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The Orange

This is ... weird. But I like it.



I'm not quite sure why I like it... perhaps because it's weird but not so weird I can't make some sense out of it. Or can I make sense out of it? Maybe I only think I can.

Well, I have no idea. Probably could interpret the story many different ways. But this is from a short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum. I tried looking him up but couldn't find that much info on him (not that I tried very hard), but he does have a book of short stories that I'd now very much like to read. Fun stuff.

Muziic allows YouTube song streaming

According to this article:

A 15-year-old has created a free-music service by harnessing YouTube's vast library of music videos.

Muziic, created by teen developer David Nelson, has built an iTunes-like interface on top of YouTube. The service enables users to stream YouTube's music to their PCs without fiddling with videos. Users can build playlists and organize songs in a way similar to iTunes.

While it's a nice idea, I don't like it. And if I were YouTube, I certainly wouldn't like it. Here are the problems I see at first glance:

1) Professional record labels (or all artists in general, really) allowing their music to be on YouTube expect their work to be experienced through YouTube. Something like this isn't fair to them, and YouTube owes it to them to prevent it. Some may be okay with it, some may not.

2) As far as I can tell, you have to register to use this Muziic service, which means someone else will have access to and control over a user base and their usage statistics. Even if technically legal, this bothers me in a moral sense because the service isn't providing any of the music or streaming resources at all. I would think this David does want to financially profit from this somehow. That just doesn't seem fair to me since YouTube is providing most of the essential resources. In other words: how can YouTube profit from this, as they should? And what gives anyone else the right to profit from YouTube's resources?

3) The name "Muziic" is just terrible.

However, I think this is still a good idea. To me, it just seems like it's trying to profit too much off of YouTube's resources. As huge and mighty as YouTube is, this just doesn't seem fair to them, and, as someone who composes music and puts it on YouTube myself, it doesn't seem fair to me either. I'd rather see YouTube hire this guy to help improve YouTube with his ideas, with YouTube's permission and oversight.

I think YouTube will probably successfully shut this down, as it should. It will probably anger some people, but I'll have to be on YouTube's side.

Driver pulled over for laughing

Somebody twittered this...

When Mr Saunders got out of his car, the policeman told him: "Laughing while driving a car can be an offence."

The officer spent half an hour questioning his suspect before reluctantly allowing him to carry on his way.

So don't be too happy, drivers!