Oh this is probably not going to be good:

CBS Corp said on Wednesday it had paid $280 million in cash for the popular music social network service Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement the online service had more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries and would fit well with its plans to attract younger viewers and transform it from a content company to an audience company.

I love Last.fm (aka Audioscrobbler), it’s one of the rare examples of a community site that found a niche and filled it well.  They’ve recently started expanding their feature set into events listsing and they’re providing a bunch of widgets for other sites.  They’ve also always had an extensive list of data feeds that could be consumed (and which I use for the latest album shown on my sidebar). 

I may be concerned for no reason, the article does say that

The Last.fm team will continue to run the online network under the terms of the deal and work with CBS to apply their community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online

And CBS has certainly seemed to embrace the new media: they show full episodes online, they have wikis, blogs & podcasts on their site. 

I just hope that the RIAA doesn’t use this as an opportunity to try an squeeze more money out of the site, like what they’ve done to Pandora. And I hope CBS is smart enough to not wreck a great site.

[tags]Last.fm, Music, CBS[/tags]

TiVo, the time-shifting digital video recorder that became a household name in the US, will come to Australia in 2008.

For a small subscription fee plus the price of the hardware, Australians will be able to pause live high definition TV, fast-forward ads, record shows and series from any of the free-to-air digital TV channels, and access broadband content such as video-on-demand.

The company today announced a partnership with the Seven Network, which will build the digital platform behind the service.

Sweet.  I really wish Australia didn’t lag so far behind the US on these sort of things.  We need to get much better & cheaper broadband into this country very soon.

I’ve been working on a new version of the verse of the day plugin.  There have been a few reported problems with the verse not updating, and I’ve been wanting to add widget support for ages.  So I’m after a few beta testers.  Doesn’t matter if you’ve installed it before or not, if you want to try it out, you can grab the zip file here.  Extract it into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and try it out.  If you have already installed the plugin, please deactivate it and delete the existing plugin files before installing this beta. If you want to roll back to the earlier version after installing this beta, you can grab the current stable version from here.

If your wanting to use the widget, it should show up automatically in the list of available widgets.  If not, and you haven’t installed it before, you’ll need to add <?php wp_votd(); ?> to your sidebar to make it show up.

Please leave any bug reports and questions in the comments below, or if you’re a member on wp-plugins.org, please create a new ticket, selecting the wp-votd component and assign it to dalziel.

Thanks in advance!

[tags]Verse of the Day, WordPress Plugin, Bible, WordPress[/tags]

Just got the OK from work to go to Google Developer Day at Eveleigh.   I’m quite interested in Bo Majewski’s Google Maps API talk & the newly engaged Aaron Boodman’s Building better AJAX applications should be good too.  But mostly I’m wanting to meet other developers who are working on & interested in developing the same stuff I am. 

Oh yeah, and learning new techniques that can be assimilated to the rest of our development team and to leverage our paradigms.  Or something like that… important business reasons for me to be going!

So anyway, if anyone is going to be there, let me know & we’ll meet up!

[tags]Google, Google Developer Day 2007, Sydney, Australia[/tags]

Just released the 1.1 version of the Noembedder Plugin, which adds a <noembed> section to any embedded content (e.g. YouTube videos, etc…) containing a customisable message & for YouTube and GameVideos,  a thumbnail of the video.  This is very handy for people reading your site in an RSS reader, as a lot of them don’t display embedded content. Well, FeedDemon 2.5 will, but plenty of the other readers don’t!

This release added the thumbnails for GameVideos & fixed a few bugs.  The major fix was enabling the plugin to work if the embed section didn’t have a closing tag.  That is, if it looked like this <embed src=... /> rather than <embed src=... ></embed>.

You can download the plugin here, and there are more details on the plugin page.  As always, please leave any comments or questions on the plugin page.

[tags]WordPress Plugin, Noembedded, YouTube, GameVideos[/tags]

I couldn’t agree more. 

Looks like it’s “games I’ve been waiting ages for” week. Starcraft 2 has finally been announced by Blizzard at a special event in Korea.  There’s no release date yet, so we may yet be waiting a while. So until then, check out this 1UP page for more details, demo videos and a few in-game images.  The official site has a whole bunch more screenshots & details on the game units (it only has some of the Protoss at the moment).  We also know that this will be a PC-only game.  Not surprising as RTS games don’t tend to port to console all that well.

Blizzard have done quite well in the past. They’ve stuck to a fairly niche market with the War/Starcraft and Diabolo games and they seem to be more interested in expanding the games they have rather than developing competely new games.  Not common in the games production business, but it seems to work for them!