Much blogging today, much going on...

After reading through Ottmar Liebert's blog, I couldn't help but notice "the problem with music", a fascinating article from three years ago, linked from Dave Winer.  Read it - clearly the economics for artists in signing with a label are terrible.  No wonder they're eagerly embracing self-publishing on the Internet.  Business 2.0 has noticed "the MP3 economy".

The same post on Scripting News has a great entry, "where do I send the money'", about Napster.  Remember Napster?  Yeah, they were big in mid-2000, nobody bigger.

James Lileks: France is living down to our expectations.  More well-deserved French bashing...  "Parisians are reduced to sneering at each other, just to keep in practice."

It gave me great pleasure the other night to pass on ordering French Champagne at the House of Blues, despite a wonderful selection; the Schramsberg we ordered instead was great.

Another week, another Carnival; this one is at Real Women Online.  Despite the threat, entries were not limited to women only :)

Wow.  CNet reports that according to a study by the American Management Association, U.S. workers spend a quarter of their day dealing with email.  I hope this isn't true for programmers.  Actually I hope it isn't true at all.  That can't be right, can it?

Jeremy Zawodny: The Bot from Redmond.  MSN's new search bot is crawling...  Here's more on the MSN site.  Will this be the Google killer?

[ Later: Dave Winer posted this email from an anonymous source; "they have Google in their crosshairs" ]

Aaron Swartz presents Edward Tufte's essay about the evils of PowerPoint - as a Powerpoint presentation.  I love it!  [ via Philip Greenspun ]

There's more on the Handspring Treo 600; apparently it has been formally announced a the CeBIT show in New York.  From the pictures it looks really cool.  The screen is the same size as the Treo 300, but the device is much smaller and lighter.  It includes an integrated camera, and has the ability to exchange pictures as "caller id" on 'phone calls.  Sprint will be selling it - and I will be buying it :)

Want to read something really bogus?  There are two modern ways to connect things to computers, USB and firewire.  A few years ago when they both became available firewire was much faster than USB.  The USB people figured out how to make USB somewhat faster, and the old USB was called 1.0, with the new USB called 1.1.  Well it was still way slower than firewire, so they kept working, and came out with a newer version they called 2.0.  This is *almost* as fast as firewire, and backwards compatible.  So far so good, right?  Well, it turns out people like you and me wanted USB 2.0 and not USB 1.1, so we began asking "what kind of USB does this PC have"?  And PCs with USB 1.1 stopped selling.  So what did the USB people do?  They renamed USB 1.1 as USB 2 "full speed", and USB 2.0 as USB 2 "hi-speed".  Is this bogus, or what?  Buyer beware!  Actually buyer should choose firewire, which just works, is still faster than USB, and has no downside or industry bogusness.