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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Egomania, Part 2
A friend at the nonprofit Electronic Freedom Foundation tells me an article of mine, The New Napsters, is quoted in the music industry's lawsuit against Morpheus. Actually, when it was first relayed through a mutual friend, telephone-style, the news came out thus: "Apparently you've been named in a lawsuit." This caused a split-second panic attack while I wondered who I'd libeled now and whether a journalist's salary would allow me a decent attorney. However, the fact that my words have been quoted by music industry lawyers in an attempt to prove their case -- see the footnote at the end of page 6 in this PDF document -- is no less disturbing. First of all, my article -- like at least three others I've written about Morpheus -- was very favorable towards the service, and pointed out that unlike Napster, there is no central server and thus no obvious legal way to shut the service down. Secondly, I'm generally sympathetic towards the EFF and its causes, such as defending Dmitry Sklyarov. And thirdly -- well -- I'm a user, man. I love Morpheus almost as much as I loved Napster. How ironic would it be if it were brought to its knees partly on the basis of something I wrote?
Closer examination suggests that the music industry's lawyers are reaching. The quote they took out of my piece was "the industry needs to listen to consumers: free and easy file-sharing is what they want." This is supposed to prove that Morpheus is being "pugnacious." Yeah, right. More like a simple statement of fact: nothing has become more clear in two years of digital music downloads. When will the record labels listen to this simple message? We don't want poor-quality streaming audio. We don't want $20-a-month licenses to listen to music. We don't want copy-protected files that sit on our hard drive for a limited time only. And we certainly don't want CDs that cost $18. But we will happily pay for MP3s, as long as they're easy to download and we can do anything we damn well want with them. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if the record labels were to do this and charge something simple like $1 per song, they would make an absolute killing. Hollywood's battle against videotape in the early 80's proved this: there comes a point where you have to stop fighting massively successful new technology. Why not sooner rather than later?
And they'd save all that money they're wasting on paying lawyers to read my article, too.
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