My employers – SeeWhy have been having a good year with lots of press recognition and awards (having already received awards from Red Herring and Guidewire Group) of our innovative product.  The latest award is from ComputerWorld which can be found here.

An article I first saw today from The Register.  It turns out that eMusic are launching a subscription service which allows you to download MP3s – so NO DRM – hurrah, so obviously the tracks can be kept and used even once the the subscription has ended.

On top of this, the track pricing is very competitive at 22p (~$0.42) each.  So more expensive than the ever so slightly dubious AllOfMP3, but notably cheaper than iTunes.  Most importantly at a price where downloading is cheaper than buying the physical media when it comes to an entire album – something that deeply irritates me with iTunes where the price of a downloaded album is no cheaper than purchasing the physical media.

Having blogged previously about how annoying The Producers DVD was for people who want to keep their media in a digital library I’ve just found another DVD;  this time its Capote. Grrrrr – you have been warned.

With all fuss a few months ago about releasing search results to the US Federal Government and privacy, AOL have managed to go one step further and release three months of search data onto the net. It turns out that the information being held contravenes both US legislation as well as the their own privacy policy.

The EFF have suggested that some organisations are treating such personal information with very casual regard. Although it may seem fairly minor, as the EFF have pointed out the impact could be personally very harmful – for example if you’ve been using your AOL account to research a serious illness that you’ve been diagnosed with and its information that you don’t want people to know about.

I have doubts about how hard AOL will be treated by federal organisations on this breach, so it may fall to a well presented class action from AOL users  (or former users) to make it clear that personal data should be treated with the utmost respect and security.

Having looked at the AOL site to see what they say about the situation – AOL UK at least make no reference to what has happened in their news pages – but still carry news about Id theft in the UK.

In the last few days I’ve upgraded my MSN Messenger to the new MSN Live Messenger primarily as it finally offers the first step in the right direction by being able to communicate with Yahoo messenger users plus with the absorbing of  the FolderShare technology that I used in the past until the service became a pay for only option.

The look & feel and how some of the previous instant messenger functions don’t appear to as well realised with the new MSN Messenger.  For example the colours used to indicator when someone is on or off line aren’t as distinctly different, sa rather recognising someone’s status with a glance you have to look with a little more care – which in my opinion is a step backward.

With the new MSN Live push has been a further promotion of MSNSpaces, the Microsoft alternative to MySpace.  I have been intrigued by the attraction of MySpace and MSNSpaces has had to people.  To be honest, I struggle to see what they offer, beyond features that are already available on the net – bulletin boards exist; blogs do; and online photo albums as well.  Having had a quick tinker with MySpace and now MSNSpaces (http://mp3monster.spaces.msn.com/). I can’t say that they offer these features in a manner that beat the best solutions (like WordPress and Flickr).  So what is the attraction, simply that they’re all under one virtual roof?  The fact that they have drawn a reasonable number of people there already?

If this is the attraction, then whoever integrates the best offerings combined with a good market reach stands an exceptional chance of seizing a very large slice of the market.

Why do I have an MSN Space?  Well to be honest, because a friend was setting up a space and in replying to the friendship request Microsoft get you to create a your own address. Content wise it only exists to point people back to this website.  I have the ability to work the best of breed solutions together like WordPress and Flickr.

What ever the outcome my current MSNSpace is here, but everything will remain with the website.

If you haven’t seen it yet – then the new take of Mel Brook’s The Producers with Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane is very much worthy of a viewing, so much so in my opinion that we’ve purchased the DVD. Bully for you, I hear you cry. Well, being a techie I’ve got the house setup to handle streamed media – including video, so now rather than trawling through our DVDs to choose something to watch; we simply flick the TV over to the media device and then navigate through our online collection. The DVDs themselves get stored away, keeping the place nice and clutter free. To store the DVDs, I convert the film to the popular DIVX format which gives me a nice compression of 50%-75% without seriously compromising quality.

Now the point is, the studio has so kindly put some form of copy protection on the disk so I can not do the conversion, so much for the networked home media solution if they keep that up. So what can I do? Well ironically, I can either keep the DVD laying around – not desirable got too many to easily store anyway; or I can turn to the one thing the media moguls love to tell us is both illegal and the source of inferior versions – P2P, and hey thirty seconds and I’ve found someone who is sharing a DIVX conversion of the DVD film. So what has been gained by the effort in figuring out how to stop me converting a DVD to meet my home media requirements, aside from from really annoying me?

The silly thing is, if I download the converted form of the DVD then the studio will scream thats another lost sale. I was going to say that of course this is rubbish in this case, but it  occured to me that if you’re looking to do the same thing you may well not bother buying the DVD – not because I’ve said you can find downloads available on the net, but because you like me want to show the film within in your streaming media environment and wont bother buying it now given that you can’t load it into your media system! Not the intention that the film studio or distributors wanted to achieve.

Incidentally, Sony who have a huge investment in both music and film have announced such a home media streaming device – and I bet you that it wont help you transition from their DRM/protected content to their media network.