Copyright

I HAVE often read that illegal file sharing is killing the music industry. Those who usually come out with such a statement tend to be either from or affiliated with the recording industry.

But this got me thinking… so what if it is destroying the music industry? Think about it. The music industry doesn’t exist to make musicians filthy rich. Nor does it exist for the benefit of the public. No. It exists for one sole reason – to make as much money as it possibly can for itself and its shareholders. Of course it does, it’s a business!

When you start thinking of the likes of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI, think of a desire to make a massive, pure and unadulterated profit. It’s all about the $ for them. And why not? Businesses exist for that purpose after all.

That is why when they whinge that illegal file sharing is killing the industry I get a little pissed off.

Look at the state of music in 2009. I’m 25 and there are a two or three of musicians considered ‘popular’ right now who I think are any good, and they’ve been around for a number of years already. The last new band I heard and thought “wow, they’re good” was the Arctic Monkeys. That was back in 2006. Most new music is dire, but a lot of this dire music seems to sell by the bucketload. Music that sells by the bucketload tends to be marketed to teenagers, this isn’t new. Since the 1960s this has been the case. The music industry dictates what they think is good, they give it a bit of a polish in the studio, create a video teenagers will go “oooh” at, and it’ll be an instant hit. Even better if it sounds irritating as a mobile phone ringtone. Britney Spears is case in point. She cannot sing, but she can dance, she looked cute, and computer software made her sound good. So she made her record company filthy rich off the backs of teenagers.

Teenagers don’t define what is popular in music. The music industry does. And illegal file sharing is putting an end to that.

If there’s less money in the pockets of the music industry because making music isn’t seen as being as profitable as it once was, then record companies won’t sign up any old crap. Only the best would be signed. Only the best will play sell-out concerts. Only the best will make serious money for the music industry.

Harsh? I don’t think it is. Football clubs in the FA Premier League don’t sign any old crap, because that’d be utterly pointless. Fans pay a lot of money to see the best, and they demand the best. It isn’t possible to put someone who isn’t talented at football on a football pitch in a Premier League football match and tell teenagers he’s great because he looks good. It’ll only end in tears.

I read an article recently that almost nobody buys music in China because it is so widely available illegally and the chances of being caught are minuscule. But instead of it killing the Chinese music industry it is actually strengthening it. People download the albums illegally or buy copies from street sellers, listen to it, and if they love it they go and see the musician or band live. A lot of musicians over there have embraced this economic model as advertising. Think about it… people get the music illegally, and if they love it they’ll pay money to see live music because they know it’ll be good. They just don’t want to take a risk paying money for something they might not even like.

It’s a way for people to discover fantastic music without taking a risk, and I’ll tell you that it’s an infuriating experience to pay £10 for an album only to find it’s crap. I’ve done that enough times.

The music industry has needed a revolution for years, and it has finally come in the guise of illegal file sharers. Illegal file sharers aren’t the evildoers depicted in the media by the music industry, they’re people who are sick to the back teeth of being spoon-fed crap aimed at teenagers. As was once said, we have 19th century intellectual property laws and 20th century business models in the complexity of the 21st century. Once the music industry stops feeding the public the drivel they do now they’ll be a lot better off in the long run.

City bankers were the target of a lot of hatred when all those banks failed last year, and many people were angry because these bankers were being rewarded for being so utterly crap at their jobs. Why should crap musicians be any different? Why should they get rich for being rubbish? They shouldn’t!

Don’t pity the music industry. If their business model cannot operate in the 21st century without them threatening to sue children for downloading songs then they need to change – desperately. Good musicians will always find a way of making a lot of money, and rightly so. Crap musicians need to get a job like the rest of us!

A dilemma

SINCE my blog has switched from a politics blog to a technology blog I have decided that some further changes are needed. The main being where to host it.

Currently this blog is hosted for a tidy sum each year, and it’s a great deal at £45 per year. However, WordPress are willing to host it for free, but with limitations.

If I choose WordPress to host it for free I lose access to various plugins and themes, and right now my blog uses quite a few plugins. I’d also have to ditch the current theme, which would be a mighty shame as I like it.

From what I can tell, these are the pros and cons:

Pros:
It’s completely and utterly free, unless I want my own domain name, and then it’s about £10 a year.
It’s low maintenance – WordPress do the backups, the upgrades and whatnot for me.
If I somehow ever get on the frontpage of Digg, my blog won’t crash.

Cons:
Almost all plugins and themes are off-limits.

I think I’ll give it a try as a test and see how it goes. £50 a year for hosting the domain name is a little pricey when my blog is still only a baby.

The Google

DO you use one search engine for all your searching needs? I do. Unsurprisingly I use Google. My guess is that you do too. As do approximately 65% of internet users.

Why? What makes Google any better than Yahoo, Bing or Ask Jeeves?

To find out I decided to do a little test.

I ran a search of the word “Apple” on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask Jeeves.

The above chart shows that Yahoo clearly lead the way in finding more webpages with “Apple” in them than Ask Jeeves, Bing and Google combined do. But is that a good thing? After all, who is going to sift through 1.63 billion webpages to find what they want? Then again nobody is going to do that with Ask Jeeves’ 55.6 million either, so the number of results is completely useless.

Gettin’ down to business

My guess is that most who use search engines usually find what they want on the first page of search results. Some will go two, maybe three pages deep, but it’s probably going to be single figures who go any deeper than that. So I’ll look at the first page…

Click to enlarge.

As you can see from the image on the right, a Google search for “Apple” brings up what it believes to be the most relevant matches first.

There’s one ad, for the Apple Store. The first proper search result is the Apple UK homepage, which I’d say is pretty relevant given that I’m in the UK. The second result is the US Apple homepage, with the third being the US Apple Store. So far so good. What you cannot see is below this third search result – a selection of Google News results for “Apple”. Then there’s the Wikipedia article on the fruit apple, then an Apple Agency result, then the Apple Developer Connection result. After that there’s Apple’s financial performances from Yahoo, then the Apple Livepage page (the default start page in Safari for new Apple Mac users) and finally the Apple portal on Slashdot.

Click to enlarge.

Next up is Yahoo. If you look at the image on the right (click to enlarge it) you will see the following:

There’s a sponsored advert at the top which is pretty much the same as the one on Google. The first proper search result is the Apple UK website, and the second is the European Apple website. The third is the US Apple Store, and the fourth is the UK Apple Store. Next up is the Apple, Inc. Wikipedia article, then a Wikipedia article on the Apple II series, and then the Apple support website. To round off the first page is the Apple Illustration website, the Apple India website, and the Apple page on Gizmodo. At the very bottom there are two text ads – one for Woolworths Apple products, and the other for some video converter.

Click to enlarge.

Now for Bing. First up is the same sponsored ad found on Google and Yahoo. The first proper search result is the Apple UK website, then the US Apple website. Third up is the Apple Developer Connection, and the fourth search result is the Apple Developer Connection Worldwide Developers Conference 2009 website. Next up is the US Student Discount Apple Store website, and then there’s the Apple Livepage. After that is the official Apple Support Forums, then the Apple Support website. The last two are the Apple US Back to School Store promo, and the Apple Certification Programs website.

Click to enlarge.

Finally it’s time for Ask Jeeves. First up there are two sponsored ads – the same Apple UK Store ad found on Google, Yahoo and Bing, and then there’s a Woolworths UK Apple products ad. The first proper search is the UK Apple website, and then the US Apple website. After that there are a few news article searches, and then the Apple Developer Connection website. After that comes the fruit apple Wikipedia article, and then the US Apple iPhone website, closely followed by the yourmobilephonereviews.co.uk iPhone review site and the mobiledia.com website. Finally there’s the phonescoop.com website. There are the same two ads at the bottom as were found at the top.

So what were the differences?

I’ve got to admit that Yahoo’s seemed the most relevant when taking the entire first page into account. All four returned their results incredibly quickly, so there’s no issue with speed. Google and Ask Jeeves returned some news articles, which was handy.

Perhaps the least relevant search came from Ask Jeeves who threw a few mobile phone review websites in the mix despite me just searching for “Apple”. Not exactly what I was after.

If I were to rank them in order of how relevant they are, from most to least, it would look like this:

1.) Yahoo
2.) Google
3.) Bing
4.) Ask Jeeves.

So I’m still left asking myself the question “why do I always, unfailingly, use Google?” It clearly isn’t because it produces better search results, because by and large the big four are all pretty much the same give or take the odd website.

Maybe it’s the way the sites appear on my screen.

Google looks clean, neat and tidy. Its main search page has zero ads, is mostly white spaces and the text is nice and simple.

Yahoo is a mess. It has flash adverts, links all over the show, not to mention categories and other nonsense. When I want to search I just want to search. I don’t want the other nonsense.

Bing is, I must admit, a breath of fresh air. The search box is easy to locate and the background photograph is usually a pretty impressive one. No ads, no nonsense, it looks great, if a little distracting.

Like Google, Ask Jeeves is clean, neat and tidy, and most importantly, it’s simple to use. Jeeves presents a clickable question of the day above the search box, and the search box is not amidst a load of clutter.

If I were to rank them in order of how appealing they are to look at, it would look like this:

1.) Google
2.) Ask Jeeves
3.) Bing
4.) Yahoo.

Hmm… so Yahoo is the best for results but the worst to look at. Bing has so far come a steady third place in both rankings.

But then I’m going to throw a spanner in the works here by saying that I use Firefox, and as such I don’t ever have to look at the main page of any of those search engines, for Firefox comes with a search bar built in. A quick click and I can choose from Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask Jeeves (Bing and Ask Jeeves can only be used by installing addons). I very rarely go to google.com to search as I do it through the search bar in Firefox. All it takes is a click and I can select whatever search engine I want to use. It’s effortless.

There must be a reason why I use Google dammit! It’s not ease of use because as I said above it’s effortless to switch to another search engine in my Firefox search bar.

Maybe it is because I have used Google for the best part of a decade. But then a decade ago I was using Internet Explorer, Winamp, Windows 98 and Napster. Now I’m using Firefox, iTunes, OS X and Windows Vista/Windows 7 and iTunes Music Store. See? I’m not resistant to change. Recently I even ditched Safari for Firefox because it’s better. I ditched the Nokia N95 for the iPhone. I ditched ordinary Sky Digital for Sky+. I ditched a Peugeot 106 for a Volkswagen Passat. Change for the better is good.

So let us return to the rankings I made earlier. Let us say for arguments sake that 1st place gets 4 points, 2nd place 3 points, 3rd place 2 points and 4th place 1 point. The rankings will look like this:

1.) Google (7 points)
2.) Yahoo (5 points)
3.) Bing (4 points)
4.) Ask Jeeves (4 points).

Ergo, Google wins. Is it really that simple? Do I use Google simply because the front page seems more relevant and because the main page I never use looks better? How fickle I must be.

But I don’t believe that, not for one moment.

Consider this… Yahoo are currently redesigning their main page to make it more appealing and what not. Therefore, if Yahoo continues to pump out more relevant searches and looks two points better it’ll tie with Google in my ranking, which is frankly a load of rubbish because in reality I never use Yahoo.

Having thought long and hard above all of the above I was still unable to come to a solid conclusion. I guess Google just feels like home. I cannot sum it up any other way. It just seems to trigger the right chemical response in my brain, whereas Yahoo doesn’t.

Ah well, sorry for wasting your time reading the above. If I did one thing though, I hope I got you to think about why you use the search engine you use. After all, there’s a reason why you do.

Why the future looks rosy for technology

HAVE a think about this for a moment…

The world’s three most influential computing corporations are all from the United States of America – Microsoft, IBM and Apple. All three changed and continue to change the way we use computers.

Then there’s the other players – Adobe, AMD, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Electronic Arts, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo to name just a few. They’re all from the United States, and they’re all incredibly influential throughout the history of computing and the internet.

So in short the USA brought us revolution after revolution in computing, and still does to this day. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, they’re all American.

With the Chinese and Indians making serious advances in software engineering and hardware design, it’s only a matter of time until the Next Big Thing comes out of either country. Many of the American revolutions in hardware and software occurred in California, a state of just 33.8 million people. Now imagine what a combined population of 2.5 billion people could conjure up.

It’s going to be a glorious future for technology.

Can a BlackBerry do this?

MY iPhone 3G is awesome. Much love to those who designed and built it. It truly is the work of geniuses.

An often overlooked feature of the iPhone is its numerous screens, each accessible by swiping your finger across the screen from left to right. For your viewing pleasure I have taken screenshots of my screens…

The above screenshot shows my main home screen with my most often used applications and services such as Messages, Calendar, Camera, Google Maps, etc. Touch any icon for a few seconds and you can move it around anywhere you like.

The above screenshot is largely made up of the original apps I had in the first few months of getting my iPhone. My favourite on here are iShoot and HoldEm. Wikipanion is invalable. You may have noticed that the bottom four icons (Phone, Mail, iPod and Safari) remain the same. They’re for ease of access.

The next screenshot (above) contains some of the newer apps I have downloaded over the past few months. TVGuide is great, and Paper Toss is a fantastic time waster.

The next screen is where it gets interesting…

The above screenshot is where the funkier stuff happens, and some of it is stuff Apple strictly do not approve of. See the fourth app on the right at the top called Cydia? That’s what appears when an iPhone has been ‘jailbroken’. For those not in the know, ‘jailbroken’ means that an iPhone has been modified by software to let it do things that Apple don’t approve of, such as installing third-party non-approved apps. Jailbreaking is easy, not particularly risky, and it opens up the iPhone to a whole world of possibilities. The apps from Cydia are Flashlight (much brighter than any Apple-approved flashlights), genesis4iphone (plays Sega Megadrive/Genesis games), iPoints, Terminal, XKCD comics and Quakes. The rest are Apple App Store apps.

The above screenshot has just one app in it – Rope’n'Fly.

The final screenshot below is something that non-Jailbroken iPhones will never see…

The above screenshot is of a magic little screen. A swipe of the bar at the top of any normal screen which says the battery life, signal strength, network etc and this pops up. From here it tells you what your IP addresses are, how much memory is left, and crucially it lets you kill services quickly and easily just by pressing them. I use this a lot when traveling because I use one of those FM broadcaster thingies which broadcasts sound from my iPhone on a specific frequency which is picked up by my car radio. Interference makes it hard to listen to so I quickly and easily switch 3G and Phone modes off. No more interference!

Try doing all that on a BlackBerry.

A wee game

I DOWNLOADED a game today from the iPhone App Store called Rope’n'Fly. It’s a simple game where the user is some sort of Spiderman-esque character who has to flick his ‘rope’ (cough, spider web, cough) at tall buildings and swing between them. Touch the floor and die.

It’s awesome so it is. Look at the graphics above and below… it’s basic, simple, yet brilliant. It’s so easy to play but so hard to get it right. In what has become something of a trend with iPhone/iPod Touch games, I’ve noticed that the best games are those which are simple to look at, simple to play and incredibly addictive. Fancy graphics aren’t everything these days.

In fact, I think I’m going to play it again now. The free version is limited to 30 seconds on the training mode, and is great for getting the hang of it, and the full version costs 59p (99 cents). For the price of a can of Coke you can have this much fun. It’s outstanding.

Seven Day Statporn

SINCE undergoing a policy change last Sunday (to go from blogging primarily about politics and to a lesser extent technology to blogging solely about technology) I decided I should have a look at how my blog’s statistics are doing.

First up, I shall detail the statistics from the week prior to the change.

Numbers

Between 5th July and 11th July, my blog received:
67 visits
127 pageviews
1.90 pages/visit
76.12% bounce rate (basically people who come to the site but don’t look at anything else and leave. A lower percentage is better.)
2 minutes and 52 seconds average time spent on site
44.78% were new visitors.

Between 12th July and 18th July, my blog received:
121 visits (up 80.60% on the previous seven days)
208 pageviews (up 63.78%)
1.72 pages/visit (down 9.31%)
71.90% bounce rate (down 5.54% – down is good)
7 minutes and 14 seconds average time spent on site (up 152.19%)
57.02% were new visitors (up 27.36%).

Now for a few statistics to warm my heart…

Browsers

Between 5th and 11th July 2009:
65.67% of users were using Internet Explorer
20.90% were using Firefox
8.96% were using Safari
4.48% were using a BlackBerry 8900

Between 12th and 18th July 2009:
40.50% were using Internet Explorer
30.58% were using Firefox
11.57% were using Safari
10.74% were using BlackBerry 8900
2.48% were using Mozilla
2.48% were using Mozilla Compatible Agent
1.65% were using Chrome.

That’s great news, my friends. The less people using Internet Explorer the better! Safari still has far too small a market share amongst my readers, but it’s still somewhat respectable. It’s good to see my readers are more diverse in terms of what browsers they use, and one in ten using a BlackBerry is impressive. Much love to Firefox users who are attempting to wrestle Internet Explorer from the top of the tree.

Operating Systems

Between 5th and 11th July 2009:
82.09% used Windows when visiting my blog
10.45% used OS X
4.48% did not specify
2.99% used iPhone OS.

Between 12th and 18th July 2009:
67.77% used Windows
10.74% used OS X
10.74% did not specify
7.44% used Linux
2.43% used iPhone OS
0.83% used iPod.

Below is a chart that shows it in pretty colours:

It’s clear that Windows is by far and away the most-used operating system amongst my blog’s readers, although since becoming a tech blog there has been a rise in Linux readers. Hopefully they’ll stick around. It’d be nice to see more OS X users, though, although they do actually only represent about 1 in every 10 computer users around the world, so 1 in 10 on here is pretty accurate.

Operating Systems and Browsers

Between 5th and 11th July 2009:
65.67% used Windows and Internet Explorer
16.42% used Windows and Firefox
5.97% used OS X and Safari
4.48% used BlackBerry 8900 and its browser
4.48% used OS X and Firefox
2.99% used iPhone OS and Safari.

Between 12th and 18th July 2009:
40.50% used Windows and Internet Explorer
24.79% used Windows and Firefox
10.74% used BlackBerry 8900 and its browser
7.44% used OS X and Safari
3.31% used OS X and Firefox
2.48% used Linux and Mozilla
2.48% used Linux and Safari
1.65% used Windows and Chrome
1.65% used iPhone OS and Mozilla Compatible Agent
0.83% used iPod and Mozilla Compatible Agent
0.83% used Windows and Safari
0.83% used iPhone OS and Safari.

Below is a nice little chart just in case you didn’t fancy digesting the above numbers:

It is quite surprising the massive drop in readers of my blog using Windows and Internet Explorer. Still, it’s only been a week since this place becoming a technology blog so all of the above statistics are pretty meaningless in the long run.

What do I make of it all?

Well it’s abundantly clear that since becoming a technology blog my blog has become a lot more diverse in terms of what my readers use on their computers. They also appear to be less likely to use Internet Explorer than the politics bunch who used to read my blog. That’s not really a surprise.

It’s nice to see readers are on average sticking around a lot longer than they used to, and that 4% less readers are leaving the site without looking at anything else. Both are encouraging statistics. My goal is to keep them around for an average of over ten minutes and to get the bounce rate down below 66%.

I know that the first seven days of a new blog can be a bit up and down and using just seven days worth of statistics is meaningless, not to mention comparing them to the previous seven days, but I thought it’d be interesting to see if there would be much of a difference. That said, I’ve just had a look at the browser and OS statistics from 28th June to 4th July and the percentages are eerily similar to those a week later – especially the Internet Explorer ones (they’re less than 0.5% different).

But then is it really a surprise that technology readers are going to be more inclined to use non-Microsoft browsers and operating systems than politics readers? No.

So while this little study is completely meaningless, and my viewing figures are still tiny, they at least appear to be improving. It’ll be interesting what the figures are after a month.

Nostalgia

I HAVE been reading this interesting article over on the Guardian website about what we have done technologically since first putting a man on the moon in 1969. It seems people have been whining that they want to return back to the 1960s when life was apparently simpler and better. Why is that? Why are some looking back on the moon landings as being as if they were from a time when all was well in the world and life was worry-free?

Thinking about it, life may have been ‘simpler’ back then, because like the author says people didn’t know as much as we know now about things like climate change, poverty, crime and what not. We have 24-hour news on TV now, and news which is available at the click of a mouse button whenever we want it, and from wherever we want it.

Also, where would we be without mobile phones? Or computers that we can actually carry around? Or MRI machines? The first human-to-human heart transplant took place just two years before the Apollo 11 landed on the moon, whereas now they are commonplace. A lot of what people seemingly take for granted now were not commonplace or did not exist back in 1969. Would they happily give them up to go back to then?

But then you’ve also got to acknowledge that in the 1960s the Cold War and the Vietnam War were in full swing. As was the Civil Rights Movement in the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, and China developed a nuclear weapons programme and its Cultural Revolution inflicted a lot of needless damage to China’s society and economy. In short the world was not as happy as people like to remember.

So here’s to the Apollo moon landings. They were an incredible feat but I certainly don’t hanker to live in a time when so many technological advances we take for granted nowadays had barely been invented.

Adverts

YOU will be pleased to discover that I have removed all advertisements from my blog. It just didn’t look right, and in the time I had them I made a great big whopping total of 5p (8 cents).

Namaste.

Digg baiting and why it is wrong!

YESTERDAY I was having a read of an article on how to digg bait. Digg baiting is a practice where people – usually bloggers – intentionally incite Digg users by submitting blog posts on to Digg which are likely to piss them off. It’s a more subtle art than doing that, as it’s got to be a legitimate article which prods and pokes at their sensibilities until they attack you.

It sounds awfully childish, but I did it to see if the many articles on digg baiting were right. The thing about Digg users is that many of them are teenage boys who love a good ‘flame war’ (a flame war is hostile or insulting interaction between internet users in the form of a discussion). Digg is somewhat infamous for this.

My social experiment was two-pronged. First it involved writing an article about why Windows users are idiots (for the record, they’re not! It was purely an experiment) and the second one was about a top 10 list of why Apple are awesome. The Windows article contained manipulated statistics (a few but not all were) and the Apple article contained manipulated statistics and outright barefaced made up statistics. The Windows article was designed to enrage the young Digg users who are firmly in the Microsoft camp, and the Apple article was designed to pander to the Apple fanboys (for those not in the know, a fanboy is an obsessive fan of comic books, films or technology) over at Digg.

How did I fare? My experiment worked up until this morning, and this morning my experiment all of a sudden didn’t work particularly well. By that I mean I was banned by Digg. It seems such an experiment is against the rules, apparently. Bah. Sorry Digg! That’ll teach me to not read their terms and conditions.

/me sulks away deflated