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At last, EMI has announced what many digital music fans have been hoping for, something that has been the subject of rumours ever since Apple supremo Steve Jobs wrote his Reagan-style “tear down this wall” anti-DRM rant awhile back: for the first time, a major record label will sell music free from DRM. The songs will be $1.99 each, and will be higher quality, or consumers can opt for lower quality with digital rights management. The deal reportedly includes the entire EMI catalogue of more than 5 million songs, and previously purchased songs can be upgraded. There are lots more links at Techmeme, including the official release from EMI — which is here — as well as live-blogging of the keynotes from Jobs and the EMI gang by Crunchgear, more details from CNet and some perspective from Cynthia Brumfield over at IPDemocracy.

This is pretty huge. Maybe even bigger than the Beatles 🙂 The big question, of course, is whether this will start a DRM-free land rush of any kind, or whether EMI will be left to twist in the wind. My hunch is that the other labels will wait and see whether the move pays off, and when they realize that they can sell even more music if it is free of DRM, they will open up as well.

Steve O’Hear of ZDNet doesn’t think EMI’s attempt will get much traction, however, because it means paying more for something you can already get for free. And my friend Paul Kedrosky thinks that EMI — which he describes as an “also-ran” in the music biz — is effectively buying market share.

On a Canadian note, EMI’s new DRM-free songs will be available at iTunes.ca as well (Canada already has a source of DRM-free independent music: a site called Puretracks). Does DRM prevent you from buying more music from official or legitimate sources? Let me know in the comments.

Update:

Gizmodo has some interesting behind-the-scenes details about the EMI and Apple deal, including the fact that EMI came up with the idea rather than Apple, and that the 256kbps format and the pricing were both Apple’s idea.

Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow and Citizen Agency, who joined us at the last mesh conference, has a great post up showing some love for Canuck startups — including the Shopify.com guys, the ConceptShare.com gang (just one minor correction: they’re from Sudbury), the Freshbooks.com team (which includes mesh organizer and Ultimate star Mike McDerment), StumbleUpon.com (now based in the Valley but Calgary-born), Tom Williams’ GiveMeaning.com, and a roster of equally great young companies such as CambrianHouse.com and NowPublic.com. Thanks for the props, Tara.

Has anyone else noticed that all of the headlines in the Techmeme blog swarm about Mike Arrington’s great April Fool’s Day post (which I wrote about — along with some other recent pranks — here) have been edited to insert asterisks in the name FuckedCompany? I didn’t really notice until late yesterday, and then realized that it wasn’t just the main headline with Mike’s post, but every subsequent link as well.

What’s up with that, Gabe? Surely we are all adults, and can tolerate the use of that great old Anglo-Saxon word, no? Unless Techmeme.com has a large readership among the kindergarten set that I don’t know about. After all, it’s not as though everyone doesn’t know what those two asterisks stand for. Or is there some other Google-search related reason — do headlines with expletives get marked differently by the algorithm?

It seems Mike Arrington has gotten the last laugh on more than a few bloggers — with his announcement that he has bought Fuckedcompany.com. Even Dave Winer got reeled in by the news. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Mike got the idea after reading the Valleywag post about the sale of Fuckedcompany, which suggested Mike should buy it (my friend Steve O’Hear at ZDNet figured out the gag too).

Mike’s post on the “acquisition” was a masterpiece. But there were some clues amidst the press-release-style delivery, including comments like: “the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap.” That one set off a warning bell for me — if Fuckedcompany.com has the same size audience as TechCrunch, I thought, then I am Darth Vader. Mike also said that “its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom (disregard recent statements I’ve made to the contrary).” Ding! He also said “there just isn’t the “wow” factor around new startups like in 2004/2005. That does not bode well for the future – there just isn’t anything left to invent.” Ding!

Near the end of the post, Mike says that “we will likely move new startup coverage, which will be a secondary consideration going forward, to a new blog over time. TechCrunch and FuckedCompany will begin to mirror each other’s content.” Good one, Mike. Happy April Fool’s to you too.

Update:

In other April Fool’s-related news, Ionut. Alex Chitu has word of a new Google offering called Google Writer that will automate blog posting for you, Markus Frind says his dating site Plenty of Fish and eHarmony are merging, Google itself has announced Gmail Paper for sending paper-based mail, as well as Google TiSP, a plumbing-based wireless system for your house. And Google blogger Matt Cutts’ blog has apparently been hacked by the Dark SEO gang. Wikipedia has more here.

Is wireless power about to become a reality? It sure sounds that way, according to a piece in Business 2.0 magazine about a company called Powercast, which says it has developed a way of powering devices (albeit fairly low-voltage ones for now) without power cords or bricks. And electronics giant Philips has signed a deal with Powercast to bring its technology to market.

It may sound incredible — and Ben Metcalfe seems to think it’s an April Fool’s joke come early — but wireless power is not a fantasy. In fact, the eccentric genius Nikolai Tesla, who invented alternating current or AC power, was pretty close to developing wireless power around the turn of the century, but didn’t quite make it — in part because his financial backer, J.P. Morgan, pulled out. It’s possible that his feud with fellow genius Thomas Edison (who favoured direct current power) had something to do with it, but I can’t say for sure.

And there is already what amounts to a wireless-power company, a company called Splashpower.com, which uses adapters that attach to electrical devices, and then charges those devices whenever they are placed on a special mat. But that involves actual contact between the device and the mat — Powercast says it can broadcast power to devices up to six feet away, through relatively small and inexpensive chips the size of a dime.

(in unrelated news, some guy likes to build giant Tesla coils in his garage).

Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post is working on a “citizen media” venture with NewAssignment.net (which I wrote about in an earlier post), has an interesting perspective on the future of newspapers in a recent post. She describes how she and her friends are Web junkies, but still like to read a printed paper — although they print out different versions of papers from around the world, using NewspaperDirect.com.

Then she describes what she sees as the future:

“Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

“Chomping down on a story and refusing to let go is what bloggers do best. And while the vast majority of material that ends up being blogged about still originates with a mainstream news source, more and more stories are being broken by online news sources.”

“So stop writing teary-eyed eulogies for newspapers. The only thing dead is the either/or nature of the musty print vs online debate. The hybrid future is kicking down the door. It’s time to let it in and fully embrace it.”

Hat tip to Roy Greenslade of the Guardian for spotting that one — he has his own take on it here. For whatever it’s worth, I think Arianna nails it pretty well.

In other Huffington news, Rachel Sklar of Eat The Press has a great overview of a panel she was on at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ conference, along with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Barry Diller of IAC. Thanks to Rob Hyndman for that link.

As my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans notes over here, New York’s video-blogging ninja master Loren Feldman of 1938media is coming to mesh — although as Loren mentions on his blog, we had to accede to a rather long list of demands before he would agree to grace us with his presence.

For any of you not familiar with Loren, his video blogging usually involves a stark, in-your-face, blunt assessment of someone’s shortcomings, something the British refer to as “taking the piss” and New Yorkers refer to as “talking.” A prime recent example was the clip below about Jeff Jarvis, which is right on that fine line between cruel and hilarious — territory that Loren pretty much owns.

http://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=05cc9e6e-c151-441a-bc77-878aebedf010

Although he is part of Podtech now, like Robert Scoble, that hasn’t stopped Loren from taking shots at the Scobleizer, or at Jason Calacanis, or pretty much anyone else for that matter. If you know Ze Frank at all, just think of Loren as the anti-Ze — or like Ze with a five-day growth of beard (and occasionally without a shirt) and a really bad hangover.

Another great mesh meetup last night at the Charlotte Room, complete with plenty of beverages, snacks, pool tables and great conversation. Thanks to all who came — and especially to podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes, who brought her podcasting bag of tricks and hopefully caught some great ideas being born amid all the meshing.

Hopefully some photos will be making their way into various places — I know Rannie Turingan was taking some because I saw them on his Facebook group (it’s here if you are a Facebook user), and I saw Will Pate snapping some pics as well.

If you have some photos and they’re at Flickr or Photobucket or whatever, just send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll link to them here — and over at the mesh blog as well — and if you have a blog post about it, feel free to do the same. Mark has some more details at Maple Leaf 2.0.

Jay Rosen, the online journalism veteran behind NewAssigment.net — an experiment in “crowdsourcing” journalism, or “citizen reporting” or whatever you want to call it — announced earlier this week that NewAssignment and the Huffington Post are collaborating on a new journalism venture aimed at covering the upcoming U.S. elections.

Jay posted about it on his own blog, but has also written about it in a guest-post on Marc Glaser’s blog at PBS. As he describes it:

“Our idea is not complicated: it’s campaign reporting by a great many more people than would ever fit on the bus that the boys (and girls) of the press have famously gotten on and off every four years, as they try to cover the race for president.”

In other words, instead of just one or two reporters trailing John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani or whoever, the idea is to have dozens of people tracking different parts of each campaign, filing to blogs and stories and other formats, and then aggregating all of that and editing it and posting the best of it somewhere like Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington’s post on the new venture is here. As she describes it:

“We are recruiting large groups of citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates. Each of these volunteer reporter/bloggers will contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video.”

Ms. Huffington says that this is “the wisdom of crowds hits the campaign trail,” and that hopefully such a venture will avoid the kind of group-think reporting that the mainstream media can become guilty of at times, adding that “Exhibit A is, and will always be, the press’ shameful lack of questioning during the run-up to the war in Iraq.”

At the mesh meetup we had at the Charlotte Room tonight, I ran into Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and he said he had just finished posting something interesting about the new Skype beta — and he was right. It seems that not only is the client being improved, but eBay is finally starting to achieve some of the synergies that many observers were hoping for when it bought the VoIP service for $4-billion or so way back when.

According to knowledgeable people like Jim and Iotum co-founder Alec Saunders, who posted on it here, among the things that Skype has improved is the sound quality of the application. Now, the sound is apparently just as good with the regular mike and speakers you get with a PC as it is with a dedicated headset or other equipment, which will be a big boon for regular users.

Jim says he suspects that Skype is making use of new codec technology they acquired awhile ago. They’ve also made it possible to take a snapshot with your video cam to use as a profile picture, and you can import contacts from more mail clients than before.

But for me, the biggest move with this beta is the fact that you can now click and send money to contacts via PayPal — which was one of the no-brainer synergies that I expected would have happened a long time ago. Maybe there was some technical issue holding it up, I don’t know. But finally it’s possible.

For some unknown reason, my favourite story today out of all the RSS feeds I plowed through was this one from the Telegraph (via Neatorama.com), about a Russian gangster who built a gigantic, 13-storey wooden house — or at least the skeleton of one — almost single-handedly before being thrown in jail for extortion and emerging penniless. He’s now living in four rooms on the main floor and the townsfolk (not surprisingly) want the eyesore torn down. A Telegraph writer got a tour of the structure, and the photo gallery is priceless.

The relationship between a reporter and a company he (or she) is trying to write about is… well, complicated. In some cases, it’s like two hostile nations trying to meet at Camp David, with each side compiling as much information — secret and otherwise — about their adversary, and each side trying to read between the lines to find out what the other party really meant. And sometimes those files get leaked, as they did in the case of Wired writer Fred Vogelstein.

In a classic case of mis-communication, Fred got sent the file that Microsoft PR firm Waggener Edstrom had compiled on him. The PDF, which Fred has helpfully made available here, contains 13 pages of notes from interviews, commentary about his reporting abilities, and so on. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, but still somewhat embarrassing — including comments such as “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient” and “We’re pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing.” Ironically, the story was part of a Wired cover package on transparency, as editor Chris Anderson describes here.

As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the fact that Microsoft’s PR firm compiled a dossier on Fred is not surprising. Somewhere, there is an underground server farm the size of the Pentagon filled with minutiae about anyone who has made it past the Microsoft reception desk (I’m only partly joking). That’s how Microsoft — and many other large companies — work.

Frank Shaw, president of Waggener Edstrom — whose blog, fittingly enough, is called “Glass House” — has responded with a post about the event. For the most part, he plays it cool, although he seems (perhaps not surprisingly) a little on the defensive at certain points. Towards the end, he says that in most cases “the interests of a journalist and PR are totally aligned – a great interview is always the best possible outcome.”

Mr. Shaw is right, of course. But what he doesn’t say is that the definition of what constitutes a “good” interview can differ radically depending on whether you are a PR firm or a reporter trying to get a story. Sometimes that relationship is a pitched battle, sometimes it’s an arranged marriage, and sometimes it’s a dance. A PR firm has to be equal parts marriage broker, dating service, DJ and (in some cases) spook. ‘Twas always thus.

Spring seem to have hit Toronto with a bang, and that can only mean one thing: mesh is coming soon (check out all the details here). And that means it must be time for the next mesh social event, which is on tonight at the Charlotte Room on King Street just east of Spadina. Come on out for some cold beverages, warm food and conversation, maybe a little nine-ball or Boston on the pool tables, and some all-around meshing.

We’re planning to get started at about 6 p.m. and keep it going until they make us go home, so be sure to drop by and join us. All the details and some of the attendees can be found at the Upcoming page.

Anyone who came to the last mesh meet-up at the Irish Embassy knows that it was a blast, with about 100 people showing up on a rainy November night, complete with guest appearances by Darren “Problogger” Rowse, all the way from Australia, as well as the guys from ConceptShare (all the way from Sudbury), and many of the usual suspects as well. Leesa Barnes did a great job conducting a bunch of podcast interviews with folks such as Dr. Tony Hung and Bernie Aho, and we’re hoping she’s going to do some more this time.