mariorz

ACT NOW!

The reason why doing this isn't more common is because regular folk don't know where to get the content from. Bittorrent is far from mainstream.

Both readwriteweb and gigaom have better articles. The only arguable thing TC has going for it is that they're usually the first with the "news", which is only the result of Arrington's refusal to cover startups if they don't go to him first.

Why would this be a waste of money? as marketing campaigns go, this doesn't look expensive.

The tricky part is obviously in how to fairly distribute the money, and this is where tracking what gets listened or downloaded comes into play.

Well in the proposed flat-rate scenario there would be no need for distinction.

>That's regarding the idea of buying records - the money from most of which goes directly to the record industry. Different models work in different ways.

The post was talking about the flat-rate scenario not buying records, in any case it's obvious the record industry model is dead as it currently exists. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about viable ways of compensating artists.

That post isn't just about the technical problems though, for example:

"We’re paying a tax to a system not needed anymore. The record industry is passé and we do not need nor want them anymore."

I'm not one to defend the decrepit record industry but that's just avoiding the real issue. Is compensating artists considered passe now too?

http://blog.brokep.com/2008/04/14/maybe-a-grant/

Hey brokep: How about doing something similar with the cash from all the porn ads?

I also find it unreassuring to see he isn't interested in proposed flat-rate compensation schemes:

http://blog.brokep.com/2007/12/06/the-problems-with-a-flatra...

Maybe he thinks artists should only be compensated for live shows. Those who can't should probably tend bar or something.

They seem to present themselves as if they were doing this purely out of love or their beliefs, while serving some of the most atrocious ads on the www.

I see them constantly mocking the media's business interests while they themselves have obviously a big money interest on the matter.

I think that makes them less virtuous.

It's the other way around. For a given problem to be NP-complete requires that every problem in the NP superset be reducible to it in polynomial time. So in the A->B case, if we know A to be NP-complete, we have just proved every problem in NP is also reducible to B in polynomial time, by ways of any-NP-problem->A->B, ergo B is NP-complete.

I'm confused, you store values in the tree but in itself it is not a data structure?

Plus it is interesting that you view a B-Tree as an object - when I think about it, I categorise it as an "algorithm" operating on various data objects.

I see a B-tree as a data structure not an object per se, I still don't see how it would mean anything without its operations.

I'm possibly damaged from a few years of OOP but how do you separate a data structure from its functions? e.g. How can a B-tree mean anything separate from its search/insert/delete operations?

  (load 'last.fm)

  (load 'flot)

Seriously, not directed at matt maroon for posting this on his own blog, but I assume most people here have heard of bittorrent and rss before. This isn't new, worthy of discussion, or even vaguely interesting to hackers.

Seems to me that the article would go over great on digg/reddit, maybe you should try there.

really last.fm should do this.

Try posting every tc, mashable or rww article you come across for say a week. I predict your karma will go way up and this site will be less interesting because of it.

I also think micro-payments can be an option one day when someone gets around to making it less painful and more available. I think this will probably involve cellphone companies but I digress.

In any case, I think selling ads can be a very profitable route for others.

Completely agree, but the possible payoff in the latter case tends to be quite higher.

>Myspace hasn't show itself to be a real business yet and either has Youtube. I still can't think of user based acquisitions that have quantifiably proved themselves to be a wise decision, though I think Youtube will.

I think that's hard to say. Take hotmail for example, while it might have not generated a $100 mil in revenues yet (or maybe it has?), I would doubt that the purchase was a strategic decision they regret over at Redmond. I think the same could be said for Youtube. If NewsCorp has regrets over the MySpace purchase, they are quite likely much more due to FB´s growth than to MySpace's current revenue.

If all these companies decided to grow users before revenue when they where a startup, it makes little sense to try to squeeze revenues quickly out of them, at the expense of user growth, once they've been acquired by a company with much larger pockets. I think the logical thing to do, in those cases, would be to continue the same growth strategy for a few years while calmly exploring ways to monetize them.

Startups that don´t get acquired are obviously more pressed to find a way to monetize quickly.

Sites like youtube and myspace did not need to worry about the monetizing part as they got acquired quickly, had they not, maybe the story would be different. I still can't think of sites with a huge and active userbase that failed.

I agree that you shouldn't bank on getting this fobillion users and after that monetizing them. But that's because the real hard part is getting that much users in the first place.