Webspace of Eric Brodeur

Perspectives on storytelling and digital cinema technology

Archive for August, 2007

YouTubeWhat'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 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.

Starbucks gets the mobile Internet

Starbucks on the E61 browserWhat’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.

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