With the blossoming profusion of online music sales sites, it must just be a matter of time before meta-sales sites turn up, offering simple consolidation of search (so you can specify an artist/song and the service will track it down for you at a price/in a format you want). Such a portal would have an interesting effect on the market: I can’t imagine it unseating ITMS, which is heavily tied into a brand experience and standalone software (iTunes), but the effect on the smaller online music distribution (OMD) businesses could be quite dramatic, adding to sales but weakening branding and brand presence: the endless cycle of commodification continues.

What I’d be most interested to see would be such a portal also offering on-the-fly format transcoding. Not exactly a commercial proposition (wait for the lawsuits on that one!), but certainly something that, if released, deCSS-style, as a covert open source hack, might prosper in the wild: cheap easy online music sales, where the music companies actually get their cut, but consumers get the freedom to use a single portal interface and whatever device they choose for listening…

I’m on my third of these Sui worklights from Artemide. The first one, which we bought in Rome, was broken by the movers last year. The second one (which arrived after a 4-month wait) turned out to be ex-display and damaged. Finally, almost a year to the day since the move, a new one turned up at SCP. I love these lights — the actual illumination is a grid of 18 white LEDs, and on battery they will last a couple of hours between charges. And they feel good in the hand, if somewhat surgical in their ergonomics.