After Techcrunch published the slide, the web lit up with the rumor that Delicious would be shut down. It took Yahoo a full twenty-four hours to respond, an eternity in internet time, and when their official statement did finally come, it didn’t exactly put anyone’s mind at ease. They’re keeping Delicious live for the time being, but they plan to… do what? Sell it? The language is vague.

I’ve loved Delicious since I started using it — here’s my full-length rhapsody on why it’s so valuable to me. Watching Yahoo neglect it has been painful, since there’s a lot of untapped potential. For example, two months before Twitter launched, Delicious rolled its Network feature, which lets you subscribe to other users’ bookmarks. It’s basically a more tightly curated and better annotated version of Twitter. I started going back through my bookmarks to see who else was saving them and following everyone who was coming up with interesting tags and notes. The result is my list of a hundred or so Delicious users who consistently post interesting, useful and entertaining links. I look at my Delicious network feed first thing in the morning, before any news site, or Twitter or anything, because its signal to noise ratio is superb. Yahoo had an opportunity to create a robust social network around the Network feature, and they blew it.

If you’ve invested a lot of effort in curating your Delicious bookmarks, at least you don’t have to worry about losing them. It’s easy to download a backup of them and there are plenty of other services you can upload them to. But having Delicious shut down or just atrophy would be a huge loss because of the accumulated mass of everyone else’s curated bookmarks. Yahoo lets you grab your own data but not everyone else’s, and everyone else’s data is what gives Delicious its value. ReadWriteWeb compares Yahoo’s data policy to “setting a museum on fire.”

Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there’s a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users – I haven’t been able to find it yet.Yahoo blocks all automated extraction of data from Delicious. The company apparently is going to let this unique cross between a museum, a library and a crazy old collector’s attic burn to the ground. I’d like to take a few things with me before that happens, please. One community of non-profit technologists has been bookmarking links with the tag “NPTech” for years – they have 24,028 links categorized as relevant for organizations seeking to change the world and peoples’ lives using technology. Wouldn’t it be good to have that body of data, metadata and curated resources available elsewhere once Delicious is gone?

What someone probably ought to do, as Karl Long said to me on Twitter today, is scrape all the public bookmarks and data and put it on Bittorrent. That would be against the rules, though.

Please, please Yahoo! let us save some of what you’ve got, before it goes to waste.

I’ve heard the argument that we’ve been using Delicious for free all these years, so why should we feel entitled to anything? I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to pay for it. I quite happily pay for Flickr, I pay for web hosting, I’d pay for Twitter too. Yahoo never even attempted to monetize Delicious, aside from a little advertising on the popular bookmarks page, which I don’t think I’ve ever used. Yahoo’s focus on the popular bookmarks page misses the point. I don’t care what everyone has been bookmarking. I care what specific smart people who I trust are bookmarking. Mass trends are occasionally interesting, but only occasionally.

With the future of Delicious still in doubt, I followed the example of a bunch of geeks I trust and joined Pinboard. I’m using it to mirror my Delicious bookmarks, and if worse comes to worse, I’ll just move over there completely. There’s much to like about Pinboard. It’s not free, which inspires confidence in me that it won’t just vanish. I like its zany pricing scheme, where they charge a tenth of a cent times the current number of users. (I paid $7.65.) I can also set Pinboard to archive all my tweets if I want, though I haven’t taken them up on this because my tweets aren’t that interesting to me. If I have a profound thought I’ll put it on this blog.

So far, Pinboard seems fine and dandy for my own bookmarks, but it’s missing the social component. Delicious has over five million users, Pinboard (as of this writing) has nine thousand. Those nine thousand are mostly power users, but even so, that’s not the glorious emergent hive-mind that Delicious offers. If my entire network were to migrate over en masse, I guess it wouldn’t be such a big loss, but so far I don’t see that happening.

So what’s to become of my favorite thing on the social web? Former Delicious engineer Stephen Hood runs through the most plausible options on his blog:

Selling Delicious to a third-party

is not a straightforward proposition. As mentioned above, most of the team is now gone. Last week’s leak (and the subsequent fallout) also did unfortunate damage to the Delicious brand, sending panicked users to competing products.

But ultimately the real challenge here will be the technology. During my time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace.  Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer. I’m not sure they’ve done that before.

Open sourcing Delicious

This is a seductive concept but doesn’t make much sense.  As in the case of a sale, they would need to unwind a bunch of proprietary technologies before this could happen.  And open sourcing a complex product isn’t as simple as switching your GitHub repository from private to public.  It involves a lot of work to clean up and document the source.  For Delicious this would add up to a huge effort that would be hard to justify purely on a financial basis. Even then, it’s not clear how an open source social bookmarking system would work, given that much of its value comes from being centralized.

Donating Delicious to the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian

Now we’re getting closer.  While it is folly to assume either of these institutions could take over Delicious and keep it running as a viable service, it does seem like they would be interested in preserving the Delicious corpus and making it available for research.

I love Delicious for many reasons, but chief among them is that it is the Internet’s memory storage device.  In the 7+ years of its existence it has recorded the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the Web was evolving dramatically.  Those memories are irreplaceable and have enormous value both to their owners (the users) and to society.

For now, I continue to post to Delicious, mirror in Pinboard, watch and wait. Whoever winds up owning Delicious, I hope they value it properly and show it some love.

There are two different ways to make yourself a WordPress blog. There’s the more advanced method, which offers you full functionality, and the easy method, which is a little limited but is, like I said, easy.

The advanced method

You can download the software and set it up yourself, which is how my blog works. To do so, you need a web host, a place for your blog to live. People have generally good things to say about Bluehost. My business uses Apollo Hosting. I also know a lot of people and organizations that use GoDaddy, but I’m put off by their sleazy branding.

Once you have your hosting set up, getting WordPress installed requires a small amount of fairly scary technical business, best handled by a web geek like me. WordPress brags about having a five minute installation, and it’s true, but it can be a hairy five minutes if you’re a web novice. Some hosting companies make it easier by offering an automated installation system.

The easy way

If you want a gentler introduction, you can sign up for a free blog on wordpress.com. If you set up your blog there, all the behind-the-scenes admin is handled magically by the elves of WordPress’ parent company Automattic. Having a blog hosted on wordpress.com requires no web savvy and minimal fuss. The only downside is that blogs hosted by WordPress don’t give you access to the full range of plugins and other tools. A good option for novices is to start out with a WordPress.com hosted blog, and then as they develop more confidence, move into a full-blown self-hosted blog. Fortunately, it’s easy to export posts from one WP blog and import them into another one.

Reasons to love WordPress

Geeks like to make a distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. WordPress is free as in speech and free as in beer. The basic code is open-source. You’re welcome to explore its innards, hacking to the fullest extent of your courage. If, like me, you know some HTML and CSS, you have complete control over how your blog looks. If you know PHP, Ajax and JavaScript, you can create your own plugins and custom add-ons. You’re free to give away or sell any of your additions to the WordPress ecosystem.

You might wonder why Automattic is so generous as to give away blog software and server space to host it. What’s in it for them? According to their web site, they make money from optional paid upgrades to wordpress.com blogs, consulting services, anti-spam technology, and affiliate deals.

WP’s open-sourceness can be a mixed blessing. The user interface doesn’t have the glossy polish of a Google or Apple product. But for me, the rough edges are a small price to pay. Google’s and Apple’s own blog products are excellent inadvertent advertisements for WordPress. They work fine as far as they go, but they’re severely limited in their feature sets and aren’t easily extensible. For example, in WordPress you can easily insert “Click here to read more” links into longer posts. Google’s Blogger system only lets you perform this useful function through an awkward and lengthy workaround.

The WordPress community is fiddling with the code day and night, adding new features and hunting down bugs. Users of Blogger are at the mercy of Google’s priorities, and right now it doesn’t seem like Blogger is very high on their list. Also, Google has been known to take down blogs for hosting copyrighted material like mp3s. I’ve never heard of Automattic taking a blog down for any reason.

WordPress in the wild

• Gawker Media.
• The New York Times blogs.
• Jay-Z’s official web site. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man.
• Smashing Magazine, a great web design resource.
• WordPress.com is itself a humungous multi-user WordPress blog. Recursive!

WordPress does have some time costs. The user experience can be a challenge. You sometimes get exposed to frightening strings of PHP. But the community has got your back. The ever-growing list of free plugins handles all kinds of advanced functionality that used to require heavy-duty coding. For instance, a simple plugin makes your blog renders attractively on iPhones and other mobile devices. Here’s how mine looks on the phone:

The less attractive side of the open-source coin is the official WordPress iPhone/iPad app. In theory, it’s pretty rad. You can write posts from the phone, edit and upload them, with a lot of the same functionality you get on the full web version. Unfortunately, the app is buggy and unreliable. It’s failed to save my work and has even eaten a few posts. I hope it receives some more developer attention. Being able to write posts while I wait for the train or stand in line at the grocery store is a miraculous thing. It makes me feel like I’m living in the future — when it works. I guess this aspect of the future hasn’t fully arrived yet.

Like all open-source entities, WordPress evolves quickly. It gets hacked easily and often, but it bounces back robustly. Last year a malicious virus broke every single link in my blog, incoming and internal. But a patch was released immediately and I had my site back to normal in a matter of minutes. It was a scary couple of minutes, but no harm befell me.

WordPress isn’t the best tool for every situation. If you’re a bigger company or organization, you might want a more robust content management system like Joomla or Drupal. A former employer of mine and my old high school both use Moodle, though no one at either of those institutions has much love for it. There are some commercial products that perform WordPress-like functions with a much more polished user experience. A nonprofit I’ve done some volunteer work for uses Squarespace, which is reasonably inexpensive and quite approachable.

Handy WordPress tips

The Lost In Translation blog has a handy setup guide for a new WP installation, including initial configuration tips and a list of recommended plugins. It makes a great preflight checklist.

Even if you plan to extensively hand-code a customized look for your WP site, starting with the right theme can save you a lot of effort. I use a modified version of the veryplaintxt theme, which replicates the look and feel of McSweeney’s. I like the serif fonts and lots of white space, but I made all the centered text left-aligned, since I don’t like hourglass-shaped text columns.

I have a bunch of nice WordPress themes bookmarked on Delicious. Happy designing!

In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.

Folk music is by nature open-source (that’s folk in the “public domain/traditional” sense, not the “pop music played on acoustic guitar” sense.) You’re free to take public-domain material and rewrite or rearrange it as you see fit. There are more Frankie and Johnny and Sweet William songs than you can shake a stick at. Amazing Grace was sung to twenty different melodies before it settled into the one we’re all familiar with. Musically, the American folk tradition draws on a narrowly limited toolbox: I-IV-V chord progressions, major and minor pentatonics, circle of fifths root movements and the like.

Blues is an especially good example of an open-source form. It belongs to no one and everyone. Historically, at one point it belonged to African-Americans in the deep south, and some might feel that it still belongs to them. But as a practical matter, blues belongs to anyone who can sing or play an instrument and who’s willing to learn the vocabulary. There are a wealth of practitioners, teachers, recordings, books, videos and web sites to help. To really play blues with mastery takes a lot of practice, but there’s a low barrier to entry, and you can play it on just about any instrument, or just sing it a capella.

If you want to learn any improvisation-based music like blues, jazz or rock, an excellent strategy is to transcribe other people’s solos from recordings. Once you’re a sufficiently experienced musician, you can figure out pop songs in a few listens. But complex jazz and classical music can be impenetrable to the best of us when it’s rushing past in real time. Without a score to guide me, a lot of the inner logic of John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk would be beyond my grasp. Transcribing from recordings is a tedious, labor-intensive process. Fortunately, there’s a piece of software that helps you, called, appropriately enough, Transcribe. Click to see it bigger.

The top part of the screen shows about eight bars of “Afro Blue” as played by Coltrane. Two bars are highlighted. Once you highlight a section, you can play it back as a loop. You can also hear the loop slowed down to half or quarter speed with the pitches intact. This feature is invaluable for figuring out the twistier passages. I added the little green measure markers and red section markers by hand. You can stick these markers in from the keyboard during playback, it’s a lot like conducting. At the bottom of the screen, the software is guessing which pitches are included in the sample. The sharp peaks at the right show that the soprano sax plays A flat, B flat, C and E flat during the loop. The software has a harder time figuring out the pitches in the more crowded/muddily recorded lows and mids, but when you give it shorter samples to work with, it gets more accurate. If you give it a single cleanly-recorded piano chord, it can usually identify the individual notes  accurately. Helpful! Transcribe helps you uncover the source code of the music, so to speak, making it much easier to repurpose it for your own creative use.

Once you’ve got your bars and beats identified and looped in Transcribe, you can export them as samples with just a few mouse clicks. You can use these samples as the basis of new tracks in and of themselves. I usually drop my samples into Recycle for further slicing and dicing. It’s no coincidence that Transcribe should be such an excellent sampling tool, not just a transcription tool. It reveals the inherent similarity between both practices.

The recorded music industry is generally unfriendly to sampling, since in its present form it depends on ownership of and exclusive access to music. The software industry is coming around to more of a folk music attitude. On the Google blog, Jonathan Rosenberg says this about the virtues of openness:

The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software … expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system.

Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics.

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term.

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

As music comes to live increasingly on the internet, it too is going to continue to become more open-source in nature, with or without the blessing of copyright holders. Any sufficiently motivated kid with a computer can find and dissect anything that’s ever been recorded with some diligent web searching and software experimentation. The result is a lot of surprising new hybrids. Sampling, the internet and mp3 player shuffle combine with immigration to completely decontextualize musical memes, freeing them to recombine in ever-more unpredictable ways. This article gives the example of Mexican-American DJs who sample Bollywood soundtracks in a mistaken attempt to get an Arabic sound, resulting in something that sounds better than if they sourced the sounds “correctly.”

Some hip-hop musicians have embraced the open-source attitude. Kanye West gives away mp3s of the stems for “Love Lockdown” conveniently separated by track for your remixing pleasure. I hope more musicians follow his example.