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last chance to ROFL

As some of you may know I consort with the evil geniuses behind ROFLCon. We are really really excited about the ROFLThing NYC event coming up this weekend and there are FIVE tickets left in the entire world. Five.

all proceeds will go to charities (real ones too, not fund the Zeroday Waffle Addiction Foundation)

* ROFLTicket supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation
* ROFLTicket supporting Big Cat Rescue (in honor of our guest Sockington)
* ROFLTicket supporting the Internet Archive
* ROFLTicket supporting Global Voices
* ROFLTicket supporting New York Cares

Did I mention these auctions are only for 24 hours? I should have.. you have less then 20 hours. GO!
win 1 free internetz!

US District Judge Declares “Downloads != Lost Sale”

From Ars Technica:

Jones wrote in his opinion that equating each download with a lost sale is a faulty assumption. “Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price,” Jones wrote. “[A]lthough it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording through legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free.”

Could the media industries finally be moving in the right direction?

Youtube remixes now have links to amazon and itunes to purchase the songs. This is a great monetization strategy for youtube as well who has a snickering Hulu making money on the content which they, and only they, can negotiate (hulu is a joint project of Fox and NBC)

hulu is smart in that they are finally figuring out they can monetize their back catalogs with advertising revenue if only they made it easily available (no drm, etc). granted it only streams but this is a decent tradeoff for legal content on the internet. And this is from someone who absolutely abhors sitting through commercials or viewing 80% of advertising.

hulu officials have belittled youtube in trade publications [citation needed] because they don’t believe user created content can be monetized. I have a feeling they will be proven wrong in the next 24-36 months. as remixing becomes legitimized in both legal and social contexts the sheer amount of content created by unleashed masses with personal computers will start to eclipse the major studios.

2009 Resolutions (public copy)

more open source

* pine for email
* firefox for web
* gimp for photo editing
* audacity for audio editing
* more ruby
* more mysql

more cloud apps

blip.tv for media storage
* less stagnet account on flickr
* more rss feeds

more mobile

* Twitter on mobile only
* IM on mobile only [edit: way too hard]
* increased IM on mobile
* email on mobile ReadOnly
* increase social app posts from mobile -> {flickr,youtube,blip.tv}

more social
* more irc
* more flickr posts with geotag

no drm
* none