What’s so fun about YouTube are the old school videos that get uploaded. I went looking for 90’s era techno tracks from BG The Prince of Rap and Brooklyn Bounce from the early 2000’s. Before you roll your eyes take one look at your playlists of crap before you throw stones.

Example: Brooklyn Bounce’s Bring it Back. You can’t buy this song anywhere let alone the video. I found it on YouTube, saved it my favorites, and now it’s gone. Forever pulled from their massive hard drives due to a TOS violation.

I understand fully about copyrights and the DMCA. What I don’t get is the music industry’s attitude of “lock it up so no one can get it.” As a consumer I can’t buy Bring It Back nor can I enjoy it for free on YouTube. I’m certain the stupid video played ad naseum on some music channel back in the day (free to the viewer I might add) but today? Nope.

Options? Rip the video from YouTube and save it, forever, locally. It’s as if the music industry encourages piracy by withholding content. TubeSock, you are my friend.

It’s been about two months since I last wrote about Spodtronic. A recent email from Keith prompted me to see what’s new with Spodtronic and give my two cents.

Keith mentioned Spodtronic is adding live events to their program line-up but I couldn’t find any reference to a press release. (Standard disclaimer: the web is a big place and I didn’t spend more than five minutes looking.) Tuning your mobile into live events, normally reserved for desktop platforms via Windows Media or Real, is an excellent extension of the Spodtronic software.

What’s less clear is the development going into the Spodtronic software. It hasn’t been updated since May and the same glitches still exist as I noted in my other post. I have one more to add: when a channel is removed from Spodtronic’s line-up it remains orphaned on your device, forever trying to connect and never throwing an error message.

Spodtronic should be managing the channels on your device, not simply aggregating them. I can aggregate easily enough with Nokia’s built-in player or a third-party product like LCG Jukebox. The user experience is based on integration and ease-of-use. Spodtronic is pretty to look at, and quite usable, but needs more work to keep you connected and retain your loyalty.

When Digitally Imported (silently?) pulled some of their channels out of Spodtronic, I lost a large degree of interest. There’s a saying, you get what you pay for.

What’s great about the Nokia E61 is the full web browser. What’s bad about the browser is that it takes time to render full sites or Javascript causes a crash.

This is easy to fix on the web host: just autodetect mobile browsers using the User Agent string. If the User Agent is a mobile device, send down the “lite” version of the site and provide a link to the full site for completeness.

I was surprised today when I browsed to Starbucks.com and instantly came to a store locator page. That’s very smart of them and all retail establishments should do this.