Fixing iTunes CDDB lookup – more details

Since Apple’s forums don’t seem to support permalinks, the hint I previously posted about fixing iTunes for Windows’ connection to CDDB isn’t complete. Here’s how to reestablish connection to CDDB if your track lookups start failing:

  1. Quit iTunes for Windows.
  2. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools | Internet Options, click on the Connections tab, and click on the LAN Settings button.
  3. In the dialog that follows, uncheck the checkbox about using a proxy. Hit OK, then OK again.
  4. Open RegEdit and look for the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_USERSoftwareCDDBControl2.0. Delete this key.
  5. Open iTunes and insert the CD. iTunes should now be able to connect to CDDB again—at least, until it forgets again later…
  6. If necessary, reenable your proxy settings.

Speaking of Virginia universities…

It looks like some of the more paleolithic of the undergrads at my alma mater are protesting the trend of extension of benefits to same sex partners. See this opinion piece by an assistant editor at the Cavalier Daily, which appears to be in reaction to a protest site, DontGiveToUVa.com, that recently appeared over the issue. (Aside: what is it with this paper and neo(lithic) conservatives? In my day it was editorial cartoons ridiculing the Jewish student union for asking the university to consider not having football games before sundown on Rosh Hashanah.)

Kudos to Tin Man for noting the piece and providing an extremely well written and well thought out response.

Feed similarity: the Also Subscribe To feature

I started to write yesterday about this but decided to wait until something happened. I’m glad I did because the end result was much cooler than I described.

While I was chatting with Dave at the end of his Microsoft talk, two folks came up and asked if there were a way to cut through some of the noise of the RSS ocean based on recommendations. The young woman described it as “people who subscribe to feed X also subscribed to feed y.” Dave first told them that the SDK was open to anyone to code against, then got out his cell phone, called Andrew Grumet, and gave the phone over to Shira who described the idea to him.

I had to leave at that point so I didn’t know how it would turn out. But yesterday Andrew had the first version of Similar Feeds up and running, and Dave pointed to it last night. Here’s my similarity list.

(Incidentally, thanks to all for the comments and pointers over the last couple of days. It’s been helpful hearing other peoples’ perspectives. Shouts out to Tom Harper (subscribed) and Korby Parnell (subscribed).)

Around the block

A quick link roundup:

Getting Script-dotted in 2004

Yesterday’s liveblog of Dave Winer’s Microsoft Research Talk drew a lot of visitors. This has been true for my previous liveblogs as well. The difference is in where the visitors came from.

My first high traffic day ever—a Script-dotting, if you will—was when I pontificated after a MacWorld in 2001 about XML-RPC on Mac OS X. Dave Winer and Macintouch pointed to the article and I got something like 2000 visits. About a quarter of those were directly from Scripting News.

This time, the flow isn’t as high—probably around 700 visits—but the sources are a lot more diverse. I can account for about half of those, but instead of coming from one pool, they come from Scripting.com, the Scobleizer (yup, I been Scobleized!), weblogs.asp.net (the aggregated flow of Microsoft bloggers) and Anita Rowland. A handful come from people reading news feeds in Radio (with the telltale :5335 or /system/pages/news referrers).

The rest? Direct hits without referrers, meaning in all likelihood they read it in a client side RSS reader.

So what has changed?

  1. Scoble is sending tons of flow. It isn’t just Dave (and Macintouch).
  2. There are a ton of other bloggers who read Scoble; one of them posted on weblogs.asp.net.
  3. There are a larger ton of people reading these people in RSS feeds.

The last point is most interesting to me. Why? It stands all the reputation metrics of the blogosphere on their collective heads. The readers visiting from RSS are pretty much invisible to conventional metrics reporting. Call it the dark matter of blog referrals. These readers don’t leave traces that show up in Google, can’t be trackbacked, can’t be read in referral logs. All you can know is you’re being read.

And maybe it’s healthier that way.

Thoughts on Dave’s talk today

Finally, my driving-home impressions of Dave’s talk today:

  1. It was interesting seeing how tightly tuned the Microsoft crowd was to issues of blogging platforms (e.g. SharePoint vs. LiveJournal vs. other platforms) and less to the social impact of blogging, both inside the organization and on society as a whole, which seemed to me to be rather more along the lines of Dave’s point. At one point with all the SharePoint questions, I wondered if the product team had been on the “to” line of the invitation.
  2. Really interesting message about blogging both positive and negative messages about your organization (in the context of the Channel Dean incident).
  3. Dave’s point about the 2004 election is right on. There’s a sense among a lot of people, even folks who aren’t normally political, that this is our chance to take hold of the reins of this country again and bring it back away from paranoia and extremism and back to the values that we were created in. And a lot of the empowerment stems from learning in the blogosphere that we aren’t alone. Of course it doesn’t end in the blogosphere. People have to get out and vote.
  4. Which brings me to my next observation: I think that we still haven’t hashed out the difference between the blogosphere’s role in affecting “influentials” (whether in the technical or political world) and effecting real change. It’s hard to get a bunch of engineers via weblogs and wikis to agree on adopting technological formats; harder still to convince someone to vote for a candidate on the web, particularly when they don’t necessarily read your weblog. (Remember, I have many readers; 20, in fact (or 21, as I just got contacted by another today!).)
  5. But if Dave Winer reads your blog and tells five hundred or a thousand people? Or Glenn Reynolds? And some of those people are law professors, or media folks, or ministers, or what have you, and they tell 10 others…
  6. One thing is for sure: this model of the blogosphere as people talking to influencers and invisible channels of influence sure puts my thoughts about measuring the reach of the blogosphere in perspective, which is to say in the circular file. Technorati and its peer tools can tell you what bloggers are talking about, but not about whether their readers are paying attention and doing anything about it.
  7. Interesting thoughts from Dave about Microsoft publishing the worst people have to say about it on the PressPass site. Must remember to suggest that to the editor. Seriously, though, it’s not out of the realm of the feasible to suggest that Duncan Mackenzie’s Visual Basic blog (which appears on the MSDN Visual Basic dev center) might discuss some of the issues that VB 6 developers are having migrating to .NET head on.
  8. Dave says that knowledge sharing via weblogs at Harvard is going slowly. Should that have been a surprise? Maybe not. I think the biggest takeaway from the speech today was that change is hard, particularly in organizations.

Why liveblog?

That is, why go to events like Dave Winer’s talk today at Microsoft, MacWorld San Francisco 2002 or BloggerCon and take notes about everything that’s going on, and post them in real time to your blog?

Two reasons, at least for me. One is that taking extensive notes helps me to pay attention. I’ve always learned better when I took copious notes; not so much for later review as for making me focus on the words at hand.

Second, I hopefully add some incremental value for folks who can’t attend the events in question.

Of course, one adds more value through commentary than transcription. Soon, soon…

So much for Bloomsday

Clancy Ratliff at CultureCat points to threats from the James Joyce estate to enforce copyright through lawsuits if there are public readings of Ulysses during the 100th anniversary Bloomsday festivals this June.

For the uninitiated, Bloomsday marks the anniversary of the events of Joyce’s brilliant novel, which all occur on the 16th of June in 1904. The occasion is typically marked by all day readings of the novel in pubs and other gathering places, a typically Irish homage to an otherwise monstrously forbidding work (at least by reputation). The threats have caused the 100th Anniversary celebration to cancel planned readings and performances of Joyce’s works. I can’t imagine that the estate thinks this will help appreciation of Joyce’s work. Maybe it’s time that someone introduced them to the economic concept of “growing the pie” by building demand for Joyce’s works, rather than crouching in the corner muttering “my preciousss” over royalties.

In the meantime, I’m marking my calendar to be violating some serious copyright law on the 16th of June. Care to join me?

QTN™: Ridley’s Witchfinder Porter

Before I tuck into follow-up thoughts from Dave’s talk today at Microsoft, a brief pause of appreciation for a really fine porter. One of my monthly beer selections, Ridley’s Witchfinder Porter. Color when poured is a deep ruby-black, with a big (albeit shortlived) thick white head. Nose is malty, toffee-ish almost, with hints of chocolate. After that, the initial taste is malty and full but turns surprisingly, pleasantly dry after, with hints of smoke and more chocolate after. Definitely recommended as a pleasant change from American porters (not that there’s anything wrong with them…)