it’s unix, not eunuchs

I’m a huge Net Neutrality advocate for many reasons.  I believe in, and spent time in America’s military, defending everyone’s right to free speech.  For some corporate interests or religious interests to decide that they don’t want me to access something I find interesting is antithetical to everything I was raised to believe in.

There are many who feel the same way and we’ve all been talking online about it from our various perspectives.  In fact I sparred a bit with Richard Bennett in the Future of Music Coalition Blog about it just last month.  And there have been some bills presented in Congress but nothing has really come of the debates or the pending legislation.

Enter the idealism of Larry and Sergey of Google to help move the discussion forward.  Apparently the Googlish Duo have set a team of engineers to work on this problem for two years now and what they’ve decided to do is make it easier for people to see if they’re actually being limited from using their internet access in any way they feel like.  So, in line with that goal, they are developing a suite of applications that will allow individual users to monitor their ISPs.

This is a great ideal, because it takes this nebulous idea of Net Neutrality and puts it into concrete numbers.  My grandfather may not care if he uses his full 6Mbps pipe, but tell him that he can’t actually use it even though he paid for it?  He’ll be madder than a wet hen and he’s got all the time in the world to call up and raise hell.

It would also be wrong of me to not point out the obvious, that Google would actually be a huge winner even if Net Neutrality were not enforced.  These guys are acting against their own interests and leaving open the door for innovative competitors because they think it’s the right thing to do.  Not to mention, when a small startup has a great idea, Google tends to buy them out and them incorporate them, so why would they allow ISPs to destroy their creativity hatchery?

You can read more about it over at the Register.

I had Zetrax begin following me a few minutes ago in Twitter. I’m very new at Twitter, so I am a bit suspicious whenever I begin being followed by people I don’t know. Although it appears to happen fairly frequently.

Anyhow, I checked out their profile and there’s not much but a link back to their webpage which allows you to stream music to your computer. The selection seemed pretty good but there’s very little documentation. Basically you just search for music, hit the green PL button to the right side of the stuff you want to listen to. That song is then added to your playlist at the top of the screen. In my case, the playlist didn’t start playing immediately, but I hit the ubiquitous play button at the top left and music did start playing.

I hadn’t heard about this website on Lifehacker yet, as they usually are the first to tell me about new ways to listen to streaming music. So I went off to do some research and it is apparently a REALLY new website. Here’s a guy who did a bit more research than I did at Google Blogoscoped. He looked at the headers and figured out that it’s a mash-up actually pulling audio from youtube.com.

One of Blogoscoped’s commenters complained about the audio. I don’t think it’s superior, but how good does free have to be?

I am not a huge personal fan of streaming music. I used Pandora.com for a while, due to the way it would profile your likes and dislikes, feed them into a recommendation engine, and then try to play you more of the same, but from different artists. I liked some of the recommendations, but it seemed like they ended up playing a lot of b-list music after a while and when they added advertisements I just stopped listening at all.

Now I just ensure that I always have an ipod physically on me somewhere. Plus I can always pull down some music from Rollins Archive and play it locally.

One of the problems I can already foresee with Zetrax is that they’re going to pull some things that are predominantly video streams. I searched for a band called the Minutemen and one of the results was two minutes of some guy’s kid moshing to the Minutemen. I’m sure it might be compelling in video format, but an audio ecstasy it was not.

And as another of Blogoscoped’s commenters pointed out, youtube’s probably not going to be very happy about this when they find out.

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UPDATED at 7:02pm

So I worked on a script to clean up a postfix problem we were having at work.  Imagine my surprise when I logged back into twitter to find that I was being spammed by the Zetrax user?  Check out my post about it here: Zetrax Twitter Spam

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I do receive ad revenue from Google, just to keep things up front and honest. But I’m not going to out these guys, maybe they have something going on with google for all I know.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/google_tips853.html