Adobe cripples Flash video with DRM - Boing Boing

Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it's so fluid, versatile and remixable -- not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology.

I know there are good uses for Flash (Homestarrunner, Google Analytics, YouTube).  But for every good usage, there are probably 100 bad uses.  If you've ever been to a site that takes forever to load, and then when it does, it's impossible to navigate, it was probably made with Flash.  It's not that the technology itself is necessarily bad, it's just that the potential for abuse is so great.

Now, with the introduction of DRM and the inevitable flood of DMCA takedown notices, perhaps we will see the end of Flash.  Not that I think the absence of Flash will prevent bad websites, but maybe it will help.

Techdirt: Yahoo Now Thinks AOL Will Be A Savior?

Then, late Sunday a new rumor arose: Yahoo! might try to keep Microsoft away by merging with AOL. That seems sort of like trying to keep a wild animal from eating you by covering yourself with feces. It might make awful sense for about a second, but it's just a bad, bad idea. First, it's unlikely to work -- and, second, it's just pathetic.

I don't think I've ever laughed so much at an article on Techdirt.  Comparing a merger with AOL to covering yourself in feces?  Do they have a new intern writing articles?  Wow.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great analogy, and really funny, but totally not what I expect from Techdirt.

I don't really care what happens to Yahoo.  My only request is that they make sure that someone with a soul gets control of Flickr.  That is the only part of Yahoo that I care at all about.  When Yahoo bought them, I was afraid that Flickr would be ruined, but Yahoo has pretty much left the site alone.  There is a really good community there (Slightly obsessed with half-naked women, but isn't that why most people pick up a camera anyway?), and it's one of the only things online where I actually pay for the "pro" version.

Anyway, I hope Yahoo finds a buyer and everything works out.  I doubt they'll ever catch Google, but they can at least keep nipping at Google's heels, keep them from getting soft (And putting out a product like Windows Vista).

McSweeney's Internet Tendency - finally with RSS! While they offer a title-only feed, which I'm not sure I've ever even seen, at least they're making progress.

I guess they want you to come to the site and see the ads for their various books and subscriptions and such, but it still seems very odd not to at least offer a teaser in addition to the title.

Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

I hate partial text feeds. It's very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there's a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.

I 'm looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don't do full text.  Uniwatch doesn't, and I frequently forget to read it.  The Hardball Times doesn't, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing.  Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.

And look - here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.