I cam across a new free service called Chilirec.  It allows your to select and record Internet radio stations for later playback.  Currently there are 300 or so stations although none of the major names appear for example BBC, KCRW and so on.  As a solution it has some exciting potential, and could if it takes off have some interesting affects on podcasting (i.e. you record your favourite programmes for time shifted listening without first having to download or accept any download quality restrictions.

It does however raise all sorts of interesting copyright issues, which probably explains why the major stations are absent from the available list as it would attract the big money lawyers.

Following my recent post (here) about MSN Music discontinuing the ability to move DRM’d music, it would appear that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have the same view that I have and have written to Microsoft outlining what they believe Microsoft must to make good the service discontinuation – see EFF’s statement here.

del.icio.us tags: DRM free, EFF, MSN Music

Now you can BBQ the MP3Monster way, that or someone has been eating too many mad cow burgers. This BBQ is fitted with an iPod docking station. For more info checkout the Idolator Gift Guide or checkout details at Target.

del.icio.us tags: mp3, ipod, grill, BBQ, Idolator, gadget

A while back I read an article on Guardian Unlimited which used Google Maps used to pick out places that had been referenced in song lyrics (go here for the Guardian Map).  I had thought it would be interesting to see a global one – even the most anglophile groups reference all over world (Return of the Los Palmas Seven, New Delhi, Night Boat to Cairo – just examples from Madness).  Well in my search of an example I did come across England Rocks which uses Google Maps to highlight significant locations in British musical history (where Jimi Hendrix used to live) but no map like the Guardian one.  Admittedly the search is difficult because it gets clouded by lots of lyric sites.

So I started to tinker with Google Map’s maplets to produce something.  I found two things:

• firstly the maplet lists all your points which is no good when you’ve accumulated a lot of entries – you can see my attempt here.
• I found that working with Google Maps through Firefox 2 to be a bit flaky with Firefox crashing regularly when trying to edit the annotations.

Having looked at the Google Maps proper API so we could underpin the map with a database of entries so we can slice and dice the data points more effectively it doesn’t look too challenging to build something, so hopefully I’ll find time to try it out.  The real effort looks to be around the protection of the data from being filled with spam, whether to put in an authentication mechanism or the common random image/text combination.  Once I’ve got a solution running and primed with some initial entries then I’ll blog again and popup things for people to try.

The radical idea of adding a surcharge to the fees that ISPs charge for broadband connectivity as levy for P2P piracy is to be discussed at the SXSW conference according to the wired article here (Surcharge on ISPs).  It is an interesting and brave move, and already has presidents for example the Performing Rights Society (PRS) levy in the UK on venues who play music (just about any public venue), or Canada’s charge for blank media.  The achilles heel to this that I can see is the move could seriously hurt the download what you like for a fixed monthly fee services, whilst the majors mess about with licensing contracts.

Hopefully a download of the session will be made available as the arguments for and against this will be very interesting.