Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
"Web 2.0 is so sterile... I'm not saying make it look like Windows XP... but I feel like I'm in a very expensive post-modernist Manhattan loft where you can't sit on the furniture." -- A commenter on Digg's redesign. I was just thinking the same thing when looking at the Last.fm beta. I've finally hit my limit with the Web 2.0 look. We need to spice it up again somehow. Where's David Carson when you need him? 
Daring Fireball nails it again. The record industry today is rife with anger and envy that iTunes is as influential as it is, but it's a situation that they created by requiring DRM in their deals. Anchoring DRM on what should be open content means that whatever DRM scheme the market leader uses is the key leverage that keeps current users involved and becomes a necessary factor when determining vendors (when it should be an irrelevant issue). Before the FairPlay system got the traction it has now, I'm confident Apple would have been happy with selling unprotected music files. But once the money around the system coalesced, it became another piece in the big game. And now, not-suddenly-at-all, iTunes has the leverage to control music distribution online, and the only way to diffuse that is to remove DRM entirely and free digital music to all vendors. As Gruber puts it, "Record industry executives refuse to believe what is patently obvious to anyone with a clue — they are never ever going to regain complete control over the distribution of recorded music."