this is sippey.com

I originally posted the following to my Vox blog, with the intent of cleaning it up and posting here as a “proper blog post.” Alas, after all these years of doing this, I’ve yet to learn that the only “proper blog post” is a “timely blog post.”

Stupid hack idea:  a local script that pulls currently playing from one of your friends last.fm profiles and updates your IM status with what they’re listening to.  Have it update in real time for that creepy simulcast effect (“OMIGOD, we’re listening to the same stuff”), or have it pull from the friends’ playlist archive at random to leech off their coolness (“yeah, I’m into too") or fake a shared interest for other purposes ("I can't believe we're both into ; we should get together some time").

And then today, on Buzzfeed, this:

Meeting your soulmate through the playlists on your network in iTunes. In the age of MySpace, Nerve.com, and scary Craigslist ads…this is actually kind of a cute way to meet people.

Look, ma, I’m prescient!

I have a need to clear these Apple-related things out of my head:

• Even if I don’t use it as my phone, I’ll probably still want an iPhone.  If only as a Wifi enabled, media-playing, web-browsing toy.

• Relatedly, what I want come June is a way to track the price movement of the secondary market for iPhones, esp. if an unlocking method is discovered.  I’m sure there’s a way to do it on eBay (or through their API), but it will be interesting to watch the price differential between a subsidized model (with forced subscription) and a resale model (without).

• Surely they’ll iTMS enable the phone, right? And leverage the Cingular billing relationship?  (I want that track, I want it now, and sure, go ahead and charge it to my cell bill.)

• I keep reading about how DRM will eventually go away, that it’s days are numbered.  The strategic rationale for this is that Apple’s dominance of the digital music market will force the labels into action that attempts to leverage distribution of other players (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Real, etc.) to break the iTMS stranglehold.  (E.g., sell it in non-DRM’d MP3 format so that people can buy it wherever they want and still play it where they want. Like on their iPod.)  This very well may happen, but it might not have that much of an impact on Apple’s position in the market, since there would be nothing to prevent them from offering those songs in a non-DRM’d format as well, and they’d still be able to leverage the iTunes hardware-software connection.

OK, that’s it for now.

I was going through some old stuff on Stating the Obvious this afternoon, and came across my favorite old tagline for the long-departed site:

Operatic in tone, trivial in scope.

If I can say so myself, [this is good].

Tim Goodman, TV writer and possibly the most compelling reason to read the SF Chronicle, is threatening to shutter The Bastard Machine, his blog on SFGate.com.  “Now that I’m back at work, I’m really, truly going to work on not blogging. So much, I mean. I don’t think they’ll let me stop. I’m told that’s the future.” I trust that this is just one of those “blogger phases” that everyone links to but I’m too lazy to Google.

Congrats to Scott Weiss and the whole crew at Ironport (read the announcement -- bought by Cisco for $800mm in cash and stock).  I had a chance to meet Scott back when email was my life, and from the beginning it was clear they were building a great product and a great company.  Kudos!

Erick Schonfeld on The Web Widget:

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening.  The Web is splintering.

Splintering away from the portals, sure, and then reaggregating in places where individual expression happens - blogs, profile pages, etc.  Widgets are another point in the trendline of cut-and-paste culture:  mix and match content and functionality to fit my personality, my blog, my audience.