photo credit: rjs1322

Recently, I have become very impressed with Open Culture.   It is a website consisting mainly of a lot of downloadable material such as e-books and podcasts.   In fact the sheer amount of stuff is staggering and I am still working my way through it.   It has made me realise how much free quality stuff there is to download for the iPod / MP3 player if you know where to look for it.   The other day, I downloaded for free old Beethoven symphonies from Danish radio.   This must have been recorded back in the 1970’s (and the sound quality showed it) but Open Culture dutifully provided the iTunes and MP3 links.

This is definately a website to watch on a regular basis and definately one to visit if you like to download podcasts.

Technorati Tags: beethoven, download, e-book, MP3, open culture, Podcasts

I am totally obsessed right now with Pidgin. I like how I can integrate Skype into it, in fact I like full stop how extensible the whole thing is. You can skin it, you can add plug-ins, you can make it whatever way you want it. Due to its open-source nature, there’s an active developer community and I am talking to a couple of people at the moment via email and IM about their Pidgin development projects (you can see one of them here).

You see, to me, this is the exciting side of the web - the side that opens up to user participation and innovation. Web companies that don’t offer API’s and developer support are just shooting themselves in the foot basically, because what really drives a product are the users. If there is genuine passion among the users, and innovation with third party addons then you’re going to build a loyal customer base - period. If you shut out the developers and discourage innovation then you’re not really inspiring loyalty are you?

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Technorati Tags: bot sentry, chat, developer, hotkeys, IM, Make Use Of, open source, pidgin, plugins, shortcuts, Software, spam