Oops

I was flipping through the channels tonight and noticed some sort of conference session was airing on C-SPAN. I stopped to listen a moment because they were talking about blogs, Meetups,s and other internet trends. Then I noticed I recognized the panelist sitting on the right.

Thanks to C-SPAN, we now know what you get when you cross Billmon with Gillmor. :-)

Luckily my Treo was nearby and I quickly snapped a blurry shot above right off the TV screen.

Looks like not only did they get Dan's name wrong, but the event did not happen "Today", despite the text C-SPAN superimposed in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen (it didn't show up in the big photo but is barely visible in the little photo, above Dan's head). I believe this panel session was held on August 24th at the Aspen Summit conference.

Addendum: some of the sessions from this conference are archived as video webcasts here, including an interesting session called "Future of the Internet: Pipes, Devices, Services & Applications" with Larry Babbio, Halsey Minor, Craig Mundie, and Kyle Dixon.

FSU Enters "Deal" With Apple Re: iTunes

Florida State University forms an "Online Music Committee" to help figure out how to cut the rampant downloading of copyrighted music by students. The outcome? A "deal" with Apple Computer whereby FSU will distribute "for free" the iTunes software and let students download music for $0.99 each.

Here's the story in something called FSU News.

Scroll down to all the comments at the bottom of that page. Everybody's immediately asking, um, how is this a "deal"? Since iTunes software is already free, and it costs $0.99 for anyone to buy music from iTunes, not just FSU students. Is FSU really that dumb?

Or did FSUNews miss out on a key part of the story?

Here's the MacDailyNews coverage of the story, and here is the Tallahassee Democrat's take ("FSU cracks down on illegal file sharing and offers free music-swapping software").

It continues to amaze me that the music industry and the media completely overlook IRC. Who needs P2P for file-sharing when you've got more music than you can possibly ever listen to flooding through IRC channels? (Not to mention USENET too!)

iTunes Affiliate

The same week Microsoft launches its online music store, Apple launches an iTunes Affiliate Program. Miracle of miracles, Apple let the brianstorms blog into the program (in fact they told me they were "thrilled" to welcome me as a partner . . . I bet they'd been fretting about "will brianstorms sign up or not!?" all week), so yer now lookin' at a gen-u-ine iTunes Affiliate. Um, what to do next . . .

The odd thing is, Apple outsourced its whole Affiliate program to a company called LinkSynergy. (Never heard of 'em.) It'd be ok, if LinkSynergy had figured out a way to fit within Apple's domain name. In other words, when you mouse over the little emblem right here, your browser would show you that you'd be going to something reasonable and predictable like "click.apple.com" or "affiliate.itunes.com" if you clicked on it. As opposed to what your browser actually tells you, which is a big long link for "click.linksynergy.com". What's that? Who are they? Is it safe? Some people notice these things.

I also noticed, at least here on this Mac, that if one's iTunes app isn't running when you click on the little logo here, nothing happens other than the browser reloading the page. If iTunes is running, it goes to the main page of the iTunes Music Store.

I wonder what happens on Windows machines. Well, to be honest, I don't. But seriously: shouldn't there be some smarter behavior on the part of the Affiliate links? If a user doesn't have iTunes installed on their machine, shouldn't clicking on an Affiliate's link at least take you to Apple's iTunes website?