Robert Scoble is organizing an open dinner tomorrow night at the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto. 6 pm. Good place to be if you can make it.

The next TechCrunch party will be on Feb 17. Past parties have been wonderful, and this one is going to be even better. We’ll be celebrating the publication of a new book.

I am taking six sponsors for this event. There are a couple of slots left open. If you are interested in being one of the sponsors, please email me at editor@techcrunch.com for details on sponsor benefits. I expect these to be sold out in the next 24 hours.

This party will be partially by invitation, and then open up for sign up to about 300 attendees.

Everyone’s talking about online music and DRM issues today (David Berlind‘s post is excellent). Elliot Spitzer is even starting to look into the labels online music pricing habits. I also enjoyed this quote in my inbox from GMSV this morning, although I do not have a date:

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue. We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only. We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders. We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others.”
– Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman Jr.

I’m sticking to my prediction that music will have to be free and un-DRM’d at some point. There is just no other way. Labels and artists will need to make money from certified-quality downloads, limited edition merchandise, tours, etc. Bands and managers will make a lot more money. Labels will mostly go out of business.

And while this debate and courtroom drama continues, Russia-based, pay-by-the-megabyte allofmp3.com is changing the game permanently. The RIAA either needs to go nuclear on them (if they can) or change their own business models for good, because they can’t just continue to pretend they don’t exist.

Om writes about his experience with splogs and plagiarism too. What’s great about these complete copy-cat blogs is when they steal and re-post the entries that talk about them stealing and re-posting content. It shows, of course, that this is just an automated system, and these guys are doing it to generate revenue. They do it because they can, and because it makes business sense for them to do it.

I had my own experience with plagiarism recently as well, as did Steve Rubel and countless others. The experience I had just sucked the energy right out of me. It was good, I guess, that it happened just before Christmas so that I had an excuse to stop blogging so much for a few days. But knowing there are people out there that don’t have any ethical grounding whatsoever, and that they have complete power to take what they like from you without any consequences, makes me just want to stop blogging altogether.

I found that I actually had to defend myself and how I dealt with the fact that someone stole my content. People have a tendency to try and see both sides of an issue. So when someone steals content from you, others are going to ask if you handled yourself properly in dealing with it. It is the same mentality that leads people to forgive other types of criminal behavior, and blame the victim.

Update: Dave Winer pointed me to a post he did two years ago that pretty much says everything I mean to say, but better (see the comments to this post as well). Journalists have a responsibility to dig for the truth, not to blindly report what both sides are saying. Just because people disagree doesn’t mean the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That’s why I was somewhat disappointed with Jonathan’s post.

I’d like to get people’s opinions on what annoys them the most about faulty beta launches for products. For instance, do landing pages with email signups really annoy you, and would you rather not hear about a product until it is ready to launch? What about a lack of proper FAQs? Lack of firefox or safari support? Etc. Let me know what really pisses you off.

I need to make a decision about when to return to the bay area (I’m up in Washington state for the holidays now). There are a few important meetings happening next week, and I’d like to be in SF for New Years. However, the snow report is looking extremely promising at Mt. Baker, which is an hour away, starting Tuesday:

BY TUESDAY WE EXPECT 6 – 10 INCHES OF NEW SNOW. We are hoping to have both base areas open on Monday, or by Tuesday at the latest depending on when the snow moves in.

FROM TUESDAY ON IT LOOKS EVEN BETTER
From Tuesday on are the days to look forward to for significant snowfall. How much we get and when depends on the timing of how the storms move over us, but these will likely be the “rally” days as cold air mixes back in . . .just what we like to see!

I love skiing almost as much as I love blogging.

I’m also finding that I’m able to get a lot more work done up here than I expected.

Rex and Dave – Why would you pay $1 for a DRM’d file in the first place? Particularly when you are just buying a one-time download?

I either buy the cd, keeping the master physical copy somewhere safe, or buy from AllofMP3.com, where you can purchase non-DRM music in the format and quality level you choose, at a price of $0.02 per MB. Yes, two cents per megabyte. And it’s, arguably, legal. If I lose the copy, the biggest cost in replacing it is download time, not dollars out of my pocket.

Dave goes on a rant about Christians and Christianity. As always, Dave’s timing is perfect as Christmas is only two days away.

the radio was playing some Frosty the Snowman shit, and I was sitting there while every person who came in wished everyone a Merry Christmas as if this were a Jimmy Stewart movie and not downtown Berkeley.

Christmas with my parents is never perfect. We know each other too well. My mom, who by the way loves her new Lexus more than she ever loved me, wonders aloud if she’ll ever have grandchildren (I’m unmarried and an only child) and suggests that I’m getting so old (35) that I won’t be able to have a successful marriage. She’s now hoping for the quick fix – suggesting I marry a divorced woman with kids. It’s like instant grandkids – just add water/divorced woman. Oh yeah, and she still doesn’t understand why I left that great paying job at the law firm a few years ago. My dad always gets in the middle of our arguments and things tend to blow up. But I’ll tell you this: THANK GOD its not like a Jimmy Stewart movie around here. I’d have to buy a shotgun and end it all. I like things just the way they are around this house, and after three or four days here I’ll be sad to leave.

Dave, next year I think you should come to Washington and spend time with the Arrington family for Christmas. We’ll have your favorite Christmas meal, chinese food, and I’ll light a Hanukkah candle for you.

Ian Sefferman is clearly an up and ‘comer with keen insights and with a decisive, indisputable logic to his conclusions. I love this guy. Everyone should read his blog.

In all seriousness though, I am not “the most influential person of web 2.0 in 2005″. Why? Because all I did was write a blog and throw some parties. The hard stuff is building companies.

But thank you, Ian, for this wonderful compliment.

TechCrunch is doing much better this morning after last night’s server switch. I’m crossing my fingers that things will be very stable from now on.

Ben’s right – the new blog I’ll be launching with an established blogger is not a Cricket blog. More on that next week.

Also, I got a nice surprise today. The PostSecret book that I ordered back in October arrived from Amazon. I’ll be putting up a quick post on TechCrunch. I put some pictures on Flickr. If you want to order the book, a link is at the bottom of the TechCrunch post.

Dave Winer posted an interesting breakdown of how he defines the various Web 2.0 camps. He wrote something very similar in an internal email to the Web 2.0 Workgroup yesterday. It generated quite a discussion on the email list, and I’m glad he’s put it out on the open web.

I don’t fully agree with Dave, but as always he has an interesting and intelligent viewpoint that demands consideration.

He dislikes the Web 2.0 moniker because (my words) he believes it was born in sin and has been exploited by lots of people purely for their own gain. Ok – I don’t have an opinion on that because, frankly, I don’t know all of the facts. But I do know that I love what’s happening on the web right now and am perfectly happy calling it Web 2.0 – because we clearly had a period of a couple of years after the stock market crashed where innovation didn’t quite die, but certainly was mostly going on behind the scenes. The renaissance we are witnessing now is beautiful, and I for one am going to enjoy every single minute of it.

The discussion around Dave’s most recent post is building up at the Meme. My original post on the issue, where I jokingly call Dave and Richard MacManus traitors, is here.

We are moving TechCrunch over to a dedicated server tonight. Things didn’t go as smoothly as possible, and the site is down now. Probably will be for another few hours. The nice thing is that when it is back up, I’ll have all the bandwidth and CPU cycles I need to handle the modest traffic.

There is a very talented engineer helping me with the move as well as some new features. I’ll write more about the engineer later, but I want to describe some of the new stuff now, and your thoughts.

First, I’ve gotten a ton of requests for better search on TechCrunch. The standard wordpress search leaves a lot to be desired. Quite often I go to the search engines to find my own archived posts, for instance. I’m not improving on the search feature for now. But I am going to do two things. First, I’m going to redo the categories to be more useful (and go back and retag posts more appropriately). Second, and more importantly, we are building a self-creating index of all companies I’ve written about. If you want to see what I’ve written about a company, you’ll be able to go to this index and find it by looking it up alphabetically or searching. This will also auto-generate an opml file, of course.

Second, I need to find a better way to organize and respond to profile requests. Right now I link to my email address, and I’ve fallen so far behind that there is no way to catch up. Instead, I am going to add a quick web form that companies can fill out, giving me the relevant data in a structured way. The data will be private, but there will be an option (the company’s option) to allow me to share this data with venture capitalists and other service providers. Some companies really want this, others absolutely don’t. It will be their choice.

Third, and I’m really excited about this, I’ll be launching a new blog next week under a completely separate domain name, which will be written by a really great, established blogger. The topic will be tech-related and highly specific (and an area I don’t really cover enough). Over time I will be adding more blogs and more authors on relevant topics.

I’ll be giving more details on each of these items next week. For now, we’re just trying to get the site back up.

I bought a really nice Vaio desktop computer last month at Worst Buy in Easy Palo Alto. My friend broke it the other day and I’m getting a screen that demands I put in the original windows cds to fix it. Problem is that Sony no longer ships the original cds.

Worst Buy says I can drop it off at their store, pay them $167 and they’ll reformat the hard drive for me with the original software and settings. That isn’t appealing to me for a number of reasons.

If anyone near Atherton, CA wants to come by and fix this for me, I’ll pay $100 cash. It has to be tonight, and you have to bring everything you need to fix it. If not tonight, I’ll be back around Dec 30 and could do it then.

If you want me to, I’ll also put a very nice link up to your blog/site thanking you.

This guy is simply stealing people’s blog posts, making slight changes and re-posting them as his own writing.

What’s different about this guy is that he runs in the same circles as many of my friends and apparently used to work at Yahoo. I can’t wait to meet you, Josh.

Josh’s email is Jstomel@oversee.net. He works at Oversee.net.

Josh’s post on Riya

There were rumors in the market that the company was being acquired for around 30 million.

Tonight, Founder and CEO Munjal Shah finally addressed the acquisition rumors around Riya on his blog, stating flatly that Riya continues as an independent company:

For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn’t and still can’t directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality.

Robert Scoble just wrote about this as well, admitting that Microsoft took a look at Riya (passing on the price), and expressing his hope that they’ll take another look now that the Google deal has fallen through.

Either way, I’m just looking forward to the product finally shipping. Munjal says that will be at Demo in February.

And as an interesting side discussion, Peter Rip, a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying “Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had.”

Ouch. But this can’t be entirely correct – Robert has confirmed in his blog that Microsoft met with Riya and passed on the deal. So at the very least, acquisition discussions were taking place.

My Post on Riya

Riya, the celebrated facial recognition company that has allowed in a few lucky alpha testers over the last few months, was the subject of significant acquisition rumors a few weeks ago. “Sources” put the price in the $30 million range, although the company was understandably silent, even during their launch party a few days later.

Tonight, Founder and CEO Munjal Shah finally addressed the acquisition rumors around Riya on his blog, stating flatly that Riya continues as an independent company:

For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn’t and still can’t directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality.

Robert Scoble just wrote about this as well, admitting that Microsoft took a look at Riya (passing on the price), and expressing his hope that they’ll take another look now that the Google deal has fallen through.

Either way, I’m just looking forward to the product finally shipping. Munjal says that will be at Demo in February.

And as an interesting side discussion, Peter Rip, a Riya investor (and a friend of mine) takes us all down a notch (TechCrunch is specifically mentioned) saying “Every report was factually incorrect at the time it was printed. I did not see one accurate characterization of any discussions Riya.com may or may not have had.”

Ouch. But this can’t be entirely correct – Robert has confirmed in his blog that Microsoft met with Riya and passed on the deal. So at the very least, acquisition discussions were taking place.

Here’s another one he stole from me. Compare the screen shot below from Josh’s site to my post here.

UPDATE: Josh called me today and apologized (I forgot to ask, but I wonder who gave him my cell phone number). He also posted an apology on his blog. Ok, I’ve accepted his apology and I’m now over this.

Robert’s right, the politics side of Memeorandum is going nuts over the NSA spying scandal. I never check that side of the Meme out, but my father is hooked.

I’ll be there.

A classic from Hugh Macleod (via Jeff Clavier).

Russell Shaw, Dave Winer and Richard MacManus have each declared that Web 2.0 is dead and/or that it never existed.

In the words of Kyle from Southpark, “You Bastards”.

These attacks come from the Web 2.0′s biggest champions, making them that much harder to bear. Dave Winer and Richard MacManus are members of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, and Richard also writes a ZDNet blog called Web 2.0 Explorer. These are the elite troops of the new web, and the last people I’d expect to hear say these things (well, except for Dave, who tends to say whatever is on his mind).

Web 2.0 is not a marketing slogan. It is the slogan of a people’s army. Our army. They are words that help us explain the explosion of conversations on the web, and justify our enthusiasm for innovation. Web 2.0 is why I came back from my exodus at the fringes of technology, to explore the frontier of the new consumer web.

Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that something amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.

Don’t be so eager to tear down this castle in the sky. It may not be so easy to build it yet again.

Dave Winer left for New Orleans earlier this week to see for himself what was going on. A summary of his posts is up at his wordpress blog. Don’t miss his podcast and flickr pics.

Richard MacManus gives us his top ten web 2.0 moments of 2005.