undesign

These are hyperlinks to internet websites you should read.

• Rhino is doing a Prince retrospective. Though there's certainly more than enough retrospectives out there already (a box set with b-sides, a crappy single-disk colection, and the soundtrack to Spike Lee's Girl 6) it looks like this is one of the easiest ways to get a lot of the extended versions of the old Prince stuff on CD. In the olden days, we had to track down European import CD singles, and it was uphill both ways! In the really olden days, we found vinyl 12" singles at flea markets while knee-deep in the snow. I hope Rhino cleans up the audio, too, as these tracks approach 20 or 25 years old, they need remastering.

• Now don't get me wrong, I love Prince. I'm just glad I'm not this guy.

• Who dares to link???!1 I dare to link! In related BLTN news, that's a mighty purty logo.

• A few years ago, Andre and I got obsessed with instant messenger bots, and he built some pretty cool little apps. Of course, these all get killed off after a while because AOL hasn't had the sense to do open licensing on their APIs. But now Microsoft has, which would be cool if anybody I know used MSN Messenger.

• Two years ago was a very naive time.

• If shareholders start to think that investments like Amazon's (excellent) web services platform aren't delivering enough short-term value, how is this going to impact the trend of big publicly-traded companies being more open with their technology? The combination of cool but expensive technology investments and unexpected underperformance is could make it harder to do Good Things.

• The SEO community just loves drama, it seems. Especially as reported in this Wall Street Journal story. I'd be mad if the person I was paying to improve my site was busy wasting time with a pointless online pissing match. And I say that as someone who's participated in one.

• In found Shaun Inman's discussion of Mint piracy interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I've faced the opposite problem for a while, in that we have a totally free version of our application that we make available which people are allowed to customize and extend and hack the code of, but some people don't know it's there. So seeing the contrast is educational. And second, with the purchase of MeasureMap (congrats, kids!) Mint is theoretically more valuable now -- how does that complicate the requests that some people made that Shaun simply encourage free distribution and then charge for support? The honor system and the gift economy are tricky things to navigate.

• And finally, stop sending me the link: I've Seen It.