knofun

Ok so a while ago I wrote about my funky pagerank situation, and it keeps getting wierder. A little background information: on the domain Zeropaid.com I have a mod_rewrite rule that rewrites zeropaid.com/whatever to www.zeropaid.com/whatever for uniformity in my web stats. A few months ago, my pagerank as reported by the toolbar was a 6. Suddenly, Google did a pagerank readjustment and we are like smokey in deebo’s pigeon coop, ain’t been the same since.

According to this pagerank query tool, www.zeropaid.com has a pr of 6 on one data center and a 0 everywhere else:

And zeropaid.com has a pr of 6 one the same datacenter and a 4 everywhere else:

This will fluctuate, sometimes www.zeropaid.com will have all 0 or a few 6 and the rest 0, but never all 6. What gives?

geek stuff, web marketing

Fast Company’s February issue has a great article on a quiet little company called Musictoday. Little may be kind of a misnomer because they help more than 700 artists connect with and monetize their fanbase. They provide end to end services for artists, including building their web presence, managing their fan club, and marketing their brand to their fans.

This is the kind of innovation the music industry needs, and we all knew it was just a matter of time before evolution reared its head. Suing your customers is not evolution, its regression and fear. In a time when all we read about is how the RIAA has sued another 800 file sharers and how record label after record label is losing money and going out of business, this story should be a shining beacon of hope that the industry is healthy. Because, after all, people want to buy their music. They WANT to support the artists they like.

digital media, entertainment, file sharing / p2p

So my desktop setup is a windows xp machine with a NVIDIA GeForce 660 GT card powering my two Dell monitors. I have one 24″ display and one 30″ display, both connected via DVI. I used to have two 24″ displays, and when I moved to the 30″ my screensaver stopped working. I am using some OpenGL free screensaver pack that totally rocks, but that’s not the point. No screensavers work! The 24″ monitor is on 1920×1200 resolution and the 30″ is on 2560×1600 resolution. I cannot set the two monitors to the same resolution as the option is not available. Is there any way to get the screensaver to work??

update: someone just sent me this one which is cool, pans through a collection of photos and works on both monitors. Anyone know of some cool Open GL style screen savers that work on dualies?

another update: you gusy are mad helpful. someone found this long list of free multi monitor tools including screensavers

geek stuff

Just read on shoemoney’s blog that Google Reader has changed the way it pulls your feed so that true scubscriber stats are showed for your Google readers. His readership went up about 250%, mine was a much less drastic 25%, but hey, improvement.

web marketing

Days of Thunder is a great movie. That’s all.

entertainment

Yes, another study proving what people (smart, respected industry folks at that) have been screaming at the music industry for years now:

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

Yes, its true. Will this keep them from claiming under oath with a straight face that downloading a single song can cost them upwards of $10,000? No.

digital media, entertainment, file sharing / p2p

Hmm, ever since Google did a pagerank update a few weeks ago Zeropaid’s pagerank has been fluctuating between 7 and 0. It now seems parked at 0 for the domain www.zeropaid.com, and at 4 for the domain zeropaid.com. This kind of wacky, because I rewrite all my urls from zeropaid.com to www.zeropaid.com automatically. We are still in our important spots in Google’s index, so I guess pr is not all that important? Still worries me.

geek stuff, web marketing

That is actually a generous noun, maybe it should be CNN+Reuters+NPD = RIAA propoganda. CNN.com published a Reuters story titled Illegal downloads grow despite lawsuits with the slug underneath reading “The music industry has started winning lawsuits in the last few years, but the number people downloading illegal music continues to slowly increase.”

Ahem. BULLSHIT! To quote Reuters on the exact nature of these lawsuits, “the music industry started winning lawsuits against individuals in the last few years.” Um, name one. Oh you mean the extortion letters that the RIAA’s thugs lawyers send to their customers demanding $3,000. Yes, people have settled but I have yet to hear of the RIAA actually fighting and winning ONE of these lawsuits.

No surprise here, Reuters is getting its data from NPD. I went on a tear of NPD’s suspect data back in June and CNET actually pulled a story because of it. I just wish these guys would do some homework or actually care. But no, its all about a catchy headline and some pageviews. They also quote “industry experts” like Wayne Rosso, former “CEO of Grokster”. Give me a break, that’s like saying “Hugh Hefner, publisher” Rosso is a scam artist, Grokster scammed both its users and the technologists it licensed from, and cheated them both in the end. Hey Wayne, how is that Mashboxx service coming? Any customers? Any funding? Any product??? Hellooooo?

*yawn* Seriously I am putting the laptop away now. Sorry for yelling.

digital media, file sharing / p2p, rant

So I just read Steve Jobs’ open letter on DRM and the iTunes store and I was just beginning to craft a response to post here. Then I got my Michael’s Minute email and found that MR had beat me to most of the points I was going to make. Of course, when reading these posts one has to remember that Steve is trying to push Apple, iTunes, and the iPod, while MR is trying to push open standards - which is covered by his MP3Tunes.com offering. To his credit, Steve has done an amazing job opening up digital music to the masses. To HIS credit, MR had the epiphany the industry is heading towards in 2000.

Both of these guys are talking about opening up DRM and really getting to the heart of what consumers want. They are both technologists and it shows, the difference being MR jumped first with ideas that were WAY ahead of their time. Jobs played it a little safer (although in all fairness he was sitting on billions in the bank and a company with a solid revenue stream while Michael had investors money and wall street to answer to) by waiting for the dust to settle a little bit after Napster and then walking in to the record labels like some kind of savior. Clearly Jobs emerged the winner from that scenario, after a 400% increase in his stock price while MP3.com was sold for cents on the dollar to Vivendi then CNET. He may be smiling now, but Michael must get some small satisfaction from knowing the industry would love to have his my.mp3.com now instead of suing it into oblivion.

My favorite point to make in discussions with “industry people” is that although they make a big fuss about releasing digital music without a DRM system, they do it millions of times EVERY DAY. Nearly every CD you have ever bought is digital music with no DRM, and I am glad both of these guys make that point, although now I will have to come up with a new favorite point. Here is my favorite exceprt from Jobs’ rant:

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

At any rate, I am sitting in a hotel in hollywood and really shouldnt be on my laptop, just had to comment on these industry heavyweights helping shed some light on a seemingly simple problem. Happy weekending!!

digital media, entertainment

I’ve been surfing Scripps Pier in La Jolla since I was about 12, so more years than I would like to admit
Right above the beach used to be a bunch of UCSD facilities, little workshops and whatnot. They also kindly provided outdoor HEATED public showers, which is the only place I have ever surfed that had them. I went surfing there today to find half the main parking lot and all the little workshops completely demolished and under construction.

Sad, but I guess a time comes for everything. If I owned that land those little shacks would have been gone years ago. I would just like to take some time and say thank you to UCSD, the Scripps Foundation, and whoever else was responsible for the years and years of warm showers that got us through the oh so cold San Diego winters.

other