geektastik technology, communication & random geekiness

Robert Scoble has the best take yet on the Steve-Jobs-DRM story: Jobs is a linkbaiter

Let me get this straight. He sells my family three iPods that have DRM on them, then he turns around and says “that game is over.” Yeah, I’m not cynical. He gets everyone in the blog world to say “yeeehaaww.”

Meanwhile we all forget that the iPhone isn’t open to third-party developers and that the iPod has near-monopoly-status marketshare already.

So, why is he doing this? Maybe he noticed that most iPod users don’t buy many songs from iTunes. Why? We’d rather get a CD from Amazon, rip it ourselves so it doesn’t have DRM, thus denying Steve Jobs his rightful $.99 a song.”

Then again, I’m a cynic, too, and a cranky geek. I should call Scoble and Dvorak so we can have one big cranky-geekfest.

UPDATE: Music execs to Jobs: “Uh, not so much.”

UPDATE 2: I don’t disagree with the comment from “anonymous” that Jobs is motivated by the media quagmire in the EU regarding Apple’s DRM policies. The MacNN article I link to in the first update discusses these issues.

Neither Scoble nor I are naive enough to think that Jobs cares one way or another whether bloggers link to him. Apple has never shown any interest in the blogosphere, and I don’t think Jobs’ latest announcement is anything different.

I don’t think it’s completely off-base, however, to think that the attempt to distract from another media quagmire – the lukewarm reception of the iPhone after the novelty wore off – is another motivating factor for newfound Jobs’ anti-DRM stance. Tail wagging the dog?

Steve Rubel on Apple’s Linkblog and Its PR Influence

This is not an argument about which OS is better. This is about the use of linking for PR. What I am saying is by linking to something on a corporate Web site, you’re basically making a statement without uttering a word. And that’s almost like blogging.

Todd Defren at PR Squared points to a great AdAge article warning against “Get Me One Of Those” (GMOOT) Syndrome: piling on any and all cool new trends.

GMOOT is manifesting itself a lot with social media – especially “user-generated” (what does that even mean anymore?!) viral videos, or at least that try to go viral. But what’s true for “social media” is true for all marketing and publicity tools: they’re only effective when used correctly.

That means you must select the medium, tone, message, etc. that will work with the people you are trying to engage and the subject you want to talk about. More importantly, it means saying something much more like this: “If we set up a MySpace page about this, a lot of people could engage. Do we have the resources and expertise to manage that? Who can?” and less like this: “MySpace is popular. Let’s put it there.”

John Battelle has a good summary of the debate over the Viacom takedown notice for GooTube.

John Mahoney at The Digital Edge posts about presidential candidates, video on their websites, and embed codes.

Although Hillary Clinton has the most video on her site, Barack Obama‘s video announcement of his candidacy has been making the rounds much more quickly and prolifically. Obama is currently the only candidate allowing bloggers to directly embed his videos into their websites, like so:

Mahoney suggests that, Clinton’s lone Quicktime-download option for her videos (the format used by pro video editors) signals that she is more interested in courting traditional media (aka powerful sneezers) than bloggers, grassroots organizations, and other promiscuous sneezers. Compare that to John Edwards announcement of his presidential bid as covered by Robert Scoble.

I agree with Mahoney that the importance of embed code reflects the fundamentally different nature of the internet this election, versus previous ones.

These candidates will need to microchunk their messages, and make them available broadly. They need to be reaching audiences not just through The New York Times and CNN, but via blogs and iPods as well . More than anything, they need to reach out to people and talk to them directly without all of the spin. (I’d love to see them all have their own blogs – and actually post into them themselves.) In this election, they can’t simply hide behind well produced web sites and scripted media events. They really need to make themselves accessible.

The key word for me is accessibility.

A UK newspaper reports on a Connecticut case and expert testimony from a Florida security company. Got that geography down? Ok…

The case has attracted an enormous amount of interest, because the reported details of the trial appear to indicated that a lack of understanding of the technology involved and not solid digital evidence, led the jury to convict the teacher…The criminal conviction would not be the first case of misunderstood technology leading to a guilty verdict.

… School officials recently told parents that the incident could never happen today, because the district has installed security software and a filtering system. “This was a Windows 98 SE machine with IE 5 and an expired antivirus subscription,” Eckelberry said. “It hadn’t been updated since August, and there was no anti-spyware, no pop-up protection, no firewall and no content filters. Regardless of whatever happened, this machine was a machine that should not have been on the Internet.”

Wouldn’t have happened on a Mac. More important than the software/security issue, this case brings up the expert testimony issue:

“In technologically complicated cases, expert testimony is really important–more so then in your normal prosecutions,” said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University’s School of Law and the attorney that defended McDanel in his appeal. “It is complicated for a normal person – the idea that the computer does something without your agency is not something that they understand.”

The New Yorker‘s legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin weighs in on the Google Book Search story with an interesting (if typically long) piece.

The Guardian‘s Ben Hammersley thinks bloggers got better access at Davos than print journalists.

ohmygodWHOCARES?!! Yeah, yeah, Turner should have let Boston city people know about the campaign, but only morons with the intellectual capacity of a Cheerio could confuse a Lite Brite cartoon flipping the bird with a bomb.

Massholes (with apologies to Fitzy, who is kind of awesome).

UPDATE: Neatorama reports that you can already get “ATHF is the bomb” shirts. More importantly, the same adultswim LED boards have been up for weeks in 10 other U.S. cities without incident, so it’s official: Beantown police – Staties, no less – are asshats.

Now, where have we seen highly paranoid “zero tolerance” behavior like this before?