Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Wall of Fame: Napster vs iTunes

napster

The Gadget show's wall of fame again and this time its the battle of music download sites. Thankful this time they picked the right one. Napster.

In the red corner: Napster. A bit of a rebel it shook the music industry to its core and changed the way we thought about music for ever. Devised by an 18-year-old college student, Napster launched in 1999. It combined a music search function with a file-sharing system, which effectively meant you had access to all the music on all the hard drives of computers connected to Napster. It was bit dodgy, infringing on copyright law, and the music industry had it shut down in 2001. But Napster lives on in an online music store, and it’s the legacy of the original site that makes it so great.

In the blue corner: iTunes! Proclaiming to be the daddy of online music, iTunes is like having a massive music and video warehouse in your bedroom. It originally launched in 2001 as a digital music player before it converted to an online store. It makes transferring music to your iPod easy as! And it’s this simplicity that’s led to its dominance of the online music world with over four billion songs sold!

Putting my hate for the itunes store and its locked in ecosystem a side, itunes would never have come about unless Napster had come on the scene. Napster took all the risks and got finally sued so much that it went legit. iTunes has a massive audience but its just a large download store and isn't ground breaking. Even the removal of DRM came late to iTunes. No doubt Napster deserves the position on the wall of fame.

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Northern Exposure

I don't mind being asked about my time in Manchester, I've come to really enjoy Manchester even with its changeable weather. So changeable that I usually keep my sunglasses on my head even when its raining. Anyhow I was interviewed by Ariel which is BBC's internal weekly newspaper about my move to Manchester. As usual what was printed does not truly reflect what was said. For example at the end, its writen that there are things you couldn't do in London such as hold meetings in the bar. Well actually no, I said there's lots you can not do in London such as host external usergroups from around the region in our bar and meeting rooms after hours. The picture isn't too bad, but I did think there were many better ones which reflected Manchester better that a tatty billboard with club flyers over it. We did shoot pictures inside the bars on deansgate locks but instead they picked that one. in Anyway its done and I'm left feeling that lack of trust again for mainstream media. If your interesting in reading the whole piece, you can read it here.

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TEDxLiverpool

TEDx Liverpool

TEDx Liverpool happened yesterday (Aug 7th) at Liverpool's ICDC. Being the first one of five is no mean feat but the TEDx Liverpool team pulled it off nicely. The line up included Steve Clayton from Microsoft, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker.it and Alison Gow from Liverpool's Daily Post. The concept of TEDx is that there are live speakers crossed with pre-recorded talks from the real TED events. The choice of videos was good and mixed well with the live speakers, I did wonder if it would work as smoothly but it did. I would say there was about 100+ people at the event, but a lot of people did drop out for one reason or another. So anyway the friendly challenge of one upping each other is off to a great start. I took some nice pictures of the event.

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The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts

Jason Calacanis has wrote a extra long essay about why the love affair with Apple is over. Its a good read and hopefully adds to the mounting public pressure. The essay is broken dowin into 5 main points.

  1. Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices
  2. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications
  3. Draconian App Store policies that are, frankly, insulting
  4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone
  5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone

Of course I've been writing similar things for a while but its always good to hear Mac fans coming to there senses.

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The fiery warm snap mix

Another mix, this time on the more chilled side of the trance spectrum. It was recorded at about midnight while sitting on my balcony watching the trains go by. It was a warm night and I was sipping a Diet Ginger beer while mixing. Its a good mix, lots of lesser known tunes with some new ones. I did make one mistake in the middle where I pressed the pause button on the wrong track but otherwise its all good. Let me know what you guys think… The artwork for mix cover is from – Burn Blue under CC licence of course.

  2. She wants him (Blake Jarrells Panty Dropper Remix) – Moussa Clark & Terrafunka
  3. Fallen (Gabriel & Dresden Anti-Gravity Remix) – Sarah McLachlan
  4. Made of Love – Ferry Corsten feat Betsie Larkin
  5. Body of Conflict /images/emoticons/laugh.gifub mix) – Cosmic Gate
  6. Isn't Life Wonderful (Flat 6 mix) – Alex D'ella vs E-Bop Allstars
  7. Into Something – Richard Durand
  8. Language (Santiago Nino Dub Tech Mix) – Hammer and Bennett
  9. Minimalistix (Club mix) – Close Cover
  10. Unprepared – Marco V
  11. Silver Bath – Plastic Boy
  12. The Situation (Liquid life remix) – A Situation
  13. Radio Crush (extended mix) – Ferry Corsten
  14. Can't Sleep – Marcel Wood Feat Elles De Graaf
  15. It's time (Ferry Corsten's flashover mix) – Ferry Corsten

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ESPN needs to get on the Cluetrain

ESPN Tells Employees They Can Only Tweet About ESPN, as reported by Mashable. Shocking stuff I would say. Telling your employees that they must talk about only your business is bad news. It feels unhuman. I'm so happy that the BBC are more forward looking than this. Here's some cluetain's which seem to fit.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

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The new look Kdenlive

New look Kdenlive

When I upgraded to the latest version of Kdenlive a free software non-linear editor which runs on every platform except windows. I was honestly shocked, it was clean, crisp and professional. There's little doubt that open source and free software has somewhat left user experience and interface design concerns closer to the bottom of the pile but this is radically changing. I'm hoping to show some of the new look applications which are worthy of another look and your attention, starting with the new look Kdenlive.

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The only platform that really works is the internet

Thanks to Dave Crossland for pointing me to Dave Winer's view on the iphone as a developer platform and its problematic app store model.

The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.

I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.

Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is also useless.

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Google reader take over all…

Interesting to see this in my email today. I'm now going to reconsider my rss reader choice after reading this…

You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator's best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.

As part of this transition, NewsGator Online users will need to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. In addition, NewsGator will no longer support the free versions of NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, and NewsGator’s RSS features (Shared Clipping Feed, Blogroll, Ratings, Headlines, Browser Toolbar, and Desktop Notifier). NewsGator will also continue to support FeedDemon (for Windows) and NetNewsWire (for Mac and iPhone) for all customers – free or paid. If you have questions as to whether or not you qualify as a paying enterprise customer, please contact your account manager.

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