http://www.horseforce.net Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:58:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Arthur recently emailed me asking why I chided Lin for the In The Heights soundtrack having iTunes-only exclusive tracks, and it got me thinking (hopefully) blog-worthy thoughts: The short answer is, I wanted to see the exclusives on AmazonMP3, since that's where I buy music these days, but that's not really ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/160 In no uncertain terms, this new Girl Talk is the shit. It's hilarious, insightful and joyful in all the right places. If I know you, expect to endure this soon: "Here, let me play this bit for you...see, isn't that crazy...the way he cut in that track is like whoa...c'mon, ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/151 Mashable is dead right about Billy Bragg's Bebo beg (say that five times fast): royalties to musicians from social networks just weren't part of the deal. Nick Carr calls it exploitation, sharecropping even, which just ain't so, and would be offensive to me if I were a sharecropper or ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/117 On a related note, if you understand why this is funny, then we can be friends. http://www.horseforce.net/archives/94 So one of the talking points about Microsoft! has been the question of government, i.e. antitrust, approval. While many think it passes muster behind a fervent desire for somebody, anybody to really compete with Google in search, I'm not quite so sanguine about a merger to duopoly in a market ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/90 "The shrieky, out-of-tune verbiage and garish illustrations resemble my friends' failed attempts to write books for children." -Valleywag's Paul Boutin on Yahoo's page design. We could say all the same things about Clippy, couldn't we? The crucifixions of interface design that these two companies have perpetrated in the name of branding ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/89 [Ed: written a while ago, but seemed appropriate to publish as this nears] Every time I re-read Souter's majority opinion in Campbell, my goat is thoroughly gotten. It's obviously the correct result, and it elevates important appellate precedents, but it just isn't really honest about what needs to be done about ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/85 As an initial matter, it seems like DRM is not incompatible with at least the distributional goal of Open Access. Getting more works of scholarship onto the network to reach where physical copies don't is a big part of why people care about Open Access, even if they don't especially ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/87 There's an avalanche of alliterations for you. It's also a vaguely astonishing fact; the numbers involved don't really surprise me, but it reminds me that MySpace is reaching almost too broadly. When everyone's on there, and everyone is everyone's friend, then everyone just has a blog. Not a bad thing, ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/86 A new year has come, and the constant deluge of spam comments and pings has forced me to flee from my antique version of Movable Type into the Open and waiting arms of WordPress. I've known it was the right thing to do for some time, but I finally bit ... http://www.horseforce.net/archives/80