Jenny: “lists that express our disbelief”

I was surprised to see traffic from Jenny the Shifted Librarian this morning. She follows up my thoughts about the iTunes Music Store and eMusic, noting,

I’m fascinated that this surge of supply to meet the pent-up demand for quality, online music downloads is resulting in lists of “finds.” By that, I mean posts by people who can’t believe they found a place to legally download their favorite bands’ music. We’re posting lists that express our disbelief, and those posts are what I’d like to aggregate.

This could be huge—a searchable list of artists that is annotated with the online stores that carry their music. I wonder whether such a project would cause the hoary cry of “no deep linking” to rear its ugly head. Probably not, I think, as long as the download sites still make money. But IANAL.

And in the spirit of Jenny’s post about stuff she’s found at Rhapsody, here are some of my other finds from eMusic and the iTunes Store:

  • eMusic
    • Red House Painters
    • the Pixies – just about everything save the recent compilations of b-sides and live tracks
    • Nick Cave – Nocturama
    • Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins – Dig
    • Mono
    • Mull Historical Society
  • iTunes Music Store
    • Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Lady Day and John Coltrane”
    • Blur
    • Johnny Cash – Cash IV
    • Mark Eitzel – West
    • …and others I’ve already listed

The best I ever did was freeze a banana

Found on Blogdex: In this month’s Popular Science, Theodore Gray (of Mathematica fame) gives the recipe for liquid nitrogen ice cream. Damn. Wish I had thought of that when I was freezing bananas in the lab after hours to amuse and impress friends. (Disclaimer: I only did that once, and it was a bitch to clean up. Fellow smart-ass physics undergrads, you’ll try it once and then curse me out.)

Measuring blogs, part IV: Pageviews and RSS

A follow up to my thoughts about the acceptability of inserting arbitrary markup into RSS feeds to measure usage. Some RSS “readers” just display headlines (such as the Radio and Manila RSS Box), meaning that the tracking code would have to be in the title element of the RSS to measure exposure successfully.

But Mark Pilgrim’s experiment last week has awakened the authoring community to the danger of arbitrary markup in RSS, and it appears the community has quickly decided that titles aren’t for markup.

Why did we go down this thought road in the first place? So we could track page views of RSS content. Why? To get clickthroughs (total clicks divided by total pageviews, for each RSS exposure). But we can’t get clickthroughs that way.

How about this: the most effective way to measure RSS usage is to put a tracking URL in your RSS feed, one that’s distinct from the one you expose through your navigation. This should be trivial with a good content management system (which all blogging engines are), and you needn’t even make the tracking URL hop through a redirect. On the landing page you can count unique users and all that fun stuff, and if the RSS link has been posted to other pages for discussion and people click through there you’ll be able to track the spread by watching referrers.

It can’t be that bad a system—after all CNet uses it. All links in their feeds include the parameters “part=rss&tag=feed,” and some even are directed to a special host, rss.com.com (oddly, the home page for this redirects to download.com).

In short, we don’t get reach and we don’t get clickthrough rates. But we get something that can empirically measure the effectiveness of RSS against other content promotion technologies.

Keiretsu update, with news on the side

A quick sweep of the blogosphere and a ton of interesting stuff this morning:

  • Matt Kirschenbaum (a fellow Hooblogger) writes about the convergence of anti-spam technologies and the humanities in a pointer to an email list discussion article by the editor of the venerable Humanist Discussion Group.
  • Jenny the Shifted Librarian points to the approval of the CD antitrust deal, indicating that I’ll be getting my check soon for $12.63 (not the $20 max). Which will pay for a month of eMusic, with enough left over for an Americano…
  • Esta writes about the family reunion picnic this past weekend. Best line: “…my DNA realigns to become ‘Dutch Hillbilly’ rather than the usual ‘Hillbilly Dutch.’” Um, shouldn’t that be Hillbilly Deutsch? Second best line: “A dinner party on Saturday with my parents, aunt, two first-cousins-once-removed, a first-cousin-once-removed-in-law, and most of the over-40 gay population of Lancaster County. And no air conditioning. We were stuck together like highly conversant and well-fed things that stick together.”
  • Greg did a rib feast for Father’s Day that sounds like it was even more lip-smackin’ than our grilled chicken. And in another post comes up with one of the great one-liners of the Bush presidency: “Bush gives more lip service than a cosmetician.”
  • In local news, in a story about Medicaid the King County Journal points out that the clinic that has my current primary care physician decided not to accept any more new Medicaid or Medicare patients. Actually, I should say had my current PCP. That little revelation is the last straw and I’m officially changing as of today.
  • My mother in law is moving her mail out of Netscape 6. The Mac Classic versions of Outlook Express and Entourage don’t appear to support importing mail from Netscape 6. Suggestions?
  • Rand Beers, former National Security Committee member and presidential antiterrorism advisor to George W., resigned his post over concerns that the Bush Administration’s antiterrorism policies were making America less secure. And now he’s working for John Kerry’s
    campaign    . Why? “The way he wants to make a difference in the world is to get his former boss out of office.” The article is amazing, quoting a series of interviews with Beers in a list of critiques of the administrations fumbles on terror—the administration is “not into teamwork” in a war on terror that requires it; the Iraq war shortchanged domestic priorities including security, ran the risk of breaking our alliances, and could breed more al-Qaeda recruits; Afghanistan was begun, then abandoned leaving it an unstable mess—that sound like they could have come straight from the Green[e]house.

  • People continue to speculate about new product announcements at next week’s MacWorld. Since Steve Jobs isn’t giving the keynote, I’d rate any significant product announcements about as likely as the Justice Department embracing FOIA.

iTunes Music Store: unanticipated side effect

A confession: I wasn’t an online music buyer until Apple’s iTunes Music Store came along. Too many of the stores seemed to offer music in proprietary formats which only proprietary clients could play. All seemed to have a crawlingly limited selection.

Of course, I realized after a week or so happily downloading stuff from the ’Store, the same is true of Apple’s offering. Proprietary format? Close—AAC appears to be supported by a very small constellation of players (fortunately including both iTunes and the iPod). And limited selection? Well, no Radiohead, Sigur Ros, or Beatles, and (at least for now) no indie labels. But, I decided, I was still having a good time with the service.

But what to do about all the indie music? As a loyal KEXP listener, I yearned for something beyond the major labels. Then Scott Rosenberg wrote about eMusic: “If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.” Encouraged, I gave it a try. And Scott was right: eMusic rocks. MP3 downloads, lots of indie labels, and (bonus) enormous swaths of the Fantasy back catalog, including Prestige and Riverside recordings (think Monk, 50s era Miles and Trane, and hundreds of other key jazz records). Over the last week (during my trial membership) I’ve downloaded the Pernice Brothers, Yo La Tengo, Kristin Hersh, Daniel Lanois’ latest (oh well, always at least one clinker), an EP of My Morning Jacket, and some oddities to round out old reconstructed mix tapes, like Peter Murphy. Plus the cover of “You and Your Sister” by This Mortal Coil with Kim and Kelley Deal on vocals.

So that unanticipated side effect? All of a sudden, after Apple’s breakthrough, buying music on line seems like the most natural thing in the world—regardless of who’s selling. I wouldn’t be surprised if eMusic and other online stores get a big lift over the next few months.

Weekend of leisure

parade of keg toss contestants

Of course, leisure is relative. Sometimes it means discovering a new restaurant. Sometimes it involves digging rocks into a slope and planting rudbeckia. Sometimes it involves a cookout with friends, brined chicken in a lime, fish sauce, mint, and hot pepper marinade sauce. Sometimes it even involves a beer festival. This weekend was all of the above.

The gardening is almost self explanatory—it spanned Friday night through Sunday afternoon, with breaks for the other activities. Friday night we went to Restaurant Zoë, which rocked our worlds. Lisa had king salmon with a blood orange sauce over lentils and fennel. I had veal cheeks with prosciutto. We shared a lamb carpaccio that was to die for.

Saturday—after gardening, and putting teak oil on our new patio furniture—we headed over with Ed and Gina to the Northwest Brew Fest. Lots of fun, as it was two summers ago (this year I was smart enough to wear sunscreen). There was a keg toss this year again, and I got photos with the Nokia, though none of them came out super well.

Sunday’s cookout was a lot of fun. In addition to the chicken, which was brined all day and cooked bone in on the grill before tossing it in the marinade sauce, I grilled some asparagus on the top rack and tossed it in olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. It was really nice just to sit back and enjoy the evening.

One down

Well, there will be one fewer Mac browser to worry about supporting in the future. Following on the heels of suggestions that there will be no future stand alone releases of Internet Explorer, Roz Ho of Microsoft’s MacBU said (and CNET confirms) that the Mac version of Internet Explorer is now browser history.

While I think that watching MacIE, Safari, OmniWeb, and whatever the heck will happen to the Gecko-based browsers compete would have been fun, I gotta say that as a web page designer I’m not unhappy to have one fewer platform to test on.

Scoble: “cheaper than marriage counseling”

Scoble writes about a fight with his wife over his weblogging. Gotta say I wondered how he was able to write that much and be married. He’s right that writing about it is good therapy, but (once you’ve got the words down) it might be better to talk about it.

And yeah, balancing family and “creative time” can be tricky. Sometimes it’s easier to be “creative” (or just busy) than be there for people and deal with real things. Where’s the line? It’s a slippery slope. All I know is that I blog a lot when I’m depressed, or when I’m alone and happy; when I’m with my wife and happy, I don’t blog as much because I’d rather be there with her.

So yeah, good luck, Scoble, and try talking about it.

Long day

Got pulled into a review with my senior director this morning (planned) and my general manager this afternoon (unplanned), which played hell with my workload (as well as my blogging). For now, know that (a) I’ve been listening to the new Radiohead album and alternately awed and unimpressed, almost track by track (it’s uncanny how good the good stuff is; I think the bad stuff will grow on me) and (b) I plan to relax tonight and not think about work or RSS tracking. Maybe AmazonHandler, though. Maybe.

Measuring blogs, part 3: Tracking RSS the old fashioned way?

A reader emailed after my post last week about measuring RSS to ask “Why not slip a 1 pixel ‘webbug’ into the RSS feed?” Good question.

Advantages of web bug graphics:

  • Unobtrusive in the RSS reader’s pane.
  • A direct hit to your server, allows you to play games like feed views and unique users. Note I didn’t say page views or content views; more on that in a second.

That’s about it, really.

Disadvantages? Plentiful:

  • No referrer, no specific content tracking. RSS readers generally send “no referrer” per the HTTP standard rather than try to make up a referring URL (though some, like Radio Userland, refer back to a host page for their services). So you can’t track which content piece the reader was coming from.
  • Doesn’t always get forwarded. RSS items generally contain minimal markup, so an extra image tag inserted is sure to be noticed and removed by most bloggers. Why is this important? We care about the total reach that our content gets, on other peoples’ sites as well as our own. At minimum you won’t be able to count any references that your content gets on tech-savvy bloggers’ sites.

Plus, of course, any tracking system that relies on client side code can be exposed—and risks your readers’ alienation. And, as we’ve discussed before, alienating your blogging readers can be a sure way to invite shunning—and shrink your reach, but good. Kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do in the first place.

And, by the way, this goes double for any more complicated embedded Javascripts or other solutions.

But what about embedding meaningful images, each with a unique name (perhaps associated with your article’s GUID), in each article? Kinda suggests that the photobloggers are the people most likely to get real tracking of how their content is read.

Of course, they’re also the most likely to get it stolen, renamed, and rehosted on someone else’s site.

This is starting to feel like the three laws of thermodynamics, which I propose we recast as the three laws of measuring RSS:

  1. You can’t win.
  2. You can’t break even.
  3. But you don’t want to get out of the game. Not if weblogs are worth one one-hundredth of the hype that they’ve received. (And I think they’re underhyped. Weblogs at Harvard? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.)

Second blogaversary

Today is my second blogaversary. Two years ago I started this blog in earnest and quickly got embroiled in XMLRPC, scripting, and other stuff. Since my first blogaversary, graduating from business school, moving 3000 miles, and buying a house, the blog has been a lot less technical and hopefully a little more human (apologies to those for whom either prospect is daunting).

Some things remain the same: the first post was about listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac, and music has continued as a theme. The second post was about beer, and I’ve since broken out food and beverage as a separate department (and one that I haven’t written for in a while). The third: about the Mac and streaming audio.

AmazonHandler acting up

I’ve had no less than four people contact me within the last few weeks to tell me that AmazonHandler, my AppleScript glue to allow calling the Amazon Web Services API, isn’t working for them. The most common error is “Can’t make ‘http://soap.amazon.com/onca/soap’ into a record” but others have been reported as well, including problems with finding and loading the support scripts to do SOAP.

I think the first problem is caused by some code I put into SOAPXMLRPCHandler to work around a bug Apple introduced in the underlying SOAP layer sometime in the late 10.1.x/10.2 timeframe. The support script problem is tricky. The point of scripts is that they’re supposed to be quick and easy, so making the user install support scripts seems dumb. But it’s quicker and easier for me to release scripts that use common technologies (including the Manila API and SOAP generally) if I keep the scripts separate.

I promise I’m looking at it, if only because having this script would allow me to automate some of the workflow around “Current Listening” and “Current Reading.” But be patient—I have a day job, after all.