Darknet: User-generated content: MP3.com data mining

Darknet: User-generated content: MP3.com data mining JD Lasica blogs about Derrick Olen's article regarding understanding the what makes a "hit" song. Olen worked at mp3.com and has some interesting insights into hit songs that were not pushed by the labels.

PCWorld.com - Internet Tips: No-Guilt Downloads: Free Books, Music and Movies

PCWorld.com - Internet Tips: No-Guilt Downloads: Free Books, Music and Movies PC World is running a story that mentions the Internet Archive and talks about where to find free books, music and movies on the web.

Cable Car

Netflix, TiVo Promise New Service

Wired News: Netflix, TiVo Promise New Service So the rumors, despite TiVo's denial, really were true after all.

One of the nice things that I've enjoyed about my HDTV TiVo is the ability to order really amazing picture quality pay per view movies.

Ordering movies via Movielink is so second rate as the quality is dramatically inferior to anything that you would rent on dvd or watch on HDTV recorded from HD HBO or HD Showtime or from pay per view.

How is it that TiVo is the first to bring us a HDTV recorder, has amazing quality pay per view downloads and will now be offering what would appear to me an amazing selection of high quality HDTV downloadable movies and Microsoft can not?

Geeking with Greg: Microsoft and the search war

Geeking with Greg: Microsoft and the search warMore on the importance of desktop search.

My problem is that with over a terabyte of data, searching my entire PC comes all but impossible. My temporary solution has been Copernic, which has indexed my desktop and does super fast search. The remaining problem though is that I can't then work with these files through Copernic like I could through Explorer. I can't copy them after they are found for instance.

I'm looking forward to future versions of Microsoft's operating system fixing the very real desktop search problem.

Watching the Wheels go Round and Round

How to take control of your TiVo

How to take control of your TiVo: From Howard Wolinsky at the Chicago Sun-Times. "But I wanted more. I found Weaknees.com, an online company based in Los Angeles that has been offering TiVo enhancements for four years.

To tweak our recorder, we bought a do-it-yourself upgrade kit from Weaknees that added 105 hours. (Note: And voided our warranty.) The installation wasn't textbook. But through e-mail, Weaknees gave us the instructions we needed to complete the job.

Jeff Shapiro, co-founder of Weaknees, named for the feeling you get when you discover the power of TiVo, said it can make sense to just buy a high-capacity unit from the outset rather than upgrade. He said a 35-hour unit can cost $99 plus $189 for a 120-hour upgrade kit. In comparison, a 120-hour unit, costs $249.

His site has a buyer's guide to help consumers sort out which machine to buy and whether to buy DirecTV's TiVo service or stand-alone service. It's very Talmudic.

Shapiro is a 1995 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, who had worked as general counsel for a software company. He and his friend Michael Adberg started helping friends and family upgrade their TiVos. Soon, their hobby turned into a full-blown business. The power of TiVo strikes again.

Weaknees sells units with up to 320 hours of recording time as well as new units for high-definition TV. Weaknees also offers replacement remote controls in case your dog ate yours. Shapiro claims that has happened.

More intriguing to me was a new kind of remote that enabled me to control TiVo throughout my house. We only have one TiVo/DirecTV receiver, but our home is wired to carry signals to TVs through the house. Dean, the TiVo installer, said, 'You know, satellite signals aren't supposed to split.' And yet they do.

The problem we faced was we couldn't control the channel except in the room in which the TiVo receiver resided touse the line-of-sight infrared signal. That meant trips downstairs. Bummer, right?

Shapiro had a solution, a $56 radio frequency remote control. With the "Around the House Wireless Remote Control Extender," you install special batteries that transform your TiVo remote into a wireless transmitter."

Techdirt:This Old Microsoft House

Techdirt:This Old MS-House Home technology for the future.

Wired 12.10: Would You Buy the Future of Radio From This Man?

Wired 12.10: Would You Buy the Future of Radio From This Man? A bio piece on Lee Abrams, the inventor of album-oriented rock (AOR) in the late 1970s and a current force behind XM Satellite Radio.

Personally I find that these days I'm mostly becoming my own radio station. With an extensive mp3 library I mostly listen to and rate these at home. In the car or traveling I use my laptop as my default personal satellite radio. I can put my 5 Star mp3 list on my laptop, plug in my IRock beam it and listen to what I really want to on the radio. I use headphones when walking around town or on the plane or BART. Because I'd rather be my own DJ than let someone do this for me I find that I simply have no use for XM Satellite.

At some point I still may subscribe to XM Satellite if it gets easy enough to rip mp3s from their broadcasts. On the other hand there are a lot of other more easier ways to build your music library.

At Scoble's Geek Dinner on Saturday night I met a guy named Tom who worked at Savage Beast - a music recommendation type service. According to Tom their mp3 library was at about 300,000. This was the largest library I've heard of yet.

I'm very curious about what the size of other's mp3 libraries are these days. I'd love to hear from you, anonymously if you'd like, in the comments section about how large your own personal mp3 collection is and what it consists of and how your organize it.

Fortune Magazine on Corporate Blogging

Fortune.com - Technology - It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most prominent blogger, says via e-mail that "I often link to bloggers who are not friendly to Microsoft. They know I'm listening, and that alone improves relationships." Other tech companies with company blogs include Yahoo, Google, Intuit, and Monster.com. Even Maytag has a blog. Thanks to largehearted boy.

A Detailed Background Article on Phil Spector and His Upcoming Trial

Scotsman.com News - Features - Studio to murder trial: whatever happened to Phil Spector? "The actions of the Hitler-like DA and his storm trooper henchmen are reprehensible, unconscionable and despicable," Phil Spector told reporters on Monday night.

Details of the troubled life of Phil Spector from Scotsman.com. Thanks to largehearted boy.

Scoble on dealing with the information overflow

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger I was very impressed with Scoble's ability to sift, scan and sort through 900 plus feeds. Certainly RSS aggregators help but I know that I don't follow near that many and yet I seem to spend hours a day on the ones that I do follow. I'm very interested in what additional tools beyond RSS can help filter, sort and manage the information flow.

Yahoo treats their free accounts better than their paid accounts

Yahoo! Search blog: New Beta Version of My Yahoo! One of the things about my yahoo that really bugs me is that because I use SBC DSL I get an inferior my yahoo service.

About a year ago SBC and Yahoo! forced me from my yahoo to SBC's my yahoo. The big difference? A new whopping large banner ad at the top of my my yahoo! page that wasn't there before. Other than that it's basically the same thing.

So let's see. If I don't pay SBC money I get a better my yahoo for free. If I happen to be a SBC DSL client then I get an inferior product and I have to pay SBC money. I wish there was some way to hide the fact that I'm an SBC customer from Yahoo!.

To make matters worse, of course because again I'm a paying customer and not a free account, everyone else can update their my yahoo account today and I cannot. See the screen shot above. Nice to know that they take care of their paying customers first.

When SBC/Yahoo! forced me into this new my yahoo I lost a bunch of calendar data as a result of the process.

I wish Yahoo! treated SBC my yahoo clients as well as they treated those that use their service for free.

New Media Musings: The creative chaos of blogs

New Media Musings: The creative chaos of blogs JD Lasica points to a nice write up on the issue of blogs as media and media's checks and balances from the San Jose Mercury News.

MSNBC - The Book of Bob

MSNBC - The Book of Bob Newsweek on the upcoming Bob Dylan autobiography, Chronicles, Volume One.

Slashdot | Recording Deals In The Digital Age

Slashdot | Recording Deals In The Digital Age Slashdot is running a post on a short description of a record industry panel discussion on the future of making money in their business. It's interesting to see where they think things are headed.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Download and store every piece of music on XM Satellite Radio... Legally.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, September 27, 2004 Doc Searl's has got a post this morning in which David Strom describes a legal way to use Time Trax to download and store and sort mp3s from XM Satellite Radio. It sounds very interesting and may be something to play around with at some point. The sorting would be the key though. One of the things I like about WMP is that it actually creates an album cover complete with artwork and the entire CD when you rip.

I wonder how Time Trax handles this?

Geeking with Greg: 4 Million Weblogs?

Geeking with Greg: 4M weblogs?

Falling in Love

Electricity

Rosealia

Closed

Puppet Boy

St. Clair's Liquor

The Guilty Undertaker Sighs

The Lonesome Organ Grinder Cries

Noe Valley

Diner

Night Starbucks

Night Passageway

Scoble Geek Dinner at Barney's

I enjoyed attending my first geek dinner with Robert Scoble tonight at Barney's in Noe Valley.

The dinner conversation revolved around numerous subject items but some of the themes that came up repeatedly were RSS and the technology surrounding it, RSS customization and recommendation, RSS sorting... you get the idea a lot of people are talking about RSS now, or maybe that's just what bloggers talk about when they get together these days. Google also kept popping up in the conversation.

Despite all the hype in the blogsphere these past few weeks Scoble doesn't seem to think that Google is really building a new browser -- but people are definitely interested in what Google will be doing to justify that high stock price and move beyond just search which it was generally agreed is more or less something of a commodity these days. Calendar, email, operating system, office? They have to do something with all of those really smart people they seem to keep hiring.

Robert whipped out his Tablet PC and showed us how he keeps track of his 900 RSS, yes you heard that right, 900 RSS feeds.

I also enjoyed meeting and chatting with Michael Creasy of the Microsoft eHome group. I'm a huge Media Center fan and although with the rollout of MCE 2005 coming shortly and the NDA and all it was difficult to talk specifics, it was nice to hear from Michael about some of the areas that they are looking at and working on in general.

I'd never been to Mary Hodder's site Napsterization before and was glad to meet her. Mary works for Technorati. Her site looks very much like something that I'd be interested in. I subscribed to it on my RSS feed and added it to my blog roll.

I also met Tom who works for Savage Beast -- a music recommendation and meta data type of company in Oakland. Apparently they have a digital library with about 300,000 mp3s. Boy would I love to take a few Maxtor 250 gig drives down to their office. They actually employ real human music specialists who get paid to sit around and listen to music all day and categorize it. Interesting. We talked about Musicplasma and I thought that it was funny that he pointed out that when using it seems to have every band related to Radiohead and have Radiohead at the center of the universe of music and largest band in the world.

There were a few more people there, two Adams, Gary, and as I'm not very good with names I'm not sure on the rest.

I had a great time and look forward to some of these in the future.

Late Night Mission Street

Things You Didn't Know

Somebody to Love

Let Your Love Flow

Early Morning West Oakland BART