Category: Other

There has been an intense debate in Sweden the last few days regarding a dawn raid against an internet service provider. The ISP had four servers in their office which allegedly had hundreds of thousands of illegal files available for downloading. Well, I have another question regarding measures to stop illegal file sharing, namely copy protection. Can a CD with copy control fail to play correctly in some CD players? I have experienced that my CD player cannot play the first track of some of my new albums, for example R.Kelly’s “Happy People” and Christian Walz’ “Paint By Numbers”. I even went back to the store with Walz’ record and got a new copy – same problem with that one. And they work ok when I play them on my car stereo, so something on these CDs is making my CD player go nuts.

Twice can be a coincidence but three times is a pattern. So does this have something to do with copy control? I read somewhere that some techniques include adding information in the beginning of the CD that ordinary CD players ignore but makes it able to control how it is being used on a computer. Can this cause my player to get stuck? I don’t know.

Both examples of albums above are from the BMG label so I went to their site http://www.bmgcopycontrol.com to seek answers but scored zilch. I even wrote them an email asking for advice, but no reply. So now I’m asking the blogosphere. Any advice? To me this seems like I’ve been sold flawed goods.

Footnote: My CD player is a Denon DCM-360, which should have quality enough to play any CDs.

March 15 is the last day to vote for Sweden’s best blog in Internetworld’s poll. Just follow this link and cast your vote for Media Culpa or any of the other 49 nominated blogs, then click the grey button marked “Rösta” (Vote, in Swedish). Winners will be published on April 26.

Blogging goes mainstream. Yesterday on the front page of Dagens Nyheter, today on the first page of SVT text (Swedish Television). The article is about how bloggers who published information about Apple, might have to reveal their sources.

There are some interesting stats in the new blog reader survey from Blogads. Like for example that more than 5% of the readers are lawyers or judges. In addition, 7.1% say they are in the legal industry, more than in media, advertising and PR. Wonder if they are reading blawgs about their own business or if they are checking the blogosphere for their clients.

Other findings are that the New Yorker seems to be a popular publication among blog readers. Almost 18% subscribe to it. Furthermore, one out of five blog readers is a blogger.

Adam L. Penenberg in Wired, about the Wall Street Journal being close to invisible in Google.

If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.

Related article.

The blogosphere is currently abuzz about the entrance of advertising in RSS feeds on a broader scale. The other week, Kanoodle announced they were partnering with Moreover for the launch of BrightAds.

Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts.

As a response Ed Sim at the BeyondVC blog decided to launch a second feed to be able to fool around with the ads. He’s convinced RSS ads will become standard procedure for publishers. Monitor his blog for feedback on the experiment.

First, the fact of consuming RSS feeds will typically reduce traffic at many publishers’ websites giving them less opportunity to monetize their assets. Ads in RSS will help publishers overcome the lower traffic to their sites while still providing their users with up to date content. Secondly, ads embedded in RSS feed gives great targeting opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

In October, Pheedo estimated the number of RSS ad impressions for 2004 to be 77 million, up to 308 Million in 2005 and 1.2 billion in 2006. Now, I don’t know if that’s a lot or not, but it’s fairly safe to predict an increase in feeds that add ads as publishers, both bloggers and traditional media, want to monetize on a large subscriber base. Not everyone can quit their day job to live on donations like Jason Kottke.

InfoWorld.com earlier this year reported that its top RSS feed page on its Web site was receiving more total visits than its home page. How can such a distribution channel remain ad free?