• RIAA not suing over CD ripping but still kinda being jerks | Engadget
  Quote - It turns out that (Jeffery Howell, who’s being sued by the RIAA) isn’t actually being sued for ripping CDs, like the Washington Post and several other sources have reported
  (tags: copyright riaa)

• Last.fm FlickrFan concert photos | Joe Lazarus
  A personalized feed that searches Flickr for highly relevant concert photos based on the music interests for a Last.fm user name. (via: Taylor McKnight)
  (tags: flickrfan lastfm flickr)

Dave Winer often describes himself online as a “media hacker.” And today, he’s releasing a new product called — at least for now, FlickrFan. It is quite a cool media hack. And by hack, I don’t mean anything malicious, but I mean, something that’s a result of being able to experiment with technology and content one enjoys and understands in ways others may not.

In this case, the product is a simple desktop tool (Mac only now) that builds on some of his earlier developments related to RSS and OPML and Radio 8 (an early desktop RSS newsreader/blog editing tool). I don’t claim to have any understanding of how it does what it does, but having used it for the past 24 hours, I can tell you what the result is: It streams photos from your Flickr contacts — or other designated sources like the AP photowire — onto your HDTV while it’s in the screen-saver mode. It works also as a screen saver on a Mac.

As your contacts update their Flickr photo stream, your screen saver becomes a constant slideshow of images from your friends. I must admit, while I have lots of Flickr contacts and even subscribe to an RSS feed of them, viewing them as a screen saver provides a much more serendipitous means of discovering what your friends are up to. I added a brief demo of what’s showing up on my FlickrStream — and before you ask, fimoculous is my friend who posted shots from the cool party.

There is more the product does — i.e., it backs up your Flickr photos and it provides a desktop folder where you can drop photos that are automagically posted to Flickr and it will create a Twitter tweet when you add a photo to your Flickr account. But for now, I’m just enjoying the way all those photos from my friends are just showing up on my screen saver.

By the way, I have a Mac mini set up with a HD projector in our office conference room. I’m already thinking of ways we will be using photos from Flickr.com/hammock in that room using FlickrFan.

I’m very glad it’s Chris Anderson who wrote this post today. As it’s from Chris, the author of the Long Tail and executive editor of Wired Magazine, perhaps he won’t be written off as some right-wing wacko for putting forth the radically un-chiche suggestion that print magazines (Wired, at least) may actually have a smaller “carbon footprint” than the magazine’s website. Again, that’s Chris — executive editor of Wired and former holder of lofty editorial positions at The Economist and the journals Science and Nature, and the best selling author of one of the most influential books about economics published in the past decade — who is making this argument. Not me.

I know, I know. What Chris is saying in this post is obviously wrong — I mean it’s obvious that magazines on paper are worse for the climate than the same content distributed via the web, right? Apparently not so obvious.

I hope Chris’ post will serve as launching pad for a big debate. I hope it does because even really smart people who publish print magazines have convinced themselves that magazines in print are green no-nos.

For example, last April, I noted on this blog that in all of the official announcements about the shuttering of the magazine version of InfoWorld, “benefitting the environment” was never mentioned. However, that didn’t stop Ted (who I apologized to later for calling Tom) Samson from writing an editorial on “magazines vs. the environment” (which is, in some ways, a counter argument to Chris’ post) that attempted (in my opinion, at least) to add some after-the-fact green-spin to the IDG decision. (After my post, Ted responded.) In the new book, Print is Dead, a similar argument is made (I’m posting a longer review later). My friend, Steve Rubel, recently posted some pro-digital, anti-print suggestions that take for granted that print is less green than “consuming” the same content using digital devices.

Sure, it seems logical that “dead-tree magazines” have a bigger “carbon footprint” than magazine content distributed via the web, but is it correct?

I’m glad it’s Chris and not me who is stepping forward to provide my answer.

Walt Mossberg, the consistently Mac gung-ho columnist at the Wall Street Journal, is going to launch a million rebuttals from MacFanboy Nation with his review of the Dell XPS One that concludes it is “the first Windows all-in-one desktop I’ve tested that I believe matches or exceeds the iMac in hardware design.”

I wonder if the Dell folks are doing a re-write parody of this early “I’m a Mac” ad:

Via PaidContent.org, comes news (I guess it’s “news” that the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are reporting what every Apple rumor site has been saying for weeks) that Apple will announce a rental option for some video purchased via the iTunes Store. However, there’s a new twist to the report today: At least one studio, 20th Century Fox, will start adding an MPEG-4 version to DVDs it sells, allowing purchasers to easily transfer the movie to iTunes or their iPod/iPhones. According to FT.com:

“A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in new Fox DVD releases, enabling film content to be transferred or “ripped” from the disc to a computer and video iPod. DVD content can already be moved to an iPod but this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

Many people who read that last sentence will know what it means. But if you don’t know, you can find out by clicking over to this website to learn about HandBrake, an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

For the record, in my opinion, it’s crazy to call what you do with HandBrake piracy. Converting a file is not piracy — it may violate some obscure and legally-dubious terms of usage agreement, but it’s not piracy. You can do perfectly legal things with such a file. Or you can do illegal things, like try to re-sell it. The act of trying to re-sell such a file is piracy — not the conversion of the file.

Of course, I’m not a lawyer, so what do I know? Rather than a legal confusion, mine may be merely a confusion of logic. However, I find it an intellectual challenge to understand how I can be pirating something when I purchase a digital file on a DVD and convert the file into another digital format merely for the purpose of watching it on a digital device other than my TV, like a video iPod or iPhone — or on my computer without having to lug around DVDs. I’m not selling copies or even letting others borrow the movie — something I could easily do with a physical DVD. I’m merely transferring digital media I’ve purchased to another device for personal convenience — a variation of time-shifting, which has been determined to be legal. (I guess this makes me what Fake Steve Jobs calls a “freetard.”)

With music files, the industry has pretty-much given up their efforts to turn their customers into criminals when they decide to transfer their purchase between listening platforms. Recording industry schemes like Apple’s ironically-branded FairPlay DRM are slowly going away. (I purchase DRM-free music through Amazon.com. Update: And now I can buy even more DRM-free music via Amazon according to this press release announcing that downloads from Warner Music Group’s vast catalog are available in MP3 format from Amazon starting today. My guess: Anticipate follow-up announcements from all of the other usual suspects, including Apple and Walmart.) It will take a decade or longer, but I’m sure movie studios and, if they actually become popular, eBook publishers, will go through a period of attempting to “protect” media files (translation: keep you from reading what you buy for a Kindle on any other eBook reader). Ultimately, publishers and studios will understand why it makes sense to let their customers buy digital versions of movies or books one time and then view/listen/read it on any digital platform they choose.

(Note: For those who think I might not understand the differing value of content offered in different forms, let me be clear: I’m referring to various “digital” formats of the same digital file. I’m not suggesting that I gain the right to download the movie free because I paid to view the movie in the theatre — however, I think that would be a clever marketing strategy by studios. Here’s a slogan for them: Buy it once, enjoy it forever. But unfortunately, if they did that, the writers wouldn’t have anything to strike about.)

As my online time has been sparse the past few days, I’m only now realizing that Jon Gordon’s Public radio show Future Tense posted the story about about Apple and Think Secret that includes some Rex sound bites.

Thanks to Jon’s amazing editing skills, I don’t sound like a complete idiot — except to those who believe Apple can never do wrong.

I have only an inkling of an idea what the friendly folks at National Instruments sell, but I’m thinking my 17-year-old son may one day want to go work there after viewing this:

• 2007: The Year in RSS | ReadWriteWeb
  I ’second-that’ this quote from Marshall Kirkpatrick - I love RSS and hope that next year will be an even bigger year for this world-changing medium.
  (tags: RSS syndication)
• Titans favored in game against Colts | Tennessean.com
  Quote - Oddsmakers obviously feel the Colts will rest a lot of key players. The Titans (9-6) opened as a 2½-point favorite over the Colts (13-2) and that line was up to 6½ by late Monday.
  (tags: titans)

• Trend: Consumer generated magazines | CScout TrendBlog
  (Familiar to rexblog readers) Quote - The idea behind consumer-generated magazines is to publish some of the growing mass of online content while empowering the consumers themselves.
  (tags: magazines 8020 jpgmagazine)
• What does Santa look like? | Seth’s Blog
  Quote - Coke didn’t invent Santa. The astonishing thing is that for a moment we might even believe that they did.
  (tags: marketing)
• Boy holds Wii raffle for needy | News 14
  On Christmas Eve, this is the kind of story one should link to.
  (tags: sharing)
• News Groper
  An aggregator of parody blogs. (via Doc)
  (tags: humor blogging)

Merry Christmas Eve, or, as we call it on the blogosphere, the second easiest day of the year to get a great spot on Techmeme. Tomorrow is the easiest.

Matthew Ingram gets the whole ’slow tech-blogging day’ thing and explains how Fake Steve got it too. Matthew also wonders if FS is getting desperate:

“A desperate cry for attention on Fake Steve’s part? I wonder. For awhile now I’ve been wondering how much longer FS could continue, now that everyone is in on the joke. Can a blog based on satire continue to work once everyone knows who’s behind it? I’m not sure. But when you have to resort to lashing out at the likes of yours truly — as FS did when I wrote my Think Secret post — maybe it’s time to turn out the lights.

I’m astute enough to realize that Matthew isn’t really writing about Fake Steve — he couldn’t care less about Fake Steve. Matthew is having some fun, himself. He’s having Techmeme fun.

If you discovered my post via Techmeme, then you know also that I’m having Techmeme fun as well.

But back to the point that I really don’t care about: I tend to agree with Matthew. FS is no longer funny. What’s funny is when people who should know better even speculate that a parody blog actually is the source of real news. That’s right up there with some Chinese newspaper basing a story on a report from the Onion.

This morning, I noticed a link from Doc Searls to a website called News Groper that is an aggregator of parody weblogs. Some funny stuff there. But a word of caution to the humor-challenged: It’s all made up. See, that’s what parody is all about. It’s like someone pretending something is happening and sorta poking fun at it by taking that situation to an extreme. It’s all done in jest, see.

I promise, even if you’re one of those literal people who feel the need to believe every thing you read, if you stop thinking there are “FACTS” on a website that starts out with the word “FAKE” you’ll get the whole humor thing a lot better.

Merry Christmas, blogosphere. Merry Christmas, Matthew. Merry Christmas, Gabe.

• A milestone on the road to digital magazines | Roger Black
  Quote - The Times now ranks as the most visible mainstream pioneer in defining new digital narrative forms. …The newspaper has indicated the direction away from the static pages of print to something richer, more diverse and still portable.
  (tags: design)
• Season of the Kitsch | New York Times
  A step toward the digital magazine?
  (tags: design)
• Scoble, Feeddit, Valleywag and Mashable account for 25% of the stories I read | QuantWorks
  This is true for me, also, except for the part about the Feeddit, Valleywag and Mashable. (Merry Christmas, Robert.)
  (tags: scoble, scobleizer)
• Introducing the iShhhhh | the Daily Mail
  A new patent reveals that the next iPods and iPhones could automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level.
  (tags: ipod)

Starting Friday with this post and throughout the day yesterday, the formerly witty website, Fake Steve Jobs, has temporarily got its groove back. The gist of the current comedy-jab is an Apple amnesty program in which the company will pay bloggers to stop writing about the company. Yesterday, Fake Steve posted a series of updates on his fictional exchange with the legal goons from Cupertino encouraging him to, well, enter the program.

• What’s propping up the U.S. economy? | Kiplinger.com
  Quote - Are two of our favorite villains, oil sheikhs and China, the reason it’s still afloat?
  (tags: economy)
• How one company is using wikis and blogs to unclog e-mail boxes | CIO.com
  Quote - (Wikis) are being used for project management, internal collaboration, and to build customer, partner and developer communities.
  (tags: wikis KM enterprise2.0)
• A revisionist tale: Why a poor China seems richer | New York Times
  You know how changing one assumption in an Excel spreadsheet can drastically change a business plan? Apparently the same holds true for analyzing multi-trillion dollar economies.
  (tags: economy economists freakonomics)
• Remembering the Titans Memphis year | Tennessean.com
  Observation - The following year, the Vanderbilt stadium year, the Steeler fans still descended on Nashville. Not until the name changed and the new stadium opened did it sink in we had a ‘home team.’
  (tags: titans)
• Pacman Jones’ appeal denied by NFL | Tennessean.com
  One more Titans item and observation: Think back a year and where Albert Haynesworth was. Wanting to prove you’re not the thug everyone believes you are may be good for Pac also.
  (tags: titans)

• 107 Magazine Predictions for 2008 | FolioMag.com
  It includes a few of my wishful thoughts. Overall, the article is a fun list, but it actually contains one nugget of real news. In his prediction, Samir Husni reveals he’s not God. ; )
  (tags: magazines)
• The Frozen Pea Fund
  Remember, December 21st is Frozen Pea Friday.
  (tags: twitter community health)
• The Frozen Pea Friday Pool on Flickr
  Lots of peavatars.
  (tags: twitter)
• What’s With the Peas?
  Expressing our support of Susan Reynolds is what Frozen Pea Friday is all about. Here, she explains the origin of the whole frozen pea meme.
  (tags: twitter)
• Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading | Fimoculous.com
  A list of ‘lesser known blogs. Quote - Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos — or Cute Overload.
  (tags: blogging blogs)