| More on Fallujah |
[Nov. 22nd, 2004|09:17 am] |
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Another account of the Fallujah incident, this time from Kevin Sites, the NBC photographer who shot the tape. |
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| Newsgator niggles |
[Nov. 22nd, 2004|04:03 pm] |
In my continuing search for a good RSS newsreader I once against installed Newsgator. In spite of Dave Winer's comments there are a lot of positive aspects to getting RSS feeds via email, not least of which is the ability to manage blog posts using the same tools you manage email posts with. In Outlook, I can assign categories and flags to blog posts, do full text searches on them and so on. Sure, you can do that in some dedicated RSS readers too, but being able to use the Office 2003 tools I'm used to using is very handy and intuitive.
Anyway, Newsgator has some niggles - for one, the server-side syncing of your blogroll doesn't retain the read-unread state of blog postings on separate outlook machines. So if I synchronise all the blogs on my blogroll to one Outlook machine, and then read half of them, Newsgator Online doesn't notice that I've read half of them. It just marks them all as read because they've all been downloaded. This has annoyed some other users I know to the extent that they've stopped using Newsgator.
Well, I don't really mind this too much - I don't use a second machine regularly for reading RSS feeds, so I don't need the syncing capabilities that much. it's just enough to know that my blogroll is being backed up online somewhere.
BUT, here's the annoying thing. I realised that Newsgator was duplicating posts, apparently at random. Every so often two or three copies of the same blog posting would crop up in Outlook. It was annoying but I figured that maybe it was a flaw at my end.Then I got to the bottom of it. My wife has a new blog and I subscribed to it, and a couple of times, it duplicated her posts. I suddenly realised that she'd been editing her posts after they'd been posted, and sure enough - the number of duplicate entries in NG correspond with the number of edits/updates she performed on that particular post. So, if anyone edits a post on their blog, Newgator dupes the post.
Interesting. And annoying enough to make me start looking for another newsreader myself, which is a shame, because I really enjoyed getting my RSS via email. I guess I'll give FeedDemon another go. |
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| Weed dealers wanted |
[Nov. 22nd, 2004|05:55 pm] |
No, not the sort of weed you're thinking of. This Weed, which lets you download an MP3 file and play it three times before deciding whether to buy it or not. If you don't pay for it, you can't play it any more. If you buy it, you can play it and burn it to CDs as many times as you like. The interesting part is that Weed doesn't host its files - it uses a P2P network of member PCs to share them. And when a file is purchased and downloaded from a member's PC, that member gets paid money. Now there's an approach to P2P that hadn't occurred to me.
Downside 1: It doesn't support iTunes or the iPod, presumably because Apple would have tried to nix it, as it did with this plug-in. Still, it supports Real Networks RealPlayer and MusicMatch, and the HP iRiver.
Downside 2: DRM. Well, this is a debatable downside but it makes me nervous. You can only play your purchased files on 3 different PCs. So what happens if, seven years down the line, you want to play your tune on the fourth PC that you've purchased since buying that music? If you've preserved your Windows license store, you could copy over the licenses, but of course, many people won't have. "Just email us and we'll take care of that for you" says the FAQ on the Weed site - but will Weed be around then?
Perhaps as the market for home media servers grows, this will become less of an issue. Home media serverrs won't change as frequently as PCs do, so it might not be as much of a problem going down the line, but they're still a rarity among most home users right now. And really, what alternative is there to DRM if you want to make money from digital music? I like Week for trying, and I hope it makes a go of it.
I particularly like the bit of brand damage limitation in the FAQ:
If your site distributes Weed files or discusses Weed services, or if you create your own website that uses "Weed" as part of the name (for example, Weedfiles.com), it would be best if you don't include graphic images or text passages suggesting marijuana, tobacco, or other drugs.
We specifically recommend avoiding the following:
* designing or using a logo that conveys the likeness of a marijuana plant
* suggestive headlines, copy, or taglines like "be a Weed dealer" or "roll some Weed files" are discouraged
* graphics or images of drug paraphernalia, or people in the act of smoking, growing, or selling drugs
Perhaps it might have been better not to have set up a business based on turning your customers into content providers via a revenue generating P2P file sharing model and called it 'Weed'. Just a thought, you know. I want some of whatever their marketing manager was smoking when (s)he came up with that one. |
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