A bunch of folks have been sending in Charles Blow’s NYTimes column about the supposed “death” of the music industry. However, Blow makes the most basic of errors: he appears to equate the music industry with the recording industry. He accepts RIAA numbers of when “sales peaked,” not realizing that he’s only talking about sales of a segment of the wider music industry. Yet as recent studies both from outside and inside the music industry have shown, the overall music ecosystem has been getting larger in terms of dollar volume. Money may be shifting away from CDs, but it’s not shifting away from music-related commerce. But, I guess that’s what happens when you rely on just the RIAA for your data…

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One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.

The service–which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network–believes hackers are to blame. “From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service,” a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.

There’s another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative deal that would shave 20 percent off the cost of any flights booked through a promotional link. It used Trim as the URL shortener for the link in question, and acknowledged in its “JetBlue Cheeps” Twitter-deals account that heavy volume from the sale may have unexpectedly caused the outage.

Whether or not it was the JetBlue promotion that crippled Trim, there’s a bigger-picture problem here: URL shorteners like TinyURL, Bitly, Owly, Isgd, and related offerings from Digg and StumbleUpon, are a huge deal when we’ve all grown accustomed to fitting stuff into 140-character fields. Some, like Bitly (which Twitter uses as its automatic link shortener and which has been talked up as a possible acquisition for the microblogging company) and Trim, offer some tracking data and analytics surrounding the links plugged into their systems.

But when one crashes, so do all the links associated with it. Or what happens if a URL shortener goes out of business altogether? There would be a whole lot of lost, broken links out there. Some very small URLs could have a very big impact on the organization of the Web.

This post was updated at 1:13 p.m. PT.

Originally posted at The Social

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Features that Google brought to its developer preview version of Chrome–themes, a revamped new-tab page, a tweaked Omnibox for searching and entering Web addresses, and support for HTML 5 video–have now arrived on the browser’s better tested beta version intended for broader use.

Individually, these features in Chrome 3.0.195.4 (download) are niceties. Collectively, they show Google is steadily moving ahead with its browser project, which was ambitious even before Chrome OS arrived on the scene. Fighting for a piece of the browser market is tough, but offering an operating system solely for Web-based applications is a lot tougher.

Chrome themes, such as this one called Grass, are in the new Chrome beta.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

After some on-again, off-again wavering, I’ve gone back to Chrome as my default browser. I like its interface and a handful of features, but the main advantage is its priority on speed. Google’s Chrome ambition is to improve the Web as a foundation for applications and more generally to get people to do more online, and speed is of the essence.

That’s why the shiny new features such as Chrome themes actually are less interesting to me than some of the fine print in Google’s announcement of the new beta:

Beyond the improvements in JavaScript execution in this latest beta, there are a host of other improvements that should help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection. For example, when you open a new Web page while other Web pages are still loading, Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page–for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page–ahead of the requests from the older pages. Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config.

OK, so that gets deep in the weeds at the end there, but suffice it to say that Google is tackling browser speed in a number of areas, not just its V8 engine for executing Web programs written in JavaScript.

Google gets dinged with some justification for moving sluggishly with Chrome. The Mac OS X and Linux versions are only now beginning to come into their own, for example. But there’s a subtext to that criticism that bears mentioning.

Specifically, it looks to me as if some perceptions are shifting from “Why should I bother with Chrome?” to “Google isn’t moving fast enough with Chrome.” That shows expectations are shifting in Google’s favor. It positions the company better to win over converts through the gradual delivery of extensions and other high-demand features.

Of course, a lot of my feedback is from change-embracing early adopters who care, sometimes passionately, about browsers. Getting Chrome to appeal to mainstream folks will be another, harder challenge for Google.

Originally posted at News – Business Tech

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Last month, we wrote about a new study that basically showed that independent bloggers and the mainstream press had a rather nice symbiotic relationship, with different stories flowing back and forth across the two. Oddly, the NY Times misinterpreted the study to claim that it showed that bloggers were “behind” the mainstream press on stories, but the details showed a very different story. It’s no surprise that a mainstream publication would portray the study this way, but it makes it even more amusing when that same publication is then caught using a story from a blog as well, without doing any additional reporting.

Now, before we get into the details, I want to be absolutely clear: I don’t think there is anything wrong with this at all. You can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) copyright facts, and having multiple versions of a story written up from multiple perspectives is a good thing in my book. But with some, such as the Marburgers, insisting that its these independent sites acting as “parasites” and you have Ian Shapira and his editors at the Washington Post complaining about Gawker supposedly “ripping off” one of Shapira’s articles, it’s worth noting that this happens all the time in the other direction as well.

Eric Goldman alerts us to a blog post by writer/blogger Kashmir Hill, where she talks about how the NY Times did the exact same thing that Shapira accuses Gawker of doing to a blog post she wrote for the blog AboveTheLaw. The story is actually one that we blogged about as well (and linked to the AboveTheLaw version, along with two other blogs that led us to the original story), concerning a professor who gave his class an assignment to see what sort of private info they could find online about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (following Scalia’s claim that there was no need to protect privacy online).

It was an interesting story that got plenty of attention, and involved real reporting by Hill, including talking to both the professor and actually getting a quote from Scalia via the Supreme Court. From there, a bunch of mainstream sources, starting with ABC News, but also including the NY Times wrote up their own versions of the story. They did no real additional reporting. They did cite AboveTheLaw as the source, but also used quotes directly from Hill’s piece.

Again, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do — but according to Shapira, this is the NY Times “ripping off” Hill and according to the Marburgers, this is the NYTimes acting as a “parasite.” Does it occur to either of them that this is just part of how news is written about these days? Stories originate in all sorts of places, and then go through a variety of different sources.

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Here’s a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It’s just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You’re also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links–just in case you’re into that sort of thing.

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

(Credit: CNET)

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results–selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Last week, a lawsuit involving an allegedly defamatory Twitter message about a landlord made the news. This week, we’ve got another defamation suit involving another Twitter message and a condo building, but the situation here is quite different. First, if the alleged facts are true, it does sound like it could be defamation. It involves some condo owners, and who used Twitter, blogs and other websites to apparently accuse the condo board president of a variety of things including “murder, bribery, extortion, illicit payoffs, and corruption.” Assuming those things are untrue, it would appear that the guy targeted by all this, Daniel Neiditch, has a decent defamation claim.

However, rather than just sue those folks responsible for the message, Neiditch’s lawyers appear to have sued pretty much every company that these messages could loosely be associated with, including Twitter, WordPress, Ning, and GoDaddy. As Sam Bayard notes in the link, it appears that Neiditch’s lawyers appear not to know about Section 230 of the CDA. That’s a pretty big one for your lawyers to miss when filing a lawsuit like this. Ultimately, all four of those companies should have the case easily dismissed under Section 230, but it will be a waste of time and money in the meantime.

Of course, even if they were totally unaware of Section 230, basic common sense should tell you that these sites, hosting the content (or the domain, in the case of GoDaddy) should never be responsible for what was written on those sites. Going after them as a part of the lawsuit appears to be a blatant money grab, by trying to tie any company to the lawsuit, no matter how ridiculous the connection is between the actual action and the company. There really ought to be sanctions against lawyers who do such things, because it happens way too often.

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The Android operating system is a step closer to being embedded in consumer electronics, after the company behind the MIPS processor architecture open-sourced the code for its Android port.

MIPS Technologies released the source code on Monday, two months after it first said it had ported Android to the 32-bit version of the MIPS architecture. This architecture is used in set-top boxes, digital TV sets, home media players, Internet telephony systems and mobile internet devices (MIDs), and is a rival to the ARM technology on which Android already runs.

“Android presents a compelling value proposition in bringing Internet connectivity and a broad range of applications to MIPS-based digital home devices,” MIPS Technologies’ vice president of marketing, Art Swift, said in a statement. “We are working closely with customers and partners to ensure that critical technologies are available for developers to take advantage of Android for consumer electronics.”

MIPS Technologies and its partners–including chipmakers, manufacturers and working groups within the Android-focused Open Embedded Software Foundation–have already demonstrated Android running on a home media player and on a digital TV reference design. They plan to demonstrate more applications for the platform over the coming months.

Android was unveiled as a smartphone platform by its main sponsor, Google, at the end of 2007. Since then, it has started to take off in the handset market, with several manufacturers releasing phones using the system this year. Work is also under way to release low-cost Android Netbooks later this year, although Google is also planning a separate operating system, Chrome OS, for this market.

The move into embedded systems therefore opens up Android’s third front–after mobile phones and the desktop–against Microsoft’s Windows, the embedded version of which is Windows CE.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

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Net Applications changed its methodology, with Apple faring worse in the new statistics and Opera and Chrome getting a boost. These figures are for July.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Apple’s share of the installed base of Web browsers has plunged in half–but because of a methodology at a firm that produces the statistics rather than anything Apple or computer users did.

Net Applications, which compiles statistics based on the 160 million unique visits to a network of 40,000 Web sites using its analytics service, dramatically lowered Apple’s browser share when the firm concluded its methodology needed refining. Specifically, the company concluded that there was a disconnect between visits to its site network and actual Web use in some areas such as China, said Vincent Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing.

To try to better reflect reality, the company adjusted its statistics through use of the CIA’s estimates of Internet population, according to its explanation. Consequently the company took a month to change course then released updated statistics from May and earlier that dramatically changed some figures.

With the old statistics, Apple’s Safari had 8.43 percent of the May browser market. In the revised tally, Apple dropped to 3.7 percent. The change reveals how dramatically assumptions and other subtleties can affect such measurements–and how much faith you should place in their accuracy.

The May statistics based on Net Applications' older methods.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Net Applications' revised May statistics boost Chrome and Opera at Safari's expense.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The good news for Apple is that Net Applications says its growth rates weren’t affected by the change, and Safari is headed upward. In the July measurements, which were released only with the revised methodology, Safari has 4.07 percent share.

Opera came out ahead because the revised technique gave more weight to countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, Net Applications said. Its May share increased from 0.72 percent to 2.06 percent with the revised method, but its July share dipped to 1.97 percent.

Google’s Chrome got a smaller boost from 1.80 percent to 2.18 percent for May, but its trajectory is upward: for July, it jumped to 2.59 percent.

The top two browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, saw relatively small changes. For July, they had 67.68 percent and 22.47 percent, respectively.

Originally posted at News – Business Tech

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TiVo announced Wednesday that it has added hundreds of free Web videos to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL DVRs. Also, subscribers who are interested in watching video podcasts that they can’t find through TiVo’s listing can enter RSS feeds manually to watch the show on their TiVo box.

Starting Wednesday, subscribers will be able to watch free video podcasts from several providers, including CBS, Fox, Oprah, and more. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) They can watch a single episode or subscribe to all the podcast’s shows by opting for a season pass.

TiVo also announced that it will allow users to input video podcast RSS feeds to watch those shows that they can’t find on their TiVo Web Video listing.

To do so, subscribers will need to use the “Custom RSS Feeds” option in the “Browse Web Videos” menu. That option will allow them to input a show’s RSS feed with their remote. If it’s a valid link, they can decide to watch a single episode or subscribe to the feed through Season Pass. They can also watch past episodes.

To maximize the amount of content available to its subscribers, TiVo has provided show producers with guidelines for getting their Web videos ready for the DVR. The shows must be made available through RSS (RSS 2.0 is preferred). The video must also be in H.264 format.

TiVo’s inclusion of more video podcasts follows a long line of upgrades the company has made to its platform over the past year. In October, TiVo announced that Netflix streaming was coming to its DVRs. HD content from Amazon’s Video on Demand service was added earlier this year. The company even announced plans to bring Blockbuster Video on Demand to subscribers. Now, TiVo subscribers can supplement all that professional content with thousands of Web shows that they might already be enjoying on competing products, like the Apple TV.

TiVo’s new Web videos and the option to add custom RSS feeds are available now to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL owners.

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Mark Guertin writes in with an interesting situation that he’s dealing with, which I think highlights some of the problems with copyright law today. Guertin put together a YouTube video of some swimming pugs as part of a promotion for a charity he’s involved with. Knowing that music on videos is a potential copyright issue, he went to Wikipedia to find some public domain music, and chose Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to accompany the swimming pugs.

Except… he got blocked. YouTube’s content ID system told him that the song was owned by (who else?) Warner Music Group, and thus the soundtrack was muted. Guertin filed a counternotice, and the music was reinstated, but then muted a second time as apparently someone (Google/Warner?) didn’t agree with the counternotice. Without knowing the details, my guess is that the situation has to do with the different types of copyright coverage. While the song Ride of the Valkyries is public domain, each individual recording of it is covered by copyright. It seems likely that whatever recording was used is still under copyright.

Guertin is reasonably upset about the situation, especially the whole concept of having the music blocked until WMG has a chance to weigh in on it, noting that “guilt before innocence” seems incredibly unfair.

But the bigger issue may be how this (once again) shows how out of sync copyright law is with what people think is reasonable or fair. If you found out a piece of music was in the public domain, it’s natural to assume that a recording of that same piece of music is in the public domain. And to make things more confusing, that’s absolutely true (in the US at least) of a photograph of a public domain painting. But making a new recording of a public domain song? Bam. A new monopoly created.

Unfortunately for Guertin, the track he used probably is not in the public domain, even if the music is (yes, that’s confusing). That’s why, these days, it’s probably more reasonable to search out Creative Commons-licensed music than public domain music — because you can’t be as sure whether the PD part covers the recording as well as the music. To some of us, that seems like a problem with current copyright laws, while others appear to view it as a feature.

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