Monthly Archives: June 2008

Legal British P2P by end of year

27 Friday Jun 2008

Posted by in General, Technology

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A lot of pressure has been applied by the government to ISPs and the music industry to sort out some sort of agreement over music downloads using P2P or face legislation.  Well according to The Register (here) serious discussions between stake holders have been going on and an agreement maybe reached this year on how to address this. 

 

The interesting thing is what will happen to legitimate services if you can use P2P solutions  that are currently described as illegal if you can pay your ISP a normal sum each month.  In addition to this how will this pool of money be divided up amongst royalty owners, as measuring the illegal P2P download activity for every individual is going to be pretty challenging particularly when people often go to the effort of concealing the nature of their web traffic e.g. packaging files in zipped & rar files that have passwords, file renaming etc tec.

 

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Service Orientated Architecture in the Real World

26 Thursday Jun 2008

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Microsoft have got a free eBook that can be downloaded that looks at Service Orientated Architecture(SOA).  An cursory look at the book suggests that it is pretty comprehensive.  But more importantly is very pragmatic, and from the outset identifies that SOA is an architectural concept rather than a specific set of technologies – a common misconeption. Although technologies such as web services and Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) are often used as means to release an SOA architecture. 

 

Book examines a range of issues including:

  • Basic SOA tenets
  • Service Lifecycle
  • Workflow
  • Data Management and how article styles may impact upon the data

 

The book can be retrieved from Download SOA in the Real World in word 2008 or PDF formats.  There doesn’t appear to be a treeware version of the book.

 

Amazon tunes to the UK

24 Tuesday Jun 2008

Posted by in Music

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According to the Telegraph, Amazon MP3 is not too far away from arriving in the UK (see article here).  It has been suggested that the service will be made available before the last three months of the year. This will certainly put pressure on iTunes current market lead. At the moment there is no word from Amazon.co.uk.

 

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Muppets – Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal

23 Monday Jun 2008

Posted by in Music

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It would seem that Metallica’s press agency aren’t very with it. In an interesting set of articles on Wired have documented the farce of trying to suppress album views after having invited music journalists to a pre-release listening party.  If you invite a journalist to hear a new album, particularly from a group as big as Metallica they’re bound to write about it – it’s their job after all. But it would seem that the US agency assumed that they wouldn’t, and then tried to suppress the articles by demanding the magazines and blogs remove their reviews.

 

When the band heard about this they weren’t too happy, and have demanded that the situation be rectified, so now reviews are becoming available.

 

The overview article can be found at Pasture Of Muppets: Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal | Listening Post from Wired.com and it has links to earlier items as the whole mess unrolled.

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Microsoft have change of heat on MSN Music

20 Friday Jun 2008

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A while ago I blogged about how Microsoft was wrapping up their MSN Music site in favour of its new Zune site (original blog here).  The two online services have been incompatible resulting leaving MSN Downloads effectively locked into their current location and the owners of the music not being able to move their licensed music.  Well according to Digital Music News (article here) there is some good news, Microsoft have had a change of heart at least until 2011.  Microsoft wont be selling any more music through the MSN site, but the necessary authorisation mechanisms needed to allow the downloads from the MSN store to be moved around and copied onto MP3 players will continue to be supported for the next three years.  Not a perfect solution, but a stay of execution for those affected.

 

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Another free album on the way …

20 Friday Jun 2008

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According to the NME (here) Mercury Rev’s next album will be released as a free download in September.  The album to be called ‘Snowflake Midnight’ will released on 29th September. In addition to this if you’re registered on Mercury Rev’s mailing list you will get access to an additional companion album called ‘Strange Attractor’.

 

According to the NME the two albums will showcase the more electronica side of the the bands music.

 

Mercury Rev’s site – http://www.mercuryrev.com/, their MySpace site – http://www.myspace.com/mercuryrevmusic.

 

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Prince’s recent cover of Radiohead’s Creep creating waves

18 Wednesday Jun 2008

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Prince, who is well known for being fairly aggressive with take down notices for anything on the web that is not officially sanctioned by himself.  However at the Coachella festival the purple one performed a cover of Radiohead’s Creep.  Videos of this performance found their way onto YouTube and other web sites, Prince predictably reacted with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and demanded that the videos be taken down.  However Prince does not own the rights to the song they reside with the writers, i.e. Radiohead and as a result he doesn’t have the right to issue the takedown notices.  The fun begins as Thom Yorke when told about what had been happening told reporters that he should stop, its their song.

 

Article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the subject and CNN’s report here.

 

Illegal downloads – the solution

18 Wednesday Jun 2008

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 Fergal Sharkey (yes the Fergal Sharkey of the Undertones and singer of Teenage Kicks) has blogged on the Guardian website about recent research to try and identify how the illegal music download issue maybe resolved,  The article can be seen ay Illegal downloads – guardian.co.uk.

 

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Matthew Ryan live stripped down session

16 Monday Jun 2008

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  The hearya blog has got 5 songs from Matthew Ryan performed in a really stripped down form (guitar and harmonica) featuring tracks from the last couple of albums.  Go check it out at – HearYa Live Session 20: Matthew Ryan at HearYa – Indie Music Blog

 

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Social Networking sites as part of a business intranet

13 Friday Jun 2008

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I’ve never entirely be convinced by the suggestion that using social networking technologies to form a business intranet.  That is, until today when I heard a podcast presented by the Chief Technologist of Ektron as part of the SWSX conference. To date I’ve viewed the intranet as needing to be able provide static content (e.g. standard documents such as benefits etc) and a dynamic area for knowledge sharing.

What Bill Cava highlighted is that a large percentage (50%) of people found site searching for information can be ineffective. But by exploiting people’s innate understanding of human relationships and roles.  So by leveraging that, you improve the chance of finding what you need.  For example configuration information for a VPN, well talk to a system admin as they’ll know where the documentation is, and may well even have links from their profile to the information. This really plays dividends on distributed or larger organisations.

Secondly, social networking sites also have forum style areas where a written exchanges can be posted. But unlike the forum, the participation in the discussion can be more easily configured and dynamically controlled (self organising). But there is also context to the conversation as the social network provides detail about the participants.

Lastly the intranet only delivers value if its used, and to get use it must provide the engage-ability that social networking functionality can offer.  As Bill points out we perform web analytics on company business sites, and should we not also do that for the intranet to understand that its value and contribution to the business operation.

I’d recommend listening to the podcast if you’re looking how to improve your business’ internal IT resources, although it is slow slow going to get the nuggets from the ‘cast.