Thursday, September 23, 2004
On the webio
Dan Gillmor and Orville Schell were guests on Michael Krasny's Forum program on KQED yesterday. The topic was blogs, among other things impacting the current state of broadcast journalism following an admission of mistakes by CBS.
Raise your iPods if you hate ATRAC
How clueless can a company be? How little can a giant consumer electronics company understand the niche-to-death limits of pushing a proprietary sound recording codec the market clearly doesn't want? Sony has been testing these questions ever since they leveraged their denial of MP3's popularity into lines of highly unpopular proprietary ATRAC-only devices.
Well, it says here Sony will, at last, wake up and stop making digital recording and playback devices that don't respect MP3's giant share of the playback codec market.
Me, I've bought half a dozen Sony NetMD Minidisk recorders (ever since Sony stopped making the outstanding WM-D3 cassette recorder), and have hated them all, because they insist on making nothing but @#$&* Sony-proprietary ATRAC recordings. Converting those recordings to MP3 requires Windows-only crapware, which I can't stand.
Think there will be a way to update my old NetMD's?
I didn't think so.
Thanks to Xeni for the pointer.
Gaggle?
I didn't even know he was dead
See what he said
The Ibiblio people at the University of Nort Carolina (go Heels) have done a primo job putting together a full video of my recent talk there at the Wilson Library, where I learned more as a nonstudent than I ever did as a student, anywhere. I used to live in the stacks, back when it was UNC's main library.
The video is a fine production. I'm not well-lit, but I wore a mike, so the audio is excellent. And they edited all my slides into the video as well — something I've rarely seen done, mostly because it takes time and care. Especially in this case, since the talk ran well over an hour.
A big thanks again to Paul Jones and everybody there.
And to Signal Response for the pointer.
Bowling with pearls
Dr. Weinberger reports at length on his visit to, and participation in the World Economic Forum. Required reading. Here's part of his pitch to the Big Content people:
I said that I understand that to them the Net looks like a medium through which content passes, some of which people aren't paying for. But, (sez I) their customers aren't "consuming" content. We're not consuming anything. We're listening to music, We're watching video streams, We're talking with friends. To call it content is to miss why it matters to Big Content's customers.
Somewhere in there he mentions Sarbanes-Oxley, which is one of the biggest balls of red tape ever to preoccupy corporate paranoids and the outside consultans, which "Sox" assures full employment. (I've written about the matter here.)