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Michael Robertson has been a thorn in the side of the music business longer than just about anybody, including Steve Jobs and Shawn “Napster” Fanning. He created the original MP3.com (history here), which, like Napster, was shut down by a record industry lawsuit, and more recently created Mp3tunes.com — which allows you to upload music and listen to it through the browser.

Now he’s taking another crack at the industry with the launch of something called AnywhereCD. But before the new venture was even a day old, Michael’s plans, which he writes about on his blog, had hit a major snag. The service is designed to allow music fans to buy a CD and instantly get access to mp3 files of the same songs — but without necessarily taking physical delivery of the CD. This apparently got at least one label upset: Warner Music came out within hours of Michael’s announcement and ordered him to remove any WMG files from the service — even though all the appropriate royalties would be paid as though someone had actually bought the CD. Warner said in a statement that AnywhereCD was selling its music in a manner that “flagrantly” violated their agreement.

I’m continually struck by the bizarre contortions the industry forces people to jump through. The original MP3.com had a service called My.MP3.com, which allowed you to listen to music through the browser after verifying that you owned the original CD — which I thought was brilliant. It was shut down too (MP3tunes.com requires you to upload all the music before you can listen to it). Warner’s response seems particularly out of step given that some labels like EMI are offering straightforward non-DRM files.

Is the record industry doomed to just never get it?

I think it’s important that every patriotic Canadian order one of these custom PC case-mods from a design group called (appropriately enough) Your Psycho Girlfriend. Found via Engadget, by way of Wired, it’s a full computer system inside a stuffed beaver. How long before it explodes into flames? Who knows. Does it smell when the processor is working overtime? All good questions. For the record, it was created by Kasey McMahon, one half of Your Psycho Girlfriend, which makes unusual clothing including a dress made out of cut-up pool noodles, and one with a working hamster play-tube attached to it.

A Rolling Stone gathers no moss — but can it gather an online social network? We’re going to find out. As Om Malik reported, based on a post by a J-school student after an RS staffer spoke to her class, the geriatric music magazine is launching a social network aimed at pulling music lovers together around the warm campfire that is the Rolling Stone brand (insert your favourite lame marketing metaphor here).

Pete Cashmore at Mashable thinks this is doomed, and there are plenty of good reasons why he might be right. There are some pretty good music communities out there already with lots of traction, including Last.fm and MOG, not to mention Pitchfork Media, which is what Rolling Stone magazine should have been — and arguably could have been, if it wasn’t so big and bloated and old and out of touch (and incidentally, I’d like a little credit for not using a cover shot in this post that has naked women in it, unlike Pete and Om and just about everyone else who has written about the Rolling Stone news).

Can RS translate its readership into an online presence? I’ve yet to see any magazine of comparable vintage do so, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. NYU journalism blogger Andrea Feczko notes that the mag is “an authority figure” for judging music, but I’m not sure being an authority figure really helps all that much when it comes to building an online community. Maybe RS should just buy Pitchfork and Last.fm and be done with it.

I’m getting so fired up about the people we have coming to join us at the mesh conference (May 30 and 31 at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto) that I thought I would list some of them here, just to give you a taste — there’s lots more at www.meshconference.com and also listed on the blog there. But here are some of the highlights for me:

• Mike Arrington, obviously — the founder and editor of TechCrunch is pretty much the poster boy for Web 2.0 and also at the epicenter of what’s going on with new media.
• Jim Buckmaster — the CEO of Craigslist, which isn’t just a phenomenally successful social network, but also an incredible story of how the founders have deliberately avoided making money.
• Rachel Sklar — Toronto-born former lawyer who is now the editor of the Eat The Press section of Huffington Post, a giant in the field of new media and a wonderful writer to boot.
• Jeff Howe — a Wired contributing editor and veteran journalist who invented the term “crowdsourcing” and is now working on a book about the concept of content produced by users.
• Simon Pulsifer — Canada’s own “king of Wikipedia,” who has written more than 2,000 entries in the open-source encyclopedia and edited almost 100,000.
• Mike Masnick — the founder of Techdirt, a key source of creative thinking about Web 2.0 and technology in general, as well as a people-powered consulting company.

There are lots more too: How about Garth Turner, blogger/author and MP? Or Christine Herron, a venture capitalist with The Omidyar Network. Or Scott Feschuk, writer/comedian and former Paul Martin speechwriter. Video-blogger Loren Feldman from 1938media. Andrew Coyne, columnist and gadfly. McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, creator of CBC’s Zed and now Rapspace.tv. And dozens more. Better hurry — tickets are going fast 🙂

Kurt Vonnegut was already fairly famous by the time I became a fan — which would have been in my late teens — but I still felt like someone who had discovered a cool, underground band that no one else was into. His books weren’t quite science fiction, and weren’t quite fantasy, but a weird mish-mash of genres, complete with hand-drawn illustrations of bums and other things. They were strange, and funny, and fantastic.

I found out that Vonnegut had died by reading my feeds, from a post at Paul Kedrosky’s blog. I knew that he was elderly and not well, and therefore his death didn’t come as a total surprise — just as Warren Zevon’s didn’t come as a total surprise, since he had cancer — but it still hit me hard. The world was a lot more fun with both of those guys in it. And while I never made the connection until a long time later, Vonnegut books were a lot like Zevon songs: irreverent, and yet filled with beautiful imagery and ideas; poignant and funny, sometimes goofy, always rebellious — almost like free-form poetry.

As I said on Paul’s blog, I would put books like Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle up against almost any book published in the past 50 years. I have read them and re-read them and they just keep getting better every time. Some people have no doubt read his books and mistaken Vonnegut’s simplicity and irreverence for slapstick, and many authors have tried to reproduce that tone and come off sounding like idiots.

But Vonnegut always had a point — sometimes a funny one, and sometimes an uncomfortable one — and he made it by using the strange and the fantastic as a mirror to show us our true selves. (10 Zen Monkeys has an interesting story about one of the TV screenplays Vonnegut wrote that was turned into a tele-play with Sammy Davis Jr.)

Update:

Cory at Lost Remote has some details about what some of the partners CBS signed the deal with (described below) plan to do with the content — with Brightcove’s the most interesting.

Original post:

Well, another TV network seems to have decided to jump headfirst into this whole Interweb thing: CBS, which is home to such shows as CSI, Survivor and The David Letterman Show, has announced that it will be working with just about every social network, portal and video-sharing site or service in the known universe — with a couple of notable exceptions, of course.

The press release mentions that the network’s partners include AOL, Microsoft, CNET Networks, Comcast, Joost, Bebo, Brightcove, Netvibes, Sling Media and Veoh. And that’s on top of existing deals with Yahoo, Amazon and Apple. You might notice a few names missing, such as — oh, say Google and YouTube. Or MySpace. It’s probably a coincidence that MySpace is busy developing its own video network, and that Google and YouTube are currently embroiled in a nasty legal dispute with certain networks over their content.

Of course, CBS already has an existing deal with YouTube that includes a “channel” with some of its content. So why didn’t it mention that in the press release? It mentioned existing deals with Yahoo and Apple. It seems that Joost is the new favourite — likely because it is much more like the broadcast model that network execs are familiar with. Viacom has already gotten cozy with Joost after dumping YouTube.

To be fair to CBS, this deal looks even broader than NBC’s much-hyped National Broadband Broadcasting Network or NBBC. Video will be distributed through all of the outlets mentioned above, all of it free and ad-supported (DRM wasn’t discussed), and none of the deals are exclusive. A shotgun approach, perhaps — but at least CBS is taking a shot at serving viewers in different ways, and it should get some credit for that.

PaidContent has some of the details (or rumours) about revenue sharing here, and it sounds like Canadians might actually get to watch some of the content, since CBS says in the release that “select clips and full-length sports programming” will be available worldwide.

We had a great time (and we hope you did too) at the last mesh meetup, but we just can’t resist the opportunity to get together again — and this time, we’re sending a shout out to anyone from the political side of the blogosphere and Web 2.0 land.

One of the panels we’ve got planned for the upcoming mesh conference is looking at how the Web is affecting politics and the political process, and we’ve got a stellar cast of characters to look at the issue: blogger and National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, blogging M.P. Garth Turner, former Paul Martin speechwriter and humorist Scott Feschuk and Phil de Vellis, the creator of the “Vote Different” YouTube video.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a political blogger or just someone who’s interested in how the Web is impacting social and political change — or maybe you just like beer and pool. Come on out on May 9 at The Charlotte Room – details here. And if you know anyone else who might want to come, please spread the word.

What MySpace has done with Photobucket — blocking users from posting video clips that are hosted at Photobucket — is totally understandable and hardly surprising, particularly given the company’s past behaviour, as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out. It’s in MySpace’s interests to constrain its users in that sense, and it no doubt seems like a great idea every time someone brings it up at one of the board meetings with News Corp. types (see update below).

Regardless of how obvious and unsurprising it might be, I think MySpace is making a mistake. The tendency to try and wall users in, or control what they are posting, or force them to use your tools, takes you down a road that inevitably leads to what I call AOHell. That’s what people used to call America Online, back in the good old days of the late 1990s — and not just because they kept bombarding you with sign-up disks and/or made it virtually impossible to cancel your account once you got trapped in their spider’s web. AOL was the quintessential walled garden of content, and it virtually killed the company, and TimeWarner along with it.

Yes, it’s good to be aware of what MySpace controls and doesn’t control if you are a user, and you may want to look at getting your own blog somewhere else, as the Scobleizer recommends. And it’s good for companies to be aware of how much their business depends on someone else, as Om points out. But that doesn’t make what MySpace is doing any less stupid.

As Steve O’Hear notes at ZDNet, part of what helped MySpace take over from Friendster as the king of the social-networking scene was that it was more open and allowed users to do more. Notice that I didn’t say “do more, but only with MySpace’s built-in tools.” Greg Sterling of Screenwerk found the quote I was trying to recall from News Corp.’s COO about people sponging off MySpace.

Update:

According to a statement from Fox Interactive Media that Om has posted, MySpace blocked Photobucket because the company was encouraging its users to post clips promoting an “ad-sponsored” video contest. My point remains the same. Should MySpace allow users to post things with ads that come from other companies? I know it’s counterintuitive, but I would argue that it should. Either you’re a social network or you’re not. Tony Hung has more.

Everyone seems pretty excited at news that Google has invested a whopping $1-million (say it with a Doctor Evil sneer — it’s more fun) in Maxthon, the browser that seems to have taken China by storm. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch says that it’s just part of a larger strategic arrangement between the two, and that set tongues wagging all over the blogosphere.

What does Google have in mind for Maxthon? What does this mean for Firefox? I don’t think it means much of anything, to tell you the truth. And it’s not just the fact that $1-million is about what Google spends on anchovies for the free gourmet pizza they serve in the Googleplex cafeteria every Wednesday afternoon. I also can’t see Google getting all worked up about a browser that is effectively an add-on for Internet Exploder Explorer.

And yes, I know you can change the rendering engine to Gecko (which powers the Firefox browser). It’s still an add-on, or a front end, or whatever you want to call it. And yes, it has lots of cool features, and I know it had tabs before IE. Whatever. I think the main interest for Google is the Chinese angle, and the fact that converting Maxthon’s built-in search to Google power would be a foot in the door where Baidu currently dominates.

Surfing through my feed reader this morning, I came across a post from Kareem Mayan about why he left a job at Fox Interactive Media (the News Corp. unit that controls MySpace). The bottom line — at least from my reading of his post — is that while he got to do some interesting things at the company, he just didn’t feel challenged or motivated.

Kareem, who I met at last year’s mesh conference and is originally from Toronto, is a smart young guy who I’m sure lots of companies would jump at hiring. But he left to run a small startup that is working on something in the field of education. Why? Here’s what he says:

“After too many days of being miserable, I realized it was because I wasn’t happy with my job. I was earning a lot of money, had just gotten a promotion, lived in a beautiful apartment near the beach with my rad girlfriend, but none of it was floating my boat.”

If you’re a big company like FIM or News Corp., you need people like Kareem — but you are destined to lose them because doing something challenging and meaningful means more than having a big job with a fancy title and a nice raise or a corner office.

Just one thing, Kareem: Can I have your beautiful apartment near the beach? 🙂