shakeout news

hypebot: “Free” Thinker – The Orchard’s Greg Scholl:

On a cautionary note, however, we harbor increasing concerns about the long-term viability of many of the new ad supported businesses. The fact is, CPMs have been disappointing. Unless services get a lot smarter about helping advertisers hyper-target audiences using very detailed demographic information and are able to staff experience ad sales teams to engage advertisers and translate this into higher CPMs, then it is difficult to conceive of how these services will survive. Certainly, speaking on behalf of The Orchard at least, we won’t continue to license them.

Very few entities have both the density of users to hyper-target ads and the mass to deliver a significant number of impressions to a major advertiser. Only the biggest sites can do it. You’d have to be on the order of Myspace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.

RSS dry

So I’m hooking up a module to publish an RSS feed for the sake of virality, and it strikes me that RSS should be more fun.

I still subscribe to feeds here and there, but I find Twitter, Facebook, Techmeme, whole blogs, personal email, and mailing lists are more urgent twitches. There’s something about the feed reader interaction that’s barren and dry. You want more human pathos in an app.

But maybe that’s just the style of my feed reader, Google Reader. Techmeme is a feed reader in some ways and it’s much more lively.

floating players subtle victory for web standards

I stopped by Songza today for the first time in a while and found that they had changed their player so that it floats over the page and is positioned down at the bottom. Check it out on this Silver Jews page. See the way it’s stuck to the same place in the window, even if you scroll down or resize the page? That started with Yahoo Media Player — there was nothing like it at the time, and it was not possible using the standard Flash-oriented paradigm for in-browser music.

Bandzoogle is doing the same, e.g. on the Madame Pamita site.

And blip.fm.

Here’s the way the Yahoo! Media Player team described that model when we debuted it a few years ago: Magical floating design never gets lost, is available when you need it, gets out of your way when you don’t need it

What all these apps which have adopted this model have in common is something that will delight people who are passionate about the use of open standards rather than proprietary tools: you can’t make a player float over the page using pure Flash, so none of these players are 100% Flash anymore. Pure-Flash in-browser playback has become a lagging edge thing.

Back when we started the project, we literally heard “why not just use Flash?” on a regular basis. It seemed silly to people to do it with ajax instead. MP3 playback and Flash were synonomous. We changed that.

But we didn’t do it by evangelization. We did it by taking advantage of open standards to make better software than you can do otherwise. Once the proprietary tool got behind on features, the open approach took off.


See also my post titled “Surveying Goose-Influenced Players.”

about Playdar

Playdar – About:

Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.

It will search your local disk (iTunes library, MP3 folder etc.), it will search your home or office network (kinda like searchable iTunes shared libraries) and it will search other sources. You can write plugins for Playdar to enable it to search additional sources. It’s fast. If a matching song is within reach, it can start playing in less than a second.

This is called Content Resolution. Playdar is a “Content Resolver” – it will take metadata (artist, album, track names) and resolve them to a location of a matching music file. This might be on your disk, or over the network – regardless, sources are always presented as URLs that point to your local machine.

subprime royalty rates

Ari Shohat, in a comment on the TechCrunch article on the sorry state of streaming music:

I call the state of things now “Subprime Royalty Rates”. By that I mean that we have a few ventures/startups that are willing to pay the outrageous fees NOW, for the sake of living on another few months or years, even though common sense tells everyone that the rates are totally unworkable to a business model.

Subprime Royalty rates because just like with all the house buyers who thought they could take on overpriced house rates in the bubble, we have a bubble of royalty prices which a few are perpetuating with venture funds. Eventually this house of cards will fall too, just because they pay them now doesn’t mean that’s how economics will play out.


See also: Cait comment here about Last.fm::

My understanding, and it’s certainly the impression given by Lsast itself, is that CBS is not interfering in the day to day business of Lasat. Ultimately, they were independent for as long as they really could be, and nowthey need to rationalise their business model.

Speaking as a long (and I mean looooong) term subscriber to Last, and to Flickr, and other really brilliant and wonderful things that I love and wish to support with my hard earned wages, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for users who want it all to remain free.

I realise this is not a particularly fsahionable opinion , but you know. Get real, you freeloadaing idiots! (Heh).

mullet head file sharer

Bruce Warilla posted this narsty masterpiece:

mullet head file sharer

I question his premise that filesharing is going down, but I agree that amassing big collections of files isn’t a permanent thing. It’s a pain in the ass to have all these files, you’re better off leaving them out in the cloud and snarfing them as the need arises. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly the value proposition of on-demand subscription streaming services like Rhapsody and Spotify.