eMusic seems to be getting quite a bit of buzz around the Internet. (See James Governor’s pro-eMusic article today for more evidence.) Two weeks ago I had never heard of it, and now it seems like I’m reading about it everywhere.

The biggest marketing problem eMusic has, aside from not offering any of today’s popular hits for download, is that they don’t allow you to browse their full catalog before you sign up. To me, not offering today’s popular hits is actually a bonus, because I generally hate all of those songs. The other problem is ameliorated by the fact that they offer a two week trial during which you can browse the full catalog and download 50 songs which you get to keep. I signed up last week and I’ve downloaded 48 of my free 50 songs. (I grabbed one full CD with 18 tracks and another double CD with 30.)

I won’t be able to get every record I’m interested in from eMusic, but they offer enough stuff that’s of interest to me to make it worthwhile to pay $9.99 a month for 40 downloads, which is of course an infinitely better deal than the iTunes Music Store or CDs. And the music is unencumbered by DRM, which is the only reason I signed up. Their user interface is good enough and their download tool is a breeze to use, overall I’m impressed. Give eMusic a shot, the worst case scenario is you get 50 free tracks. (The actual worst case scenario is that you sign up, forget about your subscription and pay $9.99 a month for nothing. That’s always a risk for me.)

Update: Google seems to index eMusic’s music catalog, so if you want to know if they offer a particular band or album, just use site:emusic.com in a Google search along with the band name or whatever else it is you’re looking for.

Update: You can browse the catalog at this link, even if you’re a non-subscriber.

It’s time for another episode of Rate the Privacy Threat. In our most recent installment, we looked at the click tracking in iTunes (new downloads now include a privacy warning before enabling the feature). Today’s issue is a new Mozilla Firefox feature that will allow sites to specify a “pingback” URL that will be hit after the user clicks on an outbound link from the site.

To understand what this feature will do and why Web site creators are asking for it, it’s necessary to look at how sites currently track how many people follow outbound links. Many sites (including some weblogs) like to keep track of which links people are clicking on. The way this is implemented currently is that they direct all links to a script that acts as a “clickthrough tracker.” The actual URL to follow is passed as a parameter to the script, which logs the clickthrough and then sends the user on their way. As the blog entry describing the Firefox feature points out, there are some problems with this approach. Number one on the list is that you have to wait for the clickthrough script to process your request before you get to see the content you really wanted to see. If that script is bogging down, you can wait to see your content even if the link’s destination is on your LAN. The second problem is that if you don’t want your clickthrough tracked, you have to copy the link location, cut the URL out of it, and then paste it into your browser.

The Firefox approach is to add an attribute to the a tag named ping. After you click on a link, Firefox will load the new page, and then send the link URL to the ping URL that’s specified. From a performance standpoint, this is a win because you don’t have to wait for the ping before you can see the content you were looking for in the first place. There’s also a privacy advantage. Routing around today’s clickthrough processor is a painful process that requires manual intervention. It sure seems to me like it would be easy to write a Firefox extension that would turn pings off, assuming the Firefox people don’t include such a setting in the browser when it’s released.

Clickthrough tracking is here to stay. Standardizing it and putting it under the control of the user seems like a win to me.

Yesterday I read that Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday had drawn some unwanted attention to his article in Wikipedia. I checked out the page history and in looking over the revisions, I noticed a name that looked familiar among the people who were rolling back malicious changes to the page — Jpgordon. A quick trip over to the user’s bio page confirmed that it was in fact, Josh Gordon, a one time incredibly prolific user of The Well. Anyway, Josh used to be a full time programmer, struck it rich at eBay, and has retired. Anyway, Josh disappeared from The Well about 5 or 6 years ago, and I had wondered what he was up to. I’m not surprised to see that he has occupied himself by working to make Wikipedia better, mainly by working on thankless tasks like getting rid of junk and reverting vandalized pages. In discussions, he was always the person who brought facts to bear in an argument, and it’s logical that now he’s working on an encyclopedia.

I think this is the real secret to Wikipedia’s success. Josh is one of the smarter people I’ve met online, and would certainly command a high price for his services were he selling them on the open market. Wikipedia, just by existing and giving people something interesting to contribute to, gets a lot of labor out of him free of charge. I’m sure there are plenty of other Josh Gordons working on the site, and that explains in large part how Wikipedia turns anarchy into an orderly resource.

I’ve never been a big on making New Years resolutions, but I have come up with them on occasion. Generally, throughout the year, I also set goals for myself that are usually unattainable in that they would involve completely changing my lifestyle or personality in some way or another. I’ve decided to dispense with all that, semantically anyway, and instead try to improve myself through experimentation. There’s very little pressure when it comes to an experiment, even if it fails you’ve still learned something. For example, one of the things that can kill my productivity is thinking about one thing while I’m doing another. If I’m trying to write some code but I’m thinking about something I wanted to write about here, it makes my coding less productive. If I have two projects and I’m working on one but thinking about another, I’m not really optimizing my time. So my current experiment is trying to do whatever I’m thinking about. If I find myself reading a book but thinking about work, I’m going to try and get up and do the work, rather than having a sub-optimal reading experience. If I’m having a conversation with someone, I’m going to try to concentrate on the conversation either by focusing on what we’re discussing or turning the discussion toward whatever it is I’m preoccupied by. It will be interesting to see if I can even succcessfully perform the experiment and whether or not it makes me more productive. (It seems to be working so far — I’m writing this piece because I was thinking about it while I was trying to get something else done.)

At work we’ve been having an ongoing discussion about how to manage identity for our internal applications. We have a number of functions we need to implement, all of which will need to be tied to a user’s identity. We’d like to use a mix of applications we write ourselves and off the shelf applications, and the big question we’re facing is how to manage identity across all of these applications. This sort of goes back to a post I made awhile back noting that increasingly people are just tying into the user registration system for packages like PHPbb as a quick and dirty solution to this problem.

We’ve sort of come to a decision that the best approach is to have two systems, our identity management system, which other applications can integrate with at the Web service level or database level, and an LDAP service. That’s all well and good, but there are still a couple of questions that we’re wrestling with — how to get users who register on the Web site into LDAP and where to put the user registration code. Right now, we’re planning on writing a standalone user registration/management application, but then each application that uses it will have its own roles and privileges. Should they share one table for roles and privileges or should each application maintain its own?

I think the problem’s we’re seeing explain why the big cross-company identity systems have never taken off to a great extent. It’s hard enough when you control all of the applications and the database, the complications only grow when you’re talking about integrating with someone else’s identity application. Sometimes I think that maybe just having a bunch of different user names and passwords is easier.

Shelley Powers posted a a brief review of eMusic, which differs from other music downloading services in that the tracks are available in the MP3 format and are unencumbered by DRM of any kind. They offer over 600,000 tracks, although major label current releases seem to be missing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They offer a two week free trial during which you can download up to 50 tracks, so it sure seems like it’s worth a shot.

Let’s say you need to include a link to Microsoft’s Jscript reference in a print document. The URL used to be http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/jscript/. Now it’s this crazy, lengthy URL with another URL nested inside it, and the inner URL actually ends with a GUID. I think we can pin this one on lazy content management system developers. In any case, it’s sad to see a perfectly good URL die. For the record, here’s a link with the new URL. I would have just posted it but it’s so long that it would have thrown off the layout of this page.

I have seen some discussion of MacBook Pro prices, but few of them seem to be comparing Apples to apples, if you get my meaning. To make a true comparison, you have to compare the Mac to a similarly equipped PC notebook from a business-oriented line of products. (Business-targetted laptops are better built and more expensive than the ones targetted at consumers.) Here’s an article previewing Core Duo-based Windows notebooks, and it sure looks to me like the price of admission is $1999 regardless of manufacturer. Gateway advertises a much lower price than that, but as soon as you start customizing it to match the specs of the MacBook, you find that you’re right at the same price point as the Apple laptops.

There’s no question that Apple desktop systems are significantly more expensive than Windows systems, but Apple was competitive in the notebook world until progress stagnated on the processor front. To me it looks like the Intel transition has put them right back in the fray.

Update: Tristan Louis performed a more detailed comparison between the MacBook Pro and Acer’s new Core Duo laptop and finds that the Mac comes up short on feature by feature basis. (He has both listed at $1999, but commenters seem to think that the Acer is more expensive than that.)

Tom Coates has a good post on the new “feature” in iTunes, called the MiniStore, that prompts you to buy music from the iTunes Music Store while you’re browsing your music library. The first time I opened iTunes 6.0.2 (which came with a new EULA, a warning sign if there ever is one) and looked at the library, I had the classic, “What the hell is that?” reaction. I have since learned that not only does the window take up some of my precious screen space with content I don’t want, but it also sends a list of whatever I’m looking at in the library or listening to back to the mother ship so that it can supply me with recommendations tailored to my tastes.

You can turn off the feature (and the data collection) by selecting “Hide MiniStore” in the Edit menu, but I didn’t find that out until I read about the feature on BoingBoing. It doesn’t surprise me when people add features like this, but I still think this sort of pushes iTunes into the spyware category. Maybe some people will like this feature (I normally do like recommendations), but I think the proper solution from the user interface design perspective would have been to notify upgraders about the new feature the first time they run iTunes post-upgrade and let them opt out right up front.

I have been watching Lost obsessively since the series premiered, and one of my great worries has been that there will never be a satisfying conclusion. That’s what happened with the X-Files — the creators of the show didn’t know how long it would last, so they just stretched it out until they didn’t get renewed, and the storyline eventually fell apart. When I started watching the show, “conspiracy” episodes were my favorite, but by the end, the “moster of the week” episodes and funny episodes were the only ones I really loved. (I still contend that Humbug is one of the greatest hours of TV ever.)

Anyway, I was a bit disappointed to read that the creators of Lost have given up the pretense that they’ll wrap have to wrap things up cleanly. Here’s series creator Damon Lindelof:

How can you ever possibly think that ‘Lost’ will end in a satisfying way? Carlton and I can almost guarantee you that it will not.

If they don’t believe the show can end in a satisfying way, what incentive do they have to even create a compelling or sensible arc for the show? From day one I’ve worried that the loose ends would get out of control on the show, and it sure looks like the creators just don’t care. As long as they retain their viewers from week to week and keep getting renewed, they’re successful.

What does this mean for Lost viewers? That you shouldn’t worry about anything but week-to-week quality. If the show is good, keep watching. If it gets stale, move on to greener pastures. It’s not as though there’s going to be anything to stick around for.