Hornswaggled

Lets start off by saying this post was inspired by an effort to support my favorite music site Pandora. They have come under pressure lately with the RIAA’s push for increased royalties on streaming radio. You can read more about that here. The bottom line is that Pandora and other internet radio stations will no longer exist under the new fee structures.

I love Pandora and felt like I would support their product and their fight with purchasing the Ad-free version for 36.00 per year. That price is a little high, 20 bucks seems a bit more in line but I do use the service and want to help. That said I do not need this upgrade by any means and will not benefit much by purchasing this version, its all in efforts to help them stay afloat.

I start off by going to Pandora.com and try to find something that resembles a button or image with their premium product, I find nothing even close to this. I spend about another 20 minutes going through the site and finally stumble across the Premium information on their FAQ’s. That right, its buried deep in their frequently asked questions page for some reason. Either they really don’t want to sell this paid version or they are making some serious mistakes.

What ever happened to making your product easy to find and easy to buy? You would be suprised at how many sites hide what they are selling for one reason or another and its a shame. Pandora is not the only site that has issues like this, many others do, just go check around yourself and you will be surprised.

I just got an email from Joost, see below. For all you those wanting tokens just leave a comment and they are yours.

It’s showtime! The latest version of Joost is now available for download
- and it’s our biggest release yet.

To celebrate this we have given you 5 invitations - so you can invite
your friends to watch with you.

We’ve also added a load of new content, so you now have many more
channels from which to choose, including some of the biggest brands
in entertainment.

You’ll notice one or two other changes too, including a new login
procedure which will require a unique user name. As one of our early
testers you have the opportunity to choose the name that you want -
well ahead of the pack, so make sure you get a good one!

Apparently Yahoo is conceeding the fact that Hotjobs is NOT the only place to look for jobs. In an ironic twist they are placing ads on Craigslist for job openings within Hotjobs.

This wouldn’t typically be news but I thought that it was funny that the self touting Leader in job search was using a competitor to find employees for themselves.

Craigslist is great if your looking for local talent and I would use that over any other service first, apparently Yahoo feels the same.

One of the first sites to talk about blogging in the business world has been put up for sale on sitepoint. The asking price for Business Logs is a mere 55k, or you can start bidding at 25k. The site currently pulls in 750 per month in TLA and has much room for improvement on the monetization front. Then you throw on top of that the site recieves 15-20 leads for business weblog design every month you can see the value there, these are A list client leads by the way. This is one of those things that someone at the right place at the right time can really take advantage of this and start a new career for pennies.
It seems as though the reasons for the sale are to move on to more interesting subjects for Paul and the others and I can understand that. Hopefully they will use some discression when they find a new owner. I would hate for this site to dissapear into the blog abyss.

If you know anyone that has a blog design company you should seriously look into purchasing this site. You will own a piece of blog history.

As more and more software goes online many companies that flourished in the desktop enviroment will need to adjust. One such application is ManagerAssistant. The software is only available in desktop form and specializes in employee performance and appraisal reviews (it actually does a lot more than that).

I am curious what kind of technology a company like this should look too. It seems like Adobe is coming out with some great stuff like Apollo. It would be great to have some sort of online/offline integration much like outlook does for email. That way you have the best of both worlds and can easily back things up as backing things up with online applications isn’t always the easiest thing.

If anyone is familiar with what technologies would be best please leave a comment. I would be very interested in learning more about this stuff.

I just recieved an email from Joost letting me know that I have 2 official beta invites to send via email. I would suspect that this was done on a wide scale as I dont use the system very much and dont provide them any feedback. If your one of the many people that have been waiting this may be the time that you get your wish. Good Luck.

I have 2 invites left so let me know if you would like to check it out.

**Update: I have passed along the Invites to 2 technology bloggers: Rob Toole and Peldi Guilizoni.**

To the others: I will pass them along as I get them :). Just leave a comment below.

I just ran across this on Techcrunch and it seems pretty cool. The site is currently down for maintenance so I cant really give any reviews. Apparently you can create your own social network and applications with a few clicks and anyone can do it. With sites like this, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and other open source systems we wont need developers, scary thought. On the other hand maybe we will need developers more as more people will want to customize their sites as the barrier to entry is almost non existent. Nowadays you can have your own site up in less than 5 minutes.

**I will update this when it comes back up**

Have you noticed the cute little logos that appear next to the url on some websites. You can create your own icon from any image with an assortment of tools online, just do a search for ‘Favicon Generator tool’ and you will find a bunch of free ones. They all pretty much do the same thing and nothing particularly hard. All they do is resize and rename your image files but they are useful to those that are challenged with any photo editing themselves or just don’t want to bother. Ill give it a go with a pirate flag and see how it looks.

If you have a wordpress blog there is a favicon plug-in that works easily, just unzip, upload, and activate.

**So I made the change to the “Its Peanut Butter Jelly Time” banana. The actual ico is at www.hornswaggled.com/favicon.ico if you want to use the same one. I think its pretty funny.**

Well this has happened very fast. Apparently both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray encryption have been bypassed as of yesterday afternoon. The moment Blu-Ray was circumvented was here, the moment HD-DVD was here (a few hours earlier).

After reading through the forum I can basically describe the process, I will not pretend I know anything about this stuff. Both formats are encrypted using AACS. AACS uses keys that the discs contain and that the players read and unlock, therefore allowing you to watch your protected material. Somehow with a bunch of ingenious thinking and dedication, arnezami, as known in the forum, has been able to slow down the system enough see and record the key therefore allowing one to bypass the encryption method all together.

After learning about bumpkeys I think its time to change all the locks. Im not sure yet what type of lock to switch to but will update this post after a little research. In case any of you are interested in seeing what Im talking about check out the video below.

Basically you take a key and file it a bit and you can unlock any traditional lock (you can also buy these keys). Pretty scary stuff.
Engadget talks more about the history of locks and the technical stuff here.

[youtube]pwTVBWCijEQ[/youtube]

After thinking about this some I may not actually change the locks. All locks really do is slow people down. People can kick in the door, or better yet just go through the windows.