Geeking Out

On Thursday I was in the City at the eleventh London Girl Geek Dinner. This was the third one I've been to, and this time I offered my video services. There were a couple of issues with the camera and the new wireless mic I have, but with a bit of crafty editing it hasn't come-out too badly. You can check it out via this link to Viddler. Be patient with the crazy camera swinging - it calms down after a minute or two! I was fiddling around and slightly boozed-up.

The event itself was interesting. First-up was David Terrar from Wiki Wednesdays, which is another geeky networking London event. Then there was Angela Beesley from Wikia, which is a bit like a commercial Wiki site, although Angela talks about her work with Wikipedia too. Finally there's the Wiki team from Astraware who talk about using Wikis in their company. All quite interesting, although I was quite boozed-up by the end. Hopefully that doesn't show too badly in the video! Sarah says more about the evening in her post (the first link here), so check that out if you're interested. Oh, and Radio 4 were there recording the event for Woman's Hour, so I guess it may crop-up on there too. You never know.

Eyejot

I've been playing around a bit with Eyejot, a Web site that allows you to send video messages to anyone else with an email address. Now this may not sound particularly revolutionary, but it's all Flash-based with nothing to install, and should work on pretty much any machine. It worked very easily with the built-in iSight camera on my iMac, for example. You can watch your video before you send it, and it's all quick and painless.

So why would you want to send a video instead of text email? Well, it's quicker, and I can see occasions where it's more efficient to blither-on for a few seconds than to send an email. It's all free anyway, so why not give it a go and see what you think? It's one of those ideas that might just take off...

The death of DRM.. and WMA?

Today at 1pm the world of online music buying was changed in a big way when Steve Jobs announced that DRM-free music will be available from the iTunes store. The DRM-free music will be 99p per track (instead of 79p for DRM) but will be at twice the bitrate, which is 256Kbps AAC. The per-album price will be the same as for DRM-restricted albums, and users will be able to upgrade their existing DRM-restricted tracks.

So why is this big news? Well for one thing DRM-free music is what everyone wants. You will now be able to buy music from the iTunes store and play it on any device, whether portable player or computer, etc. The higher bitrate is an added bonus of course as music will now sound even better. The objects that some people had about buying music on iTunes were largely about 'lock-in', but now all of those objections no longer apply. If people really object to the higher price and don't care about DRM then they can still buy the DRM-restricted files. Everyone is a winner!

The best thing about this move is of course that it will kill the WMA format. EVerything can play unprotected AAC files (yes, even the Zune), and the iTunes store easily has the largest selection of music available of all of the online music sites. The Zune wasn't an attempt at a competitive music player, it was an attempt to lock people into WMA, and therefore Windows. The multiplatform AAC and iTunes now stomps all over it as you'd be daft to buy your music anywhere else. WMA is dead as a commercial digital music format.

The consumer will benefit. Other music stores that only offer DRM-limited files will have to remove the DRM to compete, and at that point all online music stores will be competing on 'real' terms - price, available selection, and so on. It is a good day for everyone, even those who don't care for the iTunes store. Freedom of the user, and value for money, has been substantially increased.

Only EMI have signed-up so far, but that's about 20% of the music. The other labels will sign-up if they see that the EMI move is sucessful, so let's make that success happen! At least one of your favourite artists will be on EMI - buy a DRM-free track of theirs when you can and lets show that we consumers want the freedom to play our music on whatever device we want to.