SoundCloud announced today that it has reached 10 million registered users. Last January, the music platform web site only had 3 million users.
To celebrate, SoundCloud co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss launched a new feature today called “Story Wheel,” which “allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story.”
Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.
“Student warning!” Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Monday. “Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”
The bad law is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act and the backlash officially starts tomorrow. See here for more info.
Wikipedia’s decision to participate with a 24-hour blackout was a decision of the Wikipedia community, and intends to bring the lobby message to the masses.
News crowd sourcing site Reddit said they’ll go offline for 12 hours in protest, displaying a “simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit.” Even Mozilla is planning to participate in the protest, replacing the content on its various sites with anti-SOPA messages.
Some called for Facebook and Google to join the blackout, saying their participation alone would kill the bill. Google has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA since the beginning. Google won’t blackout, but they will provide a link to some anti-SOPA information on its homepage.
Here’s the list of companies and organizations backing the bill.
WordPress now has an upgraded Toolbar (previously known as the admin bar) and a new HTML5 media uploader that uses Plupload, an open source upload handler with drag-and-drop functionality. WordPress now supports RAR and 7z archive formats.
The responsive design usability of HTML5 has been implemented to help WordPress work on small-screen devices like the iPad and tablets. As you reduce the screen size, features such as the side menu automatically collapse.
Users will find a reduction in repetitive clicking with our new flyout submenus. As you hover over each main menu item in your dashboard navigation, the submenus will appear, providing single-click access to any dashboard tool.
For browsers without HTML5 support, it uses fallback methods, which includes Flash and HTML4. There are also improvements to the Metadata, Settings and Editor APIs, and a new tutorial for beginners has been added.
Overall performance of WordPress is improved.
However, one of the best changes is how quickly I can write a new post or enact a new action within the WordPress dashboard.
Another good feature is the tutorial pointers which appear the first time you see the changes in the dashboard. It’s useful for novice WordPress users.
I highly recommend upgrading or using WordPress today.
Today, after 12 years, the company that sparked a revolution in how we purchase music online, is no longer.
Rhapsody, the largest on-demand music service in the United States, bought its assets, intellectual property and subscribers last month from parent company Best Buy for an undisclosed sum and a minority stake.
The acquisition nearly doubles Rhapsody’s subscriber base. They had 800,000 subscribers in July 2011 and at the time of the purchase, Napster had 700,000 subscribers.
Napster started in 1999 and almost immediately were being sued for distributing music for copyright infringement. It took two years for the service to be shut down by court order, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets to German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. However an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale and forced Napster to liquidate its assets, and it was sold to Roxio who in turn sold it to Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million.
Interestingly, when Napster was shut down, Rhapsody was started and will be celebrating their 10-year anniversary this Saturday (December 3rd). There’s also talk there might be a Napster documentary in play.
Alex Reid is a Canadian who likes a lot of things. Welcome to my world.