Via the Globe and Mail ...

Amazon store to sell music free of copy protection
Reuters
May 16, 2007

NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. said Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.

The Seattle-based company said music company EMI Group Plc , home to artists ranging from Coldplay to Norah Jones to Joss Stone to Pink Floyd, has licensed its digital catalog to Amazon, the second such deal in a month.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has been demanded by the music industry to contain piracy by preventing users from making multiple copies; but its critics say it restricts consumers and therefore hinders the growth of legal music uses.

Early last month, EMI said it would make its music available online without a key anti-piracy measure, becoming the first major music group to take the risk in a bid to grow digital sales.

With all music companies struggling from a drop in the sale of physical albums, EMI, announced its first deal with Apple Inc. and the iTunes online music store in April.

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From this report on CNN, it's about what you would expect ... cultural differences yield a difference in look, feel and dynamics.  I expect we'll see more and more of these kinds of cultural shadings and nuance, and that there will come to be observable patterns in how people share, comment and use advertising in such a space.

The tools and services offered by Qumana are designed from an ease of use point of view, and hopefully offer little in terms of cultural barriers to their use.  The content assembly and advertising selection and placement capabilities we offer users let them make the choices and stay in control of what they want to do and how they want to do it.

If we had an arrangement with a major Japanese advertising supplier, the users of Mixi could go about assembling and publishing content, and could use advertising supplied by Mixi in a work-and-revenue sharing arrangement .. getting content into circulation with appropriate Mixi-approved advertising woven into the content.

MySpace faces cultural hurdles ... and Mixi ... in Japan

Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.

Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.

"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."

Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.

Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.

MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii.

Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.

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The Guardian (UK) has put out a new list (and commentary) on the 100 Most Useful Web Sites.  I might argue about some of their choices, but I am not really mainstream ... I am pretty much  immersed in several areas of what is sometimes called Web 2.0.

Scrolling down the list, it is considerably more Web 2.0-ish than in previous years, meaning that the list is crammed full of web sites where users interact, participate, and either (or both) take content to remix and publish or upload content for others to use.

While many people have complained about the term, the Web is clearly becoming a vast arena for copious amounts of "user-generated content".

And while content has long been considered "king"  (it's what attracts the mainstream metric of eyeballs), this relatively new report from Bear Sterns (The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment) concentrated on television / video suggests that increasingly context and the aggregation of material will play critical roles.  Thus, Bear Sterns concludes that a key part of creating value is how content is packaged (Slide # 29) ... for distribution and use (use being a term that covers many forms of what people do with content).

Anyway, back to the 100 Most Useful Web sites.  i think that this is an irreversible trend pointing us to an environment where people will eventually move back and forth seamlessly between two worlds, and in many cases sites like those on the list play an essential role in many peoples' daily activities (if they don't already).

The new 100 most useful sites
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian

Two years ago most Britons didn't have broadband and Web 2.0 was barely a twinkle in a developer's eye. Things have changed - as our cream of the crop for 2006 shows

In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn't have broadband. That's changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine. So we've revisited the "cream of the crop" that we brought you two years ago.

Some of the crop is brand new; some has stood the test of time. As before, we have 100 sites in 20 categories.

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Ok .. so we've rearranged our priority list to move to the head of the list making Qumana 3.0 operate smoothly once again with the newest version of the Blogger platform.

None of us here use the Blogger platform.

Would any of you out there who used to use Qumana with Blogger (and hopefully still use it if you operate blogs on other platforms) mind giving us a hand by helping us zero in on what doesn't work, what Qumana does poorly, rudely, or not at all when attempting to publish to Blogger using it ?

Your help will be invaluable .. we want to modify / repair Qumana as quickly as possible.

Thank you in advance ;-)

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Click on this link if you want to download A SIMPLE, EASY AND FREE TOOL

FOR CREATING IMPRESSIVE BLOG POSTS

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A little more than a week ago Dave Sifry posted Technorati's most recent snapshot of the (continuing) growth and maturation of the blogosphere, including a number of analyses about how blogs continue to penetrate the media scene, the frequency of posting, where posts come from, and how Technorati is mitigating the scourge of splogs (or more accurately, taking steps to not count them).

Here's the concluding summary:

In Summary:

1. Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
2. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
3. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
4. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
5. About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
6. There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
7. The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
8. Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

The last two points are of significant interest, and here's a pie chart that gives us a sense of the spreading globalization of blogging:

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I remember two or three years ago having conversations with colleagues about the eventual penetration of social software and web services into the work-o-sphere of organizations ... I called it something vague, like "blog-like derivatives".

Here, via Rob Patterson's link to an announcement by SocialText's Ross Mayfield, is an early example of the types of "solutions" that are now available to organizations.

As I and others have noted before, it's very likely that the use of such configurations will lead to interesting changes to the design of work, and lead to a greater need for organizational development initiatives ... coaching, moderation, workshops addressing corporate blogging (external and internal) and the use of wikis, etc.  Ley's call it eOD for now.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel. Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0. In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises. Extensible because we've all supported open APIs. Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations. SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

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Via Internetnews.com

Please remember that sociology will always trump technology ... I suppose what that means is that if 50% of organizations will be using wikis by 2009, a lot more organizational culture change and work re-definition is coming.

Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise
By Michael Hickins

There used to be just one wiki known to all: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that embraced user-generated content and its rejection of hierarchy.

Chief among the principles of Wikipedia is that everyone can be an expert.

In its simplest form, a wiki is a Web page that can be edited or created through a browser and linked to other Web pages.

Unlikely as it may seem, wikis are now being adopted by enterprises large and small more quickly than celebrities adopt African orphans.

So much so that Gartner analyst Kathy Harris predicted that by 2009, 50 percent of U.S. companies will be using wikis.

That helps explain why vendors large and small are lining up to provide enterprises with enterprise-ready wiki solutions.

Large outfits, such as IBM (Quote) and Microsoft (Quote) , are wrapping wiki functionality into their real-time collaboration tools, respectively Lotus Sametime and Sharepoint Server.

Smaller vendors like Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Klir Technologies are among the vendors offering stand-alone wiki solutions.

Rather than being driven by senior management, however, adoption is coming mainly from project managers and department-level executives.

"In almost every big corporation, some group is already using a wiki," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School.

One reason is that wikis hold the promise of helping companies stimulate more innovation by their employees.

That's important: 80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.

Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP (Quote), agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.

"Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas," he told internetnews.com.

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Aha !  The payoff for hours spent trawling Technorati and Feedster so as to respond to questions or complaints about Qumana.

There have been reports of problems getting Qumana to post appropriately to the new beta pf Blogger (performancing For firefox, too).

Here's a hack, complete with screen shots, that shows how to address the problem. Thanks, bothack !

It's ridiculously easy.

I find that desktop and online blog editors and publishers like Qumana and Performancing Fox are unable to automatically configure the all new Blogger Beta.

When you perform the same actions you did for your normal blogger blog in Qumana you get an error stating “unable to integrate Blogger API”

All you have to do is, go back a bit and in the manual setup change “http://www.blogger.com/api..” to “http://beta.blogger.com/api…”.

Yes! Introduce a beta instead of www and everything goes fine.

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We've been very busy working on important bug fixes, enhanced stability and the addition of valuable new features designed to expand users' publishing capabilities and overall ease of use.

More specifically, here's what we've addressed and accomplished over the last two months.

First, we recently completed Phase One of a formal usability study, which essentially told us everything you, the users , have been telling us since our beta launch in mid-February. It has been very useful to have all the bugs and improvements grouped together in one place, and organized such that we can either say ... "oh, good, that's been dealt with" or "thanks for that recommendation .. now we know for sure how and why (and where) to implement that", and so on.

Next ... we recently completed and made available versions of Qumana in French, Dutch and Spanish. With this release we will be adding a German version to the suite of Qumana blogging tools.

We’ve made major improvements in the stability of the editor, notably, Qumana no longer freezes when a user is moving an image around in the editor, and the quirkiness some users have experienced when dragging and dropping text onto the DropPad and thus into the editor has been fixed. 

The rather annoying problem with blockquotes has also been fixed, too.

On the font front, you can now set not only the face (we list the common fonts all users will have), the size, and the colour!

Finally, we have made it easier for the average user to add video clips and other web-based objects or services that use HTML snippets into their posts... whether it be a video, a podcast, an mp3 ... you get the drift. Look for the blue button between the Insert Link and Check Spelling buttons (represented by a closed brackets icon to denote HTML code).

           ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We've also been reading a lot about Windows Live writer and thinking what it's appearance means for us.

We think it means two things. We'll be glad to hear your opinion, too.

First, it seems a clear signal that Microsoft is declaring that "blogging is NOT a fad" .. the release of MS Live Writer helps to raise awareness of the need and market for such applications. We believe this is good news for us .. and for Ecto, Blogjet, Zoundry, Performancing, w.bloggar, Marsedit and other similar applications. May the best amongst us find traction, niches and ways to prosper.

Second, it sharpens the issues about what adds value to blogging … what is it that reflects users' input, doesn't waste time, or valuable resources, and still delivers a -free product that offers use and value over and above the basics.

We’re proud of this new version of Qumana, which offers greater ease of use, stability and reliability and the ability to post video clips to a wide range of blog platforms with one or two clicks.  Thanks to Ianiv Schweber and ou suppliers / colleagues in the development process …

Download the most recent version of Qumana V.3.0.0-b5   here.

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At ZDNet, an interesting exploration of the issues of the kinds of value created by some of the leading Web 2.0 applications / web services.

Read the whole article here.

YouTube, Digg, Wikipedia: Can Web 2.0 play hardball?
Posted by Donna Bogatin @ 12:50 pm


Tim O'Reilly says, in his 2005 treatise “What is Web 2.0?”:

The architecture of the Internet, and the World Wide Web, as well as of open source software projects like Linux, Apache, and Perl, is such that users pursuing their own 'selfish' interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct.

Web 2.0 users, and others in the Web 2.0 community, seem to be pursuing their own “selfish” interests more and more.

The end product sought, however, aims for individual value, or corporate value, rather than for "collective value."

Tags: Web 2.0, Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, social software

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Bob Young was the founder of RedHat, one of the original examples of putting open source software to work in a business model that made sense.  With the money he made from the sale of RedHat, he set off to build Lulu.com, which offers writers a vehicle with which to publish, promote and distribute their work without necessarily using the existing infrastructure of agents, publishers and bookstores.

Evidently, according to this article from today's Globe and Mail, he's about to enter the video clip business, offering producers / creators the ability to create, promote and distribute their work.

The basics of the business model are outlined in this snippet from the article, below:

LULU.TV enters viral video field
Globe and Mail Update


Bob Young, founder of LULU.com, has announced LULU.TV, for video makers to profit from content as they deliver ad-free entertainment and provide a platform which emerging talent can exploit to further their video and movie-making careers.

LULU.TV has engineered a model for paying content providers. Creatives ("shareholders") pay $14.95 a month; 80 per cent of the total payments go into a pool. The pool is split up at the end of the month, with each contributor receiving a share of the pool based on his or her share of the total viewings of the videos on the site.

Tags: RedHat, Lulu.com, Lulu.tv, video sharing, content creation, Web 2.0, business models

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One click on DropPad ... open Qumana

Type in title of blog post

Type body of message ...

Open "Source View".

Paste html snippet where the cursor is flashing ...

Posts that contain Qumana per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Return to WYSIWYG ... check and adjust line spacing if desired ...

Add italics ... check Categories for this post.

Insert Q-Ads text advertising if desired ... place cursor where you want the ad, click on "Insert Ad", type a keyword (use the customizable banner designer to customize ad), then click OK.

Check which blog you're posting to ...

Add Technorati Tags by clicking on "Insert Tags"

Type tags into dialog box, click OK.

Take a last look ...

Click on "Publish Post".

Presto !

Tags: Qumana, offline blog editor, easy blogging, ease of use, usability

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I realize that you need power to run computers. Obviously, after your computer's battery runs out and you can't recharge it, it's hard to keep composing blog posts ...

When there are power outages or other related systems outages that affect the Web but you still have computer power for your individual machine, you can still compose blog posts with Qumana, and save them to be posted later.

Silicon Valley gone dark day #2

George Ou reports that 100-degree weather coupled with widespread power outages have made for a miserable weekend in the Valley. George spent his afternoon assembling a gas generator to power his AC, refrigerator, DSL modem, wireless router and laptop...

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When will that marker be reached ?

Tonight Technorati states it is tracking 49.4 million blogs, so I assume it will be towards the end of this coming week that the 50 million mark will be passed.  Friday ?  Next weekend ?

Certainly many of them will have been abandoned some time ago, or shortly after being created, and no doubt many are moribund or generally inactive ... but Technorati is still tracking them.

And it's interesting .. and useful for us ... to note that they are still being created at a rapid clip.

It was on September 18th, 2004 that I posted that Technorati had just crossed the 4 million blog mark.

So, there have been at least 46 million new blogs created in just over 22 months by the time the 50 million mark is reached on Technorati. That's a heckuva growth rate.

You'd think that at least one or two million of the bloggers who have kept on blogging would want a simple, elegant, effective and free offline blogging tool ... like Qumana.

If for no other reason (though making blogging easier is a big benefit) than to avoid the frustration they seem to experience when whatever blog platform they are using experiences a service outage (which is at least as frustrating as the dropped call cell-phone experience that is now such a problem that the cell industry's advertising focuses on the issue).

I also wonder how many of the 50 million are from countries such as Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Central American countries, California ;-), France (and Quebec ... technically not a country, but ...), Holland and Germany.  Bloggers who blog in those languages now have access to Qumana operational in their native language (German coming in  a day or two).  Good thing Qumana plays nice with Typepad ... they have a growing base of users in those European countries / languages.

Surely more than a handful will want to try it out.

Tags: Qumana, Qumana Spanish, Qumana French, Qumana Dutch, growth of blogging, Typepad, Typepad Europe

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