From Digital Music News comes this reminder that the music industry can likely have profits or control, but not both: Research Group Puts Price Tag on Interoperability Quagmire. Based on a report by the research group iSuppli, “The inability of several industries to resolve their differences over DRM could stunt the evolution of future digital markets, while potentially putting ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ at risk.” Essentially attempts by record labels, equipment makers, and others to over-control consumer use of digital music, video, etc., poisons the overall market by making digital media offering much more complex and hence much less attractive. The winners in all this: companies like Apple that can potentially offer an integrated “one-stop shopping” experience. The losers: record labels, equipment makers other than Apple, the rest of us. ...

Mitchell Baker recently posted two articles about the use of the “feed icon”) (also known as the “RSS icon”), originally created for use with Firefox, and how best to promote universal use of the icon for use with RSS, Atom and other open web syndication formats. In this post I discuss how the Mozilla Foundation proposes to approach this issue. However first I want to personally apologize for any confusion and miscommunication around the issue of the feed icon and our proposals for promoting its use, as well as the delays in getting this issue dealt with. (I had meant to post on this topic earlier this week but family medical issues kept me occupied and offline.) I pledge to do what I can to get things back on track and get this issue resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. ...

Ever since its founding eMusic has been repeatedly discovered by people who either don’t get the concept (“Hey, where’s Britney Spears?”) and/or have severe difficulty using a computer and the Internet; these people also often seem to have a fuzzy grasp on such matters as grammar and spelling. And thus on August 11, 2003 (a date which will live in infamy), after experiencing problems with downloading music mrcat first uttered those immortal words, ”E Music is SWindle.” ...

For quite some time now I’ve been a subscriber to eMusic, a digital music site that offers DRM-free MP3 tracks by artists on independent (non-major) labels. (At one point I cancelled my subscription because I wasn’t finding that much to download, but I re-joined after a few months and have been with the service ever since.) eMusic also has a quite active set of message boards, and from time to time I’ve posted on various topics, most notably my thoughts on eMusic’s business model and prospects vis-a-vis the digital music industry in general. ...

I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. Inspired by Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind, I want to take a broader view and present my thoughts on why accessibility is important for the Mozilla project, the role that Mozilla and Firefox might play in the world of assistive technology (AT) as it evolves, and what the Mozilla Foundation might do to help this process along. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 19, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 19: XTech. Gerv Markham attended the XTech conference in Amsterdam and did a blog post about his experiences. Gerv’s comments about the nature and purpose of XTech sparked a public discussion to which I contributed a comment. (Basically my point was that I’m happy with XTech as far as the Foundation is concerned; however I also see the possible usefulness of having a separate meeting focused solely on Mozilla stuff.) See also Daniel Glazman’s post responding to Gerv and Robert O’Callahan, as well as Mike Beltzner’s report on the conference itself and Tristan Nitot’s XTech wrap-up. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 12, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 12: Accessibility grants. Håkan Waara has been working on the project to create an implementation plan for accessibility on Mac OS X, and has published some work in progress: a comparison of accessibility architectures on our three major platforms. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 5, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 5: Accessibility grants. The Mozilla Foundation will be making two more accessibility-related grants. The first to improve the accessibility of the optional XForms extension; Alexander Surkov will be doing the work for this. Although XForms is not part of the default Firefox build, XForms technology is of interest to corporate and government users, and corporations and governments typically have rather stringent requirements for accessibility (e.g., the U.S. government’s Section 508 requirements). Improving XForms accessibility is therefore (among other things) an investment in promoting future adoption of Firefox in enterprise environments. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 28, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending April 28: XTech conference. Gerv Markham will be attending the XTech conference in Amsterdam May 16–19 representing the Mozilla Foundation. ...

I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post, the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. If you’re interested in this topic (and I think we all should be) then be sure to check out Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind. ...