January, 28, 2003 archives

clay shirky wrote about the music business and how it hasn't caught up to the publish-then-filter model growing in other industries in his essay, the music business and the big flip. good stuff, of course, but i'll have to quibble with this quote:

Prior to its demise, Napster began publicizing itself as a way to find new music, but this was a fig leaf, since users had to know the name of a song or artist in advance. Napster did little to place new music in an existing context, and the current file-sharing networks don't do much better.

napster actually did do one quite novel thing in putting new music in context—letting you browse the music being shared by a specific other person. that meant you could search for supreme beings of leisure and poke around the collections of people who had sbl to see what else they liked. sure, it wasn't a fancy-schmancy recommendation engine a la amazon, but i certainly found it useful. (i wasn't much of a napster user, but i remember this being touted as a neat thing about napster at the time.)

unless i'm misunderstanding, this is the sort of thing that friendster is trying to apply to meeting people. (although i find great irony in having been asked to join friendster by someone i don't really know. now to work up the motivation to enter all sorts of info into a system that won't then reward me by letting me get the data out again in a more useful format.)

it requires the leading 'http://' in the url, so if you highlight something like 'trainedmonkey.com' and use apple-shift-l, all it does is bring safari to the foreground. pretty useless. it would be nice if it also stripped out any whitespace in the url (leading, trailing, and in the middle).

various luminaries will be speaking at a blogging panel put on by rhizome.org in los angeles on february 15. (via boing boing.)

i didn't spend any time playing tourist in new york (and didn't take any photos), because i decided to commit to speaking at phpcon east 2003 in april when the weather should be less frigid. but i can already understand the appeal of living there, even with the decidedly non-socal climate. the cost is still a major deterrent, though. you can put it in the column of places i'd live if the right opportunity presented itself. (which is right about where los angeles is, and a notch below san diego.)

i'm bummed that i didn't get to the metropolitan museum of art to see the leonardo da vinci, master drafsman exhibit. it started while i was there, and ends march 30.

someone should have had the author of this comment about open source project management to this article about open source project management on builder.com write the article instead of the actual author, since he clearly is endowed with more clues. detailed code deliverables? appoint volunteers? i'd say the only tip from the article that doesn't need to be buried in a pit of caveats is the third (revision control), and even that has been painted with a horrible policy sheen.

ken coar finds the xml-rpc interface to weblogs.com distasteful. use the http post interface. and ignore the result. who cares if it fails? (and ping blo.gs too!)

supporting the trackback api on blo.gs is an interesting idea. on the todo list. (but i see a problem—trackback sends the blog name and the url for the entry, but not the url for the blog.)