Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 8/1/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/1/2000; 7:39:01 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/1/2000
Msg #:19343
Prev/Next:19342 / 19344

Today's piece 

DaveNet: Where's the messiah?

Afternoon mind bomb 

As promised this morning, now you can tell, in real-time, what I'm listening to. Here's the XML file that contains that info.

Note that there's room for everyone who's signed on to say the same thing. And there's room for an artist and album, in addition to the name of the song.

An update for all Radio UserLand bootstrappers just went out, so they can join the mind bombers parade too.

Afternoon mind links 

What are the Shadow Conventions?

The Economist: "Music lovers wanting to collect songs on their computers—hardly an unreasonable request—have little choice but to do so with Napster and its like." Bravo!

Reuters: "'Nobody thinks the technology is going away. The point is to win the suit and keep the venture capitalists away from it,' said another record executive."

SF Chronicle: Napster traffic booming.

Why? 

Some have asked why I told the story of the economics of UserLand yesterday. Instead flip it around.

Not telling the story created an imbalance that was felt in a bunch of ways. How can you understand my POV without understanding that I was writing checks until 1998, and trying to stay in the black since then.

How else could you get that I totally sympathize with the musicians? We think they're getting rich. It takes so much energy to let that myth continue. I want musicians to tell the true story, well I had to do it too. There's no shame here. To solve the problem first we have to know what it is.

We're now in the midst of a true revolution. It makes me happy. This is why I do software, for the great open spaces that my mind loves to figure out. It doesn't matter if truckloads of money ever show up, the amazing thing is, we don't need them. It's all going to happen anyway.

So, let's have a new mind bomb every day this month.

What's a mind bomb?

Read on..

Morning stuff 

Good morning and Happy August! Let's have a BBQ, go to the beach, play with the kids, and make kick-ass software.

They're talking about playlist software on Live365.Com. I think they'd like what we're doing. Interesting, I know two of the people on the management team. Small world. Hey they're in Foster City, only 25 minutes away, just like Napster. Silicon Valley North.

Flip-flop. "Pop’s creative mission has undergone what Mr. Grazer calls 'a full 180.' Rather than be the exclusive province of the existing Hollywood creative community, Pop now says it wants to make its digital canvas available to everyone."

OK, yesterday we got the connection with the aggregator smoothed out so it still works if you switch IP addresses. Now I'm going to take another step, if everything goes well, by the end of the day you'll be able to go to a Web page to see what I'm listening to, in real time. So, in addition to a song of the day, you'll have a song of the moment. And it'll be 24-by-7, even if I'm not working, there's no reason my system can't be queuing up the tunes. Right? Yeah.

BTW, everything we're doing is open and documented, shipped in source code, using XML-RPC which is pretty well deployed. In other words, even if Radio UserLand isn't your favorite playlist software, you'll be able to participate, if the developer of your favorite software works with these formats and protocols.

Here's a great story. EFF detonates a mind bomb in court. I agree with that characterization and fully support them. Websites are definitely a form of creative expression, are playlists and software. Personally I like to create mind bombs too, and I am also a user of mind bombs. Keep em comin.

We're still looking for nirvana in Windows music playing apps. In this DG message I explain what it takes to rule our world from a music-playing standpoint. A simple COM interface. It might already exist? Amazingly Microsoft doesn't do this in their music player app. I thought they had scripting religion baked into the company. Where do I want to go today? Believe it or not, COM.

Mac users who want to get in the Radio UserLand club early, check out Sam Devore's site. Along with Sean Elfstrom, he really pushed it yesterday and has Macs playing music now.

Where will all this lead? Right now the music industry pays the radio industry to promote their music, and the radio industry pays back to the music industry. In the future, we will all promote the music we love. Alliances will form, artist-to-fan. Some of the more clued-in artists will realize that they could create new art for this medium. I once thought this will never happen, now I think it might happen this month.

IBM: Messaging, the transport part of the XML puzzle. "Need help sorting out XML messaging protocols? This article looks at major transport-level options and compares how they accomplish transferring XML between parties reliably. You'll find an overview of the approaches of XML-RPC, SOAP, WDDX, ebXML, and JMS as they apply to XML transport, with simple example code."

Brent is on vacation this week, but he's still drinking coffee and doing his weblog where he says he reads Scripting News, just like the morning paper. Here's something your morning paper doesn't do, it doesn't greet you by name. Hi Brent, hope you're enjoying your time off. We miss you!



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