April 2009 Entries
Three things drove me to adopt Blu-Ray last year: first, I bought a 42" HD TV, second, the price of an internal Blu-Ray drive (~$100) has acceptable, and third (the most important), the DRM had been cracked.
One cannot argue about the superior picture that high definition movies offer, but it has been the DRM and the perceived complicated 'bag of hurt' associated with having the right combination of devices, cables, firmware, etc. to even watch them. It is, however, not a problem at all when you can remove those complications and simply sit down and watch a movie. You see,...
I got an email late last night from the Smashing Pumpkins announcing a new subscription service for upcoming material. The service, as outlined in the announcement promises subscribers a minimum of 5 hours of audio and video updates over a three month period for $40. So what exactly does this mean?
Details seem to be scant outside a few bullet points, but a subscription service misses out on a few key things that many general music subscription services don't seem to get: People want to own something. When the tap is closed off, fans still want something...
I've been a big fan of Twitter lately, mostly because it allows me to post thoughts and ideas without having to spend the time necessary to making a full blown blog post. The other part that I like is that it forces to boil down my thought to 140 characters or less. It's a great exercise in being concise, though annoying at times because some thoughts require a little bit more explanation than allows. Put both the power of a blog and brevity of Twitter together, however, and you get a nice pair of tools for self-publication.
The Internet in the...
If ever there were a fascinating time for sociologists and modern day communication, this is it. Spreading as quickly as some of the most virulent computer worms, news broke that Amazon.com had apparently deranked any and all books associated with homosexual topics or authors. A lot of disinformation and speculation as to the cause of the incident only fueled the controversy, but the real story here is the wildfire response in the form of tweets.
Digital torches and pitchforks were instantly raised and paraded all over the world in protest of Amazon's obvious anti-gay and lesbian stance. Confusion...
Looks like the Associated Press is the next in a long line of content providers who are finding it difficult to cope in the digital world. Quoted as being "mad as hell" about people linking, summarizing, or outright reproducing AP stories, it appears that they're going to start up the litigation machine to force aggregators to license AP stories.
Google has entered the foray with its own response from CEO Eric Schmidt. At an annual conference of the Newspaper Association of America he stated, "One of the fundamental problems with the Internet is that it doesn't respect traditional scarcity...