Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Online goings-on

Here's a few things worth checking out.

Amazon launched the "public beta" of its digital music store today. Two things about Amazon MP3 (as the store is called) will be music to the ears of iTunes users. (1) Amazon MP3's songs cost between 89 and 99 cents to download; iTunes songs go for 99 cents. And (2) Amazon MP3 downloads are DRM-free; that is to say, there are no copying restrictions or controls associated with the MP3 files, and you can play them on the hardware and software of your choice.

I installed Amazon MP3's download application in about 10 seconds, and 30 seconds after that I was listening to Feist's "1234" (I liked it better in the iPhone ad), which I'd downloaded using Amazon's One-Click feature; it popped up in my iTunes, ready to go.

There is a downside: So far, only independent labels and two majors (EMI and Universal) are willing to sell tracks without Digital Rights Management controls. So although Amazon MP3 offers 2 million tracks, the selection is not nearly what it should be. Yet.

Am I going crazy, or has Michael Wolff -- memorably described by Slate's Jack Shafer as "failed Internet entrepreneur, New York magazine auction loser, and media mogul courtier" -- been making a lot of sense lately? I couldn't find much to argue with in his latest essay, "Is This the End of News?" in the current issue of Vanity Fair. Excerpt:

For everybody in the news business, everybody with a daily news habit, the news forms part of our identity. But the generational change, the transformation, the schism, may be that this identification with the news, this dependence on a narrator, has become … out of it, square, dumb, hopeless. Indeed, when I watch the traditional news, read it with waning interest, try to understand what Katie Couric is about, I think, Out of it, square, dumb, hopeless.

Wolff argues that "the basic news metaphor" (the front page: important stuff first) no longer works. For younger Americans, he claims -- via a quote from Patrick Spain, the C.E.O. of Highbeam Research, the basic news metaphor "should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests." Sounds pretty good to me, so when Wolff announced, at the end of his essay, that he and Spain have started something called Newser.com, I signed up. (Registration is quick, free.)

According to the website, Newser is an online news service that "scans Internet news sources and, using human and machine driven aggregation, delivers the best information in concise, efficient summaries, together with photos, video and audio and links to original stories." Wolff says he wants to create "the Amazon of news," or "the Google of news," so what's the algorithm? Newser's story selection, one reads at the website, "is based on a proprietary formula that measures the ubiquity of coverage by the top-ranked 100 English-language news sites; the prominence with which those sites feature the stories; and the popularity of a given story with readers; and overlooked points of view, angles and scoops uncovered by our editors." OK, I'm going to give Newser a try. Check it out.

Somerville resident and Salon.com columnist Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith emails to point out that his excellent book (also called "Ask the Pilot") has been translated into Chinese and has a fun new cover. See below.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:28 PM

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