Metallica’s new album has leaked out a week or two early, unsurprisingly.  It isn’t surprsing because it’s Metallica, but that it happens to most every artist these days.  Some record store somewhere will sell a copy or two earlier than they should, one of those folks will share it with their friends, and lickety-split, it’s all over the Intertubes.

In this case, that’s almost exactly what happened, according to Blabbermouth

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich has commented on the premature release of the band’s new album, ”Death Magnetic”, via a French record store. A shop in Paris reportedly sold a number of copies of the CD this morning well ahead of its official September 12 worldwide release date — with illegal ”Death Magnetic” MP3 files making their way online by this afternoon.

During a guest appearance earlier today on ”The Woody Show” on the San Francisco, California radio station Live 105 (KITS 105.3 FM), Ulrichstated about the French leak,

“Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.”

This is the happy face that Metallica seems to be putting on this particular leak, and I’m not buying it for even a minute. Consistently since their role in the demise of Napster, they’ve maintained an adversarial role with their fans that continues to this day.  

If you remember, they were handed accolades in the blogosphere several months ago when they agreed to release their album free of DRM in digital format. Sean P. Aune wrote a post on his personal blog that at the time I thought was a little harsh, essentially saying the band was still clueless, and was nowhere close to “getting it.”

Their cluelessness a few days later was futher confirmed when they had their management issue takedown requests to all who reviewed the album based on invited advanced listenings.

I think our president once said something like “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” With eloquence like that, you have to wonder, but I think even he would be a bit wary of Metallica’s true feelings on this.  

I’m guessing they aren’t going to get involved in another ridiculous lawsuit or criminal pursuit against the pirates of the world, but mark my words: if Metallica’s album sales aren’t simply spectacular, look for an irritated and enraged Lars Ulrich coming soon to a press conference near you to blame all the pirates of the world for preventing Metallica fans from keeping his private jet fueled up.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:RCMP Says: Piracy OK (for Personal Use)Metallica Has Smoked Themselves RetardedDon’t Download Illegally in France AnymoreDRM-free MP3s from Warner Music Now Available on AmazonStudy Confirms: Piracy Is Better Than The Real ThingHey, I Know A Way To Get Windows XP After June 30NBC Exec Heats Up Battle Against Piracy

Source:Mashable!

It didn’t take long for Second Life, a leader in 3D Virtual Worlds, to respond to There.com’s announcement of new features.The most compelling new feature There.com revealed was its innovative ThereIM which would allow its members to chat in 3D and 2D worlds at the same time. Not to be out-done by their competition, Second Life has announced their own instant messenger called SLim™ (Second Life Instant Messenger) that will work in the 2D and 3D worlds.

A whole New Virtual World

The thin client SLim™ will be a voice and text instant messaging client that will enable Second Life Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with members of their Second Life Friends list in and out of the virtual world. While the Second Life viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine, SLim is capable of running on any computer and offers users a voice-enabled instant messaging client that extends the value of the Second Life platform beyond the virtual world.

Breaking down the Barriers

Allowing communication between the virtual world and the regular online world is a major hurdle that has hampered wider acceptance of that platform. Taking down this barrier will be a boon not only for entertainment purposes but also for commercial and corporate endeavors. Enabling interaction between these two separate worlds will surely take 3D virtual worlds to the next level.

Additional features of the SLim client:

- Provides residents with access to their Second Life Friends list with real-time “presence” status updates

- Enables users to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call

- Allows SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

Availability

Linden Lab and Vivox will be demonstrating the benefits of SLim at this week’s Virtual Worlds Conference in Los Angeles, California. The official release date has not been made public.

Conclusion

The future of 3D virtual worlds looks brighter than ever thanks to the two announcements made by There.com and Second Life. We can all expect more innovation to come from this platform as it becomes more integrated with the rest of our online experiences.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Armani in Second LifeSecond Life Gets Identity VerificationThe Future Of Linden Lab Following Executive ShuffleSecond Life Teams Up With IBM for Virtual World InteroperabilitySecurity Experts Expose Costly Vulnerability in Second LifeNew App Merges Facebook and Second LifeDoes Second Life Need a Reuters Office?

There’s a social network for just about anything you can imagine these days, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are services centered around quotations and famous words. Increasingly, these sites are offering more ways to collect and share your favorite quotes with widgets and plugins. Some are even making connections with other services such as pageflakes, igoogle, netvibes and many others. Here’s a rundown of the best sites for word lovers, some old and some new.

QuotationsBook

QuotationsBook aims to become the Facebook of quotes by incorporating some of the cool features that we’ve come to expect from our online services such as our own RSS feed of our favorite quotes which we can share with others. For example, you can add your quote feed to your FriendFeed account and your friends can then see any new quotes that you’ve added to your collection. Here’s Paisano’s quote feed. Another feature that’ll be appreciated is a customizable badge widget which lets you embed your collection on your own site. There’s also a firefox extension that lets you search for quotes from its search box, a gadget for Vista, and a widget for the Mac dashboard.

QuotationsBook has made some impressive connections with Web 3.0/Semantic services like Freebase, which has begun to include quotes from quotationsbook in its articles. Here’s an example from an entry about Mark Twain (look at the bottom for the attribution for quotes used).

One of the things missing from QuotationsBook is the option to contribute and save your very own quotations and sayings. However, Amit Kothari, the founder of QuotationsBook, has stated that they are planning to add that much requested feature in the future. Amit has also launched a service called Moonrise, which is referred to as “Twitter for emotions” (long before anyone had the urge to Plurk). While you cannot share your own original quotes there either, you can express your feelings or mood along with a photo, video and yes, you guessed it, a quote from its sister-site QuotationsBook.

QuotesDaddy

QuoteDaddy is another quote service with some cool social media features like QuotationsBook. They also have a customizable widget and provide an RSS feed of your favorite quotes but there are some differences worth mentioning. QuotesDaddy has a slicker interface and allows you to enter your own original quotes, not just from famous folk. I think this is a critical feature for any quotation service, especially in the looming semantic Web 3.0 era.

You can setup Gmail to automatically insert your favorite quotes randomly by following these quick steps. (The same process will work with your Quote RSS feed from QuotationsBook).

The Best of the Rest

The following quotation sites don’t have all of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles but they can provide that special quote that you’ve been searching for thanks to massive collections accumulated over time. Many sites provide specialized categories for every imaginable type of quote you could ever want or need.

- WikiQuote is a growing wiki (duh) with approximately 16,000 quotes at this time. Much like Wikipedia, anyone can contribute to the open library of quotes.

- QuotationsPage doesn’t have much pizzazz but it’s been around the longest. Launched in 1994, it has over 26,000 quotations online from over 3,100 authors.

- Bartleby includes over 87,000 quotes featuring impressive collections such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Columbia World of Quotations,Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, and Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations.

- QuoteDB is a popular site because of its simplicity, but it doesn’t have a large collection of quotes at this time. It does have a nice random quote generator widget though for your blog.

- About.com has a quotations section with a vast collection of different types of quotes.

Just for grins and giggles

- The Best Stuff from the mouth of Steve Jobs (Wired Magazine)

- The most visionary (and Funniest) things that Bill Gates has ever said!

- Famous last words

- Play the MovieQuotes Game

Conclusion

No matter what kind of quotes you’re looking for, they’re out there on the Web. Whether from a movie, TV show, athlete or even the bible, you can find them online in no time at all. Thanks to social media and social networking, it will continue to become increasingly easier to collect and share your favorite quotes, including your own original sayings. It will be interesting to see how far all this goes. Will we be able to pull any quote from our collection online and insert it in any email, blog post or comment or even a tweet on twitter? I have no doubt that we will and you can quote me on that.

[Image credit: umjanedoan (attribution)]

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Time Magazine’s Simple Facebook AppQuotationsBook Launches Network for Finding QuotesNo, Digg Isn’t Digging Its Own GraveIndonesia Removes YouTube Ban, Brazil Bans Wordpress.comideAjax Launches SaneBull WidgetsIs Creative Reporter Insane?First iPhone Reviews Don’t Reveal the Crucial Thing: GPS Reception Quality

Today Microsoft announced an expansion of its MSN Direct ‘Send to GPS’ feature for navigation devices, an option it first introduced at CES 2008. Now any website owner can implement an API to allow visitors to deliver address and business information to compatible devices.

Microsoft lists several products from Garmin’s “nuvi” line as well as a number of Alpine and Pioneer devices as being MSN Direct-enabled; some are able to gather data wirelessly or through a USB connection.

As with all things on the Web, the strength of a brand or service is very much in line with its numerical value. Its ability to gather a premium supply of users, in other words. And though something as arguably non-essential as a ‘Send to GPS’ option may not catch the eye of most Web users, making it available regardless gives Microsoft a chance at a more complete reach on the location-sensitive market. Which is certainly growing to noticeable degree. The new MSN Direct API simply provides an opening for more website developers to implement the service per their users’ convenience.

Like Microsoft, Google and MapQuest have each come to similar agreements with Garmin for the transfer of location data in recent months. Microsoft’s evolution of its ‘Send to GPS’ function is only sensible if it is to maintain optimal relevance across the broadest spectrum of websites.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Exclusive: NBC Launches TV Downloads ServiceNBC to Offer Free Downloads of Popular ShowsMySidekick.com Social Search: 100 Free InvitesMashable Readers: Get Your 15 Seconds of Internet Fame with First in ActionDivShare Reaches 100,000 MembersAsk.com Confirms Edison AlgorithmDivShare Launches Direct Sharing Features, and Site Redesign

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: PlayCrafter

20-word Description: PlayCrafter enables anyone to easily create their own casual Web games and share them with their friends.

CEO’s Pitch: PlayCrafter is a Flash-based website that lets users easily create a variety of 2D games. The games use physics and are created by dragging and dropping customizable game pieces. Users can upload their own graphics for all of a game’s pieces, including the background of the game. Creators can build upon the ideas of others by editing or personalizing existing games and discussing their games with the community. Games can easily be shared and posted to MySpace, Facebook or embedded on any website. Creators earn a share of revenues generated by their games.

Mashable’s Take: There are plenty of places to game on the Web. You can do so at sites built exclusively for the purpose of play, for instance. There are entertaining games meant to be played through social networks, too. Options abound in the MMORPG market and console realm as well. But how often do you get the option to go past the play-only stage and start to make games to be enjoyed by others? Not very, I imagine. At least not in a relatively easy way. (Microsoft is allowing gamers to use its XNA Game Studio software to build their own titles.)

PlayCrafter is an environment that makes it possible for anyone (with a reasonable set of graphic design talents) to make things for other gamers to interact with. As the CEO of ZipZapPlay, Curt Bererton says, all is Flash-based in PlayCrafter, and whether you’re building nearly every component from scratch and uploading them to the platform or using some pieces made available at the site, everything is more or less intuitive to use. Drag-and-drop is how most things work here.

If you’ve found a game you enjoy or want to show off your finished product, you don’t have to point your Internet friends to PlayCrafter’s domain. You can share titles a variety of ways. Embeds are possible. But I would personally advise that you pay a visit to the PlayCrafter home page, even if you’re solely in the mood to play. (If you want to take the role of creator, you need to bid a hello to the mothership.)

The reason I say so is that the website itself is simply an impressive invention. Everything is well positioned and the supply of games - 214 and counting - is interesting, to say the least. There’s really nothing awry. It’s all very inviting. When you enter the space, and option the ‘Play button,’ you’ve got lots of choices. And a lot of those choices engage you. Your favorites will of course depend on your taste, but suffice it to say that one or two items will grab your attention and keep it for a good while.

It’s worth noting that for first-time visitors, sign-in is not necessary in order to play. You can be “Zeeb in Arcadi,” “…in Puzzland,” or “…in Neozen” just seconds after hitting the site.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

PlayCrafter company profile provided by TradeVibes

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed several new names and a lot of cool new feature articles at Mashable. That’s because we’re actively looking for new and interesting voices in the social media space to contribute to our growing site! Here are a few recent example posts from our contributors:

Twitter Client Head-to-Head: Twhirl vs Tweetdeck – Chris Miller compares leading Twitter desktop client Twhirl with the recently launched Tweetdeck.

How to Develop a Social Media Plan for your Business in 5 Steps – Social media stratetigist Aaron Urmacher outlines the key steps for jump starting your company’s strategy.

Wish List: 8 Ways to Improve Google Maps – Doug Hamlin offers up some great ideas about how to make Google Maps more useful and social.

As opposed to news and reviews, feature articles take a more in-depth look at a given subject and can take a variety of formats, including a head-to-head comparison of competitive products, a how-to/tutorial, and lists of similar services (see Sean P. Aune’s author page for hundreds of examples). Our contributors work virtually, will be expected to produce between 1-4 posts per week, and are primarily paid on a per-post basis.

If you’re interested in becoming a contributor, please send several examples of your online work to me at adamo [at] mashable [dot] com. I’ll follow up with additional questions and details.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Steve Jobs Subpoenaed For Backdated Options CaseWill the Real Steve Jobs Please Stand Up?The Daily Poll: How Did You Follow the Steve Jobs Keynote?Writing Room is Just Another Network, So FarMySpace Jobs UK LaunchesCareerBuilder’s Facebook App Searches Personal DataeBay Cuts 125 Jobs Worldwide

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: DashGo

20-word Description: DashGo provides digital distribution and social networking analytics for bands and content owners.

CEO’s Pitch: DashGo.com enables bands to easily manage new releases and publish them to digital music services like iTunes.

For each of our clients we track performance across the top 9 social media networks. We standardize the data into the categories of “Profile Views,” “Streams,” “Friends” and “Comments” for timeline analysis. We are rapidly rolling out new features - next up is to lay benchmarking and sales data on top of this to help artists identify which sites and spikes in activity generate sales. In the future we plan to offer distribution directly to the social media networks as well, in addition to the digital music stores and ad-partners we currently serve including Last.FM, Meebo and YouTube.

Mashable’s Take: If you’re a solo act or a band of music makers (or studio), chances are you want to get your music out to as many listeners as possible through various channels on the Web. Santa Monica-based DashGo serves to help accomplish this.

Presented as a music label of next-generation making, DashGo connects with virtually all the top sales outlets - plus some lesser-known joints. The list includes iTunes (worldwide), Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon MP3, Napster, MediaNet, Snocap-Imeem, YouTube, Juno, Turntable Lab, Blast My Music, Amie Street, Songslide, Beatport, Audio Lunchbox, etc. DashGo tracks activity on social sites as well: MySpace, YouTube, iLike, Bebo, Facebook, Purevolume, Virb, Imeem and Last.FM.

Such coverage gives DashGo both a thorough sales spread as well as a comprehensive look at what occurs where on the Web, allowing the company to direct energy where necessary based on a good amount of information. Which can ideally lessen waste and boost marketing potency.

As an intermediary exclusively fixated to the digital space, DashGo’s pursuit is naturally the independent crowd. Artists in the sector are in a continuous race to rise above the fold, and are clearly seeking to raise their profile through online campaigns. DashGo’s purpose is essentially to buoy that desired objective with substantive logistical experience. How successful has it been thus far?

It’s list of partners is a literal potpourri of names. Content producers include: Delicious Vinyl, Krofft Pictures, Downtown Records, CBS Records, and GMG Entertainment (DashGo’s founder, Ben Patterson was an executive). And one of the more high-profile arrangements with a music group Patterson touts is Weezer. Patterson reportedly had a hand in digital marketing effort for the viral hit “Pork & Beans” video.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials