Forget file sharing, MP3 blogs are all the rage

[...]we have unashamed folks who are not afraid to provide you with a daily song that has been gracing their ears. Good stuff, big bands, and totally the definition of fair use

I don't know about fair use if the MP3s are rip's of commercial songs, but it seems to me like it could be a good way for up and coming independent artists to get known across the net without the pimps of the record industry getting their 99%.

[Via Boing Boing]

Interesting choice to have to make. (Not that its a choice I have to make).

A car or a Compact Flash card?

Pretecs 12GB CompactFlash card costs more than a new Honda Civic - Engadget - www.engadget.com

12 GB is impressive for such a small card. Never mind I probably couldn't use it with any of the gadgets that I have that use CF-cards. (Cameras and PDAs). But when it sells for ~15.000 dollars I just have to wonder who can afford it and what they might use it for. Is the target group millionair-geeks or some business situation where the use warrants the cost. Anyone know?

New York Times article about Michael Moore award winning movie
Fahrenheit 9/11: Frank Rich (NY Times): Michael Moore's Candid Camera.

Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?

Interesting to note the difference in coverage of the awards given the movie in Cannes in the US and here in Norway. While the US coverage seems to label the movie as "Anti-bush", the norwegian coverage talks about the movie as critical to the war and the U.S. administration.

[Via Dan Gillmor]

Flashmagazine - MMUG UK May 2004

The London Macromedia User Group has an enviable track record of attracting world class speakers. In the last year alone Lucas and Aral have managed to present Ben Forta, Tim O'Reilly and FlashMagazine columnists Steve and Ali from iteration:two.

This trend continued last night with a formidable double bill of Grant Skinner from Canada and Mike Chambers, Macromedia's Technical Product Manager for Flash.

Nice article by Flashmagazine's John Dalziel. Read it and you will know what Macromedia wants you to know about the future of Flash, as well as how Grant Skinner uses Flash to simulate real life.

Do you remember Usenet? Have you taken a fancy to Google Groups 2? (It really kicks ass. Fusing Usenet newsgroups, several corporate newsgroups and newsnets, mailinglists etc). Then you'll love to hear that Google Groups 2 Beta now also features Atom feeds!

Nick Bradbury: Google Groups 2: Usenet Atom Feeds

Hey, just noticed that the Google Groups 2 BETA offers Atom feeds for each group. To see feeds for a specific group, use this format:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/NAME-OF-GROUP/feeds

Well, now I am off to add some of my favorite mailinglists and newsgroups to my Bloglines subscriptions.

Its been interesting to follow the Google Blog since its birth the 10th of may. Its still early days and just a few posts out. But when a large company like Google releases an official blog, its bound to be reactions.

Today Doug Edwards addresses some of the feedback this way:

Well, we managed to break rules with our very first couple of posts here. We started our blog with a post about recruiting and didn't sign it. Then we changed it once it was up. You just don't do that with a blog, according to half the Google staff and all the Blogger folk.

Seems like they are keeping their ears to the ground, which is always a good thing. Doug mentions that could expect Larry or Sergey to post to the blog too. That would really be a good thing IMHO.

You can read the full entry here: Whaddya mean, "we"?

It seems like telling the truth and speaking your mind will get you in trouble wherever you are. At the very least it will get you some interesting e-mails threatening you with lawyers.

That was exactly what happened again, today. I received another e-mail threatening me with lawyers. Maybe I should start a new category of the blog dedicated to being threatened with lawyers? What would a good name for such a category be, anyone?

Well, lets cut to the case. This time there is no direct referral to juridical steps or lawyers, they are simply saying they will take any steps necessary to have me remove the page concerning their company. And I choose to believe that they are talking lawyers and not baseball bats when they say that.

Not long ago it was Nikken who wanted me to remove some pages, this time around its the Norwegian search optimisation company Mosaikk Gruppen. In this case its for calling them spammers in my Norwegian blog, after having received 10 e-mails and been in contact with them a number of times to be remove from their spam list. I even got a written apology and promises that we would never hear from them again from their general manager in November 2003, so I really felt like venting when I received yet another spam from them in April 2004.

Some explanations and an English translation of some of the juicier parts of the threatening weblog comment in the extended entry.

Yeah, I know - spam is a huge problem. Personally I get several hundred every day. So why even bother commenting about this company?

Well, in Norway most companies understand that the way to get business is not by ways of unsolicited e-mails. And in the cases where they don't understand it, its actually possible to get in contact with most of them. In this particular case I even know the company and the guy that handles their hosting. But getting in contact with the general manager, and talking directly with their hosting company wasn't enough to have them stop spamming, so I finally had to rant about them in my Norwegian blog.

Here is an excerpt from their threatening weblog comment, translated from Norwegian to English. The original can be found here:

Just a brief intro: The comment is from the sales director of Mosaikk Gruppen (he is also the CEO), and he starts the comment with an apology for their unsolicited e-mailing and promises they will change their systems so it won't happen again.

He also acknowledges that I have the right to free speech before he goes on to threaten me to remove the blog entry in question.

What I can not accept, and where I will react strongly if nothing is done, is your characteristics of Mosaikk Gruppen as a supplier of services associated with search engine optimisation. You claim that you have deliberately placed your criticism of Mosaikk Gruppen in the search engines, where it now is at number 4 in Google if you search for Mosaikk Gruppen. When you comment about our business based on mailings, and where you in very specific terms recommend potential clients to keep away from Mosaikk Gruppen you find yourself in very unsafe terrain. If nothing is done, and you remove all your characteristics of our services, employees and other products etc. WILL we take the necessary steps to make you remove this page. We take this matter very seriously, and I expect a written reply ASAP.

I might find it in me to comment on every aspect of the comment left from Mosaikk Gruppen and Knut Høibraaten (Sales director/CEO). But for now lets just leave it at this: His suggestion that I have done anything special to make my weblog entry about "Mosaikk Gruppen" visible in the search engines is simply not true. Neither have I claimed to have done so.

I have optimised my weblogs to be fairly visible in the search engines, and both my english and norwegian blog enjoy fairly high pagerank in Google. But I have never done anything special to be visible for certain search terms. Its interesting to note the apparent lack of understanding of these facts from the CEO of a search engine optimisation company.

What happens when you have a lot of old objects laying around in your drawers, a digital camera and a blog to spare? Apparently Heavy little objects is what happens.

[Via Boing Boing]

VERY nice and funny story by Scylla.

I awoke, the way you awake at 2:00 AM when your sleeping senses suddenly tell you without reason that the forces of evil on converging on you. That still doesn't do it. Let me try one more time.

Teemings - Extras - The Horror of Blimps

[Via Doc Searls]

Todd of "What do I know" has released code (FLA) and an SWF with his slide show that he developed for the PGA Championship: Flash slide show source

Its a very nice project. It loads a list of the pictures from an XML file where you set your file names, random or sequential showing, and the speed of the crossfade. He has also included attributes for toggeling looping and setting image size in the HTML for the swf. (So that people without the Flash suite can use it).

All in all its a neat little app with neat code. Very nice work Todd!

If the rumours are true, sign me up for one of these.

According to eHomeUpgrade the Archos AV500 is a

"new all-in-one handheld device that combines a portable media player, digital video recorder (bundled with a remote and Electronic Program Guide software), and personal digital assistant (PDA). Furthermore, the device will support Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GSM connectivity via an add-on port.

In other words it will connect to your cable-tv when you are home, record your favourite shows, and then let you watch them on the run. It will feature a 20 or 40GB HD, and even cooler - it will use TrollTech's Qtopia operating system. (Read Linux, from Norway :-)

More rumours over at Gizmodo. Read it and lust!

Cool use of Flash, wicked music and an interesting photo-collage of tired mornings is the CBC RADIO 3 : Snooze button feature in short. Dean Baldwin has wired his digital camera to his alarm clock and recorded his early-morning-face for the rest of us to enjoy. The project was 3 years in the making.

Canadian radio station CBS 3 is sure to see me visiting their site again. Their issue included many other interesting projects, and their site is frequently updated with new projects.

[Via Digme via reBlog]

For those of us that are blessed with always-on-broadband: Bloglines | Free, Web-Based News Aggregator is the bomb.

I started using it a couple of days ago. Right away I could import my subscriptions in OPML format (from Amphetadesk, Radio or whatever else you was using before Bloglines). It allows me to categorise the feeds I have (50 feeds so far), share them among friends and the rest of the Bloglines community. I can search my subscriptions directly in Bloglines or search all feeds that Bloglines indexes. You can also let Bloglines manage your blogroll based on your subscriptions (with an option to keep feeds and folders private).

It also lets me know whenever one of the 50 feeds I subscribe to, although I haven't found the news scroll some people have told me about.

All in all its very cool, and I know I will be using it in the time to come. Recommended!