knofun

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

The tower records by my house is going out of business… To me it’s shocking that it still even exists anywhere. You can duplicate the entire Tower Records store in a kiosk at this point. Have digital catalogs that people can access through touch screens, and have production facilities inside the kiosk that burns on the fly and prints the album notes. This actually does Tower’s job better than them, because you can include live data like tour info, discounts on merchandise and tickets, subscribe to the fan club etc.

I predict in 3 yearts there won’t be any record stores save some holdout mom and pops, and you will be able to buy your music in any format you want from kiosks all over the place. Why arent there iTunes kiosks now? Dock your ipod and cop some tunes. Anywho, sad to see a local landmark go but lets face it the dinosaurs are long dead and record stores will be soon.

digital media, entertainment, rant

Wow, what a couple of days. If you know you know, if not suffice to say life is a roller coaster. The choices in front of us never seem clear until they are behind us, and then we are either kicking ourselves or… I guess everyone wants to be happy, but maybe they should give us a manual or at least show us the previews.

I think the hardest thing is to turn your back on things you are comfortable with when you know they are wrong for your life. You know it is the right decision and the right thing to do but at the same time it hurts as you lose those things you are so familiar with, that feel so safe. I have done it many times and later on has never seemed like the wrong thing to do, but EVERY TIME it felt like I was dying, which makes me feel better that this time may be no different. Feels different though.

It is definitely a troubling time, and others are going through much harder things than I. Helps to put things in perspective, but I hate that the only thing that cheers me up is that it could be worse.

other, rant

So a while back my sidekick 3 broke, and I went through a bunch of nonsense to return the phone. The rep on the phone said to take “just the phone, not the charger or any accessories” to a UPS store and they would send it to T-Mobile. So I suck it up, take the thing in and send it back. 10 days later I get a sidekick with no battery and no battery cover.

So I call T-Mobile and they say I was supposed to just send the phone, not the battery or the cover. So I spend an hour or so talking to the rep and explaining that if someone had told me that, I would have happily removed the battery and cover before sending it back. So after an hour he tells me he can send me a battery in 10 days. No cover. I explain how worthless that would be, but he says thats all he can do. I call around to a bunch of third party T-Mobile stores and no one stocks SK3 batteries yet. Great. So I go back to the store I took my broken phone to in the first place, and he tells me he doesnt have any batteries but he miraculously comes up with a cover. So now I am waiting on my new battery, but I got sick of waiting so I bought one on ebay….. which is now 4 days late in arriving. Maybe I am just not meant to have the phone i want.

rant

I was loving the Sidekick, its a great phone, organizer, web appliance, etc. Until it broke!!! My microphone is apparently not working anymore, which makes it difficult to talk to people.

So I went into the TMob store, hung out for an hour while they ran some ‘troubleshooting diagnostics’ on the phone and then told me my microphone was malfunctioning (duh). Then they told me they don’t replace phones and put me on the phone with customer care, who then gave me a code to take to a UPS store to send them the phone. Uh….. but I’m in YOUR store right now!!! Okay okay, calm down, no problem. Then the customer care rep tells me they have two options. I send the phone in to them, and once they recieve it they can send me a refurbished unit within 10 business days, or I can pay an extra $15 for express service and get it in 3 business days. For me no brainer I want it ASAP and care way less about $15 than I should, but this is a horrible way to treat your customers. I paid around $200 for that phone less than 30 days ago and under CA’s buyer’s remorse laws I have 30 days to return any tech product for a full refund. Instead I am paying $15 for a refurbished unit that I won’t recieve for God knows how long. /me is not happy

rant

I was cruising by my blog the other day (is looking at your own blog like catching a look of yourself in the mirror? like ‘damn im sexy’) and found myself thinking about how come I never blog, and came up with two reasons. One, the stuff that goes on in my life is rarely interesting enough to blog about or if it is, I am not sure I want it on the internet. Two, I get about 15-30 emails a day telling me I have comments for moderation. 99.99999% of these are spam, meaning I get a lot of spam emails… great. This results in my subconscious hatred of my blog since I hate spam. Yes, that’s my excuse.

There has been lots of stuff going on though, Zeropaid is going through it’s summer dip as the kids get off school. To supplement we are trying a couple things, like diversifying. We bought an anonymous web proxy service, which allows people to visit websites that may be blocked by their school or work. Stick it to the man! I also got sick of looking at the homepage, so we are changing it. You can check out our progress here.

The dip sucks, especially since we have taken on some extra responsibilities in some new employees and other fiscal obligations. I have two new investment properties in Louisiana that aren’t free. Goes with the territory I guess.

My girl just finished getting her MBA from SDSU, and I am so proud of her! She must like school a lot, since she is taking her LSATs and applying to law schools. I can’t wait until she gets done so I can retire.

other, rant

Ok, so I am stuck in the Amtrak station in San Diego because someone got killed on the tracks in LA. Might as well blog *shrug*.

So after this news about Verizon disabling phones native mp3 support in favor of Windows Media (which is what powers their music store), I have decided to switch to T-Mobile. My gripes on Verizon are many, including but not limited to:

• no sim card support -which leads to:
• having to talk to them every time you switch phones - which leads to:
• a new $50 charge to activate a new phone
• lagging on cool phones
• poor customer service
• limiting technology - in my view this is never a good thing, and they do it ALL the time. Better to have an open source OS (Nokia & Symbian) and open standards (GSM)

The only thing good about verizon is the coverage is generally pretty good compared to cingular / t-mobile. I have carried both for a while and Verizon does have the better coverage overall. I am keeping my VZAccess, which is the best always on data connection in the world.

So I ordered my PEBL and am jumping ship to T-Mobile. God I hope my train comes soon.

geek stuff, other, rant

So as a web publisher, I have spent my professional life finding ways to monetize my web content. Aside from a few spectacularly successful individual advertisements, the bulk of this work has been experimenting with different ad networks like FastClick, Burst, etc. These all sort of operate the same, group publishers into categories like technology or automotive, then sell ads to big advertisers like Ford or HP based on these categories. Google has capitalized on this obviously rash generalization with Adsense, which allows advertisters to do small media buys based on keywords, to huge success.

So what if Google doesn’t want you anymore? I have heard rumors that Yahoo Publishers is in serious alpha, but is not even contemplating a public beta until the fall. This space is wide open and Google needs competitors. Barriers to entry? The seriously large amounts of data and computing power needed to do effective contextual advertising. Only Yahoo and MSN could easily be serious competitors. But what if you did tag based contextual advertising, like technorati does for searching. I tag this post Adsense Alternatives and someone searching for it finds it. But what if I was someone who wanted to advertise on the keyword Adsense? Could you effectively target ads via tagging? Not likely, as every publisher out there would try to game that system for the highest paying keywords……. Still, a wide open market.

rant

ok, ok, so I havent blogged in a looooong time. so sue me. wait, no don’t.

I was trying some new bblog templates, but haven’t found any i like more than this one. *phooey* maybe i should move to a normal system like blogger or wordpress.

we (zeropaid) have an interesting visitor at the house this week, it’s been fun.

Go sign up for FACES email and come hang with the cool kids.

play, rant