Λίγο πριν την αναχώρηση για τις Βρυξέλλες, έκατσα και συγκέντρωσα σημειώσεις, bookmarks και σκέψεις σχετικά με τα θέματα προς συζήτηση. Μπορεί κανείς να συνοψίσει τα βασικά ζητήματα στο παρακάτω πίνακα:

Στη κορυφή του πίνακα παραθέτω τις χαρακτηριστικές ‘εφαρμογές’, ή αν προτιμάτε δραστηριότητες που φέρονται να ‘απαιτούν’ επιπλέον νομοθετική ‘ρύθμιση’. Αφ’ενός το peer to peer, ή ελληνιστί η ανταλλαγή αρχείων μέσω του διαδικτύου και συγκεκριμένα η ανταλλαγή έργων πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας, αφ’ετέρου η ελεύθερη έκφραση μέσω των ιστολόγιων, που δεν είναι παρα δικτυακοί τόποι και λογισμικό που καθιστά εύκολη και άμεση — ακόμη και στον μη-καταρτισμένο τεχνικά χρήστη υπολογιστή — την έκδοση κειμένων.
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I regularly listen to last.fm radio stations, be it from my friends, neighbours or people that I stumble upon by checking out groups that may interest me.

One of the problems I’ve noticed is that music that Last.fm serves over its radio is sometimes mistagged; the problem is that the Last.fm software seems to identify this, but does nothing other than inform you that this is the case. Somewhat ironic, given that Last.fm is serving this music. Check out the screenshot below, from the Last.fm client playing the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ by Christoph Willibald Gluck. That’s the ‘baroque’ tag ‘radio station’.

This is not an isolated occurrence. I ran into the problem twice in the few minutes it took me to write this post. Which begs the question: Where does Last.fm get the music it’s serving to its users? I thought the company had agreements with most of the mainstream record companies and a bunch of indies and that’s where it got hold of the music. Wouldn’t this mean that they have all the necessary meta-data in place when they stream audio over their ‘radio’ stations? It makes no sense for last.fm to serve music with bad tags, let alone advise its users to keep their tags clean in the process.

It’s been almost four and a half years since I got my venerable Canon EOS 20D. And, in DSLR time, that’s quite a lot.

The 20D was a fantastic camera for its time, highly valued by both amateurs such as myself and pros (mostly as a second body). Sadly, most updates to the series by Canon have left me cold: The 30D was a very marginal improvement to its predecessor and the 40D, while impressive on its own, paled in comparison to Nikon’s D300 (even though the latter was significantly more expensive).

Canon seemed right on the path of losing the DSLR crown and while the figures still showed that it was the undisputed king in terms of sales, it’s the mindshare that matters most and betrays the trends of things to come.

And then it happened: for the first time in the short history of Digital SLR cameras, Canon, the market leader, the innovator, the king of DSLRs ever since they started becoming the tool of choice for million of photographers, in sport, studio and landscape photography, flinched. The Canon EOS 50D, was announced yesterday, just a short 12 months after its predecessor, the 40D. 12 months instead of the customary 18 that underlines most of Canon’s release cycles for the series, all the while Nikon upped the stakes with D90 and the D700.

The Canon EOS 50D looks like it might become my next camera; given my investment in Canon glass, it’d make no sense to switch to Nikon now. It’s price (£1200, according to Amazon UK; that’s around €1,500 at the time of writing) is quite steep for a body-only mid-range prosumer DSLR camera. I’m sure that the price will come down very quickly, especially once Canon releases the long awaited successor to the ageing EOS 5D and the rest of the market adjusts to its release.

This is a welcome step for Canon; a rare, wise and humble step by the leading camera manufacturer, but also a company that has been consistently outsmarted by its arch-rival in the past few years; a company facing intense competition by ‘challengers’ in the form of Sony and Olympus and a company that probably has the unique position to massively fuel competition in the SLR market segment.