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"I have seen the future and it works." - Lincoln Steffens

Quick blog break updateAugust 18 2008

The blog break will continue for a while yet, but I'll be back in a little bit with a whole new design and a major content injection.

In the meantime, please occupy yourselves with the following, courtesy of Equity Private:

Department of high irony, Napster editionMay 20 2008

You just can't make this stuff up:

...Napster [is] planning on offering its complete catalog of more than 6 million tracks in the unprotected [DRM-free] MP3 format.

Today, with the launch of version 4.5 of the software and store, that announcement becomes a reality.

Although digital music stores such as eMusic, Amazon MP3, and even Napster itself already had MP3s on offer before this point, the collective catalogs of all three didn't even come near the volume of tracks you can find in the entire Napster library.

This is a huge day for digital music, as all four major labels and thousands upon thousands of indies are represented in the store, and every track will be available at the standard 99-cent price point.

[Source: CBS.]

The people united will never be defeatedMay 18 2008

Marc Canter titles a new blog post, calling for revolution in the virtual streets, "The people united will never be defeated."

Which presents a great opportunity for a late Saturday night music recommendation.

The phrase "The people united will never be defeated" is a translation of "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido", originally from mid-century Colombian politician Jorge Gaitán, who was, inevitably, assassinated. It later became a song written by Sergio Ortega and performed by the Chilean group Quilapayún, and was used in various political protest movements in South America.

But that's not why I'm writing about it.

In 1975, the great contemporary American composer Frederic Rzewski composed a set of 36 variations for solo piano under the name "The people united will never be defeated." His composition is probably the preeminent American work for solo piano in the 20th century, and is likely to stand over time as a peer to Beethoven's similar "Diabelli Variations".

Since we are currently -- despite everything you hear -- in the golden age of classical music, there are several modern and complete recordings of Rzewski's work available on CD. The two I recommend are:

American pianist Stephen Drury's version. His CD includes the original song itself followed by the complete piano work, and is an excellent per

Friend Connect, Open Social, Ning, and the webMay 14 2008

First, I'm very happy to say that Ning will be rolling out our formal production support for Open Social in June.

In case you missed the news at the time, Open Social is a standard way, sponsored by Google, to build new features ("gadgets") and/or plug those features into social networks all over the web, including social networks on Ning.

Ning has had beta versions of Open Social running for six months now so we're excited to be able to now provide Open Social in production to all of our Network Creators and users. Open Social will be available within all 265,490 social networks already running on Ning, as well as the 10,000+ new social networks being created on Ning every week now.

Second, I'd like to discuss Google's new Friend Connect initiative and how we plan to support it at Ning.

We at Ning think that Friend Connect is a great idea, and has huge potential to make Open Social even more functional and widely available for a broad swath of our users and Network Creators on Ning and throughout the web.

However, in the last couple days, there's been some confusion around the idea that perhaps Fr

In praise of dual-class stock structures for public companiesMay 6 2008

A dual-class stock structure means that a company has two different classes of common stock. Each class of stock has the same economic ownership of the company, yet different voting rights.

In a typical scenario, Class A shares have a single vote per share, whereas Class B shares have 10 votes per share, for any shareholder vote.

Using this mechanism, for example, the Class B shareholders might only own 20% of the company in economic terms but have a clear majority voting position relative to the Class A shareholders.

In short, Class A shareholders have shares labeled with the earlier letter in the alphabet, but Class B shareholders control the company -- in stark contrast to the more normal single-class stock structure which is more classically democratic: "one share, one vote". Since Class B shareholders will typically be some set of founding management or founding investors in the company, in practice the presence of a dual-class stock structure means that the founders control the company and can overrule all other shareholders on a wide range of issues, including if and when to sell the company.

Both public and private companies can have dual-class stock structures, but the controversy around dual-class stock structures is usually confined to public companies, due to the presence of public shareholders. And so I will focus purely on public companies.

I used to be an absolutist against dual-class stock structures -- I used to b