a crank's progress

Janis Ian Articles

The music industry is no different from any other huge corporation, be it Mobil Oil or the Catholic church. When faced with a new technology or a new product that will revolutionize their business, their response is predictable:

a. Destroy it. And if they cannot,
b. Control it. And if they cannot,
c. Control the consumer who wishes to use it, and the legislators and laws that are supposed to protect that consumer.

Please read this article and make sure your elected representatives understand their constituents views.

I sent email to Janis Ian, thanking her for presenting this from the artist’s point of view. I also asked if there was much opposition to the RIAA’s and the music industry’s stance on digital media. She was gracious enough to reply and yes, there is a lot of opposition, but it’s largely anonymous. The artists have lost control of their own voices when they can’t speak on this issue. Perhaps instead of lobbying congress, we need to also encourage musicians to weigh in on this. If, as the article above suggests, Napster activity at its peak represented $500,000 a day of revenue for the industry, what could a more complete solution yield? Imagine more — all — artists, complete catalogs, out of print stuff, historical recordings, all available in a portable format.

Where this idea represents money for stuff that’s taking up shelf space (metaphorically and literally), as well as the chance to enrich the music-loving public’s experience, the people who can make this happen want to find some way of making sure no one gets something for nothing.

The bottom line is the artists lose some potential audience, the music-lovers lose the opportunity to hear music they may not have access to, and the industry loses money, more than Napster may have cost them.

Myabe we’ll just see more and more small labels where the artists have control over their works and how they’re distributed.

Once again, I’m led back to this article I mentioned a few weeks back.

for some reason, small birds (finches, I think) have been flying into my windows today and walking around on the gutters and the vent covers, so many little footsteps, I thought it was raining.

We’ve had birdstrikes before, some fatal, but never more than one a day: some of these have been more than one at a time. They seem to bounce off and fly away, but that’s gotta hurt.

Press Release – Nav4 Search Engine Patch Kit 1.0 Available for Download

Based on Think Tank 23’s patent-pending Waypoint technology, which uses advanced natural-language processing to dynamically identify thematic categories embedded within Web pages, Nav4 SEPK generates in-context related-document navigation automatically.

Good news here. This is the much improved successor to the core technology that FizzyLab, my previous startup, was based on. Steve and Martin never gave up on the idea that context and relevance could be used as navigational tools. You would all be using it now, everywhere, from the desktop to the web, but for an ill-fated drive to find relationships between consumer goods and textual information.

Why this is considered the next generation of search and navigation is easy to explain when you consider where most search technologies fail. The truism “garbage in, garbage out” applies here: if the user can’t figure out what keywords will get them the results they want, it doesn’t matter how scalable the search engine is or how many documents it searches. Eliminating keywords through textual analysis and then using that information as the example to query for is where search is headed. Like the intelligent robots of vintage SciFi or Apple’s Newton technology, new technologies like Nav4 will eliminate the searching and allow knowledge workers, students, everyone to use the information they need.