Welcome back, my friends

I’d officially like to congratulate the IE team for getting the IE 7 release decoupled from Longhorn, and welcome Microsoft back to the modern browser landscape. It’s a big deal that Microsoft has awakened to the threat to its browser dominance from Firefox and other alternative browsers. We can only hope that IE 7 doesn’t bring its own slate of nasty CSS bugs that have to be worked around with yet another bunch of skanky CSS hacks.

Iron & Wine: Woman King EP

iron and wine woman king ep

The first time I ever heard Iron & Wine, I was on the bridge over Lake Washington heading from Seattle into the forested eastern shore of the lake. It was about 10 o’clock at night, and a voice that sounded like it might have come from a century ago was coming over KEXP’s airwaves. I got off the road, rolled down my windows, and listened to the song (“Upwards Over the Mountain” from The Creek Drank the Cradle) as a chill went down my spine. As I heard the rest of that first album and then the 2004 follow-up, I was still taken by the hushed intimacy, but I started to wonder if the other shoe would drop, or if the band would, like the Cowboy Junkies, keep making the same record over and over again for ten years. Iron & Wine’s new EP, Woman King, which hits the streets on February 22, happily answers no: this is a welcome evolution in Iron & Wine’s sound.

Like the Talking Heads in their live concert movie Stop Making Sense, Sam Beam has slowly added instruments and layers to Iron & Wine’s sound over the course of two albums and two or three EPs. The most recent EP, Woman King, adds fiddles, and even an electric guitar to the mix, while keeping the delicate vocal harmonies and gentle melodies that have been the bedrock of Beam’s sound.

That’s where the similarities end to Beam’s previous work. The lyrics, while focused tightly on women, cover a wide thematic ground. “Woman King” imagines the title character as an apocalyptic warrior, the Biblical (“Jezebel”) to impossible couplings and doomed relationships (“Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)”).

The biggest difference, though, is the driving spirit. In fact, “Evening on the Ground,” with its driving rhythm and dueling fiddle and electric guitar, is positively aggressive—not an adjective that you’d apply to any earlier I&W releases. Other songs are actually playful—an observation Beam himself made in an interview for Splendid Magazine conducted while the record was being made. If The Creek Drank the Cradle was a lullaby and Plug Award winner Our Endless Numbered Days a ballad, Woman King is a swinging dance across a sawdust floor with a once-taciturn partner. Beam’s songwriting continues to astonish with intimacy and newfound confrontation, and the broader sonic and lyrical palette that this release displays shows him to be a master who’s still growing. If this is the EP, I can’t wait to hear the next album.

This review was originally posted at BlogCritics.

To help with good Rocky’s revival

raccoon

We’re well and truly thawing out this morning. Not only is there a river running down the middle of the street, but the face to the right glared down at me from a tree in our back yard when I was outside with the dogs this morning. I briefly glimpsed eyes inside the tree as well before they scampered further into the darkness. Seems like Rocky is a family raccoon.

It’s a good thing we had the chimney caps installed. Otherwise we might be getting to know Rocky Raccoon more closely than we want to some dark night…

Valentine’s Day = Duck

Or at least it has for us for the past eight years. I proposed to Lisa eight years ago after a meal of duck and angel-food cake. This year the variation was in the sauce, and the source of the duck. The duck breasts were from Wilson Farm (I think technically from Maple Leaf Farms), and the sauce was a blood orange sauce courtesy of the Boston Globe. I think the blackberry and maple sauce was better, but Lisa really liked the blood orange sauce. So now we have options. And, once again, we learned that angel food cake from scratch, while romantic, loses something compared to the kind out of the box.

Popping the Bubbler

Five Across, which is headed by the guy that headed the teams that created iPhoto and iMovie, launched a new blogging system today, called bubbler™. It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows.

I took it for a spin. You can read my Bubbler test blog to see my discoveries, but the bottom line:

  1. No permalinks (at least, not ones that are exposed)
  2. No good way to create hyperlinks (other than pasting the naked URL into the post)
  3. No ability to add an image inside a post
  4. No RSS feeds. Or Atom feeds. No syndication feeds at all

Summary: This isn’t a blogging tool. It’s a nice home page builder.

That said, I do like the reporter feature, a streamlined UI to create postings that are automatically datestamped—awfully handy if you liveblog. And of course, this is beta one. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Chairman Dean

I’ve been pleased to see Howard Dean step up to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Like him or laugh at him, he’s espoused some solid stands on things that matter, not centrist waffling, and has proven that he can energize at least some of the base. Of course, I also note that the media continues to replay the Scream clip every time they talk about this, no matter how long it’s been debunked. Oliver Willis is also keeping an ear out for bias in the way the coverage is handled, including a less-than-up-and-up blind quote question in the press conference.

You are tearing me apart

This has been sitting as an open tab in NetNewsWire for so long, it’s got a new design since the first time I opened it. What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies List is a listing of all the apparent goofs, flubbed notes, patches, studio chatter, etc. that can be heard in every recorded Beatles song. Nice place to come check if you’re losing your hearing, or that really is someone belching during “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”

Link roundup

More stuff:

Hating your customers: customers hate back

Boing Boing: Angry remix of “You can click, but you can’t hide”. This is what happens when you take heavy handed legal action against customers who are doing something that may or may not be illegal—you embolden customers to go out even further on a legal limb.

Update: Why do we object so much when copyright enforcement gets heavy handed? Take a look at this story about confiscation of private property, including data files and work material, in a Manila airport in the name of “stopping piracy.”

Newsburst day 2

Got a very nice comment from John Roberts at CNet on the last post, responding to a few points I made about NewsSource and pointing out an important omission. First, the easy one: import OPML is in the “Add Source” tab of the application, and it supports importing from a local file or a public URL. Which is cool. My 347 subscriptions got imported—even preserving my groups!—though there were a few time-outs, which manifested as 404s, along the way. The latter is perhaps unsurprising given the number of sources I asked NewsSource to handle. (I fed it my full OPML list.)

Second, and more importantly, I did what I often do, which is to fail to pause and reflect on how cool NewsSource is before I start making grand points about what it says about the marketplace. It speaks extraordinary things about CNet that they are making this investment, and preserves their place both as early proponents of linking out and as innovators in syndication. (They were among the first “big media” guys to get RSS.) It also says good things about them that they are setting the bar for other news sites in this way, saying, “You want transparency and the news from a dozen different perspectives? Here it is. Go get it.” Bravos.

Other RSS stuff

More goodies from the aggregator list that never ends:

RSS business value: content portal

With last week’s launch of branded online RSS aggregators from CNet (Newsburst.com), it looks like everything old is new again when it comes to RSS. Remember the first application for XML content syndication? Yeah, Newsburst looks a lot like My Netscape. Only there are about 3 million times more potential news sources now than there were then.

John Roberts, the developer at CNet who was responsible for the portal, notes that it does OPML import-export. Which is good—if you don’t believe in being locked in (*). But it points to an issue with the RSS content portal business model.

In 1999, there were no alternatives for content aggregation—it was My Netscape or the highway. It’s 2005 now. If an aggregator (web based or traditional client) doesn’t work for you, you can take your subscription list with you and move on.

And if you’re banking on RSS to provide your users with a daily reason to come back to your site, and banking on saving a lot of money by not having to develop the content yourself… better think about banking some money to keep adding features to your aggregator. Because as you start falling behind your users’ other options, they’ll take their subscription lists and go.

It’s not a subscriber lock-in model. So where’s the incentive for a news site to add it? Simply put, it may be that you have to because everyone else will (see Steve Rubel on Dave Winer’s assertion that RSS and the news business is tightly bound). This is, maybe, the natural outgrowth of the increasing sense that all news is biased, and customers are increasingly going to demand to see all sides of the story—as well as declare that you show your own biases. Triangulation.

Update: So has anyone figured out how to import OPML into NewsBurst? I was really looking forward to putting 347 sources into it and seeing how well it held up…