Apparently Napster to Go is old news, having been launched in beta months ago. They don’t appear to be marketing it – the only mention of it I could find was on the page of compatible devices. I’m guessing the reason is the page only lists five devices compatible with the Napster to Go service and all of them are portable media centers. I wanted to search for other devices compatible with Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 but the PlaysForSure advance search isn’t working. There’s new firmware for the Zen Micro that supports WMDRM 10, but nothing yet for the Zen Xtra. On the plus side, I discovered the Nomad SDK and FriendlyNomad C# wrapper for the SDK. Not sure what I would write that accessed my Nomad – I which I could customize the playback experience but Red Chair Software’s Notmad Explorer provides a great PC expereince.
The Look and Feel of RSS
Norman blogs about how he chose what blog service to use. His criteria were: 1) ease of use and 2) look of the final product. (Of course, look of the final product was important to Norman – he’s in marketing!) As a developer and architect, I originally cared most about “rolling my own”, though I switched over to dasBlog about a year ago. (I just don’t have the time to roll-my-own as often as I used to.) However, given that I had invested significant effort into the look of my final product, that factor was important to me as well, which is one of the reasons I chose dasBlog over .TEXT.
Of course, what’s funny about investing so much time thinking about the blog template is that I think most people read the site via RSS, not HTML. Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” wrote about this a while back. Maybe I should invest a little effort into the new dasBlog Community Edition effort – I’d like to see the number of times the RSS feed is downloaded vs. the number of times the home page is downloaded.
Norman further goes on to discuss the fact that his blog is hosted on Blogger, which of course is now owned by Google. I like his point that “Interoperability and mixed environments is the way the world works. If it is good enough for my customers, it is good enough for me.”