Pants on Wordpress 2

You might be familiar with the recent “Worst Commercial Ever” meme. Along those lines, I suggest watching The Family Man (via):

Update:  The YouTube video was removed.  You can still find a copy of the video over at iFilm.

When we last discussed Yahoo! Pipes, I mentioned Pants on Everything, a merged feed of my posts from WordPress.com, Flickr, last.fm, and Twitter. The sort-by-pubDate bug was fixed sometime last night, so PoE is ready for public consumption (3/6/07: this feed is no longer in service).

Update: It looks like WordPress items are not getting their full content. A quick look around shows that Pipes is not publishing <content:encoded> in the pipe output; odd, since <content:encoded> shows up as expected in the Pipes UI. Hopefully this is just a bug and not intended behavior.

Update 2: A member of the Pipes team was kind enough to leave a comment.

Update 3: Lifehacker has posted a tutorial on creating a merged feed using Yahoo Pipes. Their experience was mostly similar to mine. If you’re interested in doing something like this, check it out.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Yahoo! Pipes, that “web 2.0 RSS mashup GUI” thing (if not, read this). I decided to try out the service by creating a merged RSS feed of my activities on WordPress.com, Flickr, last.fm, and Twitter. It only took a few minutes to put together.

Pipes is in beta. There are still some important bugs in the service, most notably (from my experience) that sort-by-pubDate is not working. This applies to grouped feeds as well as single feeds — even Yahoo!’s own example of the “sort” module is affected (compare before v. after). Someone reported this bug as a “suggestion”, and if you’ve played around with Pipes I ask you to consider voting for it.

There also seem to be issues when feeds have non-standard date formats, causing sort-by-pubDate to not function correctly when performed on merged feeds (granted, if sort-by-pubDate is known to be broken in general, one can’t reliably look at this test case).

Also, there’s performance & stability. Pipes was down for a while yesterday adding capacity, so apparently the software driving this stuff isn’t lightweight. Navigating the site is not the speediest experience I’ve had, although it is well designed. In the end, what matters is that pipes themselves are handled efficiently and have good uptime; the logged-in experience is a lower priority (though not by much).

Pipes only launched two days ago, so kinks (get it? kinks in a pipe? ah, nevermind) aren’t unexpected. I hope these sort-by-pubDate issues are fixed soon — my Pants on Everything feed is almost ready to go.

Update:  Looks like sort-by-pubDate is fixed.  Woohoo!

Steve Jobs’ recently published essay on DRM, Thoughts on Music, is getting lots of discussion around the blogosphere. In it, the genesis of Apple’s DRM system (FairPlay) is discussed, as well as it’s possible future. The possibility of a DRM-less iTunes music store is raised, saying that Apple would support the idea “wholeheartedly” if music labels would agree to it.

A number of DRM-less music stores already exist in the digital download space. My personal favorite is Bleep.com, because of their focus on electronic music and good MP3 encoding practices. They also sell FLAC versions of many albums for not that much extra, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only downside for me is that Bleep.com is operated in England, meaning that I have to deal with the US-dollar-to-pound currency conversion rate. Still, it’s money well spent.

Since Bleep largely caters to indie labels and audiences, there is a large chunk of music I have to buy elsewhere. Like the iTunes music store. In general, I have good things to say (I’ve only come across two songs with encoding errors, both fixed later on).

However, I’m beginning to regret some of the money I’ve spent there. iPods today are nice, but tomorrow I might want something different — and of course, songs bought in iTunes only work with iPods (the idea of FairPlay licensing is explicitly put to rest in Steve’s essay). There are ways to de-FairPlay songs bought from the iTunes store, but they are (A) bad for sound quality, (B) illegal, or (C) both. What makes this all even more frustrating is that iTunes music is not encoded at a very high bit rate. Yeah, it sounds alright, but it could sound so much better.

So, what to make if this latest development? Many people are speculating that this is an indication that iTunes will incorporate a DRM-less model, even if only for a small portion of the store’s catalog. Probably unprotected AAC. Probably indie labels at first. It will get lots of loving from the blogosphere, but the benefits of DRM-less downloads won’t catch on with the general public until a true iPod-killer is released. Whatever format Apple ends up choosing will be widely supported.

It’s also possible that Apple will improve their encoding process to use a higher bitrate. This is another area where iTunes pales in comparison to the competition (such as Bleep). If Apple wants iTunes to be competitive in the DRM-less arena, the issue of sound quality must be addressed.

So, what happens to those of us who already have music with FairPlay? Some scenarios:

• Apple does nothing. The masses de-FairPlay their own music using tools already available — if they care.
• Apple integrates the de-FairPlaying of music into iTunes. This would require iTunes to phone home, but after the ripping has taken place, the music is free from Apple’s clutches. This does not carry much benefit if a change in Apple’s encoding practices takes place.
• Apple lets users re-download their music. They let users redownload if you delete your music, why not do it when a new format is released? (I’ll tell you why: there is simply not enough bandwidth or infrastructure — there’s a lot of iTunes music out there that would need replacing). Still, if Apple changes their encoding practices, this method would help get everyone’s libraries up to speed.
• Apple purposely declassifies FairPlay. In the aforementioned essay, Steve talks about the secret nature of DRM systems as an integral part of their success. Imagine if Apple published the FairPlay spec, effectively making the DRM useless but FairPlay-enabled songs useful everywhere. This is highly unlikely, since this would invalidate all songs purchased in iTunes; I doubt that all labels would agree to a DRM-less system, let alone at the same time.

In any case, if Apple introduces a DRM-less system to the iTunes music store, I would love to see my current collection benefit in some way.

(Also, I wonder if the recent settlement with Apple Corps has anything to do with this. Might the Beatles catalog be the first DRM-less music to show up?)