I promised myself last year that I’d never go again, but the tentative lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival in Palm Springs is too tempting. How can I pass up seeing Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Cat Power, Gomez, the White Stripes, Ladytron, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Polyphonic Spree, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mouse on Mars, RJD2, El P, Amon Tobin and Stereo Total at a single event? Even at $140 for a two-day pass, it’s a deal.

Update: Goldenvoice posted the official set list. Looks like Cat Power was removed. (It’s probably for the best, since Chan Marshall has difficulty enough playing small clubs.)

For insightful commentary regarding the Google/Pyra buyout, look no further than the Yahoo Message Boards thread.

Yahoo Message Boards continues to be one of the strangest web-based communities ever. I’d love to see someone break down their user base to see if there are regular contributors, or if it’s completely composed of transient users clicking on news items.

Holy crap, indeed. This little news item will soon be #1 with a bullet, but Ev just announced at the Blogosphere panel I attended that Google bought Blogger. Ev told me after the panel that the deal has been in the works for four months and he’s already moved offices from San Francisco to Mountain View.

I would expect this means dedicated searching and ranking of weblogs a la Daypop/Blogdex, displaying aggregated weblog content in Google News, and time-based searching of weblogs. But they could do all those things now… Why buy Pyra? Is Google moving toward an expanded portal model of offering publishing/hosting services beyond searching?

In case you missed the memo, the peer-to-peer application du jour is DirectConnect and its better open-source cousin, DC++.

Their website says a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) is being shared on the network and I believe it. On any given public hub, it’s not uncommon to find individuals sharing 250 gigs or more of data; usually feature films, console games, and software. That’s insane.

What makes it different from the countless other peer-to-peer apps out there? Instead of relying on a central server or networked nodes, DirectConnect looks more like IRC: public or private hubs of individuals, each acting as networked file servers. You can only search the files shared by people connected to your own hub, which means less files but increased security.

Plus, it’s easy to create a private hub for your company or a group of friends, undetectable to any unwanted guests (like the MPAA). You can password-protect your hub too, for the very paranoid.

I’d love to set up a hub for archaic, out-of-print, or unavailable media, like Song of the South, abandonware, arcade ROMs, and bootleg remixes. Is anyone interested?

Continue reading “DirectConnect” →

Loudon Wainwright’s “Something for Nothing” is an entertaining and fair commentary on file sharing, from a songwriter’s perspective. Download the MP3 first, and read the lyrics below. (I’m not sure, but I think Loudon would approve.)

Continue reading “Loudon Wainwright's "Something for Nothing"” →