and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

We'll call this the wednesday random roundup (yes, I know it's thursday but wednesday just sounds better).

Firstly, Apple has added Japan to the list of countries priveleged enough to buy it's iTunes Music Store offerings (over 1,500,000 files, now). It was just over a year ago now that Apple first made their service available to non-U.S. customers (France and Germany). The addition of Japan to the list makes a total of 20 countries now. A while back, they sold their 500 millionth song online and it looks like they're not planning on stopping there. Just for shits and giggles let's look at a graph of iTunes Music store total sales by date:

For clarification, that's 70 million songs in the first year and practically 330 million in the second year. It's worth noting that a large part of the increase in sales could very easily be attributable to the addition of other countries to the store, rather than to increased online music purchasing by the average music lover.. Anyhow, it's not that it looks like Apple needs Japan's patronage, but hopefully for them the Japanese won't mind paying a 40% premium on the content, since Apple is charging 150 yen (US$1.40).

[Apple's] rival Sony's online songs range from 99 yen to 210 yen, but Sony's music download service Mora provides just 200,000 songs -- 110,000 foreign and 90,000 in Japanese.

Apple's move followed Wednesday's announcement by US online song-seller
Napster that it would team up with real-world disc retailer Tower Records to enter the Japanese music market next year.

Of course there is no mention as to the amount of Japanese content available through Apple's service.

Secondly, I thought I'd talk about a little phenomenon that you all can use on a daily basis to acquire all the things in life you wish you had. I call it the wish-yah-had-it effect: If you can think it up, it already exists. I run into this effect every time I have a great idea for a new product or piece of software. I think gee, this would be awesome and then *BAM* - within a week or two I stumble upon a product or piece of software that does exactly what I was thinking. The effect itself can be mind-numbingly frustrating for the aspiring entrepeneur. All the ideas, as they say, have been taken. But for the end-user/joe-shmo like me it's just champagne and bubbles. I come with things I need, they pop into existence. It's a lot like playing those old side-scrolling arcade games where you fought an enemy, walked away from that portion of the level, and when you returned the enemy was mysteriously revived!

So what makes me bring up this wish-yah-had-it effect? For a long time now I've chatted on occassion with a good friend of mine about creating a database system that, given an acoustic signature of some sort, could return a set of music songs that matched it. The impetus behind this was for academic music reseach but the applications are endless. Enter www.musicbrainz.org, a user-maintained community music metadatabase with information such as the ArtistName, the AlbumTitle, and the list of tracks that appear on an album. In addition to this information, however, it also contains AcousticFingerprints (unique ids that represent the audio signature of a musical piece, generated through software by Relatable) to semi-automatically identify tracks in your music collection. Bingo - no more mp3s titled Track01, Track02, Track03..

Well, this database is all good and dandy but how to make use of it? With iEatBrainz, that's how. It's a iTunes plug-in that uses MusicBrainz to fix your mp3 and aac tags in iTunes after they've been ripped using acoustic matchings. Sweet.

I'm anxious to, but I haven't tried this puppy out yet. In the meantime, user comments over at Version tracker seem pretty positive:

for me its about 85% accurate, which is fantastic.

I would say that it is about 70% accurate.

I have a lot of foreign music (French, Quebec, spanish, etc..) and it finds most of them. I have a 2000 mp3's and it only missed out on about 5% which is reasonable, I think..

Thirdly, The Buzz Engine. This is an interesting article about a company doing "Online Analysis":

[The] project hinges on the fact that these days, few rumours, opinions, musings or idle thoughts go unpublished. Through blogs, discussion forums, Usenet groups, chat rooms and opinion sites collectively known as wikis, people are sharing everything they think.

The problem for marketers is how to access and analyze this massive flow of information. They can search them through a service like Google, Yahoo or Bloogz (which specializes in searching blogs), but they'd have to know what to look for. In fact, a Google search of the words "key," "Dodge" and "Omni" [which were used to try to find information about the fact that Dodge Omnis only had six key prints, thereby resulting in a large chance that your Omni key would work in another's car] yields about 266,000 results, and none of the first 250 has any thing to do with key interchangeability.

The researcher says that using the results of the method a company can sense whether [a] new product has generated a high level of interest, what type of interest, and even head off product issues before they become massive business problems. Yah, well.. no kidding. I'm honestly surprised at how little companies look at the web when it comes to gauging consumer enthusiasm for new products. Even using just Google's search can result in some pretty strong (postive or negative) opinions. Take note of the mighty mouse discussion just the other day.

The bottom line is that large corporations, as much as they might have learned over the last decade about online-everything, are still slow on the uptake. The good 'ol boy style and mentality of doing business is an entrenched one. Yet this does make the sometimes silly analysis tools blogpulse, technorati, daypop, etc seem potentially useful. How long before they get bought up by the big kids in suits?

And finally, I really enjoyed this article over at Slate discussing NewWeek's current scaremongering cover story, "The Meth Epidemic: Inside America's New Drug Crisis,". They talk about the lack of solid reporting, the overly-disgusting photos meant to appeal to America's love for a little hysteria, and then they go on to do NewWeek's job for them, the way it should have been done in the first place:

Another significant metric is found in the superb number-crunching performed by the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future survey. Each year, the survey asks high schoolers what drugs they've taken in the last year. In 1975, 16.2 percent of all 12th graders said they'd taken amphetamines over the year. That number peaked at 26 percent in 1981 and bottomed at 7.1 percent in 1992. Methamphetamine arrives on the chart in 1999 at 4.3 percent but dribbled down to 3.4 percent by 2004.

Some epidemic.

Amen. Of course in this article we get what we apparently can't expect from the likes of NewsWeek; both sides of the story:

This critique is no brief in favor of drug use. Nor do I minimize the collateral damage inflicted on others by methamphetamine users. But journalism like [NewsWeek's] ignores how, to paraphrase Grinspoon and Hedblom, drug-war measures often do more harm to individuals and society than the original "evil" substance the warriors attempted to stamp out. In the mid-1960s, just before the government declared war on amphetamines, the average user swallowed his pills, which were of medicinal purity and potency. Snorting and smoking stimulants was almost unheard of, and very few users injected intravenously.

Today, 40 years later, snorting, smoking, and injecting methamphetamines of unpredictable potency and dubious purity has become the norm—with all the dreadful health consequences. If the current scene illustrates how the government is winning the war on drugs, I'd hate to see what losing looks like.