Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

If you’re into anything remotely indie or alternative (and why would you not?) you’ll be positively gushing over Pitchfork.tv which launched last night. One of the biggest music zines on the planet now has a video blog. It seems that there is more and more evidence of music blogs turning to video.  Stereogum has one starting up at some point.

There’s a vid of New Media Darlings Radiohead’s Bangers and Mash which features Thom on drums, which, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find hilarious.

pitchfork.tv

Last night Google launched their Application Engine. Nocturnal developer enthusiasts, get excited. It allows you to built applications that are hosted by Google’s robust infrastructure. This is fairly significant strategic change, not simply for the fact that it allows people to create ubiquitous web applications that never fall over and have unlimited space but because Google seem to have actually employed a trained designer to create a logo.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, it’s actually a bit like the way in which Facebook allows you to build applications. For most web developers the feature list will look positively erotic, however, one fairly massive drawback is that you need to know Python. Having said that, Python is one of the more simple syntaxes (there was talk of merging it with Ruby at one time). It will be a massive boon for the Python developer community. Hopefully they will ad new languages at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The level of integration with Google’s own apps is yet to be seen. And I’m yet to discover if they have a service level agreement (SLA) - this was the biggest drawback of the Amazon cloud as this prohibits application developers from providing any level of service for their own customers.

Ugh, some of these offices are really swish. Fahrenheit 212 gets my vote for its Eames-goes-Gothic-style study.

Creds: Jamie

The Times reports that CERN, the place responsible from bringing us Le Internet has gone and done it again. They’ve invented the Grid, which is a system that works much faster than the normal Internet.

The grid isn’t to be made for use by consumers initially but is intended to analyse billions of Mbs of data from from the Large Hadron Collider which is attempting to discover some particle that is proving ellusive (I have no idea what this is but the Register does). But what does really interest me is the fact that this technology could be exploited by telecoms providers to help increase broadband speeds.

Apparently, nobody will bother saving anything to their own computer and just save it to the grid instead. Sounds good to me, I kind of already do this with Google apps. It essentially means that we’re another step closer to ubiquitous computing, if you’re into that kind of thing.

CERN Accellerator Complex

Following on from my earlier post about Virgin Media’s new snitch policy, it set me off thinking over my lunch in very long sentences about the ramifications of this. The main (really long) sentence goes as follows. If the government is gong to legislate that the BPI can force ISPs to give them their logs to enable them to snoop for perpetrators of Internet crimes against creativity then surely it follows that individual content creators also have those same rights? If the BPI can have such access, why can’t the average Joe on the street take a look and see how his content is being passed around?

Essentially, what I’m saying is that it is likely that, if this legislation is successful, ISP logs will become public access. This then may mean tools become available (probably made available by someone like Google who seem to release these type of category-smashing tools for fun while their working on something more important), such as those used by Hitwise to analyse ISPs to provide meaningful statistics. The statistics would allow, in essence (as the excellent Hitwise service does) people to see any form of online activity, particularly P2P sharing. Essentially, it would be like making public everything you do in the comfort of your own home.

I may be speaking out of turn but it kind of feels right and it feels like the kind of direction we’re going in. Surely, data about public access to public web sites is the property of the public, right? Likewise, data about how public content is traded is also public knowledge. Given that this data is currently only available (at a pretty penny) from companies like Hitwise, which is owned by Experion, it seems only right that at some point in the future this information will be available to all. Probably given it’s freedom by a combination of the UK government and Google. Surely privacy advocates are going to have a field day with this?

So where does the access stop? Who isn’t a content creator these days? From big corporations using ad agencies to create stunning visual pieces to Tay Zonda creating, well, stunningly awful but incredibly infectious music. Don’t they all have the right to be able to trace how their content is being passed around. And given that no one body is ever likely to be trusted, funded or even liked enough by enough content owners and creators to take the task up, it makes sense that it’s carried out by the content creator themselves, should they chose to do so.

I’m aware that in actual fact, the BPI is a representative industry body and, as such may have authoratative powers to execute decisions about the misuse of ISPs. But the ramifications of this arrangement go on and on.

I sense a an enormous privacy backlash.

Really interesting example of ASCII art in paid search, if only it was possible, I’m not convinced that it ever actually ran. This is a classic illustration of the potention for diffusion within advertising. Apparently Google doesn’t allow this on account of repetitive punctuation. Well, at least we don’t have to put up with doubel exclamation marks. BUY NOW!! L@@K

Found via Martin’s comments on Iain’s post about search. Search being an area I certainly need to ‘wonk off’ on.

Imagine my dissapointment when I realised that this style guide for Web 2.0 turned out not to be a joke.

So now you know.

The Telegraph reports that Virgin Media are trialling a policy in which they trace people who illegally download copyrighted material and then write letters to them telling them to stop. Virgin Media just happens to be the first ISP to come to an agreement with the BMI but more will follow once the government decides to legislate, which is supposed to be this month.

A couple of problems I can foresee are that there are millions of files shared that aren’t illegal to share. Surely the ability to track each of the rights of every file on the network is far beyond the capacity of a few bods at the BPI (it’s the BPI that will be doing the grunt work, after all)? Plus, the current favored method of file sharing is to use torrents, which are hashed for extra confusion, the ISP doesn’t see the file name. Without listening or watching every piece of copyrighted material there is no means of tracking the material without the correct file name. My knowledge of how ISPs work is sketchy at best but it all seems a little far fetched. How about public access networks? How about people who share WiFi connections using the Fon network? Sounds like scaremongering. That being said, people have been fined in the past from data obtained from ISPs, presumably this will simply spur people on to develop technology that shields the contents from the ISP altogether?

Any thoughts on this?

To me, Fader’s news of Blu’s challenge of releasing 763 albums (all collaborations), supported by 1,892 videos over the course of the approaching summer is an extreme example of how digital is changing way we consume music. With over 16,000 friends on MySpace, he’s certainly got the support. Without the creative restrictions of a major label deal it looks like he’ll simply be putting everything out and allowing the natural filter of the hardcore fans to decide what sinks or swims. In Blu’s own words “YallProllyBeSickOfHearingYaBoyBy’09″.

It reminds me of Sufjan Steven’s attempt to write an album for every state in America.

Exciting times indeed.

Update: Not sure if the Fader claim was an April Fools but they’ve removed the story now. Still funny.