One of the major threads in the substance of style by Virginia Postrel, which I blogged about on October 31, is about understanding why a rational buyer would invest in purely decorative assets. How can it be that spending more on a black iPod than a white one is a good decision?
The answer comes [...]
Microsoft has this “Silverlight” thingie which is more or less but mainly more a clone of Flash. A fair number of pundits hyperbloviated over it, which reverse-impressed me. Somebody is going to land a punch on Flash eventually, but it’s not likely to be Microsoft.
But Silverlight could well have a significant impact by [...]
The best hack I’ve seen since Brad Neuberg did AMASS in 2005: Arek Korbik implements Vorbis in Flash, with no dedicated Vorbis support provided by Adobe as part of Flash. It’s a god-level piece of hacking.
What Arek’s hack means is that new sound formats can now be implemented in pure AJAX and deployed with [...]
Play the Web is a blog with the premise of exploring technical hurdles for making chains of derivative works:
On this blog we want to talk about media reuse on the Internet and enabling reuse in a responsible way. Media companies’ reactionary response of restricting all use is throwing the baby out with the bathwater [...]
Over on the O’Reilly Digital Media site, David Battino has published a piece called Three Free & Easy Web Audio Players which covers Delicious Playtagger, Goose aka Yahoo Media Player, and a new player of his own design.
Want to play MP3s on your site? I did. The unpredictable behavior of audio links annoyed [...]
There is a new version of libSpiff, the XSPF library, with support for relative paths using the xml:base attribute. Up until now relative paths have never worked in playlists as far as I know, so whereas in an HTML document you could do…
<a href=”my.mp3″>my song</a>
In a playlist you always had to spell it out, [...]
When you put a Creative Commons license in a web page, it usually applies to that page. For example, if you generated HTML for the Attribution-ShareAlike license using the license chooser at CreativeCommons.org and put that claim into a web page at http://example.com, it would mean that the page at http://example.com could be freely [...]
This blog post is for techies.
It’s natural for Yahoo! Media Player to support hAudio. hAudio has valuable functionality and is generally well thought out.
But it’s too big a project. The syntax is very complex. Writing a parser and accurately supporting the features is a large job which is out of [...]
Someone asked me recently about the Webjay popularity metric. It was a good metric — simple and reliable — so I thought I’d pass it along here. I do this with confidence that Yahoo doesn’t mind because its metrics are much more sophisticated.
The metric was based on playlist plays, so if somebody played [...]
The passwordless login approach has been spotted in the wild on a site called Journa-list. This is the setup screen for creating an account:
Setting a password is optional but recommended:
Thanks to Alf for spotting it.