The Great Triangulation…
Awhile ago I wrote about how one of the key tenets of the Participatory Age is "triangulation". Using Google or Yahoo, you can pretty much triangulate any content on the web, skirting around the charging (business) models and formats in which the orignial content resided. Content gets repackaged and "place shifted" (taken from one format, say, a chapter of a book – and represented, say, in an online guide).
Steve has a great example of this in his post on O’Reilly’s Hacks Books. I’ll leave it to you to read – you’ll get the idea pretty quick. The other value of triangulation is the other content that gets connected to what you were orignially looking for.
Biting The DRM Dust
David was glad to see Dave Winer say that, in his opinion, the problems people were having with their iPods and iTunes are DRM-related. I was glad to see David get into the issue of what the “R” in DRM really means. It means restrictions.
Until CDs vanish, I continue to buy my albumns via amazon or BN. If I ever want a single track, I’ll maybe use iTunes. The reason is simple – I want to own the music. Really own the music. David raises some fair questions related to this:
- Buy someone a specific song through an online music store the way you might buy someone a CD? You can’t and pretty soon, once CDs are gone (and they will be), we won’t be able to buy each other music (you can and will be able to buy gift certificates to online music stores…. but how impersonal is that?)
- Down the road, when there are no more CDs and all music is bought online, pass your life’s music collection onto someone else when you die (the way you can LPs and CDs today)? You can’t.
Something to think about as you drool all over that iPod Nano.
So, You Got An iPod for Christmas…
… and you are wondering how it all works. Especially how can I tell if all the stuff on my PC is on my iPod… Well, Dave Winer takes the iPod to task. It’s for the most part pretty fair from a user perspective.
When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have?
Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something? Is it really
gone? Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don’t say
it’s okay to?
Although I quite like the interface I did run into most of these scenarios trying to get my Aunt’s iPod up and running on her PC yesterday. Paul flags one of the more friendly responses, which is pretty useful in answering these questions.
They Say Things…
to make you laugh and cry… Wired covers hillarious tech exec remarks from 2006, including:
"Screw the nano." — Motorola CEO Ed Zander
"I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google."
— Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
"Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the shuffle." — President Bush
Via tech.memorandum..
Lafley On Marketing
Thursday’s edition of the FT had some telling quotes from P&G Chief, Lafley:
<blockquote>"Just as I believe the consumer has power in the purchase chain, I think the consumer has the power in the consumption and media and message chain. So she’s the boss – or he’s the boss. And so the world is shifting from a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’. She and he have a lot more choices."</blockquote>
