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Maybe that title should be “Google gets a fancier ad badge.. and some geek notices” Google has replaced their usual small text “Ads by Goooogle” with a graphical version of the logo that takes up some more room. Just noticed.

geek stuff, web marketing

Was watching Bill Gates on the Daily Show, and it made me think of this whole Windows Vista thing. I read Ed Bott’s review and he lists the three killer features of vista as the photo gallery, speech recognition, and desktop search. The reason he likes the photo gallery is “When you tag a JPEG or TIFF photo with keywords in Windows Vista, those tags are stored directly in the file as metadata, which you can use to search, sort, and filter images in Photo Gallery. That’s a great leap forward from Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, both of which store metadata in sidecar files rather than in the image itself.” Cool enough I guess, but I am usually too lazy to tag things, especially photos. Speech recognition would be cool if it worked properly, every geek has dreamed of talking to his computer like on star trek. My Dad is famous for saying he would never use a computer until he could just talk to it. (He has relented since and even has a gmail account, but he still types with two fingers Desktop search is rumored to be pretty good, but how often do I need to search for something besides email? Maybe once a month at best?

Thom Holwerda goes into some more technical detail from a more advanced user’s perspective, wich I always find to be more fun. He goes over details like Aero, details on the new interface, working with multimedia, and apparently now sleep mode actually works on the laptop.

I think the solution is to get a new machine and run vista on that.. off to the store

geek stuff

From Reuters with my comments:

With global music sales down for a seventh straight year, the talk at an annual industry meeting in Cannes, France, has become heated over how to develop digital sales against competition from the dreaded F word — free.Global sales are expected to be down again for 2006 despite digital sales almost doubling to $2 billion and the popularity of music being as strong as ever.

Critics of the major players in the industry argue that they have been distracted by the fight against piracy and in doing so, hindered the growth of the legal business.

In response, the accused argue that they had little choice.

“Many people around the world tell me that we’ve handled our problems in an incorrect manner but no one tells me what we should have done,” John Kennedy, the head of the industry’s trade body IFPI, told Reuters in an interview.

“Free is just impossible to compete with”.

Sure we did. We gave you My.MP3.com in 1999-2000 and then you sued us out of existence along with Napster and collected a nice $250 million payday in the process. Cry me a river.

Much of the debate at the gathering on the French coast has centered around the concept of digital rights management or DRM which can restrict the use of music bought online and was introduced in a bid to contain piracy.Its supporters say DRM also offers alternative methods such as subscription or advertising-supported services as the music cannot then be offered onto peer-to-peer networks.

But one result of DRM is that tracks bought legally from Web sites such as Rhapsody cannot be used on the market-leading iPod as they are not compatible, potentially restricting the growth of legal sales.

“DRM is like polonium to some people,” Kennedy said. “Digital rights management is exactly that, it’s the management of digital rights and if we weren’t managing it the headlines would be ‘irresponsible music industry … creates anarchy.’”

Oh yeah, I can picture the headlines now “Music Industry Gives its Customers What They Want” What a nightmare. Is this guy for real? Does he really imagine that people would throw a fit if they didn’t use DRM? That newspapers would accuse them of creating some kind of musical anarchy? Must be nice over there in fantasy land where this guy lives… I’ll have what he’s smoking.

But not everyone agrees.David Pakman is chief executive of eMusic, the second biggest service after iTunes in the U.S. market, and an ardent critic of DRM.

His service is the only one on a large scale delivering tracks in the MP3 format, meaning they can be played on any portable music player, including the iPod.

That stance however has resulted in none of the four major labels, who are responsible for around two thirds of the world’s music, supplying to the service.

“It’s the same model that was used for the CD and DVD, universal compatibility, and we think it’s the principal thing holding back the growth of digital today,” he told Reuters.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, argues that some form of piracy should simply be accepted.

“You cannot have zero piracy and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you’ll have zero industry.”

Now these guys are making some sense. Chris Anderson always has valuable insights, maybe they should hire him for some of these panels in Fance??

Among the many music executives discussing the alternatives at Cannes was Terry McBride, the chief executive of Canada’s Nettwerk Music Group which manages such acts as Avril Lavigne.Among McBride’s many ideas was the plan to tap into the peer to peer market where fans could recommend a track, and receive a small percentage of the sales if the track was purchased.

“We are now entering the era where the socialization of the internet is happening,” he told Reuters. “Why not truly harness the power of peer to peer.”

But despite the many issues created by digital, the industry is united and excited by its potential.

Barney Wragg, the head of digital for EMI Music, told Reuters that digital was revolutionizing the way they work.

“I was just talking to (British singer) Joss Stone who is very excited about the opportunities this offers,” he said. “We’re not constrained to the plastic CD box any more. It offers the possibility to do things that could never be done before.”

Warner is also looking at new ways to develop.

“As an industry we really need to innovate, and bring new products and services to the market,” head of digital strategy Alex Zubillaga told reporters in London last week.

“We at Warner have put out a series of premium products and … we immediately doubled the amount of digital albums that we were selling by just attaching a video, attaching some special lyrics or a photo gallery.

And this is why EMI is on the brink of bankruptcy and Warner should be thankful it has the Cable / Movie / AOL arm to bolster their sagging music division. Hopefully soon a major artist will break the payola-fm radio barrier and become hugely successful on their own through internet promotion. Imagine a world where each artist was their own music store and you could purchase and download their album unrestricted right from their site. Or like we did at My.MP3.com with instant listening, you buy the CD and can access it immediately digitally, plus the physical product gets shipped to you. Then you have a database of loyal customers to market to.*yawn* Not my problem anymore. I leave you with a snippet of Major Label Music’s future:

EMI Fires Top Two Executives

2007-01-15 12:42:11.837

Story by: Dave Ruigh

On Friday, EMI announced the firings of its two top recorded music executives, chief executive Alain Levy and vice-chairman David Munns. The world’s third-largest music company also announced a dramatic cost-cutting plan and issued a profit warning to shareholders, citing sluggish CD sales and the incursion of digital music as causes of its recent struggles. Eric Nicoli, the current executive chairman, will become EMI Music group’s new chief executive.

digital media, entertainment

From the NYTimes:

In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”

Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.

On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.

DJ Drama (whose real name is Tyree Simmons) and Mr. Cannon were each charged with a felony violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization law(known as RICO) and held on $100,000 bond.

RICO Statute???? Come one people. It’s bad enough you sue your own customers, now you are ARRESTING the artists that customers actually want to listen to?? This is seriously fucked up, and people are not going to take it. I know you think they will, you think you are doing the right thing by protecting the “control” over your interests, but you’re not. You’re slowly (or not so slowly) KILLING your business, and I am going to watch and laugh.

digital media, entertainment, rant

Digg.com is an insanely popular website. They have tons of cash. They obviously have a special relationship with Google, the kind you get when you push 20M+ pageviews a month. The fact that their AdSense is not normal and is customized for their site confirms this. I love Digg, and I read it every day. Whenever they feature one of my sites I jump around in a fit of glee. Why then, does their search suck so bad?

Yesterday (or the day before, I don’t remember) there was an awesome article on hacking Google Analytics to get full referring URLs in your stats. Today I wanted to implement it on one of my sites, so I cruise over to Digg and search for “analytics hack”. After a full 50 seconds of spinning, nothing comes up. I search again, thinking the server just hiccuped. This time, after 50 seconds of spinning, it gives me an error saying “Digg is experiencing a high volume of traffic right now. Please try your search again later.” So, I jump over to google and do a site specific query with the same terms. Got what I was looking for in about 2.2 seconds.

Hey! Digg guys!!! Just send your searches to Google, let them do the heavy lifting for you and collect some more ppc revenue on the searches!!!!!! PLEASE!!!

Do you need a place to search public records? Our people search directory allows you to do a background check and search for criminal records of virtually anybody. 

geek stuff, rant, web marketing

Finally completed the acquisition of Yumm.com. Soon this will be a bustling portal of all things yummy like food and recipes and cocktail recipes and how to videos and whatnot… how exciting!!

ventures

Welcome to 2007 everyone!!! But seriously, where is my flying car??? Damn u George Jetson. Went to an awesome NYE party at the La Jolla Hilton, Thanks Matty! At some point I will clean up the photos and post them somewhere.

At Zeropaid.com, we kicked off the new year by welcoming 75,000 new users. Congrats to my chief editor for doing a kickass job of getting his lame Al Gore bittorrent story dugg up to the most popular non-saddam-execution spot on Digg.com. News.com also picked up our story on AllofMP3.com getting served with a $1.6 TRILLION lawsuit after it was Farked up and slashdotted. All in all, we kicked off 2007 by being featured on 4 of the most popular websites on the internet. On top of that, the server held up perfectly, never turning down a request. We had to dump some oversized log files at one point, but that was it.
Hope 2007 is looking good for you folks, I for one can’t wait for some greener pastures.

geek stuff, web marketing