Being called something bugs me. Enough that I feel the need to press against it, oddly this is a trait that makes me very easy to manipulate. Negativity is something I seem to have in spades though, it’s been given as reasons for enough things that… well might just be right. It’s a hard thing to argue against really since the very act of doing so could be construded as negative.

While I might be wrong I think that people are naturally drawn toward the negativity of things. The Germans have a word for it schadenfreude, odd word really. I honestly think that people have a hard time with feeling a happines for others. Someone pointed out to me that the reason the news focuses on the negative is that it sells better. The fact this person is in marketing and is getting good enough grades to make a Deans list… well they might be right. However part of marketing is knowing what appeals to people, clearly the negative is what appeals to people.

So a line like “Don’t keep up with the Jones’ beat them” would appeal to that need in people.If by some manner you can convey that a person has greater value, or greater preceived value by their peer group, itappeals to that side of the ego that would cause impulse buys. Appealing to the Id, Ego, Super-Ego of people, knowing how to manipulate each one. But I’ve had that conversation with an amusing cat already.

Eh, I may be a negative person but I still smile when I get the forward of the polar bear playing with dogs. I enjoy the stories of good people. But it sickens me to see those things exploited. I do enjoy those stories, they give me hope. Thats all I need, a muse and hope.

I’ve been asked several times in the last week how to do something that really should be common for people to do. Simply shift the music from a CD to your computer, for free, with no added trouble or mess. Of course we’re going to use some thing free. We’re going to use CDex a nice little app that I’ve used for years. Now back then… hrmm been a good while. You had to add the mp3 encoder too. You’d have to get a copy of LAME and that would be your encoder. LAME is also free, it has been since 2000 when it was compiled cleanly. Kinda nice really.

At that time there was a community driven project known as CDDB. It has sense been bought out and is now Gracenote, but does the same thing. Works great, you hit a button and the whole CD is named and ready to go. Now enough with the history lesson and time to explain how to do it and for that you click to read more.

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It’s sad to think that a fair amount of the influences on my musical tastes come from a handful of people. But it’s a bit scary to think that two very distinct people had a HUGE influence on how digital music took off and worked. One of them has been on the cover of WIRED magazine, yet failed to make a recent list. I’m not sure the other has ever got much of a mention in WIRED.

Ask yourself, where would your mp3’s be without Shawn Fanning. They’d be on someone else’s computer and you’d never had accessed them. This is the guy that originally wrote Napster. Back before it was a pay service. This was the application that brought mp3 sharing to the masses. Suddenly what had been done over other channels was easy enough for the average person to access it and to find the music they wanted. It worked, and it worked so well that the law suits came and down it went. But he was small potatoes compared to the other guy, of course I’m talking about Justin Frankel.

What did this guy do? Very simple, he made Winamp, and later with someone else developed SHOUTcast for streaming music. After all what good are mp3’s if you don’t have a robust player to play them? Eventually he was bought out by the cooperate drones and hired by AOL. It was there that he wrote Gnutella, a step forward in P2P. I’m going to guess you’ve not paid a large amount of attention to the protocols that are used by your applications, but if you’ve ever used Limewire, Bearshare, or iMesh (to name a few). You have used his design.

Maybe I’m wrong. But if it had not been for these two guys, mp3s and file sharing would probably have never taken off like they did. At the same time, had napster never been forced to filter mp3’s someone may not have made a wrapper for it. They may not have decided to develop a new method. Never know. But one thing I do know, had these two not done what they did Apple wouldn’t have a group of people so addicted to digital media that they’ll buy over priced mp3 players.

My reply to TJ’s Rock Music Owes…