If you haven't read this story yet, go check out the serious blunder made by the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America). I guess if you pay dues in this organization you are supporting computer development efforts aimed to crawl through internet servers scouring them for music mp3s.
[...] Last Thursday, the RIAA sent a stiff copyright warning to Penn State's department of astronomy and astrophysics. Department officials at first were puzzled, because the notification invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and alleged that one of its FTP sites was unlawfully distributing songs by the musician Usher. The letter demanded that the department "remove the site" and delete the infringing sound files.
But there weren't any files on the Penn State server.
[...] Except, that is, when Soccio realized two things. The department has on its faculty a professor emeritus named Peter Usher whose work on radio-selected quasars the FTP site hosted. The site also had a copy of an a capella song performed by astronomers about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which Penn State helped to design. The combination of the word "Usher" and the suffix ".mp3" had triggered the RIAA's automated copyright crawlers [...]
Another tactic the RIAA is exploring would send offending code to the servers or the computers of those downloading illegal files. Though this approach might have serious consequences for the record companies.
[...] A more malicious program, dubbed "freeze," locks up a computer system for a certain duration ? minutes or possibly even hours ? risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too [...]
An organization that is expending its resources on this type of effort amazes me. Why won't the RIAA wake up and work with its members to develop and support an online digital music policy that flanks the moves of offenders and offers a better alternative. For example, the Apple developed iTunes Music Store. Who was the initiator in this effort? Apple. Do you think the RIAA is knocking on doors of companies that would have the ability to develop a service that would not offend those with an affinity to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act?
I guess this must be the American Way. If you can't come to terms with your customers -- sue them.
2:19:12 PM permalink | | trackback disabled due to spam
When I first started my advertising agency in the late 80's I had an opportunity to develop a number of corporate publications for emerging technology companies, among others. Some were true custom magazines, others were traditional newsletters. My team and I worked hard to forge a strategic approach to this extremely tactical vehicle. Whereas our clients were bent on utilizing the vehicle as a mouthpiece that would have been self-aggrandizing, boasty and blatantly promotional, we fought hard to encourage them to let it be a voice of objectivity that provided additional value while reinforcing our clients brand or core message. Many of our clients bought into the concept. We worked hard to find information that would be of interest to our clients' customers while at the same time related to our clients' products and/or services. These were in affect, analog blogs. Or, as I refer to them today, anablogs. That is, they were not marketing vehicles in the traditional sense that products were discussed, new products were promoted or case studies of customers' using our clients products. Rather, they discussed issues related to technologies our clients were involved in.
I remember an article I wrote on HDTV in 1989. The title was "HDTV: Consortium or Confusion". At the time the major television equipment manufacturers were battling over a number of standards that would ultimately pave the way so that the world could ultimately realize the promise of HDTV. A consortium of manufacturers was attempted. And then failed. Funny. And as a side note, look at consumer electronics today. We still have divergent standards and products on the market are far from mature. The article I wrote discussed non of the clients' products. Our client, a major distributor of electrical components including Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Siemens, Fujitsu and others.
I watched the custom publishing market rise and then fall. American Express split off a business unit dedicated to developing corporate publications for itself and other companies. Others followed suit.
Today, we have weblogs. And while considered primarily a personal, non-promotional and egalitarian "tool", you can be assured that corporate America has its eyes focused closely on what has become a pop-culture trend that crosses a number of demo-graphical boundaries. Talking to a close friend who worked with me when I was running an office of a nationally ranked web-development/interactive advertising business, asked me well isn't this really a website? Hesitating to get into the whole "what is a weblog?" conversation, I replied, "it's what all websites wanted to be." I meant that they'd be updated on a regular basis, contain content that was of interest to a select or targeted audience, and were easy to update and change.
So when I followed Docs link courtesy of David Weinberger, I read with interest the article with, that had as Doc put, "a title so blah you'd think Microsoft's product namers had coined it", Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters . Key to note in the title here is "Blog Technologies". And if I quickly run through the subheads of Todd Brehe's article, you'll find that the benefits he espouses are those benefits we used to tout to our customers in the 90's trying to convince them to allocate budget and resources to internet initiatives:
Blogs Are The "Real Voice"
Blogs Are Simple
Blogs Empower The Individual
Blogs Empower The Enterprise
In my conversation with my associate, I eventually had to sum it up in the simplest format possible while trying to explain blogs and blog technologies. I said, "Content Management Made Simple." I went on to discuss RSS, XML-RPC and the weblog options available.
Point is, Weblogs may have succeeded where corporate marketing websites have failed. That is to communicate a voice that is focused, clear and representative of the organization, to establish a relationship with customers that goes beyond the traditional buyer-seller transaction, to consistently update and provide content that is interesting and provides incentives to customers to return on a regular basis and provides added value through a feedback system that is open and unedited where ideas, concepts and opinions are discussed openly and freely.
I welcome and encourage corporate and consumer marketing companies to embrace weblog technologies and concepts.
2:01:15 AM permalink | | trackback disabled due to spam
Ok. Well, I really mean News Is Crappy. Have you checked out this news portal? Their tagline is "Policitcally Correct Is For Politicians." Very cool, fun and worth checking out on a weekly or more frequent basis. If you use an RSS news reader, here's the RSS feed. [thanks to Brent Simmons]
1:20:13 AM permalink | | trackback disabled due to spam
I've anxiously been testing and reading about the quality, performance and size compromises when switching from MP3 to AAC for encoding CDs. Apple's new iTunes Music Store has set a 128k bit rate standard using AAC. Some reports I've read claim that the music downloaded from the iTunes site seem to have been encoded using a higher quality AAC encoder than the one provided with iTunes 4.0 or QuickTime 6.2. I'm anxious to do some simple testing at this end.
But a great, yet simple and easy to understand review by Gunnar Van Vliet
reveals some interesting notes about the differences between encoders. Especially interesting to me was the fact that Gunnar finds that at higher bit rate the 128, the MP3 actually sounds better than AAC. Yet, at the 128 standard of the iTunes Music Store, the AAC is head and shoulders above MP3.
For me, I've been encoding MP3s at 256 VBR using the iTunes encoder at highest quality. This yields significantly larger file sizes, but at least they're playable on my iPod. Gunnar suggests that the file sizes may be comparable to AIFF (CD-quality) are similar and that anyone encoding at this right may as well simply save at AIFF. But this is a moot point since I don't believe the iPod will play AIFF files.
I'd be interested in hearing any readers' experience with the AAC, MP3 and other encoders and would like to post a follow up review here sometime later in May. Reply on the comments section at the bottom of this post or to my email here.
1:12:18 AM permalink | | trackback disabled due to spam
![[Valid RSS]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0108247/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
