Hanan Cohen spotted this at Last.fm:

When the artist is listed as ‘Undefined’ this is probably a poorly-tagged mp3.
Otherwise, Undefined is a Spanish progressive death metal band. The first Undefined EP is called Saturnism Unfolds and is avalaible to download at http://www.definethenoise.tk.
UnDeFiNeD is also a Belgian underground band, bringing a variety of urban styles

[Tags: undefined definitions humor ]

I had a stimulating dinner conversation with someone who works for an institution that preserves the work of a well-known choreographer. (I’m being a bit cagey because I may not be representing this person’s views accurately.) The institution licenses productions very carefully and is stringent in insisting that every element of the productions be authentic, i.e., be as the work was originally produced. Predictably, I wondered why the institution didn’t loosen up. The choreographer would have more influence because her (or his — caginess!) works would be more frequently performed. After all, if the Beethoven Institute insisted that all performances must be on original instruments, using exactly the same pacing, intonations, sonic dynamics, etc., as Beethoven intended, our culture would be far poorer because we’d hear much less Beethoven and many fewer creative interpretations of his works. In fact, Beethoven would have copyrighted himself right out of culture.

But, replied my dinner companion, it’s different with the work of a great choreographer. The work consists of the details of music, costume, lighting and gesture. The gap between composition and performance is smaller than with a musical score; in fact, there is no gap.

I am not convinced. Nor am I not unconvinced. I think I think that the magic of metadata could let us have our cake and dance it too: the association could authenticate those performances that met its criteria, while freely (liberally, if not for free) permitting non-canonical performances. I don’t know the status of Gilbert and Sullivan’s copyrights, but the D’Olyly Carte group performs a similar metadata function: There are many productions of Gilbert and Sullivan works — a couple of weeks ago, we saw a delightful Mikado that updated lyrics with references to Dick Cheney’s little list — but if you want to see an authentic version, you go to D’Oyly Carte.

But, much as a I like metadata, I’m not confident that I understand the dimensions of the issues in copyrighting something that seems to fall between a score and a performance. [Tags: copyright copyleft choreography dance arts mikado]

Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful. [Tags: wesch everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Why I’m going back to watching Heroes via torrents

I’m glad NBC is posting the Heroes series on its site. Heroes‘ schedule isn’t my own. So, I decided I would put up with NBC’s “limited commercial interruptions” because downloading torrents takes time, too.

But, the mistake of hitting the “reload” button on my browser, which slammed the NBC video player all the way back to the beginning. And guess which parts you can’t fast forward over? Plus, now the ads are freezing, so I’ll have to restart again, and watch the same damn Silver Surfer ads again. (Every time I see that ad, I think again about how bad the movie looks.)

Torrents may be a pain in the butt, but at least once they run, I can control what I’m looking at. Plus, the picture is bigger and clearer.

So, NBC, you’re going to have to do better to compete with free. [Tags: torrents heroes tv nbc]

ClickForensics has launched a network of advertisers to detect fraudulent clicks on ads, either by a competitor trying to burn up the budget or move up in listings, or by contentent publishers looking to make more money for the clicks. It's done through bots, spyware, click farms, pay-to-read... They say over 20% of the clicks coming from content sites (?) are fraudulent.

Michelle Wu of Social Television (mediaZone) — omigod, I think it's a woman! — talks about "social tv," which is professional TV with social interactivity. She's shows an over-produced promotional video, with the faux-important voice of Robin Leech. Then she pitches. It lets users talk together—chat—while watching professional packaged, long-form TV. It does p2p peering, saving "over 99% bandwidth costs." It serves ads to users based on their demographics and behavior. [I'm just not convinced that these various platforms we've seen today do much more than starting up a chat room while watching TV; that's what we do for political events we couldn't otherwise stand to watch.The P2P delivery is interesting, but I'm guessing someone else will solve this problem in a way that catches on, at which point SocialTV doesn't seem to be much more than a chatroom with ads. Unless I'm missing the point. Again.]

Dave Networks builds "video social communities around brands." E.g., the Stargate site is a money-making community site.The content developed there can be syndicated. "We've created a monetization model for syndication."

Real Time Content promises a "disruptive approach" that they call Adaptive Media. "Real Time Content, doesn't just play media, it adapts it to the audience." Every viewer sees his own TV program. [Well, ad.] It even adapts to the viewer's mood. In his example, Honda FR-V has four user profiles, although you could have thousands. He creates a thirty second ad in real time for a "young married couple" profile. Then he does one for a socer mom. The first is in Scotland with soothing music and the second features a mom packing kid's equipment, with spacey music and a voice-over. "We're empowering the consumer to control the ad." The ad creator creates the template using a Flash inteface that has metadata for content fragments for mood, demo, etc. [Great. Now we can wait for the blog post titled "My Adaptive Media ads think I'm gay."]

Jay Hallberg of SpiceWorks does "Ad-supported IT management for SMBs." If you subscribe, it inventories your network automatically and sets watches on things you want to watch, such as low disk space or low toner. As they do that, they show you ads. [Hmm. Could I be sick of seeing ads? Nah. How could I ever tire of that??] [SpiceWorks may do more than that, but I didn't hear.] [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing advertising metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I gave Midomi a quick whirl this morning. It searches for songs based on melodies you hum to it. Fun idea, but it took me six tries before it got one right. It thought my rendition of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth was the 59th St. Bridge song by Simon and Garfunkel, and it thought my rendition of the 59th St. Bridge Song was Oh Daddy by Fleetwood Mac. Midomi offers to play the matched portion of the song (recorded by users, which is rather charming), and in no cases were the match and the matchee recognizably the same, except presumably in some computer algorithmic sense. It did get, "Doe, a Deer" right. Unfortunately, that's the one song whose name is embedded in its melody.

I'm no Mariah Carey, but I'm within the bell curve of normalcy for singing on key. Even so, I played the opening notes of the 59th Street song on my keyboard, with my mic laid on top of it. That apparently is Only a Dream in Rio by James Taylor. And Beethoven's Fifth on the keyboard Midomi thinks is the melody to How Deep Is Your Love.

If I'm missing the point, I'm sure you'll set me straight. [Tags: midomi everything_is_miscellaneous music search]

Computer Gaming World after many years has dropped its numeric reviews. Instead it reviews in prose. But, probably in response to reader complaints, it has recently re-introduced numeric reviews...just not its own. Reviews now include the numeric reviews given by other other publications. Thus does CGW climb the meta-tree, aggregating information even from competitors. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous metabusiness reviews computer_gaming_world ]