for those who use the blog digest kinja: adding the xml/rss feed of a blog to the system often works when the regular url does not. Example: Antville blogs. Just add "/rss10" to the address (hint by herr k.).

Can you please tell me why I should continue buying your copy protected CDs? Not only that they don't play on my computer CD-ROM drive they also don't work on my car stereo. A JVC hifi capable of playing mp3s I bought for about 500 euros two years ago. For once I was almost an early adopter and now this. Thank you EMI et al. You are digging your own grave there. If you want turnover halve the prices and stop this stupid copy protection which drives people into piracy as the free mp3s downloaded via file sharing networks work whereas your expensive CDs don't.

P.S. Is it actually illegal to play mp3 versions of the previously purchased copy protected CDs on a car hifi (using this software for example)?

P.P.S. I own copy controlled (those bloody euphemisms always) CDs by Radiohead and Massive Attack. How could these two politically left-wing bands release their records at a consumer unfriendly label like EMI/Virgin? Maybe they don't want to sell their albums. That would make sense in a way. It's a pity I like their music and I more or less share their political stance but I won't buy any of their copy controlled records anymore.

From the Wikipedia entry on Bill Gates:

P.S. And how did he become the richest man in the world? From the same article:

So what's happening now with Linux and other open source software taking away market shares from Microsoft is in a way the revenge of the community.

The following e-mail with a batch file attached to it was in my inbox this morning:

When trying to access my referrers:

In the meantime I created a blogroll at blogrolling which is displayed on your right-hand side for the time being. The big disadvantage of blogrolling is that it gets the update data only from weblogs.com. Apparently only very few music weblogs ping weblogs.com. Or do you believe that of the 120 sites in the link section only ten weblogs have been updated in the last 48 hours?

From the technical point of the reader there are four kinds of weblogs I know of:

1. The basic outfit: An internet page which doesn't tell anybody when it is updated or it tells everybody that it is updated all the time. There are not so many of these. Often the problem is that there is pseudo-dynamic content on the page like banners which makes it impossible for the reader to know if the page has been updated or not. In this case I use my Quickbrowse collections (subscription $12.95 for 3 months) which I visit on a regular base. An example is this music collection which I check every two or three days.

2. The middle class variant: Weblogs which behave like normal pages and have a correct update status (can be found out with the page freshness bookmarklet from here). Most of the music weblogs I read belong into this group. I read those weblogs using this fresblogs page. It is ordered by last update, the freshest fruits are on top. Right now there are about 130 music sites in there. For some of those sites freshblogs shows several updates per day when they have only been updated once. Therefore I usually open the list only on a daily base. To open the links in a new page I hold down the shift key when clicking on them.

3. The upper class model: Weblogs pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs. Those weblogs can be read via a page like blo.gs where you register and add the weblogs you read. Afterwards you get a page with the latest updated weblogs on top and the lazy webloggers on the bottom like in 2). The advantage to 2) is that this method is more reliable. As freshblogs supports pings I use it here as well.

4. The luxury version: Weblogs supporting RSS (XML) feeds which can be read in a newsreader similar to an e-mail program like Outlook. The program I started to use is the freeware feedreader. Up to now I have thirty weblogs in there of which most are from antville. Unfortunately I have yet only found one music blog supporting RSS, it is monkey puzzle.

If your weblog supports RSS feeds and is about music I would be very thankful if you told me so that I can add you to my news feeds.