AmieStreet – DRM free quality music

January 4, 2007 eirikso44 Comments

AmieStreet

You’re a band and want to publish your music. If nobody knows you nobody will buy your music. So your music is worth nothing. And should be free.

When people get interested and want your music it’s worth something.

Meet Amie Street. A music publishing site where the music is free when it is submitted and the price starts increasing as the music gets popular. If it gets really popular the price rise to about one dollar pr. song. About the same as iTunes and other music sites.

The problem is that the music is not filtered by any big record companies and a site like Amie Street is bound to include a bunch of low quality crap. You need systems to guide the users into the good stuff. Well, Amie Street has included a cool recommendation system with a reward.

When you buy credits at the site you will get a certain amount of recommendations. If you find a good song that still is pretty cheap and recommend it at this low price you will get a reward as the price increase. The reward is new credits that you can use to buy music at Amie Street.

I have played around with the site and actually found quite a bit of quality music. When you buy music you can download it as many times as you want or play it directly from the site. The music is DRM free MP3 that will play on all portable players etc…

Here is some of the stuff that I found:

http://amiestreet.com/player/amie.swf?playlist_url=http://amiestreet.com/listSongs.php?fetchPlaylist/songIds__8136,8128,5526,3674,3671,3670,3444,3025,1911,1819,1708,1188,788,664,355,351,159,158,157&autoplay=false

Update: Link to the player.

On my computer the songs play in full length because I have bought them. On other computers I guess it will only play excerpts.

Now, if they could do something with the overall look of the site and the player…

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2007 eirikso9 Comments

No posting for over a week! Indicating that I have had a very nice Christmas. With family, friends, good food, good wine and nice presents. One of them is of course the 17″ iMac from eirikso to eirikso… More on that later.

The image is a two second (hand held) exposure from outside our flat at new years eve.

Look forward to loads of interesting stuff here at eirikso.com in 2007.

Yahoo Go TV dead?

December 22, 2006 eirikso1 Comment

Please see the update at the end of this post!

One of my readers just informed me that the Yahoo Go TV page has vanished. Could be a temporary error. Or, have Yahoo closed the project down? Over at the Yahoo Go TV forum people seems less than satisfied with the latest beta.

Here is the thread discussing this over at the original Meedio forum.

I have emailed the creator of the original MyHTPC and Meedio product, Pablo Pissanetzky to see if he has an explanation.

I’ll let you know if I get an answer.

(Thanks, Trond)

Update:
Pablo is answering:

I think some sites are being reshuffled – it is a temporary mistake and not intentional.

Puh! I have faith in this product and believe it could become a success. We need nice applications to bring internet content to the TV screen!

Happy christmas

December 22, 2006 eirikso1 Comment

God jul. Joyeux Noel. Buone Feste Natalizie. Selamat Hari Natal. Boze Narodzenie. Yes, I am repeating myself.

Well, the internet is about to go into hibernation mode for the holidays. Have fun. Take care of yourself. Take care of your family. I’ll do my best, so expect slow posting for the next couple of days. 🙂

TV from your media center to your mobile

December 22, 2006 eiriksoLeave a comment

I haven’t tried it yet, but this looks like an interesting plugin for Windows Media Center: Mobile TV Center 1.0

Watch TV on more than 500 mobile phones, Pocket PCs, iPod, PSP and portable media players. Take your TV programs on-the-go. All the shows that your record with your Windows Media Center are automatically converted in the background and transferred to your mobile phone, iPod, Pocket PC, Palm. Simply record TV-shows for your portable device by selecting a tv-show in the EPG (on-screen program guide).

I’ll be back with more info when I have tested it.

Other products with similar functionallity: TMPG VideoSync and SlySoft CloneDVD Mobile.

(Thanks, Oyvind and StÃ¥le)

Broadcast 2.0

December 22, 2006 eirikso5 Comments

Traditional broadcast is pretty simple. Media companies try to reach as many people as possible through terrestial, satellite and cable. They want to reach people in their own home. All the way into their television of choice. Sony or Samsung. Tube or flat screen. Stereo or mono. Broadcasters try to reach them all.

And, you are free to invite friends over to your home and share the experience. Come over to my place and watch the game on friday!

On the internet the model is slightly different. Broadcasters make their own homes. They call their homes mtv.com, cnn.com and so on. They choose their own players and choose what technology you should use. You don’t have windows media player and internet explorer? Sorry, in our home that’s the key to get in.

So, they try to drive people into their home. Come to us. We rule. We have full control. Don’t you dare choosing your own television. We control the experience. You want to share an experience? Take your friends over to our place.

During the last couple of years people have started making their own homes on the internet. Through their own blog, their page on MySpace, their personalized home page. Their RSS reader. Their own house in Second Life.

Now people want to watch, keep, organize and share media in their own home on the net. They want to share music, video and interesting stories through their page on MySpace or on their blog.

Yes, these people with an advanced home on the net are still a minority. But it’s a very important minority. And people are building. Blogger, WordPress.com, MySpace, Netvibes, Google/ig and all their competitors are growing. Steve Rubel has a very interesting thought about how peoples blogs are becoming start pages.

So, are there any broadcasters out there that understand the power of this shift? Not really. Unless you understand that YouTube has become one of the most important broadcasters out there.

YouTube let people watch, share and organize content in their own home on the net. We suddenly have something that looks like the illustration I used to start this aricle. YouTube as the broadcaster. Blogs and start pages as all the homes.

Of course we’ll see combinations of these models. But it’s important to understand this shift. Because it has serious consequences for the way we measure success.

You can’t measure the success of lonelygirl15 through the traffic on one specific web site. She’s on YouTube. She’s on Revver. And on several web sites. The stuff gets even more difficult when you add Democracy Player, iTunes and BitTorrent to the important places to be.

Pageviews are sooo last century. Unique visitors are slightly better. But for the people that start using all the available distribution methods we’re back to the old model here as well. We have to measure the way we’ve done with radio and television for years. Ask people. Make surveys. Install special measure devices in peoples homes. Make advertising that is easy to judge the effect of. It’s about reach. Not clicks.

The problem is that the advertisers don’t understand this.

Stealing an image of a kid

December 20, 2006 eirikso26 Comments

Apparently I nearly killed a reader through pure boredom with my last post, so I hope this stuff is slightly more interesting.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law calls me wondering if I have started selling pictures of his grandchildren to commercials. He is talking about a picture of his grandson listening to an iPod. Used in an advertisement in a magazine he just received.

I haven’t sold any pictures of my son to commercials, so I was quite interested in this. As you can see from the picture that I have inserted above, my father-in-law had reason to believe that I was selling images to commercials.

The image is available through this article. And available for sale for editorial use over at shutterpoint. I am selling images both for editorial use and for use in commercials. Any images that include family members are only available for editorial use. The people responsible for this ad have not bought any pictures from me. And this particular picture isn’t even available with a license that would allow use in an advertisement.

Here at eirikso.com it is protected by the simple fact that this image is my intellectual property. Eirikso.com is also marked with a Creative Commons license. Giving people freedom to use my work for non-commercial purposes as long as they give me credit and issue the same Creative Commons license on the work that includes mine.

So what do we have here?
Commercial use of my image in an advertisement. And by the way, no image credit. These people have to follow Norwegian law. This use of my image is a violation to paragraph 1 in the norwegian copyright act. It is a screaming obvious theft of intellectual property.

In addition to this, it is a violation to paragraph 45 c. Use of an image where a person is clearly visible. They need permission from the person in the picture.

At this point I have sent a letter to the shop that is responsible for the advertisement. Asking for a full report on where this image have been used. They have simply forwarded this to their lawyer.

I have made it clear in my letter that this is something that is of interest for my readers and that I will publish articles on this matter. I am awaiting an answer and will of course keep you updated on this!

Baloons

December 19, 2006 eirikso5 Comments

Thomas Hawk’s digital connection is one of the blogs that have been in my RSS reader for the longest time. He writes about photography and digital media. Between all the excellent writing he puts some articles that simply contain an image. He is an excellent photographer and these images give a nice little break from all the reading I do when I have my head deep down in Google Reader. I think more bloggers should do this. Post a poem, a drawing or a photo…

So, here we go. I can’t compete with Thomas Hawk, but I have more than 30 000 images in my archive and shoot hundreds each month.

The image in this post is from the Gustav Vigeland sculpture park, shot last Sunday. Two girls selling baloons. I like the contrast between the colours and soft shapes of the baloons and the brown trees with no leaves in the background.

Camera: Canon S2 IS
Filters: unsharp mask, a slight increase of saturation and some adjustment of light and focus in the bottom of the image

Zcubes – do it all in your browser

December 18, 2006 eirikso5 Comments

I have been playing around with Zcubes for a couple of minutes. It’s in beta. It’s quite slow and it looks ugly. But, this baby lets you do quite a lot within the browser. At this point only Explorer 5.5 and above. So, if you’re in Explorer you can go directly to a test page here.

Or, read more about it over at Read/Write Web:

In terms of using ZCubes, the idea is that it allows users to create “experiences” – ranging from the creation of personal pages, greeting cards, posters, portals, research/academic papers and more. Making these experiences easy to use is also key, as noted in a recent ZCubes blog post – e.g. providing simple drag-drop based utilities.

ZCubes: Trying to “Do It All” on the Web

Windows is on its way out

December 17, 2006 eirikso23 Comments

The computer I use for most of my work at home is about to break down. Basically it’s a windows box that I have built by using leftovers from my various media center projects.

So, it’s time to upgrade.

A little bit of history
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Entering my life back in 1982 or 83. Before that I played around with my father’s portable Kaypro II. The Commodore 64 took me all the way from playing games, programming Basic and eventually hacking around in assembly language.

In 1984 I also started playing around with my father’s new toy, a brand new Macintosh 128K. The C64 was later on replaced with a C128 and the legendary Amiga 500. I ended my Commodore adventure with an Amiga 4000. After that I was entirely on Apple Macintosh. Both at home and at work.

In 1998 I accepted a position as a consultant with Accenture and figured it was time to learn some Windows stuff as well. Doing it the hard way by building a computer from scratch and installing Windows NT. Took me about three months to get everything working. Three months that practically made me a windows expert. After that I have been using different Windows and Mac computers. Mostly Windows. All the way from NT to 2000 and now Windows XP and Media Center Edition.

How important is the operating system?
It used to be pretty important. Hardware was closely tied to the operating system. Most of the work was done in applications installed on top of the particular operating system you had decided to use. Networks, disks and file formats was alone on their different platforms. Once you were locked into an operating system it was hard to switch to another.

During the last couple of years the operating system itself isn’t that important anymore. I do 90% of my work in the browser. A computer running Firefox alone will be able to solve most of my daily work.

Outlook was entirely replaced with Gmail several months ago. Microsoft Word and the simple work i do in Excel have been replaced by Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I do my publishing directly in WordPress. Calculations are done with CalCooLate. I administrate and get my news through Google Reader.

All of this can be done fluently on Windows, MacOS or Linux. The operating system is loosing its importance.

So what’s left?
Why bother? If Firefox is the only thing you need why don’t you simply switch to the free and user friendly Ubuntu? Actually, I have considered it. But I still rely on some applications that are installed on my computer:

1. Image handling
I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to administrate and edit my images.

2. Video and audio editing
I currently use Sony Vegas Video to edit media.

3. Presentation work
This is actually a field where I don’t have a proper tool today. I use PowerPoint, but it is absolutely horrible. And the web based tools like Thumbstacks isn’t there yet.

In addition to this I use huge amounts of small more or less important helper applications to handle various tasks. You find some of my favourites here. And yes, after I wrote that article I have replaced ZoomPlayer with VLC and added Democracy Player to the list of important tools.

What’s important?
Some of the most important stuff that the operating system has to do is to run stable, be clean, uncluttered and fast and take care of some basic safety. I am quite happy with the work that Windows carries out on my boxes, but it is getting increasingly cluttered.

And my experiments with Vista has not been very convincing. They try to add security by restricting the user from doing anything. On one of the Vista boxes I use I am waiting for a security alert that would say something like: “Are you sure you want to type the letter “E”?. It could be dangerous”. I answer “yes”. The next box would say “Are you really really sure? Was it you that just typed the letter E? This is a security question to verify that your computer is safe”. So, when I try to type the rest of my name, “Are you sure you want to type the letter “i”? etc…

This, in addition to the sheer joy of some variation leads me to the temptation of some alternatives. And, it seems like Thomas Hawk has been pretty happy lately.

All of the tasks that I do in addition to what’s in the browser can be solved in Ubuntu, but I am afraid it’s not that user friendly yet, and that I wouldn’t find a video editing suite and image archive that would fill my needs. Please let me know if you have some recommendations. I know that The Gimp would probaly solve my image editing needs, but I also need a system to handle my 32 000 images with tagging and browsing.

So, I am considering to do the switch to Apple. For this house that would be to replace two old windows boxes with two brand new iMacs. And I would also keep my promise and replace my good old Thinkpad X31 with a MacBook Pro when the IBM laptop needs to be upgraded. The Media Center will stay for a while. The only real alternative there would be to install MythTV. Apple have no proper DVR software yet.

My old windows box is still running, but good advice is welcome in the comments! It seems like a 17″ iMac will be the happy and hard working box that will replace the one I am using right now. 17″ because there isn’t room for anything bigger.