Month: November 2006

Michael Gartenberg – Changing the game with HD:

“The tipping point for HD is here and there’s no going back.” from Michael Gartenberg.

Now *that’s* what I’m talking about!

While it does lose a certain sense of specialness over time, there truly is no going back. Looking forward to buying a new Vista Media Center PC in January when they are here.

Techcrunch Last.fm Relaunches with New Features Marshall’s got the story over at TechCrunch on Last.fm’s relaunch this morning. Apparently they are offering free mp3s from some independent artists as part of their relaunch which sounds interesting.

I alternate listening between Last.fm and Pandora and think both are pretty good. My only beef with Pandora is that I get the same songs too frequently in my play list. It seems like only a select number of songs are available from each artist. It would be nice to have an option not to repeat a song say for two weeks there.

I like Last.fm as well and like the music it suggests and that I can mark songs as favorites, but I don’t like the fact that I have to use their app to use it. I much prefer accessing Pandora via a url. It’s cleaner and easier.

Either way though you can’t go wrong, especially since both services are free.

I would be interested in hearing how well their stratgies of subsidizing free music in hopes of music sales is working out.

By the way, another *fantastic* resource to keep in mind for digital music is Hype Machine. Hype Machine allows you to search by song, artist, etc. and then goes out and scours the blogosphere finding the mp3s for you on people’s blogs.

Hype Machine is starting to feel an awful lot like Napster did, but with the wrinkle that they are not actually hosting the files. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them shut down at some point — but for now it is an excellent place to go if you want to go download 5 or 6 tracks from the latest Death Cab for Cutie album…

er.. all ethical concerns about piracy aside of course.

About The Image: Photolibrary acquires Index Stock: Interesting news and more consolidation in the world of stock photography today. Sydney based Photolibrary Group bought Index Stock Imagery. More from Andy Goetze.

Update: The latest is that Crook has made a bogus homemade DMCA notice to try and get Boing Boing to take down his photo. Fark has now also announced a photoshop contest. Fortunately for Boing Boing, their ISP is in Canada where the DMCA sun don’t shine.

It is also interesting to note that the photo of Crook that he so much would like removed from websites was from when he was on Fox News bragging about his websites which puportedly try to dismiss the Holocaust among other things.

Good Luck Mike!

Michael Crook used the website Craigslist to bait men using sexually explicit ads. He then impersonated a woman under the pretenses of meeting these man getting them in the process to reveal personal information about themselves.

He then used that personal information to contact these men’s employers, spouses, etc. to embarass them for sport.

This is evil and the worst of what the internet represents.

When his misdeeds were chronicled on the 10 Zen Monkeys website, including a photo lifted from a public appearance by Crook on Fox News, Crook tried to use the DMCA to force 10 Zen Monkey’s internet provider to take the photo down.

While I can understand why someone as evil who screwed over so many men might want their photo taken off the internet, I think it’s abusive to use the DMCA, a law that was meant to be used for copyright owners to have their copyrighted material take off the internet, abused and used as a tool of censorship.

So above you will find the photo of Michael Crook that he doesn’t want people to see. I have no problem publishing a photo of him after he ruined so many people’s lives. I may end up getting a DMCA take down notice as well, but if enough of us publish his photo, it won’t matter anymore and it will be in the public domain.

The EFF yesterday filed a lawsuit against Crock for abusing the DMCA to try and silence his critics. I hope that they are successful.

Bullies should not be able to operate with impunity.

Although Boing Boing says that Michael Crook is an assumed name by him (I’m not sure what kind of person would assume the last name Crook) the website Truth Luster suggests that his full name is Michael Scott Crook. With Delaney as a surname for his mothers maiden name according to a post he made in a geneology forum and Vogel another name through his mothers line.

Techcrunch Zooomr Doubles Flickr’s Monthly Photo Upload Limits

[Disclaimer: I am the Evangelist and CEO of Zooomr]

Marshall Kirkpatrick, who I just met recently in person at the Getty deal up in Seattle, covers Zooomr’s monthly increase in bandwidth limits over at TechCrunch.

Beginning this month we have increased the bandwidth available for free accounts to 100MB and Pro accounts to 4GB. We believe these higher limits will make it easier for people to post full high res uploads of their photos on Zooomr without running out of space each month. Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t restrict photo upload sizes to 5MB and 10MB — allowing you instead to upload photos up to 50MB, which should accomodate most every consumer grade digital SLR out there today, even at high resolution settings.

Megapixels are getting larger and larger and we want to make sure that we have the structure to support both full size non degraded versions of your photos as well as the monthly bandwidth to accomodate these larger size files.

Thanks to TechCrunch for covering our news and if you haven’t tried Zooomr out yet, give it a try. We are offering free Pro accounts if you are a blogger.