Author Archives: mdoeff

iTunes Song Purchases plotted on a graph

Apple recently announced 1 billion songs purchased on iTunes. I dug around the Apple press releases and tracked down some of the major iTunes milestones over the last few years. It’s amazing that there have been 500 million songs purchased since July 2005. That’s 500 million songs purchased in 7 months for an average of 71 million songs purchased per month!

2/26/06 Update:

Additional data point: 850 million on Jan 10, 2006 (announced at Macworld)

Date

Songs Purchased (millions)

Source

05/15/20031Apple
06/23/20035Apple
09/8/200310Apple
12/15/200325Apple
03/15/200450Apple
07/12/2004100CNN
12/16/2004200Apple
07/17/2005500Apple
02/24/20061000Apple

graph created using NCES Create a Graph

Diggnation at Beach Chalet

Diggnation did a live show at Beach Chalet last night.

Diggnation Episode #35

More photos here.

Here are the topics they covered: CNN Goes Clean, Phantom Dead, No More Cashers at TacoBell and KFC, Speilberg Confirms, Google Page Creator, Serenity Makes more money via DVD then theaters, Sony Stock drops on PS3 costs, Early HDTV adopters screwed by HD DVD and BlueRay.

Trying out the new Google Page Creator

I tested out the new Google Page Creator and, I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the WYSIWYG tool, but I’m not really sure where they’re going with this. I was able to build this page in about 20 minutes. I just worry that this is going to be Google’s version of Geocities. This one-line review spotted on Flickr pretty much sums it up: “No RSS? What is this for, cat photos?”.

Google Page Creator

Craig Newmark / Edgeio

Craig Newmark from craigslist brings up some good points about the soon-to-be-launched Edgeio service in the comments section of this post on BuzzMachine. It will be interesting to see how Edgeio deals with these issues. Mr. Newmark’s comments:

…I act as full time customer service rep, there’s a few of us, only a few, because with flagging, our community removes most questionable ads.

Using the tagging approach, how are bogus ads removed? Considering that spam blogs are already a huge problem, and how easy it’ll be to falsely tag viagra ads, the volume of bad ads will be tremendous.

That will also be true of blogs that do things like tagging photos that you’d prefer not to see, but they’d be in search results anyway. (You really don’t want to know.)

Also, how will ads be removed (by the poster) or expired?

When there are other problems, like defamation, how are they handled?

I’m guessing that many customer service reps will be needed, good jobs, but then,
you risk being a “publisher” which means that you have to monitor ads.”