From: Dave Winer (dave@userland.com)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 10:35:17 PDT
Jim raises some very important and totally interesting and exciting
questions, but there's another question that needs to be raised. First a
little background.
Napster is going to change. They're hiring music industry execs. They're
negotiating with RIAA.
It's clear that they are wanting to fit in with the music industry's
user-hostile and misguided idea of the role of the Internet in music. Now,
in the meantime, the window is open, Napster is serving data which if
Napster should change its service, might disappear, and we might look back
and wish we had done some harvesting.
Imperfect as it is, Napster's database holds a taxonomy of popular music
among Internet users, a snapshot, one with a lot of historic value, imho.
I want to get that data into XML on public servers. I have contact with
management at Napster and can ask for technical details. Of course I'm not
sure if they'll answer. And they don't want crawlers, even so..
Would anyone like to join me in creating such an archive? (Not of the music,
just the artists and song titles.)
Dave Winer
UserLand
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