Last summer, tired of Firefox 2’s slow and crashy performance on OSX, I switched to using Safari as my primary browser. Though I still opened up Firefox to manage research sources with Zotero and to debug web apps with Firebug, Safari plus Inquisitor was fantastic for everyday browsing–until the recent update to Safari 3.1. Suddenly my fast and sleek browsing experience became a nightmare of crashes. Uninstalling Inquisitor didn’t help, and neither did uninstalling Flash. So farewell Safari, and on to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 turns out to be really nice, and all the key add-ons I need seem to be working for it. I installed Firebug 1.1 and the current development version of Zotero. YSlow works too, although you need to edit its install.rdf and change the maxVersion from 3.0b4pre to 3.0b4. Now I’ve got a browser almost as fast and good-looking as Safari, with far less crashes, and no need to switch applications when I want to save citations or do some debugging. Thanks, Firefox coders!

I’m having trouble getting worked up about the imminent death of net radio. I’m a pretty huge music fan. I own around 1000 CDs, about as many vinyl LPs and 12″s, and I currently have over 50 GB of music in my iTunes. And of course I’m an obsessively heavy net user. But my cumulative lifetime total time spent listening to streaming net radio is probably under 2 hours. If it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice and I wouldn’t care.

Why is this? Part of it is I like to choose my own playlists. But I love broadcast radio. In high school I was a big fan of WREK and Album 88, and in college I was a DJ at KZSU. I like some commercial radio too, especially in places like Atlanta and Oakland where you can still hear sick DJing between the annoying commercials. But part of the appeal of broadcast radio is the local flavor, something lost completely in the move to the net. Net radio is the worst of both worlds: the impersonality that comes with global reach plus the loss of choice over what to listen to next inherent to the radio format.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t dig net music. Most of that 50 GB mentioned above has been harvested from MP3 blogs, which have morphed over the last few years from fanboys posting hot singles to an incredibly diverse array of musical flavor. MP3 blogs provide me with everything from super-eclectic mixes to worldwide beat culture to obscure and forgotten experiments to out jazz to hip hop tapes. As far as I’m concerned, the state of music on the net has never been better.

So farewell net radio, I hardly knew ye.

People are calling the “Digg riot” unprecedented. Unprecedented? I remember seeing this movie before, with DeCSS as The Information That Wanted To Be Free and the Slashdot crowd as the pitchfork-wielding mob of “passionate activists.” Where did that absurdly reductive equation of code with speech get us? Nowhere. Seven years later, the same battles are being fought. If the Slashdotters and Diggers of the world spent their time engaged in real activism, instead of getting their kicks being part of a mob, maybe we’d have seen some progress on DRM issues by now. But that would involve doing more than just clicking on posts while you’re in your parents’ basement waiting for torrents to download.

Yesterday’s New York Times reported that Candian police are experimenting with using YouTube to gather information on suspects captured by surveillance video. The footage shows men entering a nightclub. This is yet another example of the kind of “open source snitching” I wrote about in my paper on recognition markets (abstract). Seems like it’s not working too well, though: the latest comment on the YouTube page is “fuck the police.”

I like the way the New York Times is embedding audio in their frontpage now. The result is a true multimedia document (combining print and audio) not just multiple documents in different media (a podcast or its transcript). A lot of new media journalists and bloggers like to slam the NYT for being closed to new ideas. To me they seem like the Apple of journalism: hermetically sealed, but what a seamless and pleasurable user experience!

The trend to syndicate video through badges is another example of the hybrid document forms currently evolving on the web. Take for example the way this Japanese fansite integrates downsized Youtube screens into the flow of text. These sorts of compound multimedia documents were what Dan and I were thinking about last year when we played around with hybrid spoken/written documents.

Ramesh Jain believes that the convergence of PC-TV is finally here:

Comcast has the pipes both for TV and internet, owns content, and has resources and presence to finally bring this convergence. I hope this happens because the real winner will be the society. …[A]ll the talk is about video content that is produced by professionals. But if this infrastructure gets ready two things will happen – amateur content will also come to these portals and many exciting new technologies, like Multiple Perspective Interactive Video and its variants, will appear that will change the nature of entertainment.