Content in its shift to become digital
With a chilling wind stirred up by a tornado of law suits blowing their way, MySpace has announced that it will be implementing new technology to stop members’ using copyrighted material without permission.
Based on Audible Magic technology, the new content protection system regales under the name, “Take Down Stay Down,” and MySpace is hoping that it’ll do what it says on the tin.
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Over a tenth of all websites are pornographic, a quarter of search engine requests are for naughty things and when it comes to hosting smut, the US leads the world by miles.
The figures, delivered in a clever seductive video (below) by Good Magazine reveals just how much pr0n dominates the web, with 12% of all websites containing top shelf material and 25% of all web searches being for porno.
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Online buying has become so commonplace in America that sales of everyday items like clothing and shoes have outstripped the more traditional ‘techie’ big sellers like computers and software.
A report by Shop.org (part of the National Retail Federation) estimated online clothing sales at around $18.3bn in 2006, ahead of the $17.2bn spent on computers in the same year.
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Digital-Lifestyles towers is all a-buzz.
Something that we’ve been working on for a while has reached a significant goal.
As some of you beta-testers know, our first-of-its-kind individual news story podcasts have been bubbling away for some while now.
They’ve been well-received and are now gaining some extra polish.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve had our audio ident delivered by Ergo Phizmiz.
We’re huge fans of his amazing musical adventures and imagine that, such fine folk as would read Digital-Lifestyles, will be too.
His output is prodigious. Looking at his physical releases, you’ll natutally think that he’s been a very busy boy over the last five years, but that’s not the half of it. He’s been putting out electronically at loads of events, both live and pre-recorded.
Don’t just take our word for it. It’s not just us who loves him. There’s plenty more around who feel the same. The Wire christened him a “One Man Movement”; BBC Radio 3 called him “One of the most inventive composers around,” after they commissioned him to create “Wholepole-The Discotheque Of Erotic Misery,” the first ever large-scale work by a primarily electronic artist to be commissioned by the station. The BBC topped this off with the huge complimentary, “a musical equivalent to Chris Morris.;” and Rough Trade said, “A berserk electronic and plunderphonic whizzkid.” He was even causing ripples way back in 2004, when he composed new music from Velvet Underground’s back catalogue and was picked by BoingBoing.
Enough of the words. You can listen to some of this Radio 3 piece and their remixes; the archive of his weekly radio show on WFMU or on his performance on SlashMusic with Tom Ravenscroft (John Peel’s son) on Channel 4 radio.
Looking to listen for more? Tune your equipment in to Huw Stephens show on Radio 1 this week.
Tune in soon for the public release of our individual news podcasts, but in the meantime have a listen to this.
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/Ergo-Phizmiz-Digital-Lifestyles-Ident.mp3]Be sure to subscribe to the comments on this post, to receive an email update when the first news podcast is released.
Joost is continuing to pick up content partners with the most recent being Warner Bros. Television (WBTV). This time Joost is getting the content on an exclusive basis.
One of the common complaints of the TV service, has been that there isn’t anything to watch on it, as was brought up in a recent BBC trial. Having seen what the content of this deal is, we’re not sure that the step towards desirable programming has moved forward.
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Information overload is a buzz phrase which has been getting a lot of use recently. It refers to the enormous amount of information which we now consume (largely because of the level of accessibility to content which the Internet gives us), and the challenges that that creates. Another important issue is the Long Tail, as recognised by Chris Anderson, and the way that relates to content. In other words, there is now far more information available which makes discoverability much harder.
Continuing Canon’s exceedingly annoying habit of giving new models different names in Europe and the US, the camera giant has announced its new PowerShot SD850 IS camera, offering Face Detection Technology and an optical image stabiliser.
You can just imagine the cries of What!!! when we heard that boo.com was relaunching.
The first time around boo.com was at the peek of stupid behaviours in the UK Internet scene in the pre-bust days and its excesses are well documented. As we’re sure you all know, they burnt through close to $160m in 18 months, trying to create a portal (as they were called back in the day) to sell clothes through. They went bust in 2000.
Well the FT covers the story (by someone with an infeasibly long name, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson) that someone has bought the domain and has launched a travel site using it – this time with the golden charms of Web 2.0. Does this harken the cry that Web 2.0 is just about to bubble burst?
Ray Nolan, the founder of Web Reservations International, who currently appear to be doing OK with €19m of earnings last year, pointed out to the FT that “It’s catchy, and it works across languages.” True enough – and the tarnish on the name might just have faded far enough to not be negative. Well, it got them in the FT and us writing about it, didn’t it?
Next week is the second annual Takeaway Festival at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London.
The event organisers at the Science Museum have a natty skill of organising some great events, so we’re hoping this one will be up to their normally high standards.
It’s a three day event (9-11 May) which sounds like it could just about start a revolution. They’ll “explore how emerging technologies are transforming creative possibilities, social structures and communication networks.”
By the structure of it doesn’t sound like it will give you a chance to get bored – even if you wanted to.
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If you don’t live your life in the Blogosphere or on Digg – and why should you? – you’ll have missed out on many knickers getting in a twist.
It all started off about the posting on Digg of an encryption key for HD-DVD that is intrinsic to the security of HD-DVD content.
Next major thing – many alleged that the administrators of Digg were removing posts about this key and the growing number of anti-digg comments that were littering the system.
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