Amie St is a very interesting business idea with a good execution. They are music discovery and store with a twist - songs start free and the price goes up based on how popular they get. To encourage ratings and downloads, they even pay to the users who discovered good songs early and recommended them to others. And the songs never get as expensive as iTunes. I like free music. I have enough music in the personal collection not to buy new tracks for a while (especially not from RIAA members), but I will listen to free songs to see if something really special will catch my attention.

The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society has updated their website. It now looks prettier, runs on more modern technological base and promises better up-to-date information. This is the next step after the redesign of the society magazine to move forward in times, while preserving the original goals of the Society. It is good to see the society recognising that internet is worth putting time and effort into, especially with members and branches all over the world.

There is a fight brewing between David Rothman of TeleRead and Bill Janssen of Plucker fame. The point of contention (as I understand the issue) is what would be good format to produce e-books in. Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a disadvantage, whether that format is an open standard (like OpenReader) or a proprietary one (like Sony’s BBeB).

In my last update on applied computational linguistics, I have written about PodZinger that uses speech recognition to figure out which advertisement to match to the podcast you are searching with their service. Another company is claiming to do that with songs - Lirix. Their upcoming AdLirix platform is supposed to be so effective that Lirix would be able to give away songs for free and make back the income by embedding well-targeted advertisements.

O’Reilly labs have created a quick, but addictive code quiz that tests programmer’s knowledge based on him being able to look at code example and figure out which book it might have come from. I run through it in one breath and did not do too badly (280 points). I mostly had troubles with VB/ASP (no surprise), but also with some examples that were ambiguous. O’Reilly is going to do some serious data mining from the game results, but I wish they would also provide the dataset to the public, obfuscated or otherwise.