Daily Archives: 2/28/2005

PubSub: The Game’s Afoot!

I went to check the PubSub LinkRanks for brainwagon today, only to find that my ranking, which had been floating in the mid 50,000 range, was now ranked closer to the 992,461. A closer inspection of pubsub indicates that positions beginng at 10 are all occupied by mystery domain deai.com. Methinks somebody has been gaming pubsub for fun or profit.

Must Have Magazine: Make

I just got my first issue of Make, and all I can say is Wow! Terrific magazine. Fifteen minutes after cracking it, I went to the website and subscribed, then went back and read some more. If you need food for your inner-geek-child, this is it. Don’t miss it.

Music download prices to rise

The Register reports that major music labels are trying to get music retailers to increase prices. What a good idea! Let’s make it even more costly for individuals to acquire music, that’s sure to drive down the rates of copyright infringement!

Seriously, what are they thinking?

The problem appears to be related to Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Apparently 65% of all music downloads for money occur through the iTunes music store. Apple’s success in online marketing of music appears to be at the expense of the major labels (or so they apparently believe) and they apparently aren’t happy.

I do see why they are worried. The wholesale price for songs is 65 cents per track. Apple collects 99 cents per track, netting themselves 34 cents. The record companies do have expenses that Apple probably does not: they do after all pay to produce albums, and they have to manufacture them. One could expect that over time, online distribution of music will become the norm, and the overall market for the solid vinyl plastic form of music will become a thing of the past, and record companies will not be able to maintain their lofty lifestyles.

But it’s there fault for handing a huge market over to Apple for a pittance. You can’t put the djinni back in the bottle, and it will be damned tough for them to take the market back. Raising prices at this point results in a Pyrrhic victory for all businesses involved.

It’s time to evolve or perish.

Brainwagon Has No Daily Readers

I’ve noticed something which I sort of find surprising: this website has no daily readers.

I’ve been scanning the logs of all the people who come to my website, and by far the majority, probably 90% of all hits, come here via Google searches. Not from hitlists on websites, or directories, or anything else, but just people entering strange keywords which, by virtue of the eclectic nature of most of my posts, send them to brainwagon.

One unfortunate thing is that my statistics do not capture those who read brainwagon via RSS: statistics on those who access the RSS feed are not available from statcounter.com‘s statistics. Since I do make the entire text of my postings available in the RSS feed, perhaps all my regular readers are reading brainwagon via RSS.

I’ll have to do some more research in my log files to help figure that out.