Methinks these tips may be a little too obvious, and a little too precious. Too many bloggers have gotten obsessed about their posts - thinking that they have to be long articles packed with loads and loads of detail. I find that a blog which has posts of five words in length that get you thinking is generally better than a blog that has 5,000 word posts that leave you snoring. Unfortunately, the world doesn't seem to agree with me. Keep writing those long blog posts so you can get on to Digg. And remember, conciseness is a sin in this new attention-deprived world. 
OpenID whitelisting has been discussed by Simon Willison and Tom Coates. That seems like a prime candidate for linking in with WordPress as a plugin. And with FOAF. Think about that. If someone is listed as a friend in your FOAF file and you add a line listing their OpenID URL, then you not only have a simple boolean yes/no whitelist, but you can trawl all the linked FOAFs and find out whether your friends' friends have OpenIDs. That way, if you take A's list as a starting point, any of their friends should be whitelisted. And any of their friends should have a significant increase in deciding whether or not to hold for moderation. Trusted meta-data about people and weblogs is one significant weapon in the fight against comment spam. Similarly, you can use the foaf:weblog attribute to determine whether a person's weblog ought to be trusted to send TrackBacks. The first step seems to be simple - put together an RDF dump of all the implicit metadata on a weblog so we can do clever stuff with it including comment OpenID whitelisting.
How to operate an online music business 
1. Sell music, not subscriptions. There is only one company that does this properly and it's called Apple. Subscriptions don't work. They're antithetical to the very idea of how you buy music. They don't work for low volume customers. Not everyone is a music addict - and the iTunes pricing enables a person to hear a song they like on the radio, type it in and buy the song. Impulse buys don't happen if you've got to commit to a $8 a month subscription,
2. Sell real MP3s or something that is quite easy to turn in to an MP3. Apple does this reasonably well. Nobody else really does it very well. Apple has the biggest market in MP3 players. Make sure your stuff works on them. That means MP3. MP3 is device neutral, WMA, AAC and the multidue of DRM systems aren't.
3. Once a user has bought a track, make sure that the the user can go back and download extra copies. Hard drives fail, computers get stolen, shit happens. The users are buying intellectual property not download megabytes.
4. Offer podcast clearance rights for commercial music. Allow podcasters to register with your site and pay a chunk of extra cash to have the right to play it on a podcast, The royalty collection agencies are totally irrelevant in the podcast realm, so work around them. The one really valuable bit of PodShow is the Podsafe Music Network. If someone has got a song that cost them $1, let them pay 50 cents more to promote the music.
5. Offer an affiliate programme and build an API. Go and look up Amazon ECS. This is letting people use the data of Amazon's catalogue and sell stuff to their users.
6. Top up the albums. If I buy one or two songs on iTunes, I might want to top up and buy the rest of them. Take the album price, deduct from it the amount someone has paid for tracks from that album and then sell them the rest of the album for that amount. And no bloody 'Album Only' tracks. That's stupid.
7. If you have software, bug your users to backup their music to a DVD-R. Not just their purchased music but all their music. It's highly sensible, which is why I didn't do it.
8. If you are building hardware or software to play MP3s, remember that not all MP3s are music and not all MP3s are three minutes long. The iTunes and iPod experience has this knowledge built in. The Zune doesn't.
9. Cut the parental controls rubbish. Or at least make sure that the explicit version actually is and not vice versa (I've seen a rap album on iTunes with an explicit and clean version - only they've messed up and got the two confused).
10. Give the end user a reason to want to buy music, not a reason to not want to. DRM is the best reason not to buy music.
