Rhymes with Cars

Well, I've been busy the past couple of weeks and unfortunately, this stie has taken a bit of a back seat to other ventures. We'll, I'm back like little Carol Ann. Here is an update. In a Mark Cuban kind of way, Mark Cuban announced today that YouTube is done for due to the challenge associated with getting the rights to music used in videos. While I agree with Mark that managing the rights associated with all of the music used in videos is going to be tough, I really hope that the record industry, embraces YouTube and doesn't push this too much. If I want to make a fan video, so what? I disagree with Mark in that no one is going to listen to a bunch of music via YouTube. That doesn't make much sense. Record labels are dead. The question is do they want to long painful death or a short quick one. Dear Clive Davis, Embrace new media. The new Weird Al video is everywhere and deserves to be. It is hysterical. This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner RIAA because its content was used without permission D'oh! See above guys. Slow and painful versus quick and easy. Dummies. Millions of people who don't watch MTV or any other video channel were passing this video around to their friends and posting it on their sites. WTF? Weird Al has this on his MySpace site, but you need to deal with that. I am going to have to rock one of those White & Nerdy pullovers when they come out. Speaking of MySpace, PunkRockIdol has really taken off. Beave and I are pretty excited about it. It's only been up for a weekend, but the traffic numbers are pretty positive and the feedback that we've received has been awesome. This leads me to my final thought for the evening and that is the effect that MySpace will have on the development and usage of enterprise applications. What has amazed me in doing PRI is how much HTML knowledge is needed to build and promote a MySpace page. It is insane. They certainly don't make it easy. If you've never done it, not only is it a lot of HTML, but the text editors are terrible (tiny windows) and you're never really sure if it works or not. Yet despite all it's short comings, there are 110 million users all banging out basic HTML. This is really cool to me. In the future, somone in a major corporation is going to tell these MySpace users that something can't be done in the enterprise and they are going to say 'Screw you, I've done this on MySpace and can do it here.' A more realistic scenario is that the admin for the local dental office with 11,000 friends is going to be tapped to build a website. In 10 years, this knowledge will have an amazing effect on how enterprise applications are deployed and modified. I haven't had a chance to play with Salesforce.com and Greasemonkey, but this would be the first area that I could see this massive collective knowledge coming into play. If your company deploys a web based app, it is now very simple to modify it to have the look and feel that you want, not what is deployed by your company. The data that goes in and comes out of the system is the same, it just looks different based on your desires.