the beta-zone. Time to roll out mysqladmin.php and get gnarly with the CSS templates.

Time to Retire “Twisted”
A piece in the Times looks at Aspen and its richification over the years despite Hunter Thompson’s efforts to beat back the greed-heads with the Freak Power Party. The piece ends with a very good suggestion by an Aspen writer who says he checks himself everytime he types the word “twisted” and remembers that’s a Dr. Thompson word and should be retired into the rafters like Bobby Orr’s Number 4. Here. Here. Time to create the HST Archive of Language and relegate “Fear and Loathing”, “Greedhead”, “Twisted” etc. to the ceiling.

A Blog Post I Wish I had Time to Report
Tip of the hat to B. Lipman who introduced me to allofmp3.com, a Russian paid-music service that lets you PayPal in balance and then download CD quality music (the usual western music, not Cossack dance tunes) for pennies per song. With iTunes and others essentially pricing a song at a buck, what’s with allofmp3.com getting away with full CDs for $2.00 and songs for $0.14? Ah, it seems Russian copyright law is a very interesting thing. I shall explore and expiate. Love to see the RIAA go gunning to shutdown a Russian music service and find itself in the court system of one of the world’s greatest kleptocracies.

Highbeam vs. Factiva …
I emailed a detailed description of my online research habits to customer service at Factiva last week but haven’t received a reply. They claim I’m unfairly comparing Highbeam’s all-you-can search model with their “Individual”-$2.95 per article rate. I’ll give them another few days then post my pricing and feature analysis before declaring this tempest dead.