Ordo Ab Chao

I’m just blog tired here 😀. Just looking at blogshares again. I’m slightly p*ssed off with the inaccuracies in it’s valuation of my blog. I find it ridiculous that given the numbers of people that use the bloglines blog aggregator that the blogshares spiders can’t bypass the single level of indirection implied by their javascript blogroll. It’s a real pain in the ass as I’m damned if I’m going to do any server-side scripting to dynamically embed my roll in the page. Bloglines was recently acquired by AskJeeves which also owns the teoma patented thematic search technology. The idea appears to be the creation of a search engine that is capable of thematically searching and grouping a massive database of RSS blog and news feeds. Which is a pretty nice idea in my opinion. I wish them luck.

Yay, finally a post about technology. No science, religion or philosophy today. Hell, I’m not even going to consider the ethical or philosophical implications of having to pay for culture as opposed to it being provided free gratis to all. Still, Digital Rights Management (or DRM) has caught the imagination of an entertainment industry keen to avoid getting overtaken by the latest and greatest piracy technologies and the increasingly flexible morality of the general public. They wouldn’t sell us a DVD writer if they didn’t want us to copy movies, right???. I was extremely interested to pick the following article from gizmodo. It really does look like Real Network’s “Rhapsody To Go” service just plain doesn’t work. The technology is Real’s implementation of the the Windows Media Player 10 DRM that lets you rent downloaded tracks and even listen to them on your portable music player. These so-called portable subscriptions are a really nice feature that fits with how most users would envisage DRM. You subscribe to the content and then enjoy it on the device of your choice! If the technology works that is. However PC World points out the many limitations of the service. You range of players that support it’s DRM doesn’t include the ubiquitous iPod. That’s a bit like serving a vegetarian a steak sandwich. A bit pointless really! To make matters worse, PC World failed to successfully transfer media to any portable music player. Here’s a quote from the article:

“In my tests, transferring tracks to a notebook and playing them while I was unconnected to the Net worked fine. Of course, that’s no great accomplishment–other music services have been allowing something like that for years. But despite trying with two IRiver H10 MP3 players, two Rhapsody accounts, and two PCs, and getting suggestions from Real engineers, I was never able to transfer any Rhapsody track I hadn’t bought outright onto a portable player. For me, at any rate, Rhapsody To Go just didn’t work.”

It turned out that Real’s support forums include lots of complaints from customers about similar problems with the Rhapsody To Go service. Real have since updated the software but I don’t have access to a more recent test. Also, in support of the service, Rhapsody’s desktop client has a very nice jukebox feature and the service generates a playlist with tunes similiar in genre to those you’ve already subscribed to. A bit like Amazon’s “people who bought X also bought Y” recommendation technology…