this is mikel.org — Page 214 — Michael Boyle's weblog

It was obviously intentional,

February 2, 2004 by Michael Boyle

and it’s somewhat heartening to note that at least in the weblog world, no one doubts that the boob flash was staged. The interesting thing, though, has been the MTV and CBS reaction – they’re clearly lying, and blatantly so.

But it underlines a reality that I don’t know many people really get. ALL news about the entertainment industry is nothing but blatant lies, deception, and creative publicist media placements. I mean everyone knows that ET stories are bought and sold like nothing other than ads. But I’m talking everything, no exceptions.

The Britney/Madonna kiss? Staged. Paris Hilton “private” sex video? Staged and widely uploaded on the QT. The restaurant fight between this week’s popstars? Cooked up by somone’s agent. The really shocking thing is that Big Media thinks that we buy it, and that they can just issue a statement disavowing their knowledge to cleanse their rep.

Why Puretracks will fail

February 1, 2004 by Michael Boyle

In Canada we can’t yet use the iTunes Music Store, which is bad enough, the only legal download site is called Puretracks. Trouble is, when I go to the site I get the following message:

Thank you for visiting Puretracks.com
Currently our website supports Internet Explorer 5.0 and above on the
Windows operating system (Win 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / 2003),
and is available to Canadian residents only.
We value our Mac audience, however the Windows Media player for the Mac
platform is not currently compatible with Microsoft protected audio content.
Puretracks is currently working to make our service available to Mac users.

There are several problems with this. First of all, saying you value an audience while locking them out is NOT valuing that audience. More importantly, though, I think the companies trying to make a go of online music that tie that effort to a proprietary platform are making a big mistake and can’t, in the long term, succeed with such a strategy. The encoding method used by Apple, on the other hand, is available to anyone who wishes to use it, with no approval or license required from Apple. Tying DRM to the encoding itself is a serious conceptual mistake that a lot of people are making, and no matter how many companies signed up to play in the Microsoft sandbox I don’t think they can do well.

Massive congratulations

January 29, 2004 by Michael Boyle

to Justin Hall for his 10 Years of Links.net.

Big news from the campaign trail:

January 28, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Howard Dean has replaced Joe Trippi in a shake up of his senior campaign staff. Looks like desperation time in Dean-land. It says a lot that they couldn’t do this behind the scenes, quietly. At the same time, maybe he feels that the campaign needs to send a message to more traditional party folks that they’re ready to play ball – and he did that by getting rid of the maverick in mid-course.