I've gotten roughly 300 blog spams in the last 5 days. Even though I'm using nofollow, it's too much to deal with and so, without enough time to come up with a better solution, I'm turning off comments for now.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:47 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Checking the role-out today of torrent search on bittorrent.com, one thing that definitely got my interest was their torrent rating feature. I'm liking this alot. It would be very cool if Prodigem (and lots of other trackers) could hook into this both to send reviews and to query. Joi Ito has more.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:38 AM in torrents | Comments (0)  

Lawrence Lessig is up in arms over a recent BillBoard article which, among other things, conflates the story of a rock artist who luckily chose AIDS medicine over the Creative Commons. Matt Haughey is also outraged over the story and Lessig gives a lot of great background on where this is all coming from. The bottom line message from RIAA-types is that the Creative Commons "is little-known in the music industry" and needs to stay this way-- that if choices are made available to artists, there's a chance they won't choose to put their fate and earnings into the Recording Industry as it is known today.

This all started bubbling up back in January of this year where Lessig first responded to such attacks (video torrent link) at the Creative Commons anniversary party in his animated style. And so it seems we have moved well past the point where we are to be ignored and are now actively being fought. As they say, the next step is to win.

As the title of the original offending article clearly states, music biz wary of copyright sharing movement.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:38 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Just got back from Star Wars, good flick. What do I find on slashdot? Trackerless torrents in mainline BitTorrent. Very nice. I'll have to dive in for more details, but from the sounds of everything, Prodigem now more than before will be a great place to come for aggregated content, information and statistics on torrents, and most of all, a place to use BitTorrent to sell content. The ways of the torrent more accessible have become.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:49 AM in torrents | Comments (0)  

Fading Ways Music has joined Prodigem and are now making 4 of their albums available in both mp3 and flac format. The albums in mp3 are available for $6.99 while the albums in flac format (CD audio quality) are available for $8.99 and include bonus CD artwork. For more information on Fading Ways, check out this recent interview that Neeru Paharia did with Neil Leyton for the Creative Commons website.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:48 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Dan Gillmor has just announced the launch of Bayosphere, a project he's been working on since he left the San Jose Merc. Should make for an interesting CitizensMediaSummit tomorrow, err today.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:03 AM in general | Comments (0)  

It's a podcast in Dutch but available both directly from curry.com or from Prodigem. In his Daily Source Code from May 5th he confessed to bandwidth woes and his desire to hook into BitTorrent, so we'll see where this goes. I think there are all kinds of possibilities. Namely, higher-quality mp3s for the podcast as well as bundling featured songs as separate mp3s for the downloaders convenience.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:44 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Well, its been an especially busy day (and entire week stuck in the basement of the william gates stanford cs building) and only just now did I read that the broadcast flag was struck down. Wow! My appreciation goes out to anyone who had a hand in getting rid of this onerous regulation.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:13 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Hectic-ity has certainly kept me away from the blog as of late, but wanted to pop in to mention Prodigem's new partnership with The Weblog Project. Robin Good is leading an effort to chronicle and interview leading bloggers on what all this blogging means and where it's taking us. The result will be a creative commons licensed movie and I'm glad to help out as needed.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:41 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)