Darren Straight’s Blog

Microsoft on Monday briefly posted pricing for Windows Vista on its Canadian Web site, giving an eye into what the company will charge for the new operating system.

The posting indicated that the Home Basic edition of Windows Vista will be priced the same as Windows XP Home, at $233 ($259 Canadian). The Home Premium version, which includes support for Media Center and tablet PC abilities will sell for 13 percent higher rate, a price that translates to about $269 in American dollars.

Microsoft quickly removed the price information, but blogger Ed Bott, who spotted the price list earlier Monday, included the price list in a ZDNet posting. Bott cautioned that those trying to figure out U.S. pricing would be better off comparing the Canadian Vista prices to their XP counterparts than to try and just convert to U.S. dollars.

A Microsoft representative said the company “inadvertently posted Windows Vista Canadian retail prices” on its Web site but said it has removed the posting and is not ready to share U.S. pricing information. The company said it would announce those prices when it ships the “Release Candidate 1″ test version, due out by September.

Via: Cnet News

Videobloggers Jay Dedman and Ryan Hodson have visited Behind the Scenes at Technorati with a video camera and have got a nice little report from the people who build that blog search engine.

Via: Robert Scoble

Ever heard of Sonific’s SongSpots? Are you on the Sonific’s SongSpots Limited Private Beta? What do you think of Sonific’s SongSpots Service?

What’s this, you havent heard of Sonific’s SongSpots Service yet, well let me explain, or better yet lets have Sonific the company explain to you first about their selves as a company:

Sonific was founded in July 2005, with the mission of making large catalogs of great music available for the many types of audio-visual usages on the Internet, both for private / non-commercial or promotional purposes, as well as for professional (B2B) users, and licensed products and services.

Sonific’s SongSpots™ service is our first B2C release, reflecting our philosophy that offering better tools for music discovery and providing new, free platforms of exposure is what will really sell music, going forward, and that the viral nature of the Internet is perfectly suited to help get the word out for new and established artists and their music.

We also believe that many of today’s ‘digital natives’ and ‘peer-producers’ want to personalize their web presences, customize the look and feel of their sites, integrate multimedia where they can, and will ultimately use the web as a fully interactive, 2-way, personalized, and therefore ’sonified’ medium.

Equally important, Sonific’s business model is driven by the concept of empowering both the user as well as the content providers, and we believe that this approach will be a very powerful force in the digital music economy.

Sonific is privately funded by a well-known group of U.S.-based angel investors.

So now you should know a bit about Sonific as a business, I guess you would like to know what is Songspot, well let’s have them explain them selves, this time their service:

SongSpots™ are customizable flash-players that will play (i.e. stream) the song of your choice on almost any webpage that you can edit yourself, such as your blog, your online network profile, or your own homepage. They look like this:

To get SongSpots™ you simply log in to Sonific.com, search for, preview and select a song you like, generate and copy the player code, and drop / paste it into any suitable input field on your desired target site, such as the ‘new post’ box on your blog, the ‘description’ field on your photo site, the ‘about me’ space on your social network profile, the html editor on your website wizard, and so on. The exact process varies for each site, and therefore Sonific offers a constantly increasing number of SongSpots™guides to the most popular sites and services that will make this a lot easier for you.

Once you have put the SongSpots™ code on your website, and have re-published it, the music you selected will play every time someone visits your site. Of course, the player can be set to ‘auto-on’ or off, as you see fit, and you can customize the look and feel of your SongSpots™ player, as well (we will be expanding those choices continuously throughout the year, too). All your SongSpots™ can be saved in the MySongSpots folder, allowing you to change songs very quickly, or to just collect your favorite songs for later use.

But hey you’ve only seen the player once here, so why not see for yourself how much other people love Sonific’s SongSpots Player by seeing it in action as well as reading some media coverage about it!

Sonific media coverage
Benoit Descary
Edcostn on Triquard dot org
Florin (Player in sidebar)
Fred Destin
GrObIgOu
HypeBot
Mashable
PresseCitron
Swift Comeuppance
Sylvie Krstulovic
TechnoSight

Sonific Artists
Fez Dispenser.com (Link example)
Hitchhiker
Holly Figueroa
J.B. Schwakter
John Paul Sharp
Mark Rushton
Snagglepuss
Steven McLachlan (blog)
Steven McLachlan (official site)

Blogs
aworks
Bloggernoggin
Dalmuti
Edcostn on Triquard dot org (Player in sidebar)
Flying seeds
fugadinote
Jamie
Narrow street
Ogaudemar
Studio UES
Trendcatching (Player in sidebar)
vaishali

Social networks
Aviv at MySpace (Combining a SongSpot with a Grouper video)
Culture HiFi
George at PropokerSpace
IwannaBEaJARHEAD
Steven Ballard at MySpace (Scroll down a bit)
Wojtek at MySpace

Web sites
Calistoga Springs Research Institute
Darren Straight (Player in sidebar)
Fonesounds
Free Music Framework
gr media

Photo sites
Sorry, no publicly available examples yet.

Miscellaneous
Live365 by The Gnat (see Broadcasters Comments)
Hearts of Space

So according to the Askimet Blog, Askimet the wordpress spam stopper was down, guess that explains why I was receiving lots of spam comments on my blog, glad the problems fixed now though.

The stats code introduced yesterday had a bug which only triggered about 24 hours after it had launched. It kicked in for different blogs at different times, but the result was that starting sometime last night you probably started to see really obvious spam getting past your Akismet filters.

All of our systems were up and running at the time, and spam was being correctly identified, which is why our monitoring systems didn’t notify us of the problem. However, there was extra junk being included with the response which broke the API call, which expects only “true” or “false”.

I’m really sorry about this, when things are working smoothly it’s easy to forget how much vile junk is actually being blocked day to day. I’m going to go through my blogs now and double-check that no spam actually got published, and I’d suggest other folks do the same. The “mass edit” mode under “Comments” should be useful for WordPress users.

I’ve also taken steps to make sure on the Akismet side this kind of error can’t happen again.

Last month Michael Arrington got together with a number of startup CEOs and executives to video a discussion about Web 2.0. Participating in the discussion were Aaron Cohen (Bolt), Scott Milener and Steven Lurie (Browster), Keith Teare (edgeio), Steven Marder (Eurekster), Joe Kraus (JotSpot), Jeremy Verba (Piczo), Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf), Chris Alden (Rojo), Gautam Godhwani (Simply Hired), Jonathan Abrams (Socializr), David Sifry (Technorati), Matt Sanchez (Video Egg) and Michael Tanne (Wink).

The topics discussed included:

1. What is Web 2.0?
2. Are we in a bubble?
3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?
4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?

And though you may have already seen The 24 Minute Web2.0 Documentary on TechCrunch and I probably didnt notice it until now because I’ve been very busy at work as well as sorting out my  last year uni/college fees, I can asure you that it’s worth while watching!

Also as we are talking about web2.0, let me remind you that the Second Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer Redux is on the 11th of August September and that you’re welcome to come as a guest if you let me know or you can visit Roger’s Site and request for an Invite yourself.

Just noticed that the Windows Marketplace site has now updated it’s site design to a new Windows Vista Look and feel, is this the new look and feel already?, or are they just giving us a sneak preview while they test the new site live?

Update: Site Design rolled back after less than 1 hour!

Update 2: Try the Microsoft employees sneak preview site of the new Windows Marketplace at:

http://www.windowsmarketplacelabs.com/

As it seems to be displaying the new site design even though I’m sure it shouldnt be if this is a Microsoft employees only sneak preview site!

Check out this video of a tour of a massive Equinix Data Warehouse for the Web.

Equinix is responsible for holding massive amounts of data, including storage for popular sites like MySpace.com. Take a tour of the facilities, and see how much energy it takes to keep the Web alive.

Via: Digg

So you’ve probably already heard by now (maybe not) about how the name Windows Live Agora is the codename for the replacement of Windows Marketplace, unoriginally expected to be Windows Live Marketplace.

But had you heard/noticed how the current Windows Marketplace site features a countdown to the new version, indicating that the launch will be on Monday the 28th of August at 7pm GMT (8pm BST).

Which means that in hopefuly less than 24 hours we should see this new Windows Live Marketplace (Agora) site emerge from the shadows, but what will it be like, well that’s for you to wonder and for me to know, hey just kidding I don’t have much more information on it, but hey I would recommend keeping and open eye out on LiveSide.net tomorrow.

According to the new Windows Live WiFi team Blog, Windows Live Hotspot Locator is now live and can be found at: http://hotspot.live.com

With 106,978 free and paid WiFi hotspots in 99 countries, our Hotspot Locator makes it easy to locate wireless Internet access around the globe. Use the View on Map feature to see your search results on a map powered by Virtual Earth.

Just got word today that a Windows Live Essentials Beta is on the way, but what is Windows Live Essentials, well it’s an upcoming product which we can consider to be the Windows Live equivalent of the Google Pack, here’s a better description:

Windows Live is a new wave of online services-including e-mail, instant
messaging, and security- designed to work together as a seamless whole.
Windows Live Essentials is a simple way to get a set of these services
in one easy download. It’ll also give you Windows Live Dashboard, which
offers a handy view of what services you already have and what new ones
are available.

Included in this pack are sure to be Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail Desktop along with other popular Windows Live Products.