Wednesday, November 24, 2004

All Things Considered segment on BitTorrent. 

Kevin Marks, via IM, reminds us that Apple bought a company called eMagic, that makes a breakout box, that's probably a lot like the product that's being rumored around the blogs today.  

AP: "McCartney, after 40 years of second billing to his late partner John Lennon, has turned the tables on his Beatles collaborator by reversing the order of the famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting credit." 

Songs with lead vocals by John Lennon, Paul McCartney. 

For some reason now that I have an iPod I am re-discovering the Beatles in a whole new way. I bought $91 of old Beatles albums today, on CD, all for the second time (the other copies of these CDs are in storage in Calif). Anyway, I also found an excellent Beatles site, with excerpts from all the songs, video of interviews with the band. I've learned something new and important. Paul McCartney was the lead singer. It was never clear to me who was singing on the old songs. I thought John Lennon's style developed over the years, but it turns out he always sang the same way, he just didn't sing many of the songs. John gave a better interview, but Paul was the nicer guy, simpler, more commercial, for sure, but he did most of the work, it seems. I always thought I liked John better, he was the poet of the band, but then I found out that Paul wrote Hey Jude, Let It Be, Lady Madonna, and of course all the "silly love songs." Now I could learn more, and I expect to, but it seems that Paul got a pretty shitty deal from John. 

Tod Maffin has a picture of Apple's breakout box. 

Pet peeve. I was going to point to a podcast feed just now, but because it uses some kind of weird style sheet, it doesn't look like a feed, rather it looks like a really poorly designed web page. I'd like to request that people leave XML looking like XML. Okay the counter-argument: XML should just disappear into the background. Well, okay, but not really. When I drive on the Long Island Expressway, I see trucks. You might argue that the trucks should just disappear into the background, and I would totally agree. They take up too much space, are hard to understand, and even though they have labels, sometimes I can't figure out what they do. But somehow they're still on the highways after all these years. So someone comes along and has a bright idea. Let's paint cars on the side of trucks. That way the trucks can fade into the background and we can pretend they don't exist. Uhhh, something about that doesn't work. Could just be me.  

Adam Bosworth: "While the concept underlying RDF is simple, even brillliantly simple, it isn't how most of us think about data." 

I can't get it up. That is for some reason I'm not able to upload my latest Morning Coffee Notes. It wasn't that good, even if it did introduce a new meme: micro-politics, for an old idea, politics on a burg or burb level. We got so distracted by the national race, glad that's over. Now let's think about blogs on a local level. Based on the email I've been getting on this subject, it seems the time may be now. I want to lead a discussion on this at the I&S conference at Harvard in December. And otherwise help evangelize the notion that we can route around the TV networks, and create the political system we want, from the one we were given. That's the gist of today's MCN. I'll look for a Starbuck's, or maybe do another which is more musical. 

Tony Kahn's Thanksgiving podcast. 

AP: Lobbyists try to kill Philly wireless plan. 

Fascinating story about newspapers in Wired. "Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses." That's exactly why I cancelled my subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal in 1995. Most of the issues never got unfolded before they went into the recycling bin.  

Britt Blaser: "My dad hired the Macy's Santa Clauses." 

Sebastien Paquet asks about a weblog conference in Montreal. 

Tod Maffin: "I want to be able to delete podcasts or other audio content from my iPod after I've listened to it."