The Laszlo SoundBlox MP3 player is starting to spread. Now it's on my TypePad blog. :-)
I gotta get Jeremy Allaire to put one of these in his blog! Maybe Harold or Noah want one too?
And wait till you see the accompanying PhotoBlox and ReviewsBlox!
11:53:01 PM comment [].I've had blogger's block lately. As more people read my blog, I realize that I am writing for larger and larger audience. Just about every time I post something, I get thoughtful comments and email from a variety of perspectives. I realize that post early/post often is probably the best policy for blogging, but the rigor in which entries are discussed and the increasing percentage of people who I meet who have read my blog cause me to try to blog about things which interesting yet not something where I'm not likely to have to spend a lot of time defending myself. The fact is, I'm becoming more and more conservative about what I blog.
danah boyd often talks about the collapsing of the facets of our identity. (As I continue to collapse her context by linking to her constantly.) She quotes an article about "Mom Finds Out About Blog". This relates to Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" where he talks about how we perform differently to different audiences presenting different facets of our identity. The problem with many blogs is that the audience includes so many different communities of people that it collapses the facets of one's identity and requires you to choose a rather shallow facet which becomes your public identity. For instance, I know that people in the US State Department, friends from my Chicago DJ days, my employees, my family, 
thoughtful conservatives from Texas, cypherpunk friends, foreign intelligence officers, Japanese business associates and close friends all read my blog occasionally. In real life, I present a very different facet of my identity to these different communities, but on my blog I have to imagine how all of them will react as a craft these entries. None of them get the depth that I am able to present when I am performing for them directly. So, although I am exposing many personal thoughts such as my decision to quit drinking, the depth of my identity is becoming shallow because the context is collapsed. Most of the truly thoughtful comments I have received about my drinking have been in email and IM and I am sure my blog will not help me discover my inner goofball.
Halley writes about intimacy. What does it mean? I think intimacy relates to the Robin Dunbar's magic number 150. At this moment there are 87 people hanging out on #joiito and 216 people in my instant messenger buddy list (some are the same people). On the other hand, I have 490 connections in LinkedIn, have 510 phone numbers in my cell phone and get about 1000 new years cards. On my blog, I get about 13,000 unique sessions (30,000 page views) per day. Today, I attended a fund-raising meeting for a non-profit, and a political campaigner said that generally, one was expected to have to shake 50,000 hands to get elected.
Ross Mayfield broke the networks down into political, social and creative at 1000's, 150 and 12, but my feeling is that the political layer is 10's of thousands and next layer is business at 500 and social at 150 and creative at 12. This is not scientific, but just my personal observation. If this is true, this blog is approaching the political layer which explains why I feel
that I get more business done on LinkedIn, but I feel much more candid and happy on IRC and Chat and why I still really love dinner conversations most of all. I think that if you can manage the audience size and composition on your blog, you can tune it to any of these layers. Mena often talks about how blogs are more about normal people blogging with their friends than about pundits competing against the media. I would agree and think this may be more rewarding at an emotional level than taking your blog to the political level. What you have to be careful of is that you never know when you might suddenly become popular or when your mom might drop into your blog and your context will collapse around you. Managing your audience and the facets of your identity is a very difficult thing and navigating this has and always will be one of our biggest challenges both in the real world and online.
Blogging about not being able to blog...
Poor Joi - his popularity is cramping his style. Well at least he's true and honest to me. That's all I ask for from anybody. The truth.
The moment some glad handing, Hollywood, used care salesman type says: "let's do lunch" - then I know I'm in trioble. The other typical line is: "we only are investing in enterprise."
Well maybe those days are over, but there's one thing for sure - Joi will have a drink - again. Maybe on New Year's Eve - maybe 20 years from now - but once an addict, always an addict. I mean that in a nice way.
We can try and intellectualize our way out of our problems, manipulating our actions and behavior to suit our health - mental, physcial or economic - but you'll always go back to being - just you.
Change is constant, as the I Ching tells us, but we only know one of ourselves - at any one time. Sure we have LOTS o fmasks to don on, to hide behind or to use for special purposes or functions - but when I walk up to joi - I know I',m only gonna get one Joi - the real one.
So as Joi dumbs down his persona, going for only the lowest denominator, he'll still pick his battles, stand his ground and make his point on all teh right issues. But he'll be doing that less and less.
What I wanna know about is that new bath! Photos?
Marc Pincus goes on a rampage.
......and i want to add right now that i rarely vote and i'm proud of it. why? i cant tell you how many times i've heard my friends say (and i'm really hearing their parents and teachers) "if you dont vote, you dont deserve an opinion." bullshit. i didnt vote for Bush or Gore. i didnt want to support the fake fascade we comfortably call democracy.
10:03:23 PM comment [].
Monday, December 22 12:01 AM EST
Reviews: Digital Music Stores
Reviewing digital music stores is like reviewing a movie in production. During the few weeks I have worked on this review Musicmatch overhauled their music store pages and corrected a bug, Apple corrected an annoying "feature" of their jukebox, and Wal Mart opened their own music store. As companies compete for market share you can expect rapid changes from each of these services to stay competitive. New competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft would change the landscape even more. It should only be good news for music buyers.
I didn't start out this process with a desire to review all the music services, but as a desire to have a "legal" music collection. I found myself jumping from service to service to see what was offered, and found that there wasn't one met all my needs, but some were closer than others.
A few general notes about each service. All the songs that you buy have various licenses attached to it, and are in a protected format except for EMusic. Expecting the RIAA-backed services to give you unprotected files in the format you want is a bit unreasonable. I am aware the protection and the licenses can be easily violated, but that is not my desire nor the purpose of this review.
I used each of the services and bought music or subscribed to the service from each of them. Some of the services include digital music jukeboxes, which will be covered, but not the emphasis of the reviews. If you are looking for something to only play MP3s and nothing else then this is not your review. Also, all these service were tested on a Windows XP system with a broadband Internet connection. Not all choices are available on other operating systems. Services are only available to people in the US. We just can’t trust people in other countries yet.
Availability of songs that you want is probably the most important issue, but one that cannot be reviewed. I have listed the songs I bought from each service. Please, no comments about my musical tastes. There were several songs I looked for on each service that none of the services had. Most of them were songs from soundtracks. They were:
Self – Stay Home
Gary Jules – Mad World
Phish – Heavy Things
Howard Shore – Uruk Hai
Only Napster and EMusic carried Ana Ng by They Might Be Giants.
Musicmatch and Wal Mart did not have songs from Green Day or Tenacious D. Wal Mart also only had edited versions of songs with explicit lyrics.
What follows are reviews of each individual service including screenshots from each. Since each of us has different listening habits and tastes, I answer the questions like "How much does it cost?" and "Who would want this service?"
[Brian then goes onto into detail on each service - this is a MUST read!]
9:59:53 PM comment [].Monster.com's Something Network Service (Ross Mayfield). Monster.com launched their social networking service. Its an interesting selection of other’s ideas. There seems to be an orientation towards strangers introducing themselves to other strangers with nothing to underpin it except ratings. No social context or friend of a... [Many-to-Many]
It had to happen. Soon Match.com will have something - too.
Can't blame these guys for trying through - god bless um.
One thing I gotta say - I am sick and tired of telcos lying and putting out bullshit announcements like this! Why doesn't somebody sue these bastards?
Fiber to the home deployment schedule. Reuters: "Verizon said Monday that its initial [fiber] deployment plans involve about 1 million homes next year, with the pace potentially doubling in 2005."
So let's see. Verizon has 30 million residential customers. If they pass 1 million homes with fiber in 2004 and double that to 2 million per year in 2005, they'll light everyone up by 2020. Assuming they actually deploy this time, unlike prior telco fiber promises.
[Werblog]
Anybody wanna place on bet on whether they'll hit their goals? And what will they put through this fiber? Do they even know what fiber means?
Barlow on No Degrees of Separation. My main man JPB is playing with social software (actually, I think I first linked to him on Friendster like three or four months ago): An ecosystem is an information sorting engine.
Whether photons entering a rain forest or heat gradients entering the deep ocean, biological systems pass these differences back and forth among themselves, creating increasingly complex matrices of structure. Hence, Life.
And yet, the most complex information sorting system yet devised by humans, the Internet, remains relatively simple and flat, rather as life was before the Cambrian explosion. Every IP address is like a single celled animal, with larger critters yet to emerge.
I've been expecting to see more new forms of order in Cyberspace than I have so far and am always watchful for the substrates of connection that might support it as it emerges. Lately, I've been watching sites that seek to narrow and map the famous 6 degrees of separation, like Friendster, Tribes.Net, and LinkedIn.Com.
I'm not entirely sure these things are going anywhere truly interesting, but they are certainly diverting to observe from a sociological standpoint. The former two are like gigantic singles bars for Burning Man refugees, while the latter seems to function largely as a means to reduce professional surface tension between aspiring business types.
It occurs to me, however, that since I am eager to increase the personal connectivity among you BarlowFriendz and give you better opportunities to know one another without passing through me, these sites might be useful to us. (There is already a so-far fairly quiescent BarlowFriendz "tribe" on Tribes.Net.) At least, it feels worthy of an experiment. [The Social Software Weblog]
If Jason gets credit for Barlow joining Friendster - then I want some credit for his presence on Tribe. :-)
I'm also working on getting Barlow a coolio Laszlo MP3 Jukebox. I can't wait to hear "The Music Never Stopped", "Estimated Prophet " and "Money, Money" coming out of his blog page.
A pre-Christmas rush of news from the makers of TypePad and Movable Type. Notably:
Support for the Atom API. We've already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we'll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.
...
Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade. We have full-time engineering resources devoted to this new version, and we plan to have a beta release in early Q1 of 2004. [Finally Atom]
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote at XML 2003 and Jon Udell is covering it. one thing that struck me was Adam's statement: "things are not flat, they're complex." Which of course leads to (in Adam and Jon's mind) = XML.
But I'm saying: "now wait a minute guys!"
Yes XML can represent any complex structures, but not all. In fact - if you contrast XML to say rdf - XML comes out as the 'simple' approach, while rdf has been accused of (and rightly so) the COMPLEX technology.
So do we leave it at:
"The relational database is designed to serve up rows and columns," said BEA's Adam Bosworth in his keynote talk. "But our model of the world is documents. It's 'Tell me everything I want to know about this person or this clinical trial.' And those things are not flat, they're complex. Now we have the way to get not only the hospital records and prescriptions but also the doctor's write-ups."By the way, Adam Bosworth said a great many other interesting things in his XML 2003 talk. For those of you not inclined to watch this QuickTime clip -- and in particular for the search crawlers -- I would like to enter the following quote into the public record. ... [Jon's Radio]
The doctors and bankers will get that, just as the highway patrolmen already do. XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits. For the publishing geeks who started it all, it's a moment to savor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
10:19:52 AM comment [].
Happy holidays!
Anastasia snapped this picture of me in front of our holiday tree.
I am wearing the blojsom shirt David Czarnecki gave me.
Thanks David!
Updated: swaped in a better image.
[the iCite net development blog]
I just love good Jewish boys (or shall I say men) celebrating X-Mas. I married a Schiksa for my Family 2.0 unit - and we had fun lighting the Menorah, eating potatoe pancakes AND drinking eggnog (with my sons from Family 1.0!) Mix in the (duly required) suburbanite house lights, the X-Mas stockings and the Buddha outside - and it's a multi-cultural holiday seson.
Only question is: "what do we do to celebrate Kwanzaa?" I say "listen to Reggae!"
And for our Hindu brothers and sisters in India? I say "job out a project to Banglore!"
RSS Winterfest is a two-day conference, Jan 21-22, for people who use RSS. An audio conference that you participate in over the telephone. No charge, but registration is required. Should be very interesting. I'm doing the opening session, from a conference room at Harvard Law School, with people who are using RSS, and we'll talk about what they want to do with RSS, what they like about today's software, what they don't like; products and services they might want to buy. How do you feel about ads in RSS? How can schools, businesses, the government, better use RSS? I asked to lead a discussion about and with users so this doesn't turn into the usual Boy Kills Boy technology slugfest. Maybe RSS has something greater to contribute than just being the latest battleground for techies. [Scripting News]
It's always a good thing to listen to end-users - and how they want to use technology. I'll be there listening - carefully.
Jason Kottke has been putting his theory where his mouth is - in his current blogging patterns. Jason is combining blog posts, blog links and reviews - as three different kinds of micro-content - in one blogging flow.
Jason wrote about this.... and Anil praised him and I wanted to give it some time to see "how it felt". And the answer is "RIGHT ON!" By jove, I think he's got it!
As long as the different kind sof 'stuff' stand out - then the goal has been achieved - that of enablign end-user to personally publish MORE than just blog posts! Now we need to standardize on these enw micro-content extensions and get formal meta-data associated with each one.
Me thinks the delay in Atom has something to do with Jason's good buddy Anil and SixApart as announcing how their "lists" will be extended. I can't wait!
As long as we realize that Calendar events have their own juicy tidbits, while Recipes is important too (which I happen to know Jason't girlfiend Meg is just gonna LOVE having standardized!) - as well as Resumes (which is the honarary Phil Wolff micro-content!)
maybe we can even make photo galleries (especially contributory ones like the MirrorProject) standardized micro-content too - someday - but we can all look back to when Jason Kottke took it upon himself to say "dammit, I'm tired of having my micro-content all over the place! I want it in ONE place!"
Thanks Jason!
12:51:22 AM comment [].It was great meeting Seb in person. He's one of my favorite 'researchers'. It was also refreshing hearing him discuss the tradeoffs between sucking up to A-list bloggers versus sucking up to research wonks he needs to further his career. I say "fuck um all!"
Caution - names dropping below :-). 
Back from a short trip to San Francisco. There's an amazing concentration of interesting people there. Among others I got to meet and chat with Marc Canter (left), Eugene Eric Kim, and Jay "Santa" Cross. Many thanks to Jay and Internet Archivist / Bitizen Gordon Mohr (right) for showing me around! SF is indeed a very nice city, especially when your hometown is three feet deep in snow. If you go there for the first time, don't miss the view from twin peaks.
If you wanted to see many bloggers all in one place last Sunday, the 1-year anniversary party of Creative Commons was probably the best place to go. Most of "Joi's cool SF friends" were indeed there... Off the top of my head, I remember seeing Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, danah boyd, Matt Haughey, Wendy Seltzer, Gordon Mohr, Kevin Burton, Chris Lydon, Dan Gillmor, Rebecca Blood, Anil Dash, and obviously Larry Lessig. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Magnatune founder John Buckman and were there too.
The short movie Reticulum Rex (7 Mb, Flash) was unveiled that night. It's a well-crafted animation which recaps the good things that happened with CC over the last year. Short story: it's doing extremely well.
Too bad I had to leave early to catch a plane, only to get stranded in Toronto for a day and a half because of bad weather in Atlantic Canada... looking forward to coming back!
[Seb's Open Research]
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Creative Commons2004
Marc Canter
Crucialized: 6/9/2004; 3:06:30 PM.
