Gail Marsella: Shop 'til You Drop

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 03:19:40 GMT

Only $9.99 a month. Over 40,000 Titles. No Late Fees. Try it for Free!.

Netflix.com - Only $9.99 a month. Over 40,000 Titles. No Late Fees. Try it for Free!

Netflix is offering unlimited one at a time rentals for $9.99/month. You can choose 3 out at a time for $17.99/month as well.
[More Stuff 4 Less Bargain Blog]

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 12:53:20 GMT

The Best Games You Haven't Played. This year was great for gamers -- so great that many deserving games were all but buried. Chris Kohler counts down the sleeper hits of 2004. [Wired News]

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 02:51:37 GMT

Get out those sneakers, babe:

Even Couch Potatoes May Have Been Born to Run. Humans evolved into the way they look today probably because of the need to cover long distances, scientists said today. By By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. [NYT > Home Page]

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 21:23:04 GMT

Swap That Ugly Sweater, Online. Web bazaars like eBay are geared up for a 'Get What You Really Wanted' campaign. And on community sites like Craigslist, postings for holiday shopping and after-holiday unloading have tripled. [Wired News]

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 13:01:52 GMT

Gamer Dad: Gaming with Children
http://www.gamerdad.com/
"Game reviews from a parental perspective." Includes a holiday shopping guide, as well as articles, interviews, previews of upcoming releases, a message board, and more.

[Neat New Stuff]

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:28:09 GMT

Another new, clued record label

Techdirt writes up another MP3 and customer friendly startup label, Loca, and comments:
...sounds like more new music labels are going with this approach. At this point, they're all small time operations - but it's a step in the right direction. It will take time, but these new labels that are both artist and consumer friendly are going to be what kills the old time recording industry...
What he said. And you know, there's another way to get to the critical mass platform that I foresee: a roll-up. Some of you M&A artistes might want to be keeping a list... [Due Diligence]

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:18:16 GMT

Score one for the good guys...

Register. Archive.org to host the independent music titles stored in collections in the now defunct MP3.com.

"Our approach is to provide unlimited bandwidth forever for free," he told us today. "There's no amount of material that frightens us. MP3.com's collection is five terabytes. No sweat. We've been adding forty terabytes a month." Kahle added that the archive.org had plenty of bandwidth too.
[John Robb's Weblog]

Sat, 22 Nov 2003 04:14:03 GMT

EBay Sellers Generous With Junk. Sometimes the crap you think is fit for a charity is also viewed as crap by the charity. Now, eBay has set up a way for sellers to get rid of their castoffs while still helping nonprofits. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 01:07:36 GMT

Now you can subscribe to custom feeds that find new stuff for sale on eBay. [Scripting News]

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 01:06:53 GMT

Fry's is giving away the Myst 10th Anniversary set free with Uru. I told you preordering was for suckers. I noticed in the readme that Uru uses Speex, Vorbis, and OpenSSL. [Hack the Planet]

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 16:46:19 GMT

Carinfo.com: New car prices, new cars, car buying tips http://carinfo.com
"Car Information provided by consumer advocate & auto expert Mark Eskeldson, author of What Car Dealers Don't Want You to Know." Includes money saving tips for buying and leasing cars, new and used car quotes, used vehicle history reports, auto repair secrets, and more.

[Neat New Stuff]

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 16:31:06 GMT

YAMS: Yet Another Music Service.

Downloadable Music Floodgates Opening

"Reports say EMI, one of the world's largest music companies, is about to open its entire catalog for downloading to subscribers of wippit.com. Apple's newly Windlows-friendly iTunes system will reportedly add 50,000 new songs next week, and Napster's new legit download service launches on Wednesday." [Lost Remote]

Wow, these services are popping up like weeds. I still say they need to start differentiating themselves more, with lyrics, printable CD covers, listener reviews, and the like. I'm really surprised Apple hasn't figured this out yet, because they already have such a rabid, built-in community.

Wippit's main page touts "unlimited MP3 downloads for $49 a year (or $6.50 a month) plus 20 ringtones and a promise of no spyware or adware. That's a discounted price for the moment, as the site says the cost is normally $80 per year. It's also different from the major label services because it's a P2P engine. right now they have 60,000 titles from 96 record labels, so maybe they have some indie stuff that the others don't.

I don't see any mention of DRM or copyright protection in a quick skim of the site. Maybe I'll play around with it this weekend and see. But as I noted at the A/V panel this week, these online music services are the future, and librarians should start to track how they work, if only to understand what our patrons will be using in a few years.
[The Shifted Librarian]

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 11:28:10 GMT

The Little Audible Engine that Could.

Excellent - Audible now has The Time Traveler's Wife (sorry I can't link directly to it, but the one goofy thing about their site is the URLs)! In other Audible news, the New York Times again takes notice of the consumer-friendly company that could.

Audible Service Could Teach Music Industry a Lesson

"Reasonably priced secure downloads. Compensation for writers and artists. Peaceful alliances between publishers and online distributors.

A utopian vision for the music industry? Perhaps. But that approach, which appears to be the goal of Apple Computer's iTunes music store and others like it, is already a reality for delivering audio books and other spoken word offerings over the Internet, as created by Audible, a small company in Wayne, N.J....

On Thursday, Audible's reach grew with the announcement that thousands of hours of its offerings will be available from Apple's iTunes music store....

Persuading audio book publishers and radio producers to allow him to sell their content online was not easy at first, Mr. Katz said, particularly because many publishers were still feeling the sting of failed experiments with the CD-ROM. But unlike the record industry, book publishers agreed to share their rights long before a free alternative like Napster or Kazaa came along to make copyright violations as easy as clicking a mouse." [The New York Times]

Of course, I'm a big Audible fan because they are so willing to work with libraries. More on this soon....
[The Shifted Librarian]

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 11:41:46 GMT

Cendyne 48x12x48 Internal CD-RW Drive $19 And No Rebates.

OfficeMax.com - Cendyne 48x12x48 Internal CD-RW Drive $19 And No Rebates.

OfficeMax is clearing out the Cendyne 48x12x48 Internal CD-RW Drive Item# 20182491 for just $19. Get your order over $50 for free shipping. Here are some free after rebate items to pad your order.
[More Stuff 4 Less Bargain Blog]

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 15:41:07 GMT

More Play for the Heavenly Jukebox.

The Heavenly Jukebox Cont'd

"Tonight I went to a dinner party at some friend's house, and in between the cold dry sake and an obscene amount of yellow tail and hamachi, there was more music than we knew what to do with. These are friends that until six months ago, had been sampling all sorts of free stuff on P2P networks. Not all of it was good or complete, but they buy a lot of CD's and wanted to try stuff out first, and they wanted the convenience of mixing up thousands of songs for days of play, or a few seconds as the case may be.

Anyway, tonight, we played around with Rhapsody which was totally great and lots of fun. And my friends are proving my point that if you make it easy, cool, give decent information about the music and make it cheap, people will abandon the free stuff for something much more professional. Sorting by artist, title, genre, album, play lists we made up, we streamed Thievery Corp, Gotan and Ladytron through the first course, and then went from cool jazz, to Chopin and Mozart for the second, and then we veered into Bah-bra and Barry Gibb, the GoGo's (who can resist skidmarks on my heart!), Supertramp, Artie Shaw, Radiohead, Elton John, Frank, Ben Folds Five (Kate!), Jon Cutler, the Replacements, for about three hours of dancing, everybody was in on it, clicking and sampling. There is also stuff you can't search for or directly stream, like the Beatles, on their 'radio stations.' " [bIPlog]

Heh - it's not just me and Kailee grooving with Rhapsody. I still think the service could leapfrog to the front of the pack if it would just start offering single downloads without requiring the user to burn a full CD first and without using Windows Media Player to do it. The weird thing is that Rhapsody trusts you to burn the CD - I haven't found any invasive DRM yet, so if they'd just trust me (and the rest of their customers) with the single downloads, I'd go back to purchasing music.

The Heavenly Jukebox is indeed on the doorstep....
[The Shifted Librarian]

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 15:33:37 GMT

Overstock.com Adds Travel to Its Wares. Overstock.com, an Internet retailer that sells surplus merchandise from other companies, will add travel to its list of products. [New York Times: Business]

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 02:23:49 GMT

Dan Gillmor has cancelled his eMusic subscription, but I'm still hanging in there. I don't mind if I'm limited to a certain number of downloads a month, as long as the price is fair (works out to about a quarter a song). After all, if I wanted to over the last few months, I could have downloaded EMusic's entire collection - $9/month really doesn't seem like enough for that.

Why I've Cancelled my EMusic Subscription. I was becoming a fan of EMusic, the MP3 download service that a) treated people like non-thieves and b) had... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 03:04:37 GMT

The Music: A summary for individual action

There's more to come in our business analysis of the future of music, but I wanted to take one post for my own summary of the consequences for individual action of Kevin Law's analysis of the industry.

Preferrably, boycott the RIAA labels and acts entirely, and let the industry collapse of its own weight and ineptness. If you need any more reasons, try this. There are lots of non-label acts, festivals, concerts, CDs and MP3s available. The production isn't as slick, but you can find astonishing quality, and have the satisfaction of putting the money straight into the artists' hands.
If you feel you must patronize label acts, buy digital tracks online, and hasten the decay of the the channel for physical media embodiments of music. Apple and Dell Computer may have their own issues at time, but they pale in comparison to the corrupting influence of the RIAA.
If you really need tangible media, buy online. A virtual channel like Amazon is quite capable of adapting its business model to selling digital tracks, and won't fight the vicious rearguard actions of the physical channel. Update: Or, as Tom Walker writes to suggest: "...buy from small independent used stores. That way we keep small businesses running, and our money doesn't get back to the RIAA since they already got their profits from the initial buy."
If you really must buy a CD in a real store, go to Wal-Mart. Help collapse the influence of Tower Records and other music specialists that are holding back the industry. While you're at it, consider moving your video business to Netflix or another online source. Kevin's analysis makes it clear that the Tower's of the world are near the root of the music industry's retrograde tendencies. Let the air out of their tires.
[Due Diligence]

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 03:01:29 GMT

Still a good bargain - $.25 a song...

EMusic buyer to kill off unlimited download offer. Puts limits on subscriptions [The Register]

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 12:47:12 GMT

Get a load of this report from Reuters...I was just howling...

German women fed up with their partners' grumbling on weekend shopping trips can now dump them at a special kindergarten for men offering beer and entertainment.

"The women are issued a receipt for their partners when they hand them in and can pick them up again when they return to us later," Alexander Stein, manager of the 'Nox Bar' in the nothern city of Hamburg told Reuters today.

The men are given a name badge on arrival and for 10 Euros ($11.80) they get two beers, a hot meal, and televised football and games.

Read the full article at abcnews.com: Kids, Beer, and Football

{GM - Bone Lace}

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 02:51:08 GMT

Amen, brother...anyone know how to get the new RSS feed for TechnoCulture?

Out of the U.S. and Out of Luck to Download Music Legally. Online music-selling services have far fewer restrictions than they used to, but they do not necessarily travel well. [New York Times: Technology]

This really drives European friends crazy -- and what drives them even crazier is that I have a US credit card so can sign up for things like Apple's Music Store anyway...! But all that aside -- this story fits right in with something I was going to write about this morning. No, not a crabby rant about how the RIAA needs a better business plan than suing its potential customers.

Instead, I wanted to note that I spent a happy evening last night downloading music from the absolutely wonderful eMusic (after writing my story on how eBay is coming to Dublin, but bureaucracy in the Irish govt and the IDA (Irish Development Agency), which tried to force them to go outside Dublin, nearly lost them this investment. I'll put the piece up on the blog later but if you already subscribe to Ireland.com you can read it at the link above).

But back to eMusic. While this service does not carry the big labels, it has an extraordinary array of independent labels and back catalogues of, in particular, jazz and classical music. It even has some very mainstream British acts like Badly Drawn Boy. You pay $9.99 a month for a year (slightly more for 3 or 6 month memberships) and you get unlimited downloads; all can be burned unlimited times, transferred, etc. I signed up for a year and have long since had the value of my entire membership fee (within two months), compared to if I had bought albums.

I was once a serious music buyer, and loved experimenting with new sounds across all genres. Then along came CDs and their ridiculous pricing. I stopped buying all but a minimal amount of music -- for a good 20 years. RIAA, do you hear that? You basically lost me as a customer for YOUR clients, the musicians, whom you are supposed to represent, for 20 years because of the price gouging habits of the industry you represent.

In between Apple's Music Store and eMusic (and especially eMusic), I have rediscovered the pure joy of experimenting. And with eMusic especially, where I have no additional outlay to make, I am hearing real music again from smaller labels that can take risks -- not the palaver that the main labels have been spewing out (also making me not want to buy much but classical and jazz, where I know I am getting value and pleasure, for the bulk of 20 years). You can find a huge variety of artists in all genres. New music, back catalogue, old classics. I really encourage anyone who enjoys music to try out eMusic, which has a free introductory offer where you can download loads of MP3s before deciding whether to join. Then I'll bet you'll join.

Today I will have great fun listening to what I downloaded last night -- some sultry jazz singers, an incredible LP by Tony Bennett and the great, great jazz pianist Bill Evans (which I know will become one of my treasures), Stereolab, Ricky Skaggs, Mozart's Requiem recorded by the Vienna Philharmonic and Mozart piano concertos by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Tom Waits, oh, so much, much more. eMusic gets it, totally.

TechnoCulture

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 02:32:13 GMT

If you resolutely insist on using Microsoft products, this can't be beat...

Microsoft Office 2003 Standard for Students and Teachers 87.94.

Amazon.com - Microsoft Office 2003 Standard for Students and Teachers 87.94 After Rebate.

Amazon has Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers selling for $124.99 with a $50 rebate (exp. 9/30/03) making your cost $74.99 with free shipping and no taxes for most. Purchase this product before November 30 and Microsoft will upgrade you to the new Microsoft Office 2003 Standard for Students and Teacher for the cost of shipping ($12.95). You must surrender a copy of your reciept and your box top or manual's title page from the XP version along with this form and your payment. Amazon is currently asking $134.99 for Microsoft Office 2003 Standard for Students and Teachers on pre-order so the upgrade route vie XP is much cheaper.
[More Stuff 4 Less Bargain Blog]

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:22:24 GMT

Bravo! May I also suggest eMusic.com, where you can find thousands of classic older pieces as well as new recordings by artists smart enough to control their own creations.

Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL. If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them. [kuro5hin.org]

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 00:50:07 GMT

A Catalog of Independent Videos.

BuyIndies.com

"BuyIndies.com is a community to buy and sell movies on VHS, DVD, 16mm film, etc. BuyIndies.com offers buyers a wide selection of over 45,000 independent, educational and hard-to-find titles in a central location and sellers the opportunity to promote and sell their films to a national audience. BuyIndies.com, Inc. is a privately held corporation which was incorporated in 1999." [Thanks, Silus!]

This site is interesting because it's like the EMusic.com of video. What's even more intriguing, though, is that they offer special logins for schools and libraries and a parallel site for educators:

"BuyIndies.com has created a special mode for educational buyers (called "edu mode") to weed out all the consumer-only titles. This allows you to view only titles which are available for educational purchase which includes public performance rights. All searches and browses you do after turning the edu mode on will only call up educational titles. You can always click the "edu" at the top of the page to return here and turn it off."

Definitely worth a look.
[The Shifted Librarian]

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 00:42:45 GMT

What I want to know is when they're going to show up in my small city...

Food Shopping in the Fastest Lane. The founder of FreshDirect, the hot online grocery, believes he has found a way to satisfy a city's passion for good food minus the drudgery of actually shopping for it. By Jennifer Steinhauer. [New York Times: Technology]