Melissa's Blog

Songbeat

woodarml — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:44:35 +0000

This article by TechCrunch, talks about some of the copyright things we’ve talked about in class. What I don’t understand is why the author seems like Songbeat could win their appeal… unless he doesn’t actually believe that and I missed his sarcasm…?

Songbeat is a German start up company that enables people to stream and download music with out permission from the artist or record label. Warner music has sued them (duh.) and won and now Songbeat is appealing.

Their website has stopped running ‘just in case’ but I don’t see how they could win the case… unless they made a deal with Warner and other music labels to somehow gain permission… or charged more money?

Here’s another article about the situation: Lawsuit It explains it in a little more detail, and makes Songbeat sound even more dumb.

Would Dept. of Justice go after Google?

woodarml — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:15:43 +0000

In this TechCrunch article, the writer explains a bit why Google could get into trouble for monopolizing things such as corporations who participate in its keyword auctions.

The author makes some interesting comparisons (I think the airlines is a good explanation) that really spell out past cases and why the Department of Justice may actually, at some point in time, seek more regulation for Google. Though the article states that the Dept. may also seek to break up Google, I don’t really see that ever happening. I mean, Google is turned in to a verb half the time for crying out loud; you can’t break up something like that.

Do you think Google has abused market power?

Microsoft Surface

woodarml — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:42:41 +0000

I’m not sure if any of you have heard about this yet but Microsoft has a new… well a new surface pretty much. It can be a counter top, or a table and is a computer.

It might be better if you check out this video first:

I was amazed at the ‘moving puzzle’ part because I can only imagine the types of toys my children will have in twenty years… I was also excited to hear that they project it will be for personal use as well. A month or so ago it was only projected to be used for casinos and restaurants.

Here is Microsoft’s site as well.

There are so many possibilities with this type of technology…

OnStar can find your car

woodarml — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:25:15 +0000

Okay, so the gist is that on newer GM vehicles (I’m pretty sure right now its just GM) OnStar can locate a stolen vehicle through its built in GPS. Then they alert the police and can actually kill the car’s horsepower so the thief can’t get any farther.

They say that once OnStar gets notice of a stolen car, it alerts the police and then the police and OnStar stay in contact until the police find the car and say its safe for the car to be slowed down to a stop.

Some guy on the comments yelled ‘Big Brother’ but whatever. If you choose to have your car hooked up with a GPS locating device that’s on you, not the government. My only concern is that this is brand new and what happens if they accidentally locate the wrong vehicle and the police say its okay to stop it yet the vehicle they’re actually stopping is doing 80 on a freeway…

Anyway, here’s the video where they test it out:

video example

Watercone

woodarml — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:09:59 +0000

I think this is AWESOME!

My freshman year here at Miami I was in a geology class where my teacher tried to convince all of us that Earth was going to run out of drinking water in our lifetime. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know but I do know that this device will be so useful for poorer countries and I bet grassroots organizations are going to be delivering them like crazy, especially if they are as inexpensive as planned.

Maybe they’ll come up with a portable one and you’ll see it on Man V Wild?

Facebook

woodarml — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:28:57 +0000

Remember when Facebook was this brand new thing just for college kids and you’d never heard of it before? Ya well, according to this article, they now have 175 MILLION users… those days are totally over!

Article

Movie Piracy a big problem?

woodarml — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:16:15 +0000

So I was reading this NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/media/05piracy.html?_r=1

and it claimed that the movie industry is hurting because of online movie piracy and that they tried really hard to prevent piracy when the new Batman movie came out but it did no good. When napster had its huge problems way back when for music piracy, they just made you buy the music and then iTunes came along and made it legitimate to buy songs one by one.

Like we were talking about in my IMS class the other day, things like Facebook were created with norms that you must participate and post things in order to observe and see other’s profiles etc. whereas Youtube was not started with those same norms (think about how many times you’ve watched youtube videos but then how many times have you posted videos?). I think this same idea comes with movie and music piracy.

Norms have been reestablished around the music industry. While some still download, it is so easy to buy music from iTunes and there are perks too. If you buy it you get album art and all the info on the song where if you download you dont. So, after making these changes for music to prevent this form of piracy, why didn’t they jump start this with the movie business? I mean, they HAD to have known it was coming… people watch movies online all the time, they don’t even have to download them they can just stream them.

Maybe iTunes should make an app where you can pay a few bucks to just watch a movie once, instead of purchasing it. I don’t know what they’re going to do but I’m shocked that they didn’t forsee this problem a long time ago.

-Mel

Wikipedia’s new flagged revisions

woodarml — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:44:00 +0000

So, Wikipedia has recently decided to use ‘flagged revisions’ according to the Guardian.
Article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/29/wikipedia-internet-publishing

With these new flagged revisions, the public will only be able to see certain edits of Wikipedia entries once they’ve been cleared by ‘trusted editors.’ While it’s understandable why something like this would have to be put into place (the lede of the article explains that) it does seem as though this goes against the purpose of Wikipedia.

It’s so refreshing to know that Wikipedia was written by people who don’t all exist within the academic community and to know that these descriptions of things continually change just like the world around us. Okay okay, having editors look at most of the content before it’s published does not take away from either of these parts of Wikipedia. But it does take away from the instant idea of the information… now we have to wait for an editor to look at the content. I’m not sure how long it took before for content to appear but now it most likely will take much longer.

All in all, this isn’t the worst thing to happen to Wikipedia. Hopefully it will help protect from all those teen boys calling themselves the heroes of their state.

-Mel

IMS201- The Printed Blog

woodarml — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:51:53 +0000

First, check out: http://www.theprintedblog.com/

ThePrintedBlog is a completely and entire never been done before new kind of newspaper. This is the media of tomorrow, or today I guess, as the first issue came out just three days ago on Jan27. A compilation of all kinds of blogs (the first one is from 2007 but completely entertaining) from all kinds of people and pictures as well are used to create this newspaper. Now hard news, ThePrintedBlog is not but entertainment… opinions… good pictures and fun; well yes, it is all of those. Definitely worth checking out and I am excited to see where this blog goes and how it continues on to the future.

You can download the PDF of the first issue right off of the front page and I definitely recommend it!

IMS201 – Vatican is on YouTube

woodarml — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:11:03 +0000

So I don’t know if any of you have heard about this yet but the Vatican is trying something new to reach younger audiences and I guess to get more people interested in what the happenings of the Vatican are. I watched a few of the videos and it is kind of like a news spot about the Vatican.

I’m not Catholic but it is very interesting that not only has the Vatican has embraced the internet but also wants to be more accessible to people around the world. All of the videos are fairly short but it kind of reminds me of a peek into the life of royalty or something (though he’s the Pope); just the idea that the Vatican is that much more transparent… or able for the masses to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkbXNNGk6Jo&feature=channel

-Mel