Adobe and Digital Rights Managment.

Digital rights managment is a sore point for a lot of users. Anyone with more than one laptop dislikes how their playlists can’t be synchronised across more than one machine without a little ingenuity. Adobe offers DRM content control for DRM

Media control of content is provided by the Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, which sets user access limits – even after a file is downloaded. Adobe’s server integrates with Adobe AIR, which allows putting applications on a device and could challenge both Sun Java and Microsoft for user interaction on multiple platforms.

I hope that what this means is a greater flexibility for the distribution and sharing of media content once the content is bought. Does this mean that as new companies and devices are used that we will find new devices being supported. Does it mean that individuals with full software licenses will be able to select restrictions of the content the content producers are generating rather than both Microsoft and Apple?

This is related to the discussion about iDRM  that I followed a few months ago in London. It will be interesting to see how this changes the rules

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The twitter colour wars and sheep mentality

As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.

I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.

As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.

When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.

That’s why I won’t participate.