Digital Parsimony

Not a good start.

I’ve spent the past few hours trying to navigate my way through Music Beta and ended up finding new frustrations at nearly every turn. Music Beta in its current form is far from what we’d expect from a Google product— it’s a web of confusing programs without a lot of instruction as to how to actually get to the music you want to hear.

via Google’s Music Beta first look: it’s miserable | VentureBeat and Daring Fireball.

I just discovered a nifty application in Google Labs, it’s called Google Sets. It basically finds anything synonymous to the things you enter. I never though about it before, but if you enter three or four artists you like, it’ll recommend some similar ones. I found some great music this way, you should try it! Google Sets.

The music industry whales are putting our internet service providers under pressure by constantly making laws and regulations about how they need to monitor their traffic for pimple-nosed kids downloading the latest Jay-Z album from their favorite BitTorrent site. Who pays for the new filtering equipment though? The ISPs do, and I think that’s lame. The RIAA doesn’t understand that the Internet isn’t a government-controlled utility that can be shut off, it’s a collaboration of private networks controlled by the private sector. In other words, we do what we want. So what does Jerry Scroggin from Bayou Internet and Communications do? Ask them to put their money where their mouth is, and of course, they don’t really want to stop piracy, they just want to rob more people with their crazy lawsuits.

Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.

“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”

Snipped from CNET News.