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The Napster Weblog  Today we're rolling out a new weblog with news and ideas for Napster fans, musicians and developers. This site is commited to intelligent and thoughtful discussion, learning and sharing. If there are problems we want to solve them. We share a love of music, and the new medium of the Internet and music. We are not pirates, we don't want something for nothing. But we want the economics of music to be fair, we want professional and artistic relationships, and abhor the legal battleground that music has become. (There are no MP3s on this site.) Tell your friends that there's now an independent source of news about music on the Internet. We'll cover it all, with your help. We also provide an easy way for musicians and fans to start their own sites. The Web and music were meant to be together, now we take the next step. Let's have fun! Quote of the Day NY Times: "Everybody is in favor of the First Amendment," Leahy said. "But we'd have a hell of a time ratifying it today." Outrage of the Day ZDNet: "If the MPAA succeeds in its lawsuit, the ability of Web sites to link to other information -- arguably the most valuable feature of the Web -- could be curtailed." Song of the Day Leon Russell: Back to the Island. (No lyrics on Google.) "The time has past for living in a dream world, lying to myself, wondering if you love me, or just making a fool of me. Well I just hope you understand I had to go back to the island." Today's News Milwaukee Journal: "Manila, the software application behind the burgeoning EditThisPage and Weblogs.com sites, requires no downloading or uploading. It's completely browser-based. You can create, update and edit your blog anywhere you can find a computer, be it school, the library or Mom's house." Lucas Gonze has started the decentralization mail list to discuss subjects related to P2P, Napster, Gnutella, and distributed computing. Jesse Berst: "It's called the simple object access protocol (SOAP), and it will be one of the key structures of the new Internet." (Another Big Companies Rule Cyberspace article. Boring, predictable, corrupt, incorrect.) Inside.Com: "Though Napster's venture-capitalist barkers are still confidently whistling to themselves as the company strolls toward a July 26 appointment with Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in federal court in San Francisco, it is becoming ever more apparent that Napster will enter that courtroom armed with little more than breezy bromides about new paradigms and breakthrough technologies. There they will meet an army of grim-faced recording industry lawyers, laden with an arsenal of devastating conventional legal weaponry, ready, willing and able to space-shift Napster into oblivion." Today's inessential.com. Browser vendors take note. HJ Bosch has a neat browser-based outliner that reads Scripting News. Wired: EMI Gets Down With Downloads. "The company said it was testing the demand for its music by releasing works of Joe Cocker, Frank Sinatra, and the Steve Miller Band in Liquid Audio and Windows Media Audio formats. If all goes well, EMI will release more albums until its entire library is available." Reuters: Senators deluged with email from fans. "Two Washington lawmakers had received a combined 70,000 e-mails as of Monday mainly from fans of digital music swapping after an appeal for support by online music companies Napster Inc. and MP3.com." Apple forced MacInTouch to remove a report of a new product, presumably coming later this week. The Register has an article about it. WSJ: Web piracy hits Hollywood. "Thanks to two pieces of software, high-quality digital movies, available on a variety of Web sites, can be stored in 10% to 20% of the space that had been required just six months ago." O'Reilly: Mac OS X Brings Unix Stability to the Mac. Susan starts a Macster site I talked with Susan Kitchens over the weekend, and asked if she was into Napster, she said "I use a Mac" and I groaned. Never mind. Susan started a Macster weblog, let's figure out how to get Mac users going. There's no time like now! The discussion group is rolling Lots of interesting posts on the Napster discussion group. I'm not going to flip the home page of the Napster site until tomorrow, give early adopters a chance to get the big picture without confusion. About the Napster weblog It's a static site, so it's built to scale. We're talking on a hourly basis with execs at Napster, and with people from the technology and music industry, including artists. We hope to get linked in where music, fans and artists gather. I'll keep you posted on how it goes, of course. Woz Last night I emailed with Steve Wozniak, one of the pioneers of digital technology, educator, a supporter and investor in music, and an active Web developer. He said: "After reading one of your DaveNets I emailed Roger McGuinn with supporting comments and he's offered to come visit and help with my class, where I'm engaging 8th graders in skeptical inquiries into the whole topic." He continued: "I have worries about the new not turning out better than the old." Me too. "I imagine that many of the artists must be terrified of what's happening now. It seems we're a junction when some love could ease a lot of fear. Also, let's make sure the money stays in the business, but that it's distributed more fairly. Your smiling face and good nature could make a big difference." Steve and I are going to meet later this month, and in early August we're going to Shoreline, where he has a box, to hear BB King and Sting. (I'll bring my camera of course.) DaveNet piece I wrote a DaveNet piece, but since it contains much of the copy here on Scripting News, I'm not putting it at the top of the page. Read the closing comments, this is a very exciting time. Wheee! Defining Weblogs A List Apart has a major anti-weblog rant. My anti-rant. Can you imagine writing a piece about how bored you are? Take a vacation, try Don's Amazing Puzzle, go for a walk, see a movie, sit under a bridge, play the trance game (see below). It's not that bad. These pieces always look at the same sites. There are lots of weblogs that cover specific areas, and do it seriously, and are quite useful. (Hint, many of the sites in the left margin are pretty interesting.) Kate Adams explains why she does her weblog, which I read every day. I read it because I am interested in many of the same things she is. Pretty simple. The curmudgeon who teaches statistics says "It's your civic duty to run a weblog," something that I heartily agree with. Early early morning pointers Manila: How to share a membership group. "Perhaps you're building an intranet with Manila. You might create lots of sites, and give each department in your company control over their own site." NY Times: "The patent affords the company the right to exclude or to license others in that industry with respect to the patented business model."
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