dylan tweney if you're bored, you're not paying attention

Starting to get it.

It's finally starting to happen: Technology companies are waking up to the opportunities opened by the music industry's steadfast refusal to embrace online distribution of music files. First, Apple opens its iTunes Music Store with a simple proposition: 99 cents per song with a catalog of 200,000 tunes. There are limits on what you can do with the downloaded files, and they use a not-yet-ubiquitous file format (AAC instead of MP3), but in general their policies are pretty liberal. Besides, they're Apple.

Today, Real Networks opens a competing store called RealOne Rhapsody that will sell each of its 325,000 songs for 79 cents apiece. Real is in the process of buying Listen.com, which is parent to Rhapsody, so maybe this is their plan to breathe a little life into the so-far-anemic service. Next, expect Pressplay, just bought by Roxio, to try a similar tack.

What to watch for here: A price war, followed by an effort among warring online music retailers to keep their costs low. One way they can do that is by piggybacking on existing music distribution networks. Instead of building a huge, central server farm, as Apple has done, why not use a distributed network that's already in place, like KaZaA, or Morpheus? These services are increasingly moving towards an infrastructure that will support online transactions and that will give distributors the ability to limit access to their servers, if not to copies of their files.

My prediction: Within the next year or so, you'll pay 10-25 cents per track to download songs from a preferred server via KaZaA or some other existing P2P network. What you'll get is a higher quality digital file that's guaranteed not to be bogus, and a fast download time, plus fairly liberal limits on what you can do with that file. There will be some kind of digital rights management but it won't be excessive. And people will flock to a service like this.

RSS Explained.

Awhile back, I complained that I couldn't find a clear, straightforward, non-technical explanation of RSS. Well, here's a good one from Michael Fagan. For a more technical introduction to RSS, see Mark Pilgrim's explanation.

Fagan's site, incidentally, has a handy general search page that lets you target a couple dozen online search engines and information resources from a single search field, plus a blog search that targets weblogs and RSS feeds.

Bartleby beats Encarta.

On a whim, I decided to pit MSN's online version of the Encarta "encyclopedia" (part of MSN Learning and Research) against the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia available through Bartleby. The differences couldn't be more stark.

A search for "Abelard and Heloise" on MSN turned up a few results, most accessible only to MSN subscribers. But the first result, this page, is free to all. It's got a pretty painting of the two lovers (no information about the painting or its artist is given) and a one-paragraph, bowdlerized version of the story: "The 12th-century scholar Peter Abelard was one of the most famous theologians and philosophers of his time. In 1117 he began tutoring H�lo�se, the niece of a French cleric. Abelard and H�lo�se soon became secret lovers, but were forced to separate after being discovered by H�lo�se�s uncle. The two lovers retired to monasteries, and although they kept in touch by writing, they did not see each other again."

In the Columbia entry, there's no pretty picture (and a pop-up ad appears in front of the page), but there are six meaty paragraphs with interesting information about Abelard's dates, his theology and philosophy, his importance in the rebirth of Aristotelian methods leading up to Aquinas, and his significance as a teacher. But the biography is juicier too, telling more of the story including Abelard's abduction of H�lo�se and his subsequent castration by H�lo�se's uncle. There's also a short bibliography listing three books you can read to learn more. And that's just the first of several search results.

The amazing thing is that MSN calls its reference section "Learning and Research" -- as if you could learn anything, or do any research, there. Bartleby, on the other hand, rules. It's got not just the encyclopedia but also a dictionary, thesauri, Gray's Anatomy, various quotation references, the Bible, Shakespeare, and lots and lots of books. The site is fast and easy to use, and all of its pages have short, simple URLs. I can't figure out how the good folks at Bartleby have kept their site going for so long without charging access or subscription fees, but bravo for them.

Google cache lookup.

Jonathan Rentzsch wrote a little JavaScript utility to help recover from 404:Page Not Found errors. It takes the current URL in your browser, and uses it to retrieve the archived version of that page from Google's cache. Here's Rentzsch's discussion on Google cache hacking. Another blogger, Fuse, developed an improved version. Just drag the preceding link to the "Links" toolbar to add the bookmarklet to your browser. Next time you hit a 404 error, or want to see what an older version of a page looked like, just select this link to get the cached version.

Jon Udell's blog pointed me to this tool. Jon mentions that the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is another useful depository of old Web pages. Can it be addressed by JavaScript bookmarklets in the same way as Google's cache?

Linux is Theft?

A press release by Unix publisher SCO Group claims that "Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and that legal liability for the use of Linux may extend to commercial users. SCO issued this alert based on its findings of illegal inclusions of SCO UNIX intellectual property in Linux."

Apparently, SCO hasn't initiated legal proceedings against anyone, but it has suspended distribution of its own version, SCO Linux. The company is also magnanimously saying it won't prosecute its own customers for copyright infringement (no word on whether it will be hauling its own engineers into court, though).