Best collaboration software in years, hands down. Subethaedit still rocks for pure code, but I’ve been looking for a cross-platform wysiwyg dito for a long time. Combine it with Basecamp and you are… teh p0werful. And now those smart Googlers acquired Jotspot, too. Microsoft is truly in danger. Boy does Word sux0r on Intel Macs.
Kiko.com’s eBay auction reminds me of Adam’s and mine 24 Hour Dotcom. If only there existed an online marketplace just for buying and selling companies and company assets…
San Francisco may be the first city to provide free city-wide wifi, but Taipei becomes the first city in the world to roll out city-wide wifi (some 4000 hotspots, covering 90%). The uptake is slower than expected though, with only 40000 users out of 2.6 million so far. The reason? There are already so many free hotspots in the city that few people want to pay the monthly fee of $12.50!
I’m currently in San Francisco trying to figure out how trust works on the web. Me and my partner in crime, Alexander Ljung, has started a blog/project site that we call trustmojo.
Check it out for live reports, ramblings, interviews, photos, podcasts and other juicy bits on trust from San Francisco and the Bay Area. We’ll be here until beginning of September and then the project continues back in Stockholm.
As you might have noticed, I post very rarely here, and I probably won’t post that much in the future either. I’ll blog a lot more on trustmojo.com and forss.to the next coming months though…
“The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand”. Such a good way to put it! Paul Graham have more great tips on getting ideas for startups.
I’m not sure I’m interpreting this correctly, but it sure looks like Yahoo buys Upcoming.org. It is coming from the horses mouth, after all…
Here’s a first person account of what happened in New Orleans. Someone from New Orleans just started a new page and wrote it.
September 7, 05 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link Cosmos
I just read a very inspiring article (part 1 and 2) by Umair Haque on why the business model of the music industry — which still is about selling records — is seriously flawed. Haque applies a theory in microeconomics referred to as Moral hazard to analyze the current market of labels and consumers.
In short, he concludes that we, as music consumers, are finding new ways to compensate for the value lost when we buy music that we realize we don’t like. Labels traditionally act as “quality assurance” agents, but it’s evident that these agents provide too little information to us as consumers about the products they are selling at a (more or less) fixed price; hence creating a typical moral hazard situation. Haque argues that p2p file sharing is mainly about a radical form of risk sharing; we eliminate the costs of buying music that we don’t know if we’ll like.
In part two of the article, he then proposes a number of solutions to the problem. One way to tackle it is to let consumers listen to a piece of music in its entirety before buying. Another way is to provide variable pricing, either on the buyer’s end (consumers get to choose how much to pay), or by the use of some clever algorithm that figures out the demand/value of a particular track or record and then chooses a price accordingly.
Now, Magnatune uses a combination of the above techniques to provide more information to its customers; one can listen to a full album in high quality before buying it to a price one gets to pick (€4-14). In this way, customers can reduce the risk of a “bad experience” by carefully listening to — and then choosing the price for — the music that they buy.
All good? Well, Magnatune’s way may be good enough, but in fact — just as Haque warns — some of the solutions to the problem can give rise to a double Moral hazard! In this case, it’s the listen-to-the-full-track feature that is problematic. Being the hobby hacker I am, I wrote a script that extracts all the mp3-files from the m3u files that Magnatune uses for their track preview feature. In a very short time, my computer had downloaded over 2GB of copyrighted music (Don’t worry, Magnatune, I deleted it again). And the servers over at Magnatune just think that I’ve previewed a lot of tracks, which means that now I’m the one responsible for the moral hazard!
September 3, 05 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Link Cosmos
I’ve finally uploaded a very entertaining documentary film about the 24 Hour Dotcom online for viewing and downloading at ourmedia.org. Big thanks to Ben Pohl and Sebastian Gollek for creating the film!
Champagne flashmob. Watch the film here.
In other news, a site called Yubnub placed 2nd in the recent Railsday competition (in which teams are to create a web app with Ruby on Rails in 24 hours). Yubnub is very similar to Dozomo — the site we built in 24 hours — and has received lots of hype. Looks like we’ve got competition! I’m still addicted to Dozomo though, partly because of it’s glorious Ajaxified command completion. We’ve also got some new features coming up within the next few weeks (search history with command completion are among them).
In this cryptic post, Andy from upcoming.org announces that Nokia is working on a mobile version of Upcoming and that they need your feedback. Hmm…Interesting!
A little over a month ago I visited last.fm in their very east Londonish office. Talking to the team, I got to know about some really cool things that they have in store for the future. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to talk about it here…
Mischa, Martin and Johan at last.fm.
One of the things they’re already doing though, is spidering (both manually and automatically) P2P networks, constantly feeding the radio database with terabytes of new material. Since they have a valid radio license, it’s fully legal! This reminded me about what I wrote in 2003:
“Now, if file sharing apps would implement the cache model and rareness indexing I’m currently emulating manually, so that songs I never play are purged automatically from my local node and downloaded again upon request or automatically as their rareness indexes drops below critical, and if we could implement a way of auto-discovering other people with similar tastes by comparing my collection with theirs, it would make it even harder for commercial alternatives. Not to say if we’d come up with a cross-P2P search engine working on Google principles — “Yoodle”!”
Indy — a fairly new, client based “competitor” to last.fm — actually has a very simple caching functionality, resembling what I spoke of above. It basically dedicates more space for music relative to the rating you give it; 5 star music gets 1GB, 4 star gets 500MB, 3 star gets 100MB, etc. The cache is then FIFO-purged automatically.
Alas, I never got convinced by Indy since the music it plays simply is too bad. I believe the base of CC-licensed music actually isn’t there yet in terms of quality. I ended up pressing the 1 star button for every track, desperately hoping for the collaborative filtering system to find something good for me — but it never happened. I think I had one 3 star track out of 25 bad ones…
So I’m back to last.fm for now, thinking it would be very cool if we could somehow integrate last.fm with Indy, getting the best of both worlds.
Andrew Baio (creator of upcoming.org) just told me that the upcoming API now has full tag support. I’m now displaying tags on the event feed here.
The addition of tags+API definitely was the tipping point — now I’m really using the service. I’ve got several iCal subscriptions; Stockholm, Helsinki, and Berlin.
Couple of things; The hierarchy of metros should probably be flat altogether, editing of events could be more wikified, the fixed event categories should be dropped in favor of folksonomy. All in all: Kudos to Andrew!
Last weekend reminded me that breaking up with girlfriends sucks. Big time. Anyway, I’m slowly recovering, and things got a bit better after trying out Backpack, the new wiki/todo-list/PIM web app from the signals. Really can’t decide if this is useful social software or not. Still missing realtime collaborative editing though — heard some rumors about them working on that. I’m in bad need of a SubEthaEdit for the web, and I guess lots of other people are too. They just don’t know that yet.
Adobe buys Macromedia and suddenly SVG might get a revival! I’d really like to see that happen, as it is a much more Web 2.0 savvy technology than Flash will ever be.
Todd Dominey and Dave Shea has good posts.
What does Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young have in common? They are all investing in Del.icio.us!
Sure hope that will make our favorite bookmarks service even better! People are complaining about its user interface, but I’d rather argue that that is its big advantage. I’d really be in favor of a Greasemonkey-style customization feature though — a use-your-own-stylesheet kind of approach.
From Joi
Greasemonkey is clearly showing the way. What’s so cool about it is that it enables users of websites to actually contribute code to them!
A good example: I used to be annoyed by the fact that Flickr used Flash to display photos on individual photo pages. On OS X, it causes a slight delay in the loading of each page, destroying the otherwise slick user experience. Meet Lickr. It solves this problem quite elegantly by providing a javascript version of the photo display widget. Sure hope the Flickr folks are listening!
I wonder if there is a way for Greasemonkey to add something to the User-Agent HTTP-header so that site owners can be notified when their sites are being “remixed”. That would totally close the loop.
I realised that after assaulting it with a paintball gun. I also got the chance to give vent to my feelings for the RIAA. Please do try this at home, it’s mighty fun.
By the way, being able to do this with Flash seems a bit dangerous, I mean aren’t there any security implications here..!?
From Anna.
Roger Johansson, the guy who runs 456 Berea Street, (an excellent web design blog — probably the best out of Sweden) redesigned and linked to me today! I’m happy to get such a warm welcome in the blogosphere — this will definitely keep me going for a while…
Jyri has cool UI ideas for newsreaders. The question I have is: who should take care of the rating input in that pretty little box…?
What I’d like to see is a simple service that could store my ratings for links. The service would collect rating data from many users and then apply collaborative filtering techniques, providing me with feeds of links I’m guaranteed to like…
Just looking at how I could integrate my last.fm recently played tracks feed on my site, and it turns out I’ll have to parse rss (with some rdf thrown in), transform it to html, cache it on my server and then include that snipped on my page. I fully understand why few bloggers do this — it’s simply too complicated!
The easiest way to include stuff on a page is probably by using javascript, but few sites provide feeds and even if they do, it’s a far from optimal technique as your site will build up gradually when content is loading (and it won’t be very accessible either…). And now the rumors has it that IE7 will prohibit all kinds of cross-domain scripting, which effectively will kill much of the really interesting content syndication taking place on the web now…
So what we need, as my friend Adam argues, is a simple standard for seamlessly including stuff on a web page. I propose XML Inclusions, with standard http headers for smart content caching (e.g. “304 Not Modified”). Some smart, transparent proxy system would still be needed for high traffic sites — that, of course, is still the harder problem.
With this, I could include whichever feed I wanted to with one line of code. Just think of how many millions of people who would start aggregating stuff…
Jon and Alf has good points about upcoming.org, a site that “does a lot of things right” but still “hasn’t gone viral the way del.icio.us did”. I agree that it is indeed strange, since I found the site very useful for sharing events with people.
If the reason is what Jon and Alf suggests — lack of folksonomy, APIs and a better UI, that clearly has implications for a lot of other services out there. Basically the message is: Data lock-in strategies is a bad idea, good UIs are of extreme importance and the organization of site content is too. Do this right and you can increase traffic to your site ten-fold. At least I would be able to use the events I publish on upcoming.org on this site…
Lucky enough, it seems that Andy is listening.
The project is now over, and we survived…
Check 24hdc.com for an overview or take a look at dozomo.com, the very useful dotcom we managed to produce in 24 hours.
Right now we are at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin to make a performance art/business project. The mission is to create a dotcom business from scratch in 24 hours.
Enjoying Berlin…
That means designing and programming a complete and useful web application, recruiting people, doing marketing, creating investment programs and much more. After 24 hours, the complete business will be sold on an eBay auction, and everyone involved will be rich!
You are free to join in and help out, and you will get paid in valuable stock ;) If you are a designer, programmer, business person, all-round genius, or just want to be a part of the beta test, please visit our site 24hdc.com. The project starts at Friday *19:00* Central European Time. You will be able to follow the project continuously on the website…
This essay was published in the Aula Exposure Book. I’m proud to be in such good company!
It was long since I bought my last record. Actually, as far as I can recall, buying music over the last years was driven by my social rather than musical interests — either I bought the record of some artist who’s gig I just attended, or I might have bought a CD or an LP for somebody’s birthday just for the sake of being able to hand over something tangible.
Buying music for me, as the poor student I am, has become something special — something I do to gain social credibility in some context.
In the meantime I’ve accumulated a rather large library of music files on my hard drive. But to call it a library actually gives the wrong impression — it works much more like a sort of cache. Since my Powerbook doesn’t have enough space on its hard drive, I am forced to constantly overlook this music “cache” so that it stays within its limits. As the cache is fed with new material, I have to consider what to delete in order to make space. This is a sort of evolutionary process where I review one track after another, trying to estimate a “track value”. I might think not only “Do I like this track?”, but also “Do I know anybody else who has it?” or “is it rare or not?” or “Did I make a considerable effort in acquiring it?” before “trimming the cache”. I also look at play counts — a low play count means “dead bytes”, but conversely a high play count might tell me I ought to delete the track to make way for some variation.
I’ve established a sort of client-server way of thinking about music consumption. All in all, it’s about accessibility; a track on the local drive is instantly available, while a track on my friend’s server takes a few minutes to download. If a track is not available there, file sharing networks will do the trick. Buying music seldom comes into question.
It happens that I backup music, but I never actually use those backups — mainly because it would probably take longer to find something there than to find it on Direct Connect. Actually, if I lost my machine today, I’d probably just start rebuilding the musical cache from scratch.
Sadly, the powerful combination of love, nostalgia and hunter-gatherer instinct that drives many traditional record collectors, does not apply for digital. The love definitely gets a different, weaker character when there is no tangible object to love. Nostalgia suffers because digital is essentially timeless, anti-nostalgic. The hunter-gatherer instinct gradually evaporates as search engines evolve — it becomes clear that there is nothing left to hunt for. Hunting, which used to be exciting, is replaced by a not very dramatic “getting”.
The romantic era of the record collectors is over. Records stores are going. Instead most of us are transforming into overloaded, sloppy and half-enthusiastic musical consumers. We’ve forgotten about the bliss of ownership — at best we maintain well-sorted local nodes of the Great P2P Net, which is basically self-organizing anyway. On-demandness, always-onness and intangibleness naturally annihilates exclusiveness, intenseness and hapticness; but the latter are all highly valued properties of musical experience.
In short, the era of physically packaged music is over — and this affects our relationship to music in general. As a counter reaction, the packaging — the framing which is a presupposition for the emergence of value — desperately tries to find new forms. It is being artificially reconstructed; over empathized and broadened. A wall of hype and merchandise is built around a musical core that, at least in its digital form of today, looses market value the more you copy it.
Now, I am not saying this development is unhealthy and ought to be stopped. I think most of the possibilities new technology bring for music are good. I think it’s the paradigm shift — the critical time when new values replace old ones — that hurts our feelings.
Still it’s a fact: neither me, nor my friends, have the money to pay the artists. It’s quite clear why; we already spent our cash on technology and communication. Computer manufacturers, telcos and ISP:s are getting the money we once gave to the music industry. But this might also be a subject to change. As infrastructure matures and storage resources saturates our needs, then the market will stagnate and we’ll again have cash for music.
But to get me to pay, there has to be something even better than the iTunes Music Store.
It’s hard to compete with file sharing apps today because of their simplicity — most searches are sub second and download times are short. It took me longer to find and download an Eminem album on the iTunes Store than it took me to get it off Direct Connect. And yes, there was cover art to go with it on DC too, plus I got some inspiration from browsing around the guy’s song library.
Now, if file sharing apps would implement the cache model and rareness indexing I’m currently emulating manually, so that songs I never play are purged automatically from my local node and downloaded again at will or automatically when their rareness indexes drops below critical, and if they could implement a way of auto-discovering other people with similar tastes by comparing my collection with theirs, it would make it even harder for commercial alternatives. Not to say if they’d come up with a cross-P2P search engine working on Google principles — “Yoodle”!
But, there are things you can only do with legal, DRM-enabled systems, and those things are definitely the ones that should be played upon by the providers.
For me, there are four key reasons for buying music instead of copying it. In short, it’s about karma, credibility, quality and community.
Karma is about feeling good by doing the right thing; to help poor artists and struggling labels by giving them my money. But before giving, I tend to estimate: how established/commercial is the artist/label? On the web, where I have the option of not paying, this estimation is crucial — and this means small artists/labels are more likely to get cash.
Credibility is the darker side of Karma — it’s my payoff for supporting the artist. It would be great if there was a way of leaving a note with my transaction saying “Hey guys, you rock!” followed by a link to my site. This would work especially well with smaller bands, where the number of buyers can be counted in hundreds. Reading these “oneliners” can be amusing and helpful, both for artists and fans.
Quality is something I would pay money for. If I could get a 96KHz/24Bit/512Kbs version of a track I would pay more. I’d also pay more for an album if there were additional value adds such as exclusive interviews, videos, interactive content, liner notes, PDF covers and so on. Being able to get multiple formats of a track on demand would be useful, especially when network infrastructure matures (listen.com are currently working on an audio streaming service for 3G).
Community — If there was a way of establishing a more intimate relation between me, the artist and other fans, I’d be interested. What if I got access to a special community site when I bought an album? I’d be able to ask questions, get access to musical raw material so that I could experiment with remixes, get exclusive previews and offers. In general, the intangibleness, anonymousness and isolatedness of digital has to be tackled.
There are numerous proposed ways of dealing with the dilemma the music industry is now facing, ranging from ultra strict DRM to ISPs-as-distributors to pay-by-default to tax-driven models. There is not one solution in sight, and I hope it stays that way. It would be wonderful if all these systems could coexist. After all, each of these models have their own problems, and they’ll probably all get hacked and tweaked as we go.
In the meantime, I’ll keep on caching music, cashing in from record sales and hopefully I’ll be able to spend some cash on good music as soon as there is a decent way of doing so…
This is where I put down thoughts and reflections on the web, music, design and entrepreneurship. It’s also a place for my bookmarks, my photos and my portfolio.
I’m a student at Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm School of Economics. You can find out a lot more about me and what I do in my portfolio.
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