Wondering out Loud • |
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Tuesday, January 09, 2018
Copyright © 2002-2018 Simpatico.blogspot.com. All rights reserved.
A Personal Radio Transmitter to Go With Your Personal Printing Press Maybe you wanted to create your own Internet radio station or some kind of digital jukebox for the worldwide audience. Maybe you dropped the idea because you didn’t want to deal with the steep royalties the U.S. recording industry convinced our lawmakers to agree to. In fact, that’s one reason why some noncommercial radio stations do not provide streaming audio on their Web sites (but we digress). What if there’s a free service that allows you to set up your own radio channel on the Web? And what if it keeps track of airplay for you and manages all the licensing requirements? Well, Social.fm and Last.fm supposedly do all this for you. But the devil’s in the details. Social.fm (formerly Mercora) Social.fm does not allow listeners to search for the music channel you set up using its software. The fact that you’re not able to add a description or rename your channel to something meaningful (“Desert-Island Discs,” “Best of 1984,” “Rare Blues Recordings,” and so on) is a clue. Listeners can search for a specific Webcaster (“DJ” in Social.fm’s parlance), a limited tool for tuning in to close friends and relatives. Social.fm purports to work strictly like a radio broadcast, not a jukebox. According to customer support, the company couldn’t let users select what songs to play from a list for legal reasons. That’s surprising because lots of Web sites offer this interactive option legally (Amazon, for example). So clearly it makes no difference to the recording industry as long as royalties are paid to the rightful license holders for every click. Social.fm does not actually store your music channel’s songs on its servers, which means you must be on-line yourself and Webcasting in order for listeners out there to check out what’s available on your channel. Good luck Webcasting while surfing the Internet. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it’s open 24x7, but you shouldn’t have to be on it 24x7. And then there are minor quirks such as Social.fm’s login scheme and the inability to set your own Webcaster name (your e-mail/IM name is your Webcaster moniker). For a product that’s been through several major revisions, Social.fm’s software seems rather crude and unfinished. Starting with Version 5.5, Social.fm has added an option to “broadcast music when I’m offline.” But when we pressed the company for more details, the response we received is that this feature would not be officially supported. Talk about mixed signals. Last.fm On paper, Last.fm looks like it’s just what the radio doctor ordered. The best thing one can say about it is that you upload your list of songs once (“scrobble” in this U.K.-based company’s lingo) and then your radio is set and can be listened to by anyone anytime. Last.fm does not store your audio files on its servers; we suspect it saves each song’s audio stream instead. Now comes the bad news. Last.fm only saves about the first three minutes of each song, which is not a showstopper. But the samples that people can listen to are restricted to only those songs the company has licensed. This would explain why Last.fm doesn’t allow you to manage your radio’s playlist, a pointless exercise since you don’t know what songs are legal for Last.fm to play anyway. We suppose Last.fm’s approach means the company can better forecast its royalty payments while Social.fm has to pay for whatever users choose to play—a flexible design but potentially costly business model. In the physical world, a radio station’s frequency is its address. Last.fm provides the same kind of direct access by creating a Web address based on your user name (www.last.fm/user/johndoe/, for instance). The company’s FAQ section is missing a lot of basic information, some of which can be found, oddly enough, in the user forum area. Some features are not explained anywhere; for example, what’s the difference between a playlist and what’s on your own radio? And exactly what songs are currently part of the company’s licensing program? Like Social.fm, Last.fm’s software is also a bit quirky. There are lots of Web sites that let visitors listen to music but few that allow you to set up your own playlist of prerecorded music. So it’s disappointing when companies like Social.fm and Last.fm have so far fallen short where Webcasting is concerned.
Let’s hope some other company will implement an Internet radio/jukebox listening room the right way. Software that combines the best features of Social.fm and Last.fm would be a step in the right direction. We need someone to do for individual Webcasting what companies like Blogger did for personal publishing. Now that everyone has a personal printing press, we want the airwaves—as the Ramones would say. Perhaps some podcasting service out there is already thinking of expanding its business to include general Webcasting of prerecorded music.
* Option to add user-defined radio broadcast. ** Site-defined radio stations only. The Internet’s Dirty Little Secrets Hacking. Spam. Phishing. Adults approaching minors in chat rooms. Criminals buying and selling stolen IDs. That people conduct illegal business on the Internet is no surprise. After all, the Internet is a communications network. No, we’re talking about popular Internet products that leave something to be desired. Until we started tracking search engines in 2003, we didn’t know they could be so buggy. Follow our search engine testing and you’ll see why they’re more miss than hit. Compounding search problems are these unofficial proxy Web sites. Then there’s Wikipedia, the so-called people’s encyclopedia. We stumbled across a Wikipedia article on a local company in California and thought it read more like a page out of its press kit (compared with other Wikipedia pages for similar companies). So in April 2007, we decided a run a little experiment. We edited this Wikipedia article to add a link to an external page that contains an analysis of the company (how it stacks up against companies in the same space, etc.). Within five days, our link was removed. If one of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors removed the link, then we wonder if this person has any connection to the company, a legitimate question in light of the case of the editor who’d lied about his qualifications. Is there an appeals procedure? Who’s the moderator? And we doubt there’s any safeguard Wikipedia could put in place to prevent anyone—say, one of the company’s employees—from deleting the link because the external page is less than flattering. Either way the removal of our link smacks of “censorship.” We don’t deny search engines and Wikipedia provide a service; we just question the quality of that service. Keep in mind that some Web pages are overlooked or “censored” by these tools. Just as you should not believe everything you read, you should constantly remind yourself of what you don’t see—what’s missing. Beware of a false sense of conclusion and authority these products imply. One Bad Apple We hate to rain on Apple Computer’s 30th anniversary celebration, but what’s up with its iTunes download? Isn’t the House of Jobs supposed to be the place where they publish elegant and compact software? You wouldn’t know it judging by the size of the iTunes setup file. It’s up to Version 6 already—what’s the excuse for the bloated software? We’ve given up after trying twice to download this monster file. After downloading over 25MB of file—and with a ways to go—we’d be greeted with a message about corrupted components. But if you try to download again, it starts from scratch instead of where the error occurred. We have all downloaded numerous Windows patches before, including the large XP Service Pack 2. And one thing Microsoft does right is that if you drop your Internet connection in the middle of a download, it picks up where you left off the next time you get on the Internet. Why couldn’t Apple Computer do that? It’s a big deal when you’re talking about a huge file. And another thing: why doesn’t the company detect if your PC already has QuickTime Player installed (we suspect it’s part of the iTunes setup file)? We also had trouble recently downloading the latest version of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Google Fumbles For Google users everywhere, September 2003 will live in infamy. Without warning, some of our pages have been censored. It seems Google’s filtering software is about as sophisticated as some Internet-blocking products (see below). The irony is that adult Web pages are still listed as long as they don’t contain certain words. We have no choice but to edit our pages. Shame on Google for being so myopic and misguided. Read our final thoughts on the strange case of the missing Web pages. If Only Anti-Spam Programs Were as Unforgiving as Net-Filtering Software We often wondered what Internet-filtering software like CyberPatrol would do with our Web pages. As you know, a few pages under Bay Area Radio and Music Camp include references to a British duo with a questionable name, not to mention a foreign film with a profane title under Movie Talk. We don’t have any Internet-blocking software at the Simpatico home office, but we got our answer when we tried to access some of our pages from a computer at a local library. This kid-safe PC denied access to these pages—and others that link to them. The objective of Net Nanny and other similar products is to restrict access to Web sites that are deemed inappropriate for children. A discerning program would not and should not treat our pages as suspect material. While we don’t consider Simpatico the electronic equivalent of a family newspaper or magazine, nothing we publish justifies lumping our content with adult-only material. That’s the problem with all filtering software: it misses the target or it produces false positives. Since we are not about to censor an artist’s name or a movie title, we’ll just wait for these software companies to get their act together. That said, we feel the practice of some publications to quote every profanity uttered in an interview seems gratuitous. A letter followed by a few dashes would suffice. There’s a difference between swearing and the name of an artist or a project. A Better Do-Not-Call List When the president signed the creation of a national do-not-call list into law in March 2003, that was a good day for privacy advocates. But the government could have devised a better do-not-call list: a national call list. The protection of privacy should always be the default option. People who welcome telemarketers should be ones who have to register; people who want to be left alone shouldn’t have to do anything. Conventional wisdom holds that the majority of people don’t wish to be contacted; hence a national call list would be much shorter than a national do-not-call list. Other benefits include a more manageable database and faster crosschecking against telemarketers’ calling lists. We must also anticipate that some criminal out there would abuse this registry somehow. Given a choice between the two lists, direct marketers obviously prefer the do-not-call list because they hope that most people wouldn’t bother to register--let’s prove them wrong. Oh, they are also challenging this law in court just the same. Speaking of unwanted solicitations, our Simpatico e-mail account got spammed for the first time in April 2003. We knew that as soon as we added e-mail links to our pages, our e-mail address would be harvested by those spammeisters. While we're encouraged the government seems anxious to finally do something about spam, don't expect a national opt-in list for e-mail. That's a shame because the notion of permission-based marketing is not foreign to the government; a federal law requires marketers to obtain consent before sending faxes (effective June 2005). Update: One year after the DNC registry became the law of the land, 64 million phone numbers ended up on the list (out of 166 million residential phone lines). The U.S. Supreme Court also elected to not hear this case, upholding an appeals court ruling in 2004 that dismissed the direct marketers’ constitutional challenge. So until the DNC list is made permanent, we just have to remember to renew our registration every five years. Google This [2003] It’s amazing how much you think about Google once you publish your own Web pages. When you Google something, it doesn’t search the Internet per se. Instead, it searches a database that Google has created from all the Web pages it visited previously. While this design provides good response time, we’ve come to question two related issues this approach raises. It’s taken Google three months to update the references to our Web pages since they were first added to the database last January. If Google can only visit a given page on a quarterly basis, that can’t be good for e-commerce Web sites that change daily or weekly, not to mention the countless blogs that get updated constantly. Moreover, the latest Web pages Google presents look like information collected at least several weeks earlier. This means your Google search results are based on data that could be more than three months old in the worst case, an eternity in cyberspace. If Hollywood can release box office grosses on the last day of the tracking week, Google should be able to utilize its snapshots of the Internet days--not weeks--after compilation. But for now the bigger issue remains how frequently Google visits a Web page to begin with. So as much as we like the way Google highlights your search keys in the cached display, we are mindful it could be terribly out-of-date. Google This [2002] We all know Google is one of the few dot-com success stories. It has a good product and the company is already profitable. (You can see where we're going with this.) On October 26, 2002, we submitted two of our Web addresses to Google. No one should have to submit anything because Googlebots crawl the Internet periodically and visit all Web pages. But we did it to get a head start. Well, Google is still not seeing our public pages. What gives? So the next time you Google, just remember it's not perfect. Update: Google finally indexed our Web pages by early January 2003, three months after we went on-line and two months after we entered our submissions. Let's hope Google will be nimbler in the future. More Update: Google has just acquired the company that makes Blogger software; it should have no excuse now. Cool Web Surfers Don't Cut and Paste Would you like to share this Web page with friends? Don't cut and paste. Provide a Web link to this page or refer to its Web address. We invite all content providers to join our "Don't Cut and Paste" campaign. Copyright © 2002-2018 Calba Media LLC. All rights reserved. |
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