The Trawler

Petony Show - Episode 2

2006-12-02T11:46:00.000-04:00

Head on over to Petony.com and check out Episode 2 of the hilarious Petony Show. In this episode, Petony do a favour for Fidel and get caught up in a race to acquire a very rare breakfast cereal.

In the coming weeks look for more episodes, including an introductory primer to the world of Petony, an XMAS special, and Episode 3 where Petony get into a battle with their neighbours over their lawn care habits.

The Petony Show

2006-11-10T09:05:00.000-04:00

Wow, so, yeah, been awhile. Although apparently people are still reading - good!

Well, here's something to whet your appetite and keep you entertained for weeks to come -The Petony Show!

Follow Petony in their RAWKtacular adventures as they defeat THE MAN and his evil schemes. It's a weekly(ish) podcast with hilarious adventures, great music, and all around good fun.

So, subscribe, listen, enjoy, tell your friends.

Music Tagging Hack in iTunes

2006-04-24T17:04:00.000-03:00

So, if you're like me, organizing a vast array of music and trying to have any kind of meaningful navigation and playback is a nightmare. Browsing by artist or album or genre just doesn't cut it. Genre is a ridiculously restrictive way to categorize music, and unless you're trying to get to something specific, artists and albums is also useless.

So, why on earth doesn't iTunes support tagging? No idea, but I can't be arsed to wait around for them to implement it. My music needs organization NOW. (Btw, I'm sure there are other programs that do it, but I can't be arsed to deal with them either!)

Taking advantage of one of the unused fields in the track info, and the iTunes smart playlist feature, we can hack together a pretty useful tagging system that vastly exceeds the pathetic genre categorization.

The basic premise: utilize the 'Grouping' field which is unused in 99% of all audio files I've seen to implement our tagging feature. By editing a track’s info (or a group of tracks) we simply enter a series of tags into the 'Grouping' field. I used commas to separate them just to make it more readable. (You can get to the ‘Get Info’ function by either right-clicking on PC or CTRL-clicking on Mac)

Now, since iTunes doesn't have support for this out of the box, we have to use the smart playlist feature to create some 'filters' for our music. And of course we can use these as convenient playlists, and build up some really sophisticated logic for choosing songs to play but that's another topic.

So, we fire up the "New Smart Playlist" feature and simply add a few conditions. In this example, I create a "Canadian Indie" filter that will display all my Canadian Indie music. I simply set the field to 'Grouping' and the condition to 'contains' and then enter the tag in the value field. Voila! Instant tagging in iTunes.

Now, this isn't a particularly interesting use of either tagging or the smart playlist feature but rather a basic example to show you how it works. What would be more interesting is the really detailed qualitative filters you can get going. For instance, if I created a filter for all "Long" songs. Or all "Horn" songs. Or if I felt that song reminded me of summer, and I tagged it "Summer", I could then create a playlist of all my "Summer" songs.

You can see how this very quickly exceeds the ability of your plain old Genre field.

And of course if you are really into it, you can chain those smart playlists together for some really interesting results.

So, anyway, I'm sure it's probably been done, or there's a plug-in, or something, but as someone who is constantly battling with a massive collection and am frustrated by restrictive organization methods, this little hack provided a vast improvement in my ability to both organize and listen to my music.

Enjoy!

Some counterpoints to why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream

2006-04-07T10:29:00.000-03:00

A guy called Cedric, has posted a well thought out critique of Ruby on Rails on his blog. He’s not criticizing the framework itself, but rather the reasons why it will never become mainstream. Sure it’s based on nothing more than his personal opinion, but it’s thought-provoking nonetheless. And of course, being a recent convert to Ruby on Rails, and having been continually impressed with it as a tool, I’d like to offer some counterpoints:

“Anyone who wants to succeed in the Web arena must have a compelling story to tell to these programmers, something that will convince them to switch to Rails on technical grounds but that will also be an easy sell to their management.”

Now, he says Rails, but he’s actually talking in this point about Ruby, and how hard it is as a language. Maybe true for programmers who are using PHP and VB. But now, if all you know about programming is VB and PHP, well, you’re not really a programmer then are you?

Anyone familiar with any object oriented language can pick Ruby up in a day. Its syntax is a little different (ie. cleaner) than something like C++, but yet it offers the same flexibility as scripted languages.

Oh, and a compelling story? Ruby can be a replacement for Perl-based utilities (build scripts, etc.) with the added advantage of having easily maintained code, readability, modularity, etc. Sold!

“Ruby on Rails is just too advanced.”

Boy, he really doesn’t have much faith in programmers, eh? He also mentions that regular developers just can’t understand the flow of the code. Now, I’m not going to say that I’m out of the ordinary or anything, but I don’t even work as a Programmer as my day job (anymore) and I get it. It’s clever, yes, but it’s not too clever. The true genius of this framework is that it can be completely overridden. Don’t like how it handles something in the default case – change it.

If anything, I think what he’s getting at here isn’t that programmers aren’t bright enough to “get it”, it’s that they’re too stubborn or indoctrinated to “get it”. Hell, I find myself doing things the long way around all the time in Rails, and after battling for awhile, I realize, “Shit! I can do this in one line of code!” Duh.

“All fanatics of dynamic languages are quick to point that they don't need an IDE to use Ruby, Python, Groovy or other. …This is nonsense. Ignore these people, they don't understand how the real world works and how developers think, and they are one of the reasons why so many great technologies never make it to the mainstream. Don't ever be ashamed to need an IDE or to ask for one.”

Alright, well, name-calling aside, let’s just drop a few names: Komodo, Radrails, Textmate.

Sure some (like Radrails) are pretty early-days. But Textmate is simple, slick, and elegant. And Komodo is a full-fledged IDE used for more than just Ruby on Rails. It even costs money – how’s THAT for credible?

He points to the lack of debugger and source control integration. Komodo offers those things. And Ruby itself has a debugger. It’s no Visual Studio, but it’s usable and fairly decent as far as web debuggers go. Where’s the PHP IDE with Visual Debugger? Huh.

I enjoy a good IDE as much as the next guy, but the lack of one is hardly a limiting factor. Having developed PS2 games using little more than KDevelop, a command-line debugger, and some prints – irb seems more than adequate for debugging some web apps using a framework that does most of the work for you.

“This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know.”

Ok, well maybe I fall into this category. I just can’t help it. Ruby and rails has actually led me to enjoy programming again. There is so much WRONG with computers that it’s so refreshing when something is actually RIGHT that you want to shout it to the hilltops. It’s the same reason Apple people are fanatics.

“Ruby on Rails has pretty much nuked the field of Web development in Ruby, and I wonder if it's such a good thing.”

Fair enough. But at the same time, it has also ignited the field of web development in Ruby. There is far more activity in that field now than there ever was, and people are writing plugins, engines, extensions, tools, and all sorts of amazing stuff for Ruby and Rails, and that is definitely a good thing.

I’m really a fan of the whole DRY philosophy, and I think it applies to the community as a whole and not just for a single project. What Rails offers the community at large is elegant solutions to solved problems. So that instead of having to beat your head against the wall creating your own system for database interaction, you can focus not just on your application, but possibly give back to the community by sharing your own solutions.

I know competition breeds innovation and wonh wonh, but sometimes becoming truly adept and skilled using a tool, and taking that tool to its absolute limits will yield far superior results than just constantly trying to re-invent the wheel because there is always a “better” way just around the corner.

Rails isn’t perfect obviously, but it’s pretty F’in good, and I’m really curious to see what can be accomplished with a tool like this when I don’t have to waste my time implementing solutions to solved problems.

“Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.”

I think he’s probably right here - it’s not clear how well something like Rails scales at an enterprise level. But mainstream and enterprise-adopted aren’t the same thing. Are companies running their mission-critical systems using PHP and MySQL? Yeah, didn’t think so either.

Now, I’m not sure there’s some kind of explicit mission for Rails, but my guess is that enterprise adoption is less important than community adoption. And there is room for a solution that addresses the needs of the masses while still leaving out the Enterprise market.

“Lack of support from Internet Providers.”

Early days. PHP also wasn’t installed on every web server when it first came out. This isn’t something that prevents Rails from ever becoming mainstream, it’s just the reason that it’s not mainstream YET.

So, anyway, I’m not disagreeing with him, I’m just trying to provide some counterpoints to his points. That was a mammoth of a post, but hopefully it makes up for the fact that it’s been awhile since I posted here. You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve been busy holed up with Ruby on Rails.

Michael Geist dummies the recording industry...again!

2006-03-22T09:08:00.000-04:00

The saga continues:

Now, the pollster responsible for the results that show P2P isn't actually hurting sales of records is slamming Michael Geist for his analysis of their results. Well, in response to their pathetic spin (what did I say? spin spin spin!) - Michael has dummied them again with his rebuttal.

Seriously, does the music industry EVER get tired of being WRONG?

Give it up already. You're embarrassing yourselves. It's just...sad.

The CRIA admits they are wrong, quietly

2006-03-20T10:43:00.000-04:00

Sheesh. Holy slow news....weeks. Anyway, interesting summary of a CRIA study on consumer buying habits by Michael Geist on his blog. Basically, the CRIA study shows that P2P has almost no impact on CD buying habits, and that those engaged in it actually bought more music. It was only one minor factor amongst a whole host of other reasons why people did or didn't buy music.

Funny, seems like that's what everyone has been saying the entire time. Should be good to watch the industry backtrack and spin this one.

More Guitar Heroes!

2006-03-07T10:18:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a week since I updated. It's been a shockingly slow news week lately. But, finally, the gaming news we've all been waiting for was released by one of the executives at RedOctane:

MORE GUITAR HERO GAMES

RAWK. Not just a sequel, but genre specific games. Five or six even! Our cup definitely floweth over. I can only hope that Guitar Hero 2 or one of its associated genre games comes out sooner rather than later. It'll probably be the fall, but we can dream that maybe at E3 they'll announce something sooner.

Sony's Revolution Killer: The PS2 (!)

2006-02-28T09:17:00.000-04:00

Gamespot has some wild rumours that Sony is planning on countering the revolution with the PS2. And while they make sure to point out that these are totally unsubstantiated rumours from an anonymous source at Macromedia (?) they are interesting nonetheless. I'm not entirely sure about Sony developing a revolution-like controller and going head-to-head with Nintendo on that front, but the idea of Sony continuing to support the PS2 with fresh content and developing an online service to combat Xbox Live definitely makes sense. A few points:

100M users. That is a massive installed user-base. You don't just walk away from that kind of money. You might only get a few million people onto the PS3 in a first few years - a number still utterly dwarfed by the absolute dominance of the PS2. It makes no sense to just leave those people hanging - keep producing games for them and they'll keep buying. Start producing titles to compete with Nintendo's next-gen (party style games etc.) and you could very well steal their thunder.
Online community. The slimline PS2 ships with the network adapter and a modem built into it. Sure, it probably only costs a few bucks to put it in when you're redesigning the form factor anyway, but it'd make a lot more sense if they were prepping for the rollout of their Xbox Live killer. Free online play, with like quadruple the users, and a new onslaught of games? Yeah.
Holding down the fort. Recently there have been lots of rumours of PS3 delays, as well as projections of insanely expensive launch prices. In the time between the PS3 being launched and then becoming affordable to the casual gamer, the PS2 can plug a vital hole and keep people from jumping ship to either Nintendo or Microsoft - assuming of course they continue to produce content for the PS2.

Sony has said they would continue to support the PS2 until 2010, which means another 4 years of new content. And while again, it's all speculation, it doesn't seem implausible that Sony would fight on multiple fronts, taking on Nintendo's Revolution with the now low-cost PS2, Xbox Live with its own online service, and of course the 360 with the PS3.

I'm actually a big fan of Nintendo, but having recently picked up a slimline PS2 for Guitar Hero and other party-style games, I'd definitely think twice about a Revolution if suddenly a host of similar games were avaliable on my PS2. And that network port has been just itching to get used.

Should be interesting.

Peter Jackson just doesn't get it

2006-02-23T14:29:00.000-04:00

Peter Jackson doesn't get video games. The nature of the medium is just lost on him. That's not to take anything away from him as a director of movies, but let's just get this straight: games are NOT movies. This is of course contrary to the direction many of the major players want to take the video game industry.

Well, who the hell am I to criticize 'The Lord of the Rings' anyway? Well, I'm not just any old chump spouting crap on his blog - I'm a chump who works in the games industry making games for one of the top publishers in the world (who shall remain nameless), and I've been doing it for a number of years now.

So, that out of the way, let's examine just how out to lunch our director from down under is:

"I think that intrinsically, most video games, and virtually all movies, do one basic thing: tell stories."

Wrong! Games are not an inherently narrative medium, and the best games are not narrative driven. Many games do have stories, but they're merely a scaffolding for the game that lies at the core. What makes a game good is not what characters say during the cutscenes, or even how believable the voice acting is - it's whether or not they're fun and challenging and rewarding.

"For example, music videos were originally just musicians playing music while being recorded on video so people could watch them, but now they are elaborate short movies that do everything from interpret the song through the medium of visual art to communicating political statements."

What? What in the crap are you on about here? Music videos? Really? This is your great vision for video games? Oh wait, I see, you mean that some day video games will be 'art' and have grand messages and aesthetic appeal.

WRONG AGAIN! It's difficult to craft authorial intent in a dynamic medium, and questionable as to whether a game is really an appropriate venue for even delivering those kinds of messages. Now that is not to say that there can't be artistic statements or thematic depth to a video game (ie. the very choices of what story paths are included/excluded are thematic statements, or the rules of a simulation reflect worldview biases) but their effectiveness as a means of conveying that message are questionable when the goal of the game is to entertain and to engage, and often, to sell.

I don't want to break out the cliches like, 'The Medium is the Message' or anything, but well, they are called GAMES.

"I definitely see improved graphics and sound as continuously positive attributes for consideration among the Hollywood community. Actors will look more "life-like" in HD and the sound continues to get closer to the theatrical movie experience -- this makes it easier to provide sound effects, artwork, and talent when you, as a filmmaker, know that the final game will be a strong representation of the film."

Oh wonderful. More pixels. Higher bitrate. Yes, this will make better games. I think it's obvious that what this really means is that it will provide better licensing opportunities by creating better movie-look-alike games that are completely devoid of any innovation. Pretty soon they can render the cutting-room floor outtakes straight into the game development pipeline and properly synergize the cross-development.

The future of video games according to this award-winning director are essentially DVD outtakes and lame rehashes of the movie that look more like the Hollywood product. Fantastic. Where do I sign up?

"I'm excited that with the new hardware and such amazing leaps forward in technology, I may be able to experience games that even I can't imagine."

Well, from this interview, it apparently doesn't take much to stretch this man's imagination as movie licenses, HD actors, and more movie-like stories are this limits of his vision for video games.

Sorry there Peter, but maybe you should stick to movies and leave game making to the professionals who actually have a clue about just what gamers actually want. Save the outtakes and advergaming for the DVD.

Commerce didn't kill culture after all

2006-02-22T11:19:00.000-04:00

Recently, some of the ideas that I dealt with in my Master's thesis have been bubbling back to the surface. Generally, I had discussed online communities and their resistance to being commodified ('commercialized'). The old stalwarts of P2P and 'warez' are still around, and still provide a counterbalance to 'commercial' communities like MSN, eBay or even Yahoo.

We're seeing a somewhat different approach by business in how they deal with online communities, and how they have changed their model from trying to enforce old agendas into trying to leverage the strengths of the new technologies.

It's been a few years since I wrote on these topics, and since then, quite a few things have changed:

Google and contextual text ads have revolutionized online advertising, proving it to be a viable business model
iTunes and its online music store have legitimized (to an extent) digital music, and as they close in on 1 billion songs sold have proven it to be a viable business also
Passport failed as a ubiquitous online 'key' system, and .NET has failed to become the dominant online development platform in favour of...
...Open Source standards! OSS has remained a strong force and has become commonplace even in commercial development
A new flurry of sites and user communities have created a wealth of online interaction as user participation grows, and user-created content (blogging, bookmarking, etc.) sees the 'democratic' roots of the medium remain intact

Rather than becoming an online shopping mall with everyone swiping their 'passport' to do anything, things have continued much the same as they began on the web, and have even brought many of the claims and promises made at its outset to fruition.

That's not to say that there aren't threats to online 'culture' (RIAA - I'm looking at you), but as a one-time 'doomsayer', it is refreshing and relieving to see that things have in fact flourished in the passing years rather than withering and eroding. It's rare, and so worth noting I thought.

If you're keen on discussion, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what 'web promises' have been fulfilled, what things have or haven't been ruined by commercialization, and where you think things are headed.

Resisting the urge to 'puke' all over the page: less is more in information design.

2006-02-20T11:08:00.000-04:00

One of the most encouraging trends emerging in web design is the sparing visual design that distills the content of a page to its core essentials, ie. the 'google' style of web design. Rather than trying to cram everything onto the main page and overloading users with information, a new breed of sites is hiding the chaff from their audiences.

We don't need to address google, with its spartan layout that is essentially text-only. Big fonts and less text is one of the hallmarks of so-called Web 2.0 design. We see these sites provide us with less 'noise' and more relevant content, but without sacrificing any depth or usability.

Meanwhile, traditional media outlets just don't seem to get it. Visit any of their sites and the barrage of headlines and ads and features will overwhelm your senses. CNN recently cleaned up their on-air presentation, opting for a minimal graphic layout - their website hasn't reflected that change yet.

The Globe and Mail recently redesigned their website, leaving behind its aging, but functional, left-column navigation in favour of the 'vomit' method of web design: spew forth all possible information onto the main page interspersed with ads and let the users figure out what's what.

After living in world on information overload for some time now, it's disappointing to see that our major media outlets have yet to 'get it' - they struggle to deal with a system in which news comes in fast and furious and as a result, they're unsure of what to present as important, so they show it all.

Resisting the urge to display a vast multitude of information can be hard to resist, and they obviously feel that more really is more, but in an age where that information is readily available from any number of sources, their value lies not in how much information they present, or even what they present, but rather how they present it.

Many media outlets, and web designers in general, should take a page out of the emerging design trends in Web 2.0. These sites have a mature understanding of how to organize information and distill the quality content for their users. As time progresses, we may even see those sites that can offer the best filters rather than the most information become the media outlets of choice.

Oh my sweet mother of F#%@, RIAA give it up already!

2006-02-16T09:56:00.000-04:00

Ok. Seriously? Ripping CDs that you BOUGHT is no longer fair use? Every time I think that they've absolutely, completely lost the plot, they manage to trump it with something even more ridiculous. Bravo recording industry! Take a bow. You are now officially the stupidest pack of morons on the planet. This has to be your crowning achievement.

So, let me get this straight. You claim that you're losing money, and that it's all because of the big bad sharewolf.

Right, ok.

So you try your damndest to outlaw file sharing, sue little girls and grandmas who merely breathe the word MP3, threaten the only people who are making you money off digital music (ie. Apple), release a non-stop stream of crap for years, infect your product with vicious trojan software, impose ridiculously restrictive rules on use, and now you want to say that buying a CD doesn't give you the right to copy it onto your iPod.

Um. Ok? I guess they don't want to make money? Ever?

It's the year 2006. People don't want to listen to music on a friggin' CD. CDs suck. They're big. They skip. They only hold 74 minutes of music TOPS. You can't write to them. Garbage.

But yet the RIAA really wants you to be trapped into using CDs. The absurd "customary historic use" bill would try to lock you into only existing business models and completely erase fair use. Yup. They can't pull their heads out of their asses and join the rest of us in the freakin' future, and so they want to make it illegal to not be a moron.

Besides the impossibility of trying to enforce their ludicrous fair use proposals, they just might succeed in alienating the last 3 people who actually side with them. Seriously, how many times can I say it: it's over. O-V-E-R. Done. Finished. Kaput! Fini!

You lost. Deal with it.

Don't make me have to say it again.

(I already told them once here: Earth to Music Industry: It's SO over.)

Note: There are more music features linked in the right sidebar under features.

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Tags: music|riaa|rip|ipod

Links:

EFF – Ripping CDs no longer fair use

EFF – Customary Historic Use

Ars Technica – Fair Use

Ars Technica – Customary Historic Use

A Ruby (on Rails) Shines Brighter Than a Perl

2006-02-15T12:30:00.000-04:00

I'll get this out of the way up front: I'm a long-time Perl-head (and sorry for the lame pun in the title). It was what I learned web programming on, and its rapid development and absolute mastery of text-processing kept me loyal to it as my programming language of choice until, oh, about last week.

Enter, Ruby on Rails: offering all the flexibility and ease of Perl without any of the hassle. Now granted, I'm still in the honeymoon period with this new language, but I have to say I really like what I'm seeing.

One of the biggest problems with Perl was that despite my best efforts to keep the code clean and readable, I'd inevitably return to a piece of code months down the road and be baffled as to what on earth was going on. Perl's readability was horrible. Ruby code is so clean and simple – it almost reads like English.

Programming is also involved in my day job, and for a long time I was coding C++ on a daily basis. You get used to having a solid object oriented language, and try as it might, Perl's objects are horribly hacked.

In the end, I found myself really using Perl as a glorified regular expression parser, so when I discovered that not only did Ruby support full regular expressions but was also truly object oriented ala Smalltalk I had to investigate.

Now, of course, you can point to PHP having object orientation and cleaner syntax than Perl as well, but it just never really clicked for me. Maybe it was debugging in a browser, or writing all that code in my HTML editor, but it just didn't do it for me.

With Ruby on Rails, you get a scripting language with clean syntax, low overhead, and a huge bang-for-your-buck factor when writing code. Using Rails, you can generate web database applications that are functional in mere minutes. It's a surreal experience seeing a completely functional web app running off literally a few lines of code.

Tedious configuration, templating and SQL queries vanish. Suddenly, you can focus on making something cool rather than fighting with syntax. The intuitiveness of Ruby is phenomenal, and I think you're going to see more and more people adopt it in the coming years.

I'm sure that as I use it more I'll begin to uncover its flaws and pitfalls, but for now, I'm basking in the glow of having found a new gem for web programming. So long Perl, it was fun while it lasted.

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Tags: ruby|rails|perl|web

Songbird: Useful Widget or Unnecessary Bloatware?

2006-02-13T11:57:00.000-04:00

Songbird is a new music application that allows you to 'play' the web like a playlist. It's like iTunes with a web browser built-in. Sort of. The idea is that within Songbird, you can browse the web, and pages that contain links to audio files (like say an MP3 blog), populate a playlist that you can then listen to while you surf. It's format independent as well, so it will play anything. You can then save these playlists, set them up for auto-downloading, edit them, etc.

It all sounds pretty cool, and is a great idea. But I can't help but get the feeling that Songbird as a full fledged web-browser is a bit of overkill. Sure, I'd love the ability to browse my daily MP3 blog route listening to their posts as I read, but I'm not sure I want to fire up a specialized application to do it.

Songbird touts the use of XUL, a kind of mark-up language (like HTML) that is intended for designing user-interfaces. It's supported by Gecko based browsers like Firefox, and so Songbird is essentially a skinned Firefox with a media player built-in.

Sure, that's a great idea, but is it necessary? Seems to me that Songbird would be far more usable as a plugin to Firefox, a kind of invisible toolbar that played my web pages that I'm browsing with Firefox anyway. I just can't see myself (or even a wide variety of people) firing up a specialized browser just to listen to streamed music on the web.

I think Songbird is a fantastic application, and it's still very early in development and so has time to grow and evolve, but I think this might be a case of 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should.'

Songbird doesn't need to be a full-fledged web-browser, or even a full-fledged media app. It just needs to be a useful widget that plays music while you surf.

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Tags: songbird|mp3|itunes|firefox|xul

Note to Web (2.0) Developers: Users are Lazy!

2006-02-10T09:28:00.000-04:00

In the rush to adopt the latest technologies and trick out your app or site with the latest toys, a certain key design element is often overlooked: simplicity.

Now, I don’t presume to speak for all users, but as a computer user, I’m lazy as hell. I’m looking for things that are going to make my life easier and reduce the amount of thinking that I have to do.

And a lot of new web technologies are designed to do just that: tagging, bookmarking, social networking, search algorithms – it’s all designed to make it easier to get to the ‘good stuff’.

So why does it seem like so much work?

The amount of work required to bookmark a site and tag it with keywords so that someone else can have an easier time finding it loses its luster pretty quickly. It’s a novelty for sure, but if it takes me more than a few seconds, I’m not going to stick with it over the long haul.

And what about your mom? Try explaining tagging to your mom. Try to explain to her why she should use del.icio.us to store her bookmarks.

Yep. That’s what my mom said too.

I’m not saying these aren’t good ideas, they’re actually fantastic ideas. But their implementation is far from perfect. And for all that work, the results are sometimes frighteningly similar to what you’d get had nobody done any amount of tagging.

Granted, these are all relatively new phenomena, but that’s no excuse for poor implementations. I’m a developer myself and I know how difficult usability can be in an application – but there is definitely a difference between being functional and being usable.

It seems to me that these applications need to become more seamless, more invisible, and far more intelligent. The whole idea is that these are applications that act as a filter on content so that I only see things that interest me. And at the same time, they offer a way to discover new content, which makes ease of submission critical.

What they want to maximize is accuracy and quality, and minimize junk and work for the user. This way, they get lots of high quality submissions, and as a result, high quality results for their users.

However, currently, the system on many of these sites does none of those things. Here are a few suggestions to improve the user experience:

Title discovery. Why do I need to enter a title? The page or post likely already has a title. A little bit of code parsing can discover this easily. Give me the option to edit it if I want, but don’t make me enter it.
Tag discovery. Why do I need to duplicate the author’s work? Chances are the page already has a multitude of meta-data embedded in it. Why not borrow those? Again, give me the option to edit it if I want, but 99% of the time these are going to be similar to what I would’ve entered.
Intelligent results. Don’t show me garbage results or results from another language. Allow me to filter sites from my results so that they get better over time (see: reddit.com).
Don’t redirect me. If I want to bookmark the site, do not redirect me from the page I’m currently viewing. Pop up a new window if you have to, or automate my submission using the brand new 1 and 2 features.

None of these things is outrageous, and would simplify the experience of using the service. As a user, I’m simply looking for things that are going to improve my overall experience of something: music, news, browsing, etc.

The power of community input offers an inordinate amount of value to the content and a level of filtering that would be impossible by a single ‘editor’, however, with the burden of editing shifted to the users of the communities, there should at least be some level of responsibility on behalf of the developers to make life as easy as possible for those users.

After all, they are the ones that are making your application possible. So go easy on us, we’re lazy.

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Tags: web|software|technology|web2.0

Recent roundup

2006-02-09T09:55:00.000-04:00

Today, I'm posting a collection of links to other places covering similar topics to us, and providing a roundup of the stories we've done lately categorized by topic. So, a few links to start off:

The editor of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail" has a long tail blog with a lot of details. Today's post includes why 'hit' albums are declining.

Michael Geist has a summary of some recent P2P developments, including the French dismissing their latest P2P case.

Update: Wired Magazine is running an article about some VC's re-examining some of the dot-com ideas. Turns out they weren't so crazy after all. Some of this may sound familiar to people who read the Trawler:

"While many chalk up the dotcom extinction to the catastrophic impact of a single asteroid called economic rationality, Morgan holds that it was actually a series of fundamental factors - broadband access, consumer buy-in, search technology, and Web advertising."

Funny, I think I said something exactly like that a few weeks ago. And how about this:

"First, online access was spotty and slow. Second, consumers weren't accustomed to operating online. They didn't trust ecommerce sites with their credit cards and hadn't figured out how to form online communities. Third, search technology was weak. With the advanced algorithmic breakthroughs of Google still years away, it was hard to find what you were looking for. And finally, the online advertising business wasn't yet mature."

Deja-vu! I think I talked about this here. In fact, you should just read the entire web series.

And on a completely different note, apparently the GTA franchise has been valued at $900M. That's a lot of money for a single game franchise and the majority of the value of Take Two as a publisher. Interesting that video games are moving more towards the blockbuster format when movies and music are clearly on the downslope of that wave.

And, in case you're a newcomer, here's a roundup of some of the recent topics on The Trawler:

Music Industry

Behold the next generation of rock stars
Earth to music industry: It's SO over
Why downloading is 'legal' in Canada
Debunking music industry mythology
Breaking free from the analog economics of the music industry

Web Technology

Web 2.0? More like Web 1.0
The 'Earned' Boom

Video Games

Video games need professional writers

Enjoy. [Bookmark at del.icio.us]

Tags: web|music|games|news

Breaking Free From The Analog Economics Of The Music Industry

2006-02-08T15:41:00.000-04:00

So, when we left off, we were trying to figure out where labels fit into a digital music industry. Clearly, they still have a vital role as a mediator within the industry. They can act as a filter, an aggregator, and a promoter for talent. However, they need to change their attitude about both their place in the hierarchy, and their policies both towards A&R and the economics of how music is produced.

Labels are still living in analog economic times. They’re spending a fortune recording albums, promoting them in traditional ways, manufacturing a physical product, and cultivating an expensive persona for the bands.

What they need to realize is that you can record competitive sounding records in your bedroom for free. In addition to that, you can leverage a vast distribution network in the form of the Internet, as well as using it for promotion. All for a tiny fraction of the cost of the traditional method of producing a record. Now the labels will of course say that you can’t produce superstars in that way. They’re probably right, but need I remind you of ‘the long tail’? In short, maximizing the millions of micro-markets that exist on the ‘cheap’ end of the spectrum, rather than focusing on individual mega-stars.

Now, in addition to lowering their input costs substantially, and thereby lowering the risk of their investment, labels can also broaden their rosters rather than simply putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. They can have the freedom to enroll more acts and create a deeper roster that occupies a bigger portion of the niche.

This is an important point: aggregation. Rather than simply having a few artists scattered across genres, labels can build up clusters of artists in the same genre and cross-sell the artists to the fans of the other bands. Labels should stop focusing on themselves as product salespeople and start envisioning themselves as content providers.

Rather than manufacturing and selling widgets (that they claim are increasingly valueless), they should be focusing on distributing that content essentially for free, and shifting their revenue stream to the audiences for that content. If music isn’t necessarily free of charge under this system, the sale of digital music doesn’t provide the bulk of the revenue so much as the audience itself (via advertising, listening preferences, cross-selling with other businesses).

We’ve seen the value that an audience can garner (look at the vast success of a company like Google, whose entire revenue stream is dependent on an online audience for advertising) – and music audiences are some of the most loyal out there. Also, we’ve seen that people are willing to volunteer their listening preferences if it means that they get something back: new music. The success of something like Last.fm (Audioscrobbler) comes to mind here.

The problem we’re seeing is that labels are refusing to embrace these new ways of approaching their business. They repeatedly resort to ridiculously restrictive DRM schemes, copy protection schemes, and lawsuits to attack file sharers. Rather than trying to nullify the effects of digitalization – the industry should be leveraging them to enhance their position, and thereby nullifying any negative effects that are inherent in a digital medium.

If the music industry would simply embrace new business models rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole by trying to adapt the old way of doing things to a new system, they might experience unprecedented growth and see profits under the new regime outstrip anything they had seen previously in their analog past.

Tags: music|mp3|drm|economics

Debunking music industry mythology

2006-02-06T09:19:00.000-04:00

I said I'd spend some time debunking some of the propaganda spewed out by the recording industry this week. However, instead of wasting our time pointing out the obvious, let's just examine one of the recurring themes in their 'mythology': that they are somehow a large investor in developing new talent and nurturing it so that they can grow as artists.

Now, I'll give you all a minute to silence your bullshit detectors because mine is blaring at full blast. Ok, so that is obvious baloney - any artist can tell you that major labels are interested in one thing: turning a profit. If your record fails to recoup, you're hosed. Plain and simple. If you haven't ready it already, Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music" outlines why major labels are bullshit better than I could ever do it. Take this brief excerpt:

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit."

Yeah, so go take a minute and read the rest of it and come back. Back? Yeah, so the industry frequently claims that somehow digital music is robbing young artists of a career that they would've otherwise had if things were like the 'good ole days' when cassette taping was the bogeyman. This statement makes a few assumptions:

Labels are interested in developing 'artists' rather than revenue streams. Wrong.
Labels spend money to develop and discover new artists and markets. Wrong.
Labels are interested in new and novel types of music. Wrong.
Labels are not run by a bunch of jerks in suits. Wrong.

The whole sunny picture that they're trying to paint is that somehow digital music and the people who download mp3s are somehow robbing the world of untold musical genius because it's no longer profitable for these geniuses to develop their art. Anyone with half a brain can see through that thinly veiled pile of manure. Labels are interested in one thing: money. Their entire model operates on the mega-hit model. A few megastars bankroll the entire balance sheet, and the rest are merely failed megastars. It's actually a fairly high-risk strategy, and recently, those mega hits haven't been selling as many as they usually do, and hence, the profits are down.

Labels aren't out investing in garage bands, or searching for the cutting edge. They're waiting for artists who proves themselves and their marketability so that they don't have to do any work. What scares them is that now, with the advent of digital music and distribution, they're no longer needed. After doing all the hard work, artists can actually reap the rewards of a large audience without needing to access the gatekeepers. See my previous post: Behold the next generation of rock stars.

So, what's a jerk in a suit who works for a major label to do? Well, their instinct is to cling desperately to their old model and sue people who are a threat to it. Hardly productive, and ultimately futile. There is a place for labels in the digital domain, and there is definitely a need for artists to get paid for what they do. The problem is that the old guard running the music empires are too trapped in their outdated models to be able to see the way forward.

We'll try to imagine that way later in the week.

Why downloading is 'legal' in Canada

2006-02-04T08:59:00.000-04:00

Welcome reddit.com readers! You've made yesterday by far the best day for The Trawler. There was some discussion of the blank media levy in the comments on yesterday's post. In Canada, a blank media levy is tacked onto the price of every blank media. That money is then distributed to the rights holders to compensate them for private copying of their work.

As a result of this levy, downloading music is 'legal' (sort of) in Canada since the courts ruled that the rights holders are already compensated as a result of this levy (which is not cheap: 21 cents per CD-R or 77 cents per CD-R Audio....whatever THAT means).

However, recently, they CRIA has been lobbying government to change the laws to prohibit downloading. Although I've not seen any mention of them removing the levy. They were lobbying hard to re-elect Sam Bulte, a Toronto MP with questionable connections to the industry who supported their crusade.

Below are some links related to the Blank Media Levy, and the CRIA - the RIAA's northern counterpart. Next week I'll debunk their preposterous "Free Music Myth" and propose some sensible alternatives. Make sure to come back!

CRIA: The Free Music Myth
http://www.cria.ca/freemusicmyth.php

CPCC: They distribute the levy to rights holders
http://cpcc.ca/english/about.htm

Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_media_tax

Commentary by Michael Geist:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/resc/html_bkup/june62005.html

If you like The Trawler, be sure to add us to your bookmarks or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Earth to Music Industry: It's so OVER.

2006-02-03T10:16:00.000-04:00

Last Friday, I posted a link to a story about Nettwerk records backing a victim of the RIAA's smear campaign. A major industry player (at least in Canada) standing off against the 'industry' represents a critical turning point in the whole futile battle for control over the music industry. It's been over for a long time, but now, everyone knows it. Except the RIAA of course. Refusing to pull their heads out of the sand, they continue to sue people who don't even own computers.

Besides being embarassing and costly for the industry, it is completely counterproductive. It does nothing to address the reasons for people downloading music, and does nothing to prevent it. The overwhelming voice of consumers, analysts and surveys points to the fact that music is not just too expensive, but it sucks.

And it's not that people don't want to pay for music, given the chance they will. Last year digital music sales tripled! Suddenly the cries of piracy hurting the bottom line seem a little hollow. Of course, the industry, forever the idiots, have been lobbying Apple to raise its prices at the iTunes store and even want a slice of iPod revenues. The ridiculousness of this request cannot be overstated. I suppose, next, movie studios will want a cut of every DVD player sold? How about game developers? Shouldn't Sony be coughing up for every PSP sold?

Give me a break.

They've so utterly lost the plot that it's just sad now. People have changed their listening habits, their consumption patterns, and their opinion on filesharing. That can't be changed back. Instead, they fight a losing battle to hold onto an antiquated business model and in the meantime, are losing out on massive opportunity.

In the real world (where the rest of us live), there are a plethora of exciting options in the world of music. The iTunes Music Store, MP3 Blogs, Last.fm, Pandora, satellite radio - the list is endless. All these things are forging the future of the music industry rather than clinging desperately to its decaying past.

Wake up recording industry: it's so OVER.

Tags: music|mp3|riaa|itunes

The 'Earned' Boom

2006-02-02T12:56:00.000-04:00

There's an article in this month's Wired about the 'new boom' in Silicon Valley. Following up on my posts about the latest buzzword 'Web 2.0' and how it relates to all of this, I thought this passage was particularly striking:

"Today, broadband is mainstream, online shopping is commonplace, everyone has a wireless device or two, and Apple's latest music player was - for the fifth season in a row - the must-have holiday gift. The Internet and digital media are clearly not fads. Over the past decade, we've started to live a life only imagined in mid-'90s business plans. As a result, some silly bubble-era ideas are starting to actually make sense - perhaps a lot of sense."

I hate to harp on it, but what we're seeing here is simply maturation of the technology and industry. The article refers to technological adoption and growth even after the bust. That's not surprising at all really. The ideas were (mostly) sound, and they had value, they were simply overvalued at the time. Web services in 1997 were hardly worth the same as their counterparts today - they simply didn't deliver. However, the core of the idea was good, it was just going to take time for it to come to fruition.

In many ways, there haven't been a lot of lessons learned from the bust or any brave new ideas pioneered. There's been a lot of experience gained though, and a lot more understanding by the wider public of just what these technologies can offer. Essentially, the first Internet boom was unwarranted, unearned. It was wild speculation and excitement over what could be without any thought paid to what actually was.

I think Wired is right in suggesting that this 'new boom' may be sustainable since this time it's actually earned. They point to iPods and online music, Skype and VOIP, and open source software. I'd also point to development tools like Flash and Javascript being fully fleshed-out technologies. Or Firefox and Internet Explorer being stable browsers. Or Google providing fast, efficient searching. Or simply the vast array of quality content being produced by a culture thoroughly engaged with the technology.

The groundwork has been laid, the dues paid, and quite simply: it all works rather well. So is it really such a surprise that eventually it might start reaping the rewards?

Tags: web|boom|web2.0|wired

Glocalization is fantabular!

2006-02-01T19:56:00.000-04:00

Ok, so this link is old, but the term glocalization is just too pstupid to pass up. In an attempt to explain why Web 2.0 matters, he uses the term glocalization many times!

Fantabulous. Magcrapulent! Positively pstupendular.

Read it here.

Web 2.0 is still bogus

2006-02-01T11:07:00.000-04:00

This site uses google maps to plot useless data about all the "Web 2.0" sites around the web. I especially love that the list of sites is titled "Innovators."

Traverse the list to behold what wonders await you in the new and improved Internet. Or simply visit them and see stuff that people have been talking about for years, and now actually works properly.

I understand the need for labels so that you can sell stuff to the public, and that it denotes a new 'era' in the web, but what bothers me is when people start to believe their own hype and harp on this as if it's some new renaissance of web development that will usher in another golden age and where we can all become startup millionaires.

Isn't that kind of over-hype and wild speculation what caused the first Internet bust?

Enjoy the list, behold the wonders of Web 2.0.

read more | digg story

Web 2.0? Try Web 1.0.

2006-01-31T10:24:00.000-04:00

The new buzzword 'Web 2.0' has been gaining momentum and is becoming slapped onto every new website that rears its head. I don't think there's any doubt that as a useful term, it's quickly losing any meaning. In fact, it's a bit of a misnomer to begin with. Things are being positioned as if they are some kind of new and revolutionary development, when a better way to describe these developments would be 'mature'. As a 'platform', the web has finally reached a level of maturity and stability that actually makes it a viable platform for application development. Up until this point, it was a mish-mash of ideas, standards, and technologies that really hadn't been defined either by an organization or its users.

Technology is socially constructed - and this applies to the web moreso than many other technologies. The whole mythology of the web was that it was a distributed, open, and free space that allowed for open publishing and a vast exchange of ideas and interaction between people. However, just what people wanted to publish and how they wanted to do it was yet to be defined. The idea that it could be thrown up overnight and be a fully realized environment was naive. It takes time to develop a stable platform of this magnitude, and for the idea to penetrate the public consciousness - because it's the users that make the platform viable.

All of the core ideas that are being flagged as 'Web 2.0' have been there from the start, they're just now at a point that they're mature enough to actually deliver on some of the promises that they made. Take a few examples:

1. Personal publishing. Free publishing systems (Blogger,WordPress,etc.), free web hosting, and popular acceptance have brought blogging to the fore. Truth be told though, people have been putting their ideas onto web pages from the very beginning - the idea has just become interesting to a wider audience, and works better now.

2. Application platform. Developers have been jury-rigging 'applications' on the web since the beginning as well. It's only recently though that there's been enough bandwidth, expertise, and stability amongst platforms to make truly rich applications possible. AJAX apps could have been done 10 years ago, but browsers were too flaky, and bandwidth was too thin. Imagine Google Maps on your 14.4k modem.

3. Social Networking/Participation. This has everything to do with technology penetration. Up until this point, there just weren't enough people engaged in the web culture to make it a viable platform for any of these things. It took time for people to understand the technology, to get interested and excited about it, for broadband to become widespread, and for the kids to whom this stuff is second nature to grow up a bit.

And of course, there's the 'perpetual beta'. An apt way to close this little blurb, as I think that it accurately describes what the web as a whole has been undergoing for the past decade or so. The entire experiment has been evolving and improving and being refined as developers gain experience with the technologies and users become familiar with the ideas and culture. 'Web 2.0' is being used to describe the new emerging web "after the bust", but the bust is just what happens when you launch with pre-release software that's buggy as hell. It fails! In 1997, it was more like Web 0.5Alpha. So, rather than calling it 'Web 2.0', maybe we should be calling it Web 1.0, since it may just deliver on all the promises it made originally.

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