Virtual Thought

Posts have this nasty tendency of accumulating, un-written, in my Wordpress queue as drafts. I had these two links sitting around for a long time: One link saying that DRM is here to stay and won’t affect user-generated content and the burgeoning independent media industries and the other saying that DRM hasn’t protected a thing and should be removed entirely.

Somewhat explosively, Steve Jobs posted an essay last week saying that he would sell songs from the iTunes music store without DRM if only the big bad RIAA would let him.

So.

I posted those two links from long, long ago to make a point: I never thought those links would have a shelf life. Commercial DRM, as far as music is concerned (since video DRM doesn’t seem to be going anywhere except to be hacked most egregiously), seems to be counting down to some zero hour; here’s hoping that I live to see no DRM is used at all. I think this is much more constructive than asking that a DRM system somehow, non-sensically, be opened-up so that everyone can lock down their users in the same way! (Man, Norway, you should’ve asked for the whole enchilada and just outlawed it entirely since even a majority of music execs don’t like DRM)

Apple has claimed that they would sell music without DRM (which would be a change of policy for them) and that seems like the beginnings of a sea change. Coupled with EMI’s recent announcement to stop using DRM on its tracks I think this is a very exciting time.

There are a ton of good analyses of the tides in this debate, notably at DaringFireball… Gruber does a great job laying out the currents (to over-extend that analogy).

Here are more links on the subject from Electronista, the inestimable Mr. Doctorow, Cult of Mac, the Associated Press and some more Daring Fireball.

I wanted to switch from my old del.icio.us account to my new del.icio.us account and was very, very thankful for the (new-to-me) import feature. One problem though.

All my imported bookmarks are marked not shared. Dammit.

I haven’t been using del.icio.us that long, so it’s not like I have thousands upon thousands of links… but I have enough in there that I want public that editing each one individually to share it is a tremendous pain in my ass. Glancing through the comments on this post it seems that many people want the “share all” feature… but the del.icio.us developers have stated that they will not implement this feature.

I find that developers (myself included) get these little wild hairs up their butts about the funniest things: The creators of Yojimbo are vehemently against organizing information in the application using hierarchical folders. Not as big a pain point there as the tagging support more than makes up for it… but, dammit, sometimes I want to organize things as “Letters/Work” and “Letters/Personal”.

Anyway, I’ll probably release a little script soon that re-shares all one’s del.icio.us bookmarks.

This one’s funny:

toothpastefordinner.com

And The Order of the Stick is swiftly becoming one of my favorite fantasy epics of all time… not just because he’s nailed the dialogue of a role-playing group to a tee, but he also has engaging characters, great plot-lines, a neat, abstract art style. I’m a huge fan!

Check out the pretty YouTube video by Assistant Professor Michael Wesch of KSU.=

So that’s what Web 2.0 means. ( = JK/NR!!!11

Here’s the KSU Digital Ethnography homepage.

So I’m posting this through Trillian using a new service called IMified. I’m not sure I’ll stick with it but, I gotta admit, this is a really cool way to interface with all my little info-sinkholes (the blog, Stikkit, Backpack, etc…).

Neato!