stuart test blog

Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) announced today that the NZ music charts will include statistics from the various online music stores available in NZ. This includes iTunes Music Store, Digirama, Amplifier, and the Telecom and Vodafone mobile stores. I’d also like to see a separate chart for downloaded music as it would be interesting to compare how songs/albums sales differ.

Recording Industry Association of New Zealand President Adam Holt says with the early emergence of Amplifier and digiRAMA, the strong music presence on the Telecom and Vodafone mobile platforms and the recent launch of iTunes’ New Zealand store, legal digital downloading is now well established in New Zealand.
RIANZ says the market has established a strong digital sales base the changes are necessary to ensure the chart continues to reflect how New Zealanders are buying music.
Holt says he expects the addition of digital sales to have an impact on the chart, especially on the Top 40 singles.
“We believe the introduction of digital sales will make the chart more dynamic,” Holt says. “The singles chart will experience more change than the albums chart simply because of the sharp increase in the sales of digital tracks and singles over the past 12 months.”

I’ve just read through the validation tests that Pete McVicar put the NetGuide 2007 Web wards finalists through. Just one site passed both the valid HTML and CSS tests – Public Address. Pete criticises TradeMe for their use of tables for layout and Rowan responded with his own comments. I commented on Rowan’s site that there are a couple of tables that could be replaced with divs, but that tables should still be used for displaying the listings and search results.

This also prompted me to revalidate my own site and I discovered that my earlier post about the iTunes pricing was causing this site to fail validation. I had used Google Spreadsheets to analyse some data and produce a chart, and to embed the spreadsheet into your site, Google provides a snippet of HTML using the <iframe> tag. Turns out the <iframe> tag has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1 which is what the DOCTYPE of this site was using. After a bit of research, I found that the replacement for the <iframe> was to use the <object> tag instead.

So the original code is:
<iframe src="anotherpage.html"></iframe>
and with the <object> tag it becomes:
<object data="anotherpage.html" type="text/html"></object>

I feel good that this site conforms to the XHTML and CSS standards even though it is a bit more effort to do so – but I think it’s worth it.

Time to upgrade WordPress again as Matt tells us that 2.2 (Getz) has just been released. This seems to be more of just a bug fix release with a few minor features included. No built in tagging support yet as that has been moved to the next version, 2.3.

I had no idea that NZ had its own Digg-like social news website. It’s called Scoopit, and the blurb from their blog is:

Scoopit is a collection of links submitted and ranked by readers. Submit your own Scoop. View and vote for unpublished Scoops submitted by others.

There’s not much content on there yet as it’s only been launched within the last few months, but it’s good to see some good local content coming through. I’ll be adding a Scoopit button to my WordPress template so if you read something interesting here you may want to “Scoop it” so others can read it too.

Hmmm – their service has been down twice since I started writing this post but they are aware of the problem and hopefully can get it sorted out.

Jeff Jones (Strategy Director in the Microsoft Security Technology Unit) has written a post about Server Core and how its reduced footprint increases security dramatically. The key here is “reduced attack surface area” as all of the most insecure areas of a server have been removed, such as IIS, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc…

However, pulling all these components out of a server have also reduced its functionality, which is why only the following roles are available: (taken from the excellent Server Core Step By Step Guide)

• Active Directory Domain Services
• Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Server
• DNS Server
• File Services
• Print Server
• Streaming Media Services

I’m a big fan of this approach and I can’t wait for Server Core to be improved so that the GUI is completely removed. I also hope that the modulisation of the components is improved so that the Web Server role becomes available as a Server Core option. It would seem to me that one of the best scenarios to implement a server with a “reduced attack surface area” would be on a public-facing web server.

I was reading Jon Udell’s latest post this morning who is was in NZ on a speaking engagement as keynote speaker at the Govis conference. He praises the beautiful scenery here, especially the drive down the West Coast from Picton to Greymouth, then crossing Arthurs Pass to Christchurch, which Deb and I did a few years back.

He doesn’t have such good praise for the internet access here though, mentioning his bad experience with wireless access in Christchurch:

This card has only one purpose in life — to reveal a string of hex digits — and it cannot even manage to do that.

Wellington actually has really good wireless access as we’ve got a choice between CityLink’s CafeNet, or Telecom’s wireless hotspots. It’s not cheap though and because of this I only ever use it for occasional access.

He also comments on the number of internet cafes prevalent here, which I find interesting too. I often see internet cafes full as I walk past them in town and there’s always an interesting mix of people in them, from students and backpackers to adults and senior citizens. Does this mean broadband pricing is still too steep in NZ that people still are required to pop down to their local internet cafe to check their email. I know several people who are still on dial-up plans because they can’t afford broadband, which is frustrating because just a few years ago NZ was among the world leaders in internet penetration in homes.

PC World NZ has the details (via Public Address | Hard News) on the pricing for individual DRM-free tracks from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Turns out NZ’ers will be paying $2.49 per track, which is a 39% premium over the DRM-crippled tracks that currently sell for $1.79. This is also 9% more than US and European customers will pay, and 14% more than UK residents will be paying. The strong NZ dollar has obviously been forgotten about in this pricing so I threw together some stats…

The following spreadsheet (original from Google Spreadsheets) shows the pricing for DRM and DRM-free tracks in USA, Canada, UK, Europe, and NZ with all prices converted to USD on the current exchange rates:

Luckily we don’t live in the UK who pay the most for both crippled and DRM-free tracks, but we have jumped ahead of Europe into second place for paying the most for DRM-free tracks. No mention of the pricing for full albums so hopefully Apple haven’t changed their mind about providing EMI DRM-free albums at the same price as current, crippled albums.

Does anybody else find it strange that legally purchased music that isn’t crippled, is something that we have to pay extra for..?

Update: An Australian Economics Professor has created an iTunes Index, which is based on the principals of the Big Mac Index. He’s updated it to include NZ, and it would be interesting if he updated it to include the DRM-free tracks too.

Not sure if anyone’s interested, but drop me a line if you want a Joost invite. I haven’t been too impressed with the service so far. They have regionalised the content (which really annoys me,) the quality of the video isn’t that great, and it chews up a lot of bandwidth too.

MiramarMike started work on getting Trademe’s member listings as an RSS feed in Yahoo! Pipes after Rowan’s post about Trademe and APIs. He laid down the challenge to improve on the solution, so I managed to get some more information into the description field of the feed. Here’s the RSS feed for Movieshack’s current listings.

I had to use the tricky Regex module to get the additional info, but unfortunately, when you run the Pipe in Yahoo’s interface it strips out the HTML used for the line breaks and to display the links and images. Hopefully someone else can build on this now.

Rowan Simpson from Trademe continues the discussion about why Trademe doesn’t have an API. As I mentioned in his original post, I personally don’t have a need for an API but what I would love to see is RSS feeds throughout the site.

Trademe already uses an RSS feed for the latest Trademe site announcements. They also recently created a feed that allows you to track a single seller’s listings, but this isn’t promoted anywhere on the site, it’s just available through the Trademe gadget.