Tzetze Fly

An interesting post last night by Om Malik regarding possible business models for Twitter has sparked a lot of discussion. Here’s my two cents, and Om’s response.  Join in - either here or over there.

Radiohead announced last night on their blog that the new album is finished and will be release in just 10 days. Of course, I went and pre-ordered the ultimate disc box set right away, but news reports today indicate they are trying a new and different approach with the download version of the album. Unencumbered by a traditional record contract, they’ve decided to make the disc box available at a high price with extra goodies for their fans who will have no problem paying for it, then make the downloads available at little to no cost. It looks like the downloads will require users to register with personal details which can then be used for future marketing.

Earlier, they had announced that the album would not be made available on iTunes, so it looks now like this decision was related to giving them maximum control over the downloads and not having to split (or ensure) any profits.

Not having to share profits with a record company, having very low distribution costs, and having an established brand and fans who will support value-added products and tours all add up and give them the luxury to try a different approach. It strikes me that this is very similar to an open source software model: use low distribution costs to get a software tool in front of as many people as possible, then sell value-adds such as support, maintenance, enhancements, and indemnification, then use the established brand to come up with other products and services to sell the user base.

Is the new Radiohead album the first “open source” album? Or is it just a big train wreck waiting to happen?

Similar to the way I wanted to share my Google Reader Shared items on my blog (that post is here), I also decided I wanted to share some of my del.icio.us bookmarks. If you aren’t familiar with del.icio.us (read previous coverage here), it allows you to bookmark sites in the internet “cloud”, then easily access those links by searching, by tags, or through an RSS feed.

Del.icio.us offers a tool, currently in beta, to do just this, but it offers very little in the way of customization. To get to it, log into del.icio.us, choose ’settings’, then ‘daily blog posting’. This tool didn’t work for me - I wanted a way to specify that only certain tags get posted to my blog, I wanted control over the look of the post, and I wanted the option of posting a draft so that I could examine it before it goes live.

Below is a Ruby script I wrote that accomplishes all these things. It consumes an RSS feed of your recent del.icio.us bookmarks, optionally only those tagged with a specified tag, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface. I really don’t want every bookmark I make to appear in my blog - neither do you - so I have set up my script to only include bookmarks I tag “post:tzetzefly”. As I create bookmarks throughout the day, I simply add this tag, along with any other descriptive tags, and I know that this item will appear on my blog later that day.

You can run this manually, or schedule it to run at a specific time as a cron job. Note that this does not rely on inserting the post directly into the WordPress SQL tables as I’ve seen other WP plug-ins do - that requires you to have access to the WP database, which you don’t if (like me) your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.

Again, what this shows is how easy it is to “glue” together different web services to accomplish a useful goal when all the players use well documented web standards. The script can be found here. Read the comments at the very top for examples of how to run it. Make sure you edit your personal settings in the “Stuff you should change” section.

In the process of exporting and importing entries to fix the mis-spelling issue, it looks like all posts got re-published to the RSS feed. Sorry about that - but we’ll live.

Worse is that I lost several comments - they were no longer properly tied to their original posts after the import (sorry Greg and Keith). I’ll keep trying to figure it out, but I guess I’m getting what I paid for from WordPress.com (FREE!).

You may notice every once in a while I have a post titled “items from” and some date, with the content being some (hopefully) interesting items I’ve read on the web that day. Creating that post looks like a simple matter of manually creating a new post, copying and pasting the title and a summary, then adding some formatting and publishing. While that isn’t too hard, even easier would be if you could just share interesting items in your Google Reader (using the “Share” link) during the day and have them magically appear later that night in your blog.

Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface. You can run this manually, or schedule it to run at a specific time as a cron job. Note that this does not rely on inserting the post directly into the WordPress SQL tables as I’ve seen other WP plug-ins do - that requires you to have access to the WP database, which you don’t if (like me) your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.

This whole process takes less than 100 lines of Ruby, including lot’s of comments. What this shows is how easy it is to “glue” together different web services to accomplish a useful goal when all the players use well documented web standards. It also shows how simple, yet powerful, a dynamic scripting language designed for the web can be.

The script can be found here. Read the comments at the very top for examples of how to run it. Make sure you edit your personal settings in the “Stuff you should change” section.

Later, I’ll show you a similar script that automatically creates blog posts from your del.icio.us links.

Thanks Mike.

So my wife - you know, the one with the Masters Degree in Education and the Scrabble Championship Trophy - comes home and I say “Have I got a funny story for you!” She reads Wurzer’s classy post about Titze Fly and says “That’s not how you spell it”. After the bet is established, she spends 5 seconds in Google (yes, on my new Mac) totally smacking me down.

The results:

• titzefly.com and tzetzefly.com now go to the same place.
• I have a renewed education in DNS.
• We are going where my wife wants for dinner.
• The smack talk will continue throughout the three day weekend.

At least she didn’t take my compuer away. I do, however, have to come to bed on time…

So Wurzer outed me! I figured I’d start slowly and build up some stories before I told *anybody* about this (that’d give me a chance to quit silently), but leave it to him to find me less than a week in. That’s either an indication of how dialed in Wurzer is, how social and linked the internet has become, or I guess a little bit of both. As always, Wurzer’s a class act, and a must read.

I guess I have to tell my wife why I’ve been staying up late now… (maybe you can give me some tips on that Mike?)

Well, well. Bought a new iMac and set up a blog. What’s the world coming to?