I don’t have time to follow every little bit of eMusic news, but I do find it interesting to look at eMusic’s press releases from time to time. One that recently caught my attention reports the hiring of Kip Morgan and Anna Punsal as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) respectively. There are at least two interesting aspects here. The first is that this is a sign of where eMusic finds itself now that the rumored Amazon deal has fallen through (if it ever existed in the first place) and no new buyers appear to be showing up (at least if published rumors are any indication). As I’ve written multiple times, eMusic is not a Web 2.0 darling that can sell itself at an inflated valuation based on hype and promise; it’s a pretty conventional online service with a straightforward business model and a valuation that can be reasonably well estimated based on its financial results. (In fact, if I ever have the time I might take a shot at doing this myself; the result would likely be off by almost an order of magnitude, but the process itself might be interesting and educational, for myself if no one else.) ...

My last post on “indie classical” artists attracted a comment from Yancey Strickler of eMusic, to which I responded with a list of some of the composers and performers I’ve been listening to lately. Among those, one worth highlighting is the NOW Ensemble, whose album NOW was recently released by New Amsterdam Records. Since I’m a lousy music critic I’ll spare you any critic-speak except to say that I liked the album quite well, and the NOW Ensemble web site has streams of all the tracks if you’d like to sample it yourself. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 15, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Still waiting on formal grant announcements. (Yes, I know, this is getting old.) CAs and related issues I worked on CA applications from Cisco, S-TRUST, and WISeKey. I gave final approval for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827). Conferences and events Zak Greant spoke at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10. I worked on arrangements for CSUN and (with Marco Zehe) for SightCity. Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

Now that I’ve gone and hyped eMusic Selects, I feel I’ve earned the right to make a suggestion, for any eMusic poobahs who may be reading this: As I understand it, eMusic will have monthly Selections, which at two per month adds up to 24 Selections per year. eMusic also has a fairly substantial group of people into classical music, and has been successful in getting subscribers to try out classical releases (as noted in this recent story). ...

I thought I should say a little bit about the new eMusic Selects program. eMusic really wants people to know about this; in addition to a link on the eMusic home page, there’s a press release, an eMusic Magazine article, a 17 Dots blog post, and a message board post. Presumably the folks at eMusic feel that eMusic Selects is strategically important to the future of eMusic, and we should take them at their word. So what’s going on here? ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 8, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The board approved another significant accessibility-related grant; details to come. CAs and related issues I worked on CA applications from GlobalSign, Go Daddy, Digicert, SECOM Trust, S-TRUST, and WISeKey. I gave prelimary approval for Go Daddy to have its roots enabled for EV (bug 403437) I gave final approval today for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827) Public communications Among other things, David participated in a www.mozilla.org planning meeting and helped create a plan for www.mozilla.org changes Conferences and events Zak worked on preparations for several upcoming events in which the Mozilla Foundation might participate. Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

As of today I’m officially migrating from my old personal blog at http://hecker.org/ and publicizing the new blog at http://blog.hecker.org/. (This new blog is actually hosted at wordpress.com, but I’m using a hecker.org subdomain in case I want to move it to another service or server in future.) Most of the posts on this blog have been Mozilla-related, and I anticipate that continuing; I maintain an intermittently-updated hobby blog at https://swindleeeee.com/, but I don’t have the spare time to publish much other non-Mozilla stuff. If you want to see only Mozilla-related posts, subscribe to the Mozilla feed at http://blog.hecker.org/category/mozilla/feed/; if you don’t mind seeing non-Mozilla stuff occasionally you can subscribe to http://blog.hecker.org/feed/ instead. Finally, my Mozilla blog posts also get syndicated through planet.mozilla.org, so if you subscribe to the p.m.o feed you don’t need to subscribe to this blog’s Mozilla feed separately. ...

UPDATE 2024/01/01: This post is from a previous version of this blog; I’ve retained it for historical interest only. I’m moving my personal blog to http://blog.hecker.org; this is the last post in the Mozilla category of this blog (/mozilla). My future Mozilla-related blog posts will be published at http://blog.hecker.org/tags/mozilla. If you use a feed reader (which I recommend) please subscribe to http://blog.hecker.org/category/mozilla/feed instead of the previous feed URL (/mozilla/index.atom). I’ll keep the old blog online for the foreseeable future, so that old posts will still be available; over time I hope to migrate that old content to the new blog and set redirects from the old URLs. However I cannot guarantee that I’ll keep old content available forever or that old links will always work.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 1, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. CAs and related issues I worked on CA applications from GlobalSign, Digicert, SECOM Trust, and S-TRUST. Public communications Among other things, David worked on improvements to www.mozilla.org, including updating the Projects page with two new Featured Mozilla-Based Applications, submitting a patch to replace the Products section with Projects (bug 325485), and coordinating with fantasai concerning the About page content (bug 231131 and bug 414439). Conferences and events Zak worked on preparations for several upcoming events in which the Mozilla Foundation might participate, including OSCON. Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

In the past I’ve discussed several ways in which I think eMusic could improve itself for the benefit of both its customers and its suppliers (i.e., the music labels and the artists). Recently I read three interesting posts that touch on this subject. The first (to which this post is dedicated) is from Ian Rogers of Yahoo!, recapping his presentation at the Aspen Live conference in December: Today users are creating tremendous value and for the most part we’re ignoring it. They’re writing blogs about your artists, putting bios on Wikipedia, documenting last night’s concert on Flickr and video sharing sites, showing what songs are most popular by their behavior on Last.fm, building “box sets” on community sites, etc. How has the music industry leveraged this? What tools have you created to enable or encourage it? ...