Friday, July 19, 2002

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Google Sets  [not quite random] What a cool idea!  They must serve great coffee in the Google thinktank...[jenett.radio] The skeptical one here enters a bunch of bands / artists I like (frank zappa, igor stravinsky, claude debussy; or talking heads, king crimson, genesis; or cake, beastie boys, radiohead) ... and boom a bigger list of "related" ones appears. Spot on, I may add. Google Goodness.

MusicMoz--calling all music geeks. Some of you may be familiar with DMOZ, the open directory project that replaced Netscapeís old directory and attempts to be the open community-maintained alternative to the increasingly creaky Yahoo! directory. I just stumbled across MusicMoz, which attempts to be a definitive directory for music. Why is this cool? Well, think how important IMDB isóitís pretty much the de facto authoritative source for information about movies and TV shows on the Internet. If you want the equivalent for music, where do you go? What site can allow you to trace a musicianís progress from band to band, combine a directory with a discography and have a clean and searchable interface? Well, nowhere, really. In my iTunes scripts, I link to Google instead. But MusicMoz might be a cool alternative. And theyíre looking for category editorsÖ [jarretthousenorth News] I've been working on this problem myself...

John Cage. "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." [Quotes of the Day] Amen!

I also noted how much more convenient it would be if NPR provided its shows in an MP3 format I could take with me, rather than only streaming them in Real. I'm sure NPR has issues with this, but it would certainly help me become a listener again, and isn't that the ultimate point? [The Shifted Librarian] Yes Yes Yes. I started capturing NPR streams to my Archos Jukebox as MP3s so I could listen on the NYC subway while commuting. But obviously you can only do this in real time. I'd love to download them directly, but I know the NPR lawyers would never let it happen.

TiVo: Why It Gets No Gold Stars for Mandatory Ads. The Whingers are all riled up because there's no way to delete these gold-star ads once they show up on your TiVo system. They stay there, taking up valuable hard drive space that could otherwise be devoted to recordings of your favorite shows, until TiVo decides to takes them away and replace them with other gold-star ad content....[ZDNet] Actually, it's not worth it. Maybe if they were able to send targeted ads that you could delete when you want to delete them, then it might conceivably be worth it. Get a ReplayTV instead - SonicBlue fights disseminating your personal data and they innovate with the consumer in mind, not the industry! [The Shifted Librarian] Actually, Tivo is not taking up "our" space. The ads are stored on a separate partition. I'm not defending the ads, but I think there's a mis-perception about the space used for ads. It does not take up any of your recording capacity.

They Walk Alike, They DJ Alike. Meet Andrew Andrew, a pair of secretive New York DJs who use an Apple iPod for their work. Yes, they're Mac nuts, but blasphemy of blasphemies, they think IBM is cool, too. Leander Kahney reports from New York. [Wired News]

JPEG Patent Claim Sparks Concern. An Austin software company's claim that it owns a patent for the compression technique used in JPEG images is raising techies' hackles. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]     Google It!