Links for 04-22-2009

• The Free Music Archive « Music Machinery - "Yes, there are tons of sites on the web that offer new music for free, but the FMA is different. The music on the FMA is curated by music experts (radio programmers, webcasters, venues, labels, collectives and so on) - so that instead of a slush pile dominated by bad music typical of other free music sites, the music at the FMA is really good (or at least one human expert thinks it is good). "
• Thoughts From a Software IT Analyst: Sun Microsystems: In Memoriam - Nice piece on Sun's history from Wayne Kernochan.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Mark Penn’s fuzzy pro-blogging stats - More on the 453K using blogging as primary source of income.
• The Volokh Conspiracy - How Many Bloggers Use Blogging As Their Primary Source of Income?: - Seems like a pretty good deconstruction of the WSJ's "452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income." Orin kerr notes: "All we know is that Technorati received 1,290 responses from bloggers who responded to its query. Of the ones who responded from around the world, 2% — about 25 people — said that they relied on blogging as their primary source of income."
• tecosystems » The Oracle Predicts a Setting Sun - Agree with this very thorough analysis (as much as any analysis can be truly thorough given the information available) much more than not.
• Marginal Revolution: Why is Heinz Ketchup still so popular in Pittsburgh? - "Across 49 current leading national CPG brands, dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, we find that the current share in markets close to the city of origin, is, on average, 12 share (i.e., percentage) points higher than the national average of 22 percent."
• Novell, Inc. F1Q09 (Qtr End 01/31/09) Earnings Call Transcript -- Seeking Alpha - Interesting (because pretty baldly stated) about how Novell now sees Linux' role at company.
• Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream • The Register - I'm less pessimistic overall but there are a lot of good points here.
• YouTube - Hitler's Angst EMC - This is a good one on this theme.
• Outside Innovation: Sun Cloud & Oracle Cloud to Combine - "There one main incompatibility that I see between the Sun and Oracle cultures and brand. It's not so much a hardware culture vs. a software culture. It's a predatory sales culture vs. a respectful sales culture."
• MassBike Bikeways and Trails - Seemingly about the most complete resource for bike trails in Massachusetts.
• Twitter Gets the Oprah Treatment - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - From the comments. Hee. "Must we continually be subjected to this woman’s whims? I still fail to see why she has been made the arbiter of Midwestern hausfrau culture"
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Hashmobs - "A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob."
• Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced? - Advertising Age - DigitalNext - My observation with crowdsourced logos and the like is that it's generally a pretty terrible deal for the creators (modulo possibly being a learning experience for designers starting out). Lots of people submit on spec and even the winner doesn't get paid much.
• FBI seizures highlight law as cloud impediment | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - Fully agree.