loose wire | blog – Page 513 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

Mail: More on Pirates

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

More mail about online piracy and the music industry. I wrote earlier:

I agree with you about people being upset, but I’m not so sure about the recording off the radio bit. Digital versions don’t have DJs interrupting before the end of the song, and they’re perfect copies, and can be copied perfectly and distributed easily. I can give you my whole music collection on a CD or two. That makes it a different ballgame…

Here’s Lynn Dimick again:

That’s true. The question I have is this: Is music swapping costing the industry money? Now, on the surface anytime you have a product being given away for free it is going to take away from sales. But, if the product is being given to a consumer who cannot or will not buy it, even if it cost $1 then there is no lost sale. My suspicion is that the music industry is producing music that is appealing to those who have less money and less inclination to spend than before. Even if music sharing were not available they would not be buying CDs.

I am 43. I have well over 200 CDs in my collection that I have bought. But I haven’t bought a CD in the past 3 years. Why? Because they (the music industry) are not producing a product that I listen to. The demographics that I belong to (white male 40+) has more money than any other age group, especially the teenagers that seem to be doing all of the sharing.

I heard on the news this morning that Bruce Springsteen had a concert last night at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. 55,000 people came to see the show. He has 9 more dates there. Most of those attending are going to be my age and not teenagers. Who has the money and who is being ignored by the music industry?

Thanks for that. Thoughts, anyone? A friend recently forwarded me a piece from The Guardian on this very topic. My view is that the music world has splintered so effectively, hastened by the advent of the Net, that it makes it so much harder nowadays to find the music we want. There’s some very appealing stuff out there — my favourite of the moment is Lemongrass, for example — but you’re not going to find them in a CD shop. In a way this diversity is good but us busy folks (I’m no spring chicken either) don’t have the time or energy to look too hard for this kind of thing. I’ve found a sanctuary of sorts in Emusic where at least one can experiment legally without blowing a hole in the housekeeping.

Software: OpenOffice Almost Open For Business

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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OpenOffice, the free open source challenge to Microsoft Office, is in its last stage before general commercial release next month. It includes the usual — a word processor, a spreadsheet application — and can save in Office formats. This version can also export files in the portable document format (PDF) and in Macromedia’s Flash animation format. OpenOffice 1.1 also supports non-Latin character sets, and is available in 30 languages. Maybe now is the time to try it out. You can download the ‘release candidate’ version here.

If money is a problem, it’s a great solution. Am I using it? Er, no. But that’s because I’m too lazy to get over the (admittedly rather gentle) learning curve involved in making the transition. This is professional software, and it’s good enough for prime time.

Software: Morpheus Drops the Spyware

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Apparently not to be outdone by Grokster’s new version, fellow file sharers StreamCast Networks, Inc., have announced a new, free, version of Morpheus, 3.2, free of spyware and laden “with new features, making file-sharing faster, safer and more secure”.

This version is more than 50% smaller in file size from Morpheus 3.1, and offers superior global search capabilities, can use your own default media player, reduces traffice by up to half etc etc. It also helps users avoid the snooping of the folks at the RIAA: ”users of the new Morpheus 3.2 software can link directly to third party websites that publish “blacklists” of IP addresses, believed by its contributors, to be among those that are used to snoop into the privacy of users. If a user chooses to click on any of these blacklisted IPs, those IP ranges will be blocked from the users computer”. It also makes using proxy servers easier, preserving your anonymity.

News: Spam Stats Galore

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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If it’s one thing we’re not short of, it’s spam stats. Here are two more, fresh from the PR newswire:

Clearswift, “the world leader in managing and securing electronic communications” (I’ll be honest, I hadn’t heard of them until today), has this week launched a Spam Index, in which it has found that “in contrast to recent reports that have suggested pornographic spam
constitutes 60-80 percent of spam, Clearswift’s Spam Index shows that pornographic spam is found only 22 percent of the time. Instead, the largest proportion of spam – 23 percent – was distributed by companies selling direct goods.”

Also, a study released the same day by The Radicati Group Inc., “a leading independent market research firm” found that email traffic has grown 80% over the past year, most of which it blames on spam, which it said represents 24% of total corporate email traffic.

Email size, it says, is also on the rise. Larger and more frequent use of attachments are the primary culprits for this trend. The full press release is only available in Acrobat PDF format.

My tuppence: Radicati’s figure for total spam proportion seems way too low. And while I’d agree with Clearswift that porn does not dominate spam — I’m not sure where they got their figures, but their website press release headline blames a “sensationalizing media” for it — there seems to be a reason to be somewhat suspicious of their motives for telling us all this. Telling is a paragraph on their website press release that offers a spin on things:

Although it only takes one pornographic email to cause offence and land an organization in litigation for harassment, the level of unsolicited email that falls into the ?healthcare? and ?direct goods? categories suggests the problem of filtering spam is more complex than simply blocking profane and pornographic emails. Deciding whether or not an email is spam ultimately comes down to whether or not it is the result of a well executed and highly targeted email marketing campaign. The ability to deploy flexible spam filtering solutions that can take into account personal preferences will be vital in the fight against spam.

To be frank I’m not sure what this means. I think it means: not all spam is spam, some of it is ” well executed and highly targeted email marketing campaign”, and good spam filtering solutions deployed by corporates shouldn’t block all of it because some people might want this stuff in their inbox. I would have thought a company would want to keep out any junk that’s not specifically requested by an employee, especially if it’s for anti-ageing cream or Viagra. Odd, very odd. Can anyone explain this?