Plunderphonic idea for iTunes' Audiobooks

But what really interests me, as an untapped artistic opportunity, is Apple's new collection of 5,000 audiobooks, radio interviews (Fresh Air, Science Friday, Car Talk, etc) and comedies. The sound samples in this section of Apple's music store are 90 seconds long, and there are 5,000 of them! That's like 125 hours' worth of spoken word material to plunder!

Imagine the possibilities for samples. Setting aside the copyright clearance issues: I'm strictly thinking of the artistic possibilities for sampling this huge spoken word archive, and inserting snippets of clips into new musical compositions. Remember you read it here first when some big publication publishes an article about it.

Finally! Searching INSIDE books

This feature will drive new sales at Amazon, no doubt. But I'm not sure the feature, which I'm going to be using like crazy, is going to cause me to buy additional books from Amazon. I suspect my Amazon purchase rate will stay the same. For me, the tool will be useful as a research tool pointing me to sources that I can then go find at a library, used book store, or at ISBN.nu.

UPDATE: Here's a good overview of Amazon's new service, by Gary Wolf in WIRED News.

2nd UPDATE: Some additional thoughts. For someone like me, who's doign a huge amount of research, the ability to do full-text searches through hundreds of thousands of books is a dream come true. Best thing to happen on the web since Google opened up the Usenet archive.

But I'm wondering: won't there be publishers or authors will object to this new service? For instance: I can now go do a search, get say 80 results back, and surf through the results (can take hours) capturing the images of the actual pages of the books within the results. Amazon was nice enough to let you page forward one or two pages beyond the "hit" page. So all you need to do is do another search, for a phrase that happens two pages ahead, and the result will be the next several pages.... and so on. It is now possible to basically read the whole book without buying it.

I notice that Amazon requires users to be logged in, in order to use the new search service. That means they can easily track, and record, exactly what you're searching for, and, more importantly, which full-screen pages of the book you're drilling down to actually view. Will heavy users of the service be receiving scary emails from Amazon warning them about their over-use of the service? Or, will Amazon start charging users a fee for the privilege?

UPDATE #3: This is too big a deal. Decided to write more about it. See new article at Nettle, my other blog: http://www.nettle.com/archives/000062.html.

Hate vs Trust

Me, I do not HATE Microsoft. But I do not TRUST Microsoft.

For me, when it comes to Microsoft, TRUST is and always has been the issue. Not hate.

Why is trust the issue? The company's track record makes it untrustworthy.

• The company's products are not secure. Microsoft has admitted this time and time again. Yet it doesn't seem to be able to do anything about it. More viruses, exploits, holes, trojan horses, etc. are identified all the time.

• My own experience as a user of Microsoft products led me to conclude I cannot trust the company. Too many bugs, too many holes, too much bloat, and too frequent losses of data.

• My own experience as an independent software vendor competing for the same customers as Microsoft led me to conclude I could not trust the company. I haven't forgotten what they pulled with Blackbird.

• The way Microsoft conducted itself in the US DOJ trials led me to conclude Microsoft was untrustworthy.

It's not about hate at all, imho. It's all about trust. Microsoft brings whole new meaning to the term "anti-trust".

One other thing: Scoble says,

Don't worry, we can take it. We want to have an operating system that's beyond reproach when it ships.

This is a big chance Microsoft is taking. We're bringing customers directly into our design process. We're giving our community members extreme power. We're giving the press an unparralleled look at how an operating system is designed and developed. Many of our executives are now reading RSS newsfeeds of blogs. I'll point at the best of the "I hate Longhorn" blogs and I'm sending the feedback I see directly to the product teams (plus, you won't believe who's reading the blogs lately).

First, Microsoft is over 25 years old. I am glad to hear it's finally "bringing customers directly into the design process." Question is, why haven't they done so before? How can you have a "design process" that doesn't involve customers?

Second, as to the comment about the "unparalleled look" at how operating systems are designed and developed, I only have one word: Linux.