The extinction of the CD

When’s the last time you played music with from a CD? I don’t remember the last time, to be honest. I play music from my computer almost 24/7, and when I’m out and about, I’ve either had my iPod or my Zen Touch. The concept of a disc that only holds 20 songs seems so foreign to me now! And even if I have used a CD more recently than I can remember (perhaps in a friend’s car), I know for certain the last time I bought a CD for myself was eons ago. Any music I have bought recently has been purchased online.

I don’t think I am alone. There’s probably tons of other people who also never buy CDs anymore. Digital is the way to go, and so we are, but there are many problems that still exist. Mark Cuban has written an excellent piece on the topic, and offers advice on what the music industry needs to do:

MP3 players are changing peoples listening habits. We don’t carry folders filled with CDs anymore. We carry our library in our MP3 players. We don’t listen to CDs. We listen to playlists that we adjust all the time. We don’t burn CDs anymore, it’s too time consuming. We copy all our music to our MP3 players so it’s all available at our fingertips.

All of our music in a single device. Available to us wherever we are, for whenever we want it. Music how we want it, when we want it. Easy and breezy. That’s how we want to consume music.

That’s not how we are being sold music.

Makes you wonder what will happen to outlets like HMV, who sell hardly anything besides CDs. Why haven’t they done anything to move into the digital space yet? Or even WalMart or other retailers for that matter. What’s taking so long?

Read: Blog Maverick

Search Engine Compromise

Imagine you need to look something up on the web. Probably happens all the time! Which search engine should you use? Google might get some fast results, but Yahoo might better deliver what you want. Decisions, decisions!

Stop the madness! Compromise, and use YaGoohoo!gle, at least until it gets shut down.

Read: MetaFilter

Yahoo 360 Invites

I’ve had Yahoo 360 for about a week now, but haven’t had time to go through it. I still haven’t, but I do have a whack of invites to give out. If you want one, email me.

You know what they say…

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember toothing? Hooking up with strangers found over the Bluetooth airwaves sounded too good to be true, and yesterday, it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax:

All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ’sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities—Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.

Wired, Reuters, the BBC, and many others (including yours truly) fell for it. Must have been fun to start such a meme though!

Read: Techdirt

Google is #6 for "britney spears"

Go to Google and run a search for “britney spears”. Or, if you’re lazy, click here. See what the number six result is? Yep, that’s a Google page. It’s significant, because the pop princess is the 16th most popular search term on the web. Millions of people search for britney spears on Google. It’s also significant because the page is usless.

So why does Google rank so high for this search? A combination of two things. First of all, Google needs to upgrade their algorithms – or else MSN/Yahoo will easily surpass them. Secondly, Google should follow their own best practices! They basically invented the rel=”nofollow” tag which would have prevent their page from appear in the top ten, so why aren’t they using it?

Either it’s an honest mistake, or the whole “do no evil” mantra has gone to the crapper. For more on that, visit FuckedGoogle.com.

Read: Stephan Spencer

Why I AM Smoking the Podcasting Dope

Recently, Darren Barefoot posted that he isn’t smoking the podcasting dope – he’s skeptical of, well, everything to do with podcasting. Like anything worth talking about, there are those that agree and those that do not (and in Canada, the vast majority sit on the fence). Here’s why I AM smoking the podcasting dope, and like Darren’s post, its a rhetorical discussion:

You need a radio voice.

Why does your podcast have to be professional radio quality? I think many people will enjoy creating podcasts simply so that their friends and family can listen – that doesn’t require advanced audio or a professional radio sounding voice. Um and uh away!

Think back to the early days of the web. Did all websites look great? Nope. There was crap then and there’s crap now. The difference is that the amount of crap has been reduced. I don’t come across a flashing neon web page as often as I used to. I don’t think podcasting will be any different.

And for those individuals or companies that want to produce something more professional, there’s nothing holding them back from acquiring the necessary items.

Podcasting takes too much time.

  • Sure you can skim through 250 blogs a day, and at first glance it may seem impossible to do the same with podcasting. However, while a typical blog may have a new post or two every day, podcasting is much less frequent (unless you’re Adam Curry). I think it’s unreasonable to assume that the volume of podcast episodes will equate to the volume of blog posts.
  • We’ve got tools like Google for the web. We’ve got PubSub, Feedster, Technorati and others for blogs. When the tools exist to help you find podcasts, the task of listening will seem much less daunting. It’s not a barrier, it’s a challenge, and it will be overcome.
  • Who said you have to listen to a podcast on a mobile device? There’s no reason you can’t listen on your computer. Instead of streaming radio at work, many people may start to play podcasts in the background.

There’s no money in podcasting.

As more and more people purchase portable audio devices, the number of hours that people aren’t listening to advertisements grows. Eventually, advertising will find it’s way into podcasting. And as the number of podcasters grows, so too will grow the market for tools and services that help the creators and the listeners. Finally, just as businesses are starting to see the value of blogging, they’ll see the value of podcasting too. There’s a lot of money in podcasting, the trick is to extract it!

Podcasting is hard.

  • Again, think back to the early days of the web. Could everyone make a web page? Definitely not. However, now we have the tools that make it easy for anyone to create a website. When similar tools appear for podcasting, there is no reason that someone can’t podcast very easily.
  • Yes, podcasting does have that extra requirement – hardware. Yet microphones are cheap, and many people already have them. Furthermore, they aren’t hard to use. And if services like Skype already have millions of users with microphones, I don’t see this as a barrier to podcasting.

Podcasting uses a lot of bandwidth/needs a fast connection.

This argument annoys me. How many millions of people download audio and video files from file sharing sites and services? Tons. More than will ever download a podcast probably. And the technology for dealing with such large amounts of data transfer is constantly improving – look at BitTorrent.

Podcasting has a limited audience.

The audience for radio is in decline. The audience for live TV is in decline (just look at the dropping numbers of awards show viewers and the interest in TiVo). Listeners and viewers are changing their habits from conforming to the schedule of the content provider to fitting the content into their own schedule. Podcasting doesn’t require a new audience – the existing audience can use podcasts as just another source of media. In many places, I think podcasting will replace radio.

Podcasting isn’t revolutionary.

Sometimes the best technologies are not revolutionary, but improve on what existed before. Streaming audio simply isn’t a great way to distribute audio on the web – podcasting is an evolution that makes the experience better.

While a writer may show a certain style on their blog, it’s still just text. Podcasting has the ability to reintroduce the human quality to discussions, as your voice is a lot more personal than your writing style. Another benefit of podcasting is that the listener uses their imagination! No text or video to distract from the content, the listener can create the scene in his or her mind.

Podcasting is empowering. It gives the creator a voice and the listener a choice – it doesn’t get much better than that.

I’m sure you can come up with more reasons for both sides of the argument, but that’s why I’m smoking the podcasting dope. What about you?

Are there really that many listeners?

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

More than 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players and 29% of them have downloaded podcasts from the Web so that they could listen to audio files at a time of their choosing. That amounts to more than 6 million adults who have tried this new feature that allows internet “broadcasts” to be downloaded onto their portable listening device.

You can see the entire PDF report here. While the numbers make podcasting look very good, I think they might be slightly high. Considering that iPodder has around 125,000 downloads and there are only 5000 or so podcasts, 6 million listeners seems like a very high number. Or take a look at Podcast Alley – they now have about 300,000 page views a month. Even if they had that amount since podcasting started back in September, they would only have just over 2 million page views.

Read: Podcast Wizard Blog

Pope's death announced by email

Unless you’re living under a rock somewhere, you have no doubt heard of the Pope’s death by now. What you probably have not heard, however, is that the Vatican announced John Paul II’s death by email:

“The Holy Father, John Paul II, died at 9:37 p.m. (1937GMT) in his private apartment,” the message read. “All procedures foreseen in the Apostolic Constitution `Universi Dominici Gregis’ (`Of the Lord’s Whole Flock’), promulgated by John Paul II on February 22, 1996, have been activated.”

Announcing his death by email is pretty notable considering the number of other traditions and rituals that will still be carried out – like striking the Pope on the head with a silver hammer. And when the cardinals vote on a new Pope, the ballots are burned with a special chemical to make smoke white or black – white signals a new Pope has been chosen.

I read elsewhere today that John Paul II was the first pontiff to utilize modern technology like airplanes and computers. Interesting, but not all that surprising when you consider that these things were first catching on when he became Pope 26 years ago.

Read: CNN

Imagine Cup 2005

Today was the last Microsoft Academic event of the year, and Anthony Vranic was on hand from Microsoft to give students an overview of Whidbey and ASP.NET 2.0. The event went very well, and although it is very late, more students were introduced to the Imagine Cup.

Speaking of the Imagine Cup, we’re trying to pull something together. We should have decided to enter a lot earlier than we did, but I think we’ll pull it off! Only 22 hours to go as of the time of this post…