“Your users don’t care that it’s hard…”

In a post this week on the ongoing problems of subscription music services, Anthony Volodkin aptly summarizes the perilous landscape of the space from a user’s perspective:

So [instead] they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.

Mapping American Stress

The well designed map displays unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcy, or a composite “stress index”, by county.

(via AP Economic Stress Map (Aug 09 data) – Chart Porn)

DIRECTV is about to get really, really interesting (I think)

A handful of related thoughts, leading to a larger one:
Last week, my new favorite television show, Hung, ended its initial season run on HBO. On a lark, I posted to Facebook and Twitter for recommendations for a new series into which to sink my teeth. 24 hours and a few hundred suggestions later, a handful [...]

Miro Two Point Whoa

Xiaochang Li over at The C3 posts today on something that I had been anticipating but had let slip from my mind – the latest release of the open-source Miro video player.
The genius of Miro 2.0, as the post points out, is the ability to aggregate within the player library video content in a range [...]