Universal Media Player for the Distributed Web

Pete Cashmore of Mashable is a visionary.

Last February Pete wrote about the idea of a Universal Media Player:

Flickr, YouTube, Stickam, del.icio.us, Revver and many more Web 2.0 players have successfully employed widgets to drive traffic back to their own sites. eBay and Amazon take the next step by incentivizing their widgets (you earn a % of any transaction). And finally there’s the widget to end all widgets: the indefatigable Google Adsense. Ultimately, I wonder whether we even need to drive traffic back to the originating site – it seems feasible to have all the interaction taking place within the widget itself (and in fact this already happens with Adsense). Nonetheless, you still need a centralized site where the user can create his widgets (or do you?).

The answer to your parenthetical question, Pete, is no.  In the post-destination-website era (a.k.a. “the distributed web”), your rich media content will be splashed across hundreds of different web pages, yet you will be able to remotely control and track it all from one simple console, accessible directly from any Universal Media Player, on any web page.

Sorry it took 10 months for your vision to become reality, Pete.

Wanna sneak peak?  Sign up for SplashCast beta.

Don’t Upload…or else.

Uploading the latest track from your favorite artist to your Myspace page looks like it will become problematic in the near future. And this news comes out just days after it was reported that their numbers were down.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – News Corp.’s MySpace.com on Monday said it had licensed a new technology to stop users from posting unauthorized copyrighted music on the social networking Web site and oust frequent violators of its policy.

Short of migrating to other social network sites that are a little less, shall we say, restrictive, what will the kids do? Do we really think they are going to stop sharing music?

Pete Cashmore at Mashable mentions in his post about MySpace tackling the copyright issue that they are sure to annoy their user base with these restrictions. And deleting their pages (and their friends) will will certainly not improve their recent decline in numbers. Seems like there is a compromise here. Some artists are working with the kids by providing some content for free… as well as making a statement.

Weird Al has a track on his latest album called Don’t Download This Song and he has made it available on his MySpace page as a download.

Jack Black has produced a satirical commentary on piracy and makes half of the Pick of Destiny movie available for free from iTunes.

Can’t we all just play nice and share… legally?