AudioBooks on the Zune
It took them two years, but Microsoft finally figured out that the ability to support for their own DRM is an area where they might have a definitive advantage over the iPod.
One new media type that Zune is adding this time around is support for audiobooks. Although audiobooks won’t be sold on the Zune marketplace, Zune will be an available option through Audible.com, a leading purveyor of audio books, as well as through OverDrive-powered Web sites, an infrastructure provider for major booksellers and library systems. “Now you’ll be able to integrate your Zune with libraries,” Seitz says. “The Seattle and King County library systems, for example, offer loaner audiobooks. Now Zune customers can put them on their Zune for free.” – Microsoft
It is just unfortunate that it took them two years to figure it out.
The Power of the Wikipedia Editor
I have been highly critical of Wikipedia in the past for the penchant of some self-styled Guardians of what should be allowed in Wikipedia deleting content. But since most of the time, those were issues regarding who was or not a web celebrity they didn’t matter too much in the greater scheme of things. But the potential for abuse was still there.
Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry for Naomi Oreskes. Read this version and this later one. Notice the differences. Then read the revision history. So, why the controversy?
Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I — no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone’s views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out. By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don’t suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet’s cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse. – Lawrence Solomon
In this case, it doesn’t even matter to me who is wrong or right. What is way more disturbing is the denial that there is any controversy and the systematic manipulation to suppress any mention of it.
As long as Wikipedia is subject to the whim of the individual editors who are willing to not only delete things they disagree with but lock out furthering editing to ensure they retain control, Wikipedia will remain nothing more than a group wiki for a tightly-constrained oligarchy.
TextDrive vs. Textpattern
Once upon a time, TextDrive was started with a certain idea in mind.
TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, and was originally conceived as a managed hosting service for users of his Textpattern content-management system. In an unusual move, Allen offered lifetime hosting accounts, at a one-time price of USD$199, to the first two hundred customers in lieu of seeking venture capital; this initial group was dubbed the “VC 200”. The scope of the company quickly moved beyond Textpattern hosting, however, and TextDrive has been a general-purpose hosting service for most of its history… Since early in its history, TextDrive has provided support to open source software projects; the company donates a portion of proceeds from each customer’s hosting services to an open source project of the customer’s choice, and has offered hosting services specifically tailored for developers of open source projects. – Wikipedia
Four years later, things have changed.
As a pragmatic result of our long-lasting struggle to tame the touchy Subversion host we finally gave in and moved our code repository. – Robert Wetzlmayr
I still have my second round VC lifetime account so this won’t affect me directly but I still think this sort of marks the end of an era. And not in a good way.
Movable Type vs. WordPress
Movable Type 3.0 and on will not be the solution for everyone, and that’s okay. For some users, TypePad makes more sense. For others, non-Six Apart tools make more sense. – Mena Trott
Many of us at the time and many more since have made the choice to use “non-Six Apart tools.” Six Apart is making an effort to change that.
As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type. – Anil Dash
As you might expect, there was a response.
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page. For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community. – Matt Mullenweg
I consider myself semi-neutral in this since, at this point, I don’t use either product much although I still have sites that are running both.
Six Apart made a strategic mistake four years ago and the open sourcing of the product is a good first step toward a remedy. But just like Leo Laporte noted recently, it isn’t that Twitter is better than Pownce or Jaiku (most of them have more features), it is where the community resides.
What Six Apart is going to have to do to make Movable Type a force once again is restore the user community that once surrounded it. And that, I think, is going to prove very difficult to do.
Don't Call the Magic Attic
Just to be the safe side, you might want to check your local library and see if they have any of these titles.
Hillsborough County librarians spent much of Tuesday tracking down a series of children’s books that referred readers to a telephone sex line. Patricia MacMartin discovered the faulty phone number when her 9-year-old daughter asked to dial the 800 number in the back of her Magic Attic Club book. She notified library officials and when they didn’t remove the books, she checked out every Magic Attic book available from her local branch, the New Tampa Regional Library. – Laura Kinsler
I first head about this last night during one of those sensationalized news breaks our local stations love so much: something about “Librarians failing to remove books from their shelves.” As it turned out, that actually wasn’t necessary. When we looked into things this morning, it only required removing a pre-perforated card. Nothing sensational at all, but then is sweeps month…
