Now you can find out what torrents are available at Torrentz.com (via Robert Scoble).  Interesting thing is that, nstead of using spiderbots, they are using people as bots, meaning users register torrents streams they either own or found.  Is it working?  You bet.

What's available?  Rips of all kinds including movies, porns, music, toons, appz, warez.  For example, one of the most popular torrent is Adobe Photoshop CS 8.0.  I am sure RIAA will be chasing those torrents soon if not already, but I am not sure if Torrentz.com itself is illegal or not.

There is a bit of drama behind the site too.  Apparently, some joker hacked the site to steal the source code and setup his own site, TorrentReactor.net, with minimal changes.  The guy even admits he stole the code.  I guess he thought stealing from someone who encourages theft is not really stealing.

It's a dog eat dog world out there.

There is a big rant exchange going on over music encoding schemes (WMA, AAC, MP3), DRM, and degree of choice.  It all started with Robert Scoble and then bounced all across the board touching off iPod fanatics, Microsoft hater, and copyright guerillas.

As for me, I don't think music encoding scheme will matter in the future.  I think market competition, consumer activism, and hackers together will eventually force online music services to provide a token of ownership for each music one buys, a token that can used to get same music encoded in a different format.

Anything else will be as attractive as going to a underground disco without fire escapes.

I started reading Billmon's Whiskey Bar recently.  Billmon, one of the anonymous bloggers at Davos, is an excellent writer and quite a thinker to boot.  Here is a paragraph from his recent post about blogosphere that jumped out at me:

I guess the metaphor I would use in place of Ito's amplifier would be earthquakes — which occur by the thousands all over the world every day. Most go unnoticed, unless they happen to hit a densely populated area, in which case they become news. If a really big one hits a remote area, it might become news, if word eventually gets back to the metropolis. But it's less likely to become a big story.

His remarkable analogy stuck in my mind like a gum would to my shoes.  BTW, I don't know who Billmon is but, if he can afford to attend the Davos event, his whiskey bar must be doing pretty well because I read somewhere that attending the Davos event costs around $10K.  Ouch.

Continuing the discussion that started with Ads in Feeds, I think the next step in content-syncation markets is emergence and proliferation of OEM news aggregators for premium content service providers.  In this space, oversea software developers can compete effectively against open source and shareware developers.

Companies with necessary internal resources to develop their own news aggregators (i.e. Microsoft) or sufficient needs to differentiate itself (i.e. Apple) will develop their own, but most companies will opt to buy and brand OEM news aggregators, initially as a marketing ploy, but ultimately as a source of revenue.

Inevitable consequence is a feature war that will stretch the definitions of syndication and blogging.  Marc will be a very happy man. 🙂

RSSAds.com, operated by Chad Williams of SF, recently opened its doors (sources: Tim Marman, Mike Gunderloy) and is looking for publishers of premium syndicatable content. Will RSSAds.com make money?  Maybe.  That's maybe as in “I hope they succeed but don't expect me to make a bet…yet.”  Can advertising in feeds make money?  Yes, but it will be difficult to pull off.

Here are some problems to consider:

It's too easy to filter ads out at the receiving end, meaning news aggregators.

Since retrieval and processing of the feed is fully under news aggregators' control, identifying ads is much easier than trying to intercept ads-laden content flowing to a browser.  Ads can be identified by URL, words, dimensions, etc.

News aggregator developers have no incentives to not filter ads.

Fierce competition among news aggregators developers means ad filtering features will be widely implemented within a few weeks.  They are also mostly individuals with wide range of interests, so it'll be like trying to appease a barbarian horde with glass beads even if you had some incentives to offer.

To solve these problems, premium content publishers need to require use of news aggregators capable of protecting ads from being filtered.  While at it, billing and tracking capability is needed as well to support payed content.  Yes, I am sorry to say, blogosphere will have to embrace DRM before it can support revenue models worthy of pursuing.

I am out of time for now, so I'll have to continue in another post.

I just registered into Orkut, thanks to an invitation from Chris Pirillo — thanks Chris!;-).  While the registration process was a bit tiring, Orkut UI and user experience were more pleasant than Friendster or LinkedIn.  It could use some improvements here and there, but at least it was pleasant enough for me to invited a bunch of friends and collegues, something I haven't done with other similiar services.

Hmm.  It might be interesting to mix PKI with social networking.  For example, I could issue Friend of Don certificates to my friends that basically say “I know this person to be trustworthy, smart, and nice enough to be my friend.“  What uses would such certificate have?  Nothing in the horizon but I am wondering what might lie beyond that…

If you are my friend and haven't received an invite from me, just send me an e-mail.  I just grabbed the names that were handy and definitely missed many of you whom I would be proud to call a friend.

Update:

Apparently, Orkut invitations are highly likely to be classified as spam by spam filters.  When I got mine, it was in the Unsure pile.  Since there is no significant factor stemming this trend, invitation-by-email is likely to be a thing of the past eventually.

I didn't know Stephen Hawking remarried until I read this recent story about him being abused by his second wife.  So sad.

Most spam filters work on incoming mail.  There are some outgoing mail spam filter at mail server level, but not at the e-mail client level.  Spam filter at the e-mail client level allows the sender to avoid sending messages likely to be blocked by spam filters at the destination.

My theory is that spam filters among people with similar interests are alike.  I have no evidence to back this theory but, if true, then if my spam filter thinks a message I am about to send is a spam, then the spam filter used by the person I am sending the message to will think so as well.

Here is a conversation from the near future:

Bob: I am reading Don Park's Visual Thinking now.  It's really good.

Joe: Is that Park with an 's'?

Bob: No, just Park.  Here. [Bob beams Joe Amazon URL]

Joe: Hmm.  Reviews look good.  OK, I ordered it.

Bob: …

Joe: …

On the surface, there seems to be nothing wrong.  But notice the type of question being asked.  With information at your fingertip, the need to ask for information from another person diminishes.  So instead of asking about the book, Joe is asking about query terms.  He could have also said “Could You?“ and Bob would have interpreted it as request to beam URL or search words.

I don't know about you, but it seems like technology is eating away at the meat of everyday social life, leaving just the bare bones.

In respect to blogging, I wonder how blogging affects a person's life.  More opinionated?  Less inquisitive about other people's opinions because they are already exposed to a wide range of opinions online?  Nice chewy topic I think.