[PlayLouder MSP](http://www.playloudermsp.com/thenews.html) is a new Music ISP that’s going to be launched in the UK in a few days. They’ve got a brilliant idea that frankly a lot of other people should have thought of sooner. Basically you can freely trade music from the full Sony-BMG catalog on their networks (your own ripped music and other people’s music) and a percentage of your payment to the ISP goes to Sony. They use audio-analysis software to determine what songs are being traded on the network and I suppose that’s how they know how much to pay to Sony. Cory’s got a great and much more in-depth write-up [here](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/22/customers_of_new_uk_.html
) at [Boing Boing](http://www.boingboing.net).

For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as:

• The right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog
• Even if it’s out of print
• In any file-format
• Using any file-sharing software
• At any bitrate

PlayLouder MSP’s customers’ license includes Sony music sourced from P2P networks, ripped from CDs, or digitized from vinyl, cassettes, or radio broadcasts.

[Jason Kottke](http://www.kottke.org) has an interesting write-up about how he envisions the future of the OS and the Web. The gist of his post can be summed up in the following points:

1. The OS can be made irrelevant by people writing for another OS, let’s call it WebOS.
2. People now only need to code for one platform (Java, anyone?)
3. A local web server on the client machine will mean that an app can continue on working even if it’s offline (think local app for Gmail, etc).
4. When users are back online, the app will synchronize itself with its online counterpart. Think adding Flickr pictures locally, and then uploading them.

The OS is still there whichever one it is, but it is no longer going to lock-in developers to only developing for that OS. One of the things Jason is saying is that people will no longer need to write for 3 OSes but for just one OS. This sounds just like “people will no longer have to write for 3 OSes but for just one platform: Java”.

Jason has already outlined some of the problems he envisions with this approach, such as web apps accessing local content on your hard drive. Java applets have solved this problem for a long time by using a sandbox model. The only problem is that these applets have to be downloaded and run locally for them to work. A WebOS app, however, will run both locally and remotely, it will live on your local hard drive and perhaps a sandbox model will help there as well. Are vulnerabilities detected in these local apps any more dangerous than vulnerabilities for remote apps? Perhaps there isn’t much different because at the end of the day, a security hole is the same thing whatever app it affects. However, I suppose a local security hole can do a *lot* more damage than a remote one.

Some other suggestions like: “Read newsfeeds from bloglines locally” sound no different to NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or SharpReader, etc. These are all locally accessible feed readers which, when online, update your subscriptions, etc, otherwise they work fine when offline.

I think, as [Paul Graham](http://paulgraham.com/) said, a WebOS will allow totally new kinds of applications to exist and we don’t know what they will look like at all. So this is definitely an interesting space to watch.
Some great examples of new ways of using the web are: [Backpack](http://www.backpackit.com), [Basecamp](http://www.basecamphq.com/), [Gmail](http://www.gmail.com) and [Google Maps](http://maps.google.com). Another up-and-coming app is [Hula](http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server) which has been open-sourced by Novell and is being actively worked on by many GNOME hackers. If you want to see a demo of how the future of web-calendaring might look like, take a look at [this](http://www.nat.org/2005/august/#Hula-Web-Interface) amazing demo on [Nat's](http://www.nat.org) blog.

In other news, I would love to get my hands on one of [these](http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/08/25/wearing_firefox.html) [Firefox](http://www.getfirefox.com) T-shirts that [Joi](http://joi.ito.com) managed to pick up from the [Mozilla](http://www.mozilla.org) offices. I have ordered quite a few T-shirts from [ThinkGeek.com](http://www.thinkgeek.com) in the past, and I will order one of these if they stock them someday.

Finally after waiting for over two weeks I have my net connection back. We just moved home again and it seems we are too far from the exchange this time to get a 2Mbps connection so we’ve settled for 1Mbps. It’s not too bad I suppose at least it’s not dial-up.

With the bank holiday coming up I hope we do something interesting like our trip to Oxford last time. That was a good day out and perhaps we should do a more scenic day trip like the Cottswolds.

Wikis

I’ve been experimenting with wikis as a documentation tool. The collaborative editing facilities that wikis provide are invaluable when writing documentation or doing analysis / design / requirements work. After I first installed it, I was completely confused about how to use it. This was because I was expecting it to be similar to many web-based content management systems where you create a page for a topic and start writing on it with relevant links added to the body of the text. In this wiki, however, I couldn’t find any way to create a new page on a topic! I was dumbfounded until I read some documentation and realized that you could just create any page you like by simply typing in a link to a page that doesn’t exist and then editing it to add your content!

I’m using MediaWiki at the moment which is the same wiki that the famous WikiPedia project uses. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia yet, I strongly recommend it. It is fast becoming my choice for looking up information on almost all topics; it’s far better than Google in many cases where you are looking for historical-type information, for example Television.

I came across another really interesting wiki project today called wikiwyg. The idea is that you double click on any of the entries and the entry changes to a full text area complete with a toolbar and formatting options. You can Cancel or Save your changes right there and then. You need Firefox to make it work, though. It’s another example of how everyone is trying to find more and more interesting ways to make the web more interactive and user-friendly, in the spirit of GMail and Google Maps