Image by _ES via Flickr

Okay, this post is going to be quick and dirty. The premier one-or-two-service gadget makers Peek recently released the TwitterPeek.

It comes with a lifetime service plan but only does Twitter.

That’s right. No email. No internet. Not even WAP support.

Just reading and sending status updates.

Which you can do, by the way, via SMS text message from any phone, with or without internet connectivity.

There is no reason for anyone to spend $200 on this device when they can get a killer smartphone for the same amount of money, or a dumbphone and 6 months of basic service.

I hate the TwitterPeek and everything it stands for. And I am not alone:

[ Engadget ] – [ jkOnTheRun ] – [ cnet news ]

Make the jump to see Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky rocking the TwitterPeek on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. And, if you’re lame enough to want to buy one, you can get it at Amazon.

Anyone interested in the music industry has probably heard the accusations…the popular entertainment distributer iTunes isn’t giving the expected amount of profit back to the songwriters, music publishers and composers. CNET News posted an article about this on September 17th, 2009 in which Rick Carnes, the president of the Songwriter’s Guild of America was quoted saying, “We make 9.1 cents off of a song sale and that means a whole lot of pennies have to add up before it becomes a bunch of money. People think we’re making a fortune off the Web, but it’s a tiny amount. We need multiple revenue streams or this isn’t going to work.”

The problem really started back when the music file sharing program called Napster launched in 1999. Created by Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old student at Boston’s Northeastern University, Napster revolutionized the way people got their music. Now if you go into a store like Walmart or Best Buy, you will see they are consolidating their music sections since digital music purchases are defeating CD sales. The question is almost a no brainer…why purchase an album for $15 when you can get the song you want for $1?

According to ifpi.org, music sales increased last year and the digital music business rose 25%, earning $3.7 billion. Single song downloads grew 24% while digital albums rose 37%.

Record labels are concerned that with the growing interest of listening to music online, the industry isn’t being properly compensated. In CNET News, Universal Music Publishing Group CEO David Renzer says, “you can stream radio, and you can preview (tracks), things that we should be getting paid performance income for.”

That’s where things get shaky. Earlier this year, iTunes allowed record labels to control the pricing of their songs, either $.69, $.99, or $1.29 per song. Many hit singles have been changed to $1.29 while the rest of the album tracks are listed at $.99 a song. The movement doesn’t stop there, several record labels are urging Congress to impose a Performance Tax on radio stations, an act that has stations concerned about their future. According to noperformancetax.com, radio stations compensate songwriters and composers approximately $500 million a year and the continued broadcast of new singles helps increase sales for the record companies. With a Performance Tax, many radio stations, especially the independently owned, are afraid they won’t be able to afford the costs and will have to either change to an all-talk format or shut down completely.

Talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres is also a target of the record labels. On September 9th, several record labels accused DeGeneres of playing over a thousand songs during her dance segments without paying for the licenses and filed a lawsuit against the show.

Regardless if the record companies are justified with what they are doing or not, they need to take a step back. In these 30-60 second dance sets, DeGeneres is giving artists free publicity, similar to Oprah giving a new novel a head nod. Rather than sending a lawsuit over to a popular show host like DeGeneres, the record labels should work a deal out with a producer where they use this segment to push a new song.

It’s been over a decade since Napster was released and instead of embracing the new technologies that are available, major record labels insist on fighting the changes and continue to bite the hands that help them. Raising the fee of a song on iTunes isn’t great, but imposing a fee for playing a 30 second sample of a song is foolish. Urging Congress to push a tax on radio stations for playing their music is mind boggling. They are right to take action but these plans they are putting into place is going to hurt themselves and put many people out of work.

If these record companies were smart, they would:

1) Rather push artists to release an album, find the right producers and songwriters to create a long lasting album. I can leave U2’s “The Joshua Tree” album in the car stereo for days and not get bored of it. If an artist or band comes out with a great album, it will sell for decades. Record labels seem to have this idea that they need to follow current trends in order for songs to succeed. Auto-tune is a great example of this…if I were to tune into a Top 40 station right now, chances are I’ll hear a band with heavy production on the track.

Back in the day, if radio stations pushed a few singles, it would be easy for an album to go multi-platinum, so the rest of the record could be filler, and the industry would still make money off of those tracks. Now that consumers have other means to get their music, songwriters and artists have to work harder to get the whole album into their fan’s hands. (Or hard drive.)

2) Hire some young blood to help run their company. Shawn Fanning was 18 when he came up with Napster. Teenagers and young adults have a stronger advantage with digital technologies because they are not afraid of it. Now 28-years-old, Fanning is a successful businessman, creating the sites Rupture and Snocap, the latter being bought out last year by Electronic Arts for $15 million.

3) Realize the compact disc is becoming obselete. The first compact disc dates back to the late 70’s/early 80’s. Unless added perks are added to CDs, the medium is going to disappear. In 2005, record companies tried DualDiscs, a double sided CD with audio on one side, video on the other. That hasn’t seemed to go anywhere; labels maybe stopped creating them due to lack of interest or possibly because of the additional $1.50 to $2.50 cost to create these types of discs.

Either way, the music industry is changing very rapidly and record labels need to come up with a plan. And this plan needs to be done using methods that work with businesses who are helping them. As Mark Wright, Senior Vice President of MCA Records says, “if a song’s not on the radio, it’ll never sell.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

The denial-of-service attacks launched on Web sites in South Korea and the United States earlier this month appear to have come from a master server in the United Kingdom, according to security researchers in Vietnam.

The master server controls all of the eight command and control servers involved in the series of distributed denial-of-service attacks that started on the July 4 weekend, security firm Bkis said in a blog posting on its Web site on Monday. Bkis said it gained control of two of the servers.

The Vietnamese firm estimated the number of compromised PCs involved in the attacks to be around 167,000 in 74 countries.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/attacks-on-u-s-korea-sites-came-from-u-k/

Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

Google News was inaccessible for some people Thursday afternoon right as rumors of Jackson’s death began to circulate, replaced by an error message reading “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

Of course, those queries were quite legitimate, as millions around the world searched for accurate information regarding Jackson following reports that he had suffered cardiac arrest. The spike in queries began at about 2:45 p.m. PDT Thursday, and Google thought the traffic was an attack for about 25 minutes before realizing what was going on.

Google also noted that it saw a huge spike in mobile searches. Yahoo’s data backed up Google’s; it set a record for unique visitors in a single day with 16.4 million visitors, and its lead story on Jackson’s death was the most highly-visited story in its history.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/google-thought-michael-jackson-traffic-was-attack/

I knew it! Twitter is not the two-way conversation vehicle that it’s been made out to be.  It’s really more of a one-way, one-to-many network, according to a study published on Harvard Business School’s Conversation Starter blog.

“We examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. We then compared our findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. Our findings are very surprising.”

Here’s what they found:

-  The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets, while on a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

-  Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women, which suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.

-  Men are almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, and women are 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. This too goes against the online social networks grain where activity typically revolves around women.

This comes on the heels of a previous Nielsen report that says 60% of Twitter users drop out after one month of tweeting. Joe Flint with the Los Angeles Times says that Twitter is “awash in self-promotion. Journalists tout their most recent clips and, for some bizarre reason, their whereabouts (it’s a great tip sheet for burglars, stalkers, not to mention competitors), while networks and studios promote their wares. Is it effective? In generating ink and a lot of back-and-forth navel gazing the answer is yes. In tangible results, not so much.”

The implication for marketers and anyone else using Twitter for business purposes is to take a close look at your Twitter goals, weigh them against these findings, and determine if they are consistent with the real Twitter rather then the Twitter hype. If they aren’t, then maybe tweeting isn’t the best way to be spending your time and effort.

All these numbers point to one fact, says CNET News reporter Caroline McCarthy:  Twitter is high-maintenance.

“Even if you’re only using it to read the latest updates from a few publications and some of your favorite bands, you’re still reading about them in short bites that flow in a relatively inefficient manner. Parsing the noise takes effort; participating in it takes even more.”

D7 is on.  Speakers include Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Zucker, Rupert Murdoch, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, Carol Bartz, Heads of Palm, Nokia, RIM, ATT….  Talking about all things apps, Connected TV, and Twitter.  Follow #allthingsd and #d7.  Beet.tv is on the scene as our eyes and ears.  CNET News is also live blogging at news.cnet.com

D7:  Twitter, Murdoch Videos, FLO TV mixer
http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090527/nightcap-gathering-photos/?mod=ATD_skybox

Transcript
http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/

AP, ContentNext Media
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-d7-twitter-founders-say-company-control-is-safe/

Twitter on Making Money
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/does-twitter-hate-advertising.html

Sony has spoken with some of the major recording companies about providing music for the PlayStation Portable, music industry sources told CNET News.

The sources said the talks are only preliminary and no deals have been struck. But apparently, Sony is considering offering music on the PlayStation Network, the company’s nascent multiplayer gaming and digital download service. Such a move could place the PSP in direct competition with other multiuse music players, most notably the iPhone.

Spokespeople from Sony and the big recording labels declined to comment for this story.

The PSP is a nifty little handheld that plays games, video, and music, but has never fully lived up to its potential, many say. With a larger screen and superior games, the PSP could have rivaled the iPod. The PSP’s development, however, was partially hobbled by…

continue reading from source by Greg Sandoval

The national recession is forcing everyone to pinch pennies — both personally and professionally. For me, that meant planning a couple three-day weekend trips — like a recent excursion to Pittsburgh for a weekend of baseball (Go Reds!) — rather than a more extended vacation. Web advertisers have adapted by devoting their dollars to pay-per-click ads, for which advertisers pay based on the number of clicks. It’s a great idea, as ROI is important for any IMC endeavor and it’s easy to track with pay-per-click. According to the New York Times, pay-per-click is actually the only type of online advertising that grew in 2008. But there’s always a downside with new trends, and fraud has apparently become a problem for pay-per-click advertisers.

According to the New York Times, Click Forensics, a click fraud detection company based in Texas, indicated that 17 percent of all ad clicks during the last quarter of 2008 were fraudulent. And 20 percent of Newcars.com’s ad clicks on Yahoo in 2007 were fraudulent. Frequent clicks from IP addresses in areas the company doesn’t serve and heavy click traffic in a short time frame are both indicators of fraud, which is typically designed to cost advertisers extra money and decrease competition. One way to address the problem, according to Center for Digital Democracy Group executive director Jeff Chester is through regulation.

“Click fraud should be at the top of the priority list with Obama and the F.T.C.,” Chester said. “The F.T.C. has seriously lagged in coming to grips with the problems surrounding the online ad market, specifically click fraud. It’s extremely important to address the problem because it ultimately affects the consumers, meaning what they end up paying.”

Here’s what I don’t understand about click fraud, however. Who’s responsible and why? Do other car sellers hire computers whizzes in far-off locations to repeatedly click on Newcars.com’s ads in an attempt to drive them out of business? A CNET News article published in 2004 indicated that that’s exactly what happens in some cases, but that seems like a poor strategy to combat your competition. In other cases, the article indicated that smaller search engines are to blame.

“Marketing executives say click fraud is pervasive among affiliates of search leaders Google, Yahoo-owned Overture Services and FindWhat.com. In a typical affiliation, any Web publisher can become a partner of these large networks by displaying their paid links on a Web page or within its own search results and then share in the profits with every click.”

Regardless of the rationale, it’s a troubling trend from the early days of the Internet that’s become a problem again due to the national economic situation. Click Forensics and other companies offer solutions that help reduce click fraud, but it costs money to hire those companies, too. Ultimately, it seems some companies might drive each other out of business, either through click fraud or the cost of combatting it. Whatever happened to friendly competition? Once upon a time, competition was considered a good thing, driving all the companies involved to improve their performance and/or product.

“Underrated” is such an overrated word, isn’t it?  After all, who created these arbitrary “ratings”, anyway?

So, I’m not going to tell you that the great band X is underrated.  But I will tell you that they might just be one of the greatest underappreciated and underexposed (at least outside of their hometown of Los Angeles) bands of the last 30 years.

Perhaps their status as California’s preeminent punk band didn’t hold water for influential rock critics who had previously championed more geographically appealing New York bands (Ramones) or Brit bands (The Clash, Sex Pistols).  I’ve got nothing but love for those bands, but X should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside each of those.

Maybe it was the fact that their brand of “punk” included country and folk to go along with their political underpinnings.  Maybe it was the fact that co-lead singers John Doe (born John Nommensen Duchac) and Exene Cervenka (born Christine Cervenka) were destined to stay on the fringes and work on various disparate projects to complement their work in X.

Whatever. The fact is simply that if you haven’t discovered their music, there is still time. Check out allmusic’s biography of the band for a quick primer on X and an introduction to their classic releases of the early ’80s.  Or go the easy route and treat yourself to their greatest hits.  Better yet, check them out on tour this spring.  You’ll even get a chance to participate in the process of choosing the setlist.

X (Billy Zoom, John Doe, DJ Bonebrake, Exene Cervenka)

The band (including original members Billy Zoom & DJ Bonebrake on guitar and drums, respectively) has not actually released a new album since 1993, though new material is in the works.

However, all of the members of X have been involved in numerous additional projects over the years.

John Doe, specifically, has been nothing less than prolific.  He talks to The Patriot Ledger in this interview about the four bands that he is currently working with (including his most recent release with The Sadies). 

One of the most well-rounded representatives of the music business, he was a perfect candidate to speak with CNET News this week about the role of technology in the recording process, his experience with record labels and the effect of filesharing on artists.  Good stuff.

And the classic X material is just great stuff for any music collection.  I can see all of you X fans out there nodding in agreement. 

Oh, and sports fans, I’ll remind you of their role in one of the greatest sports movies of all-time.  Yes, that is their cover version of Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn’s theme song in Major League.  Check it here.

by Caroline McCarthy

More than 1 million viewers tuned into Mogulus.com  and into the channels’ embedded players for outlets such as USA TODAY, Democracy Now, The Real News and CSPAN’s Inauguration Hub and others as they broadcast President Barack Obama’s inauguration. 

“The audience record for Mogulus was broken with 105,000 concurrent viewers on the network,” according to an e-mail from the live-streaming service.

More than 20 channels streamed throughout the day.

Caroline McCarthy, who blogs about social media and tech culture for CNET News, wrote that Tuesday wasn’t the biggest day for online traffic, “but for many social networks and digital-media sites, Inauguration Day shattered traffic and usage records regardless.”

CNNhad a record-setting 25 million video streams and more than 160 million page views in a 12-hour span; at peak, the network estimated it served 1.3 million simultaneous live streams, McCarthy wrote on her blog this week.

Facebook, which partnered with CNN to provide live status, is still updating its numbers. The social network peaked as President Barack Obama began his inaugural address, McCarthy wrote. 

“‘Millions’ of members logged into the social network during the live broadcast,” she wrote.

The rate of Twitter’s tweets or short messages per second hit five times the normal rate; per minute, it was four times the normal rate, according to co-founder Biz Stone.

“Overall, Twitter sailed smoothly through the inauguration but at the peak, some folks did experience a 2-5 minute delay receiving updates,” Stone wrote on his Twitter blog. “We’ll be analyzing this later (Tuesday) so that during the next massively shared global event there is no appreciable delay.”

The satellite GeoEye-1 took the photograph more than 400 miles above Earth. The satellite will supply Google  with photographs of the planet, according to Stephen Skankland  of CNET News.

La machine à audience de YouTube pourrait bien finalement se transformer en machine à gros sous : les partenariats conclus par la plateforme vidéo de Google avec des maisons de disques s’avèrent payants. Rappelons que ces accords prévoient que les revenus publicitaires générés par l’audience des clips vidéo mis en ligne gratuitement par les artistes des majors sont partagés entre les deux parties.

C’est notamment le cas pour Universal Music. Dans un entretien à CNET News, un dirigeant de la major déclare que l’artiste le plus populaire rapporte « des dizaines de millions de dollars » grâce aux pages vues de ses clips vidéo sur YouTube. Selon une source industrielle proche du dossier, citée par CNET News, Universal Music devrait générer 100 millions de dollars de revenus en 2008 grâce au streaming de clips vidéo, la majorité provenant de YouTube.

Rentabilité fixée pour fin 2008:

Il faut dire que Google s’est donné les moyens cette année pour rentabiliser sa plateforme vidéo, acquise pour 1,65 milliard de dollars en 2006. Le moteur de recherche a ainsi adapté en novembre dernier son système Adwords pour YouTube, en lançant un service de vidéos sponsorisées : les utilisateurs comme les annonceurs peuvent placer des enchères sur des mots-clés pour faire remonter leurs vidéos dans un espace sponsorisé bien identifié. Auparavant, YouTube avait amélioré la qualité d’affichage de ses vidéos en passant au format 16/9. Jeudi 18 décembre, la plateforme a d’ailleurs lancé une nouvelle page dédiée aux vidéos en haute définition.

Objectif pour Google : que YouTube soit rentable fin 2008. Selon les chiffres publiés récemment par l’institut de mesure d’audience ComScore, le site a généré 2,73 milliards de requêtes en novembre aux Etats-Unis, soit 25,4 % du total des requêtes sur les sites de Google.

la rédaction, ZDNet France