Strange database queries at the Harvard Business School, and a new model for downloading online music

My Computerworld blog was recently updated with some new functionality and a new name -- The Digital Media Machine. The focus is mostly new media technologies, ranging from the Internet to virtual reality, but I also touch on some subjects that might be interesting to my Harvard Extended audience. For instance, yesterday I blogged about a strange incident at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library:

The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an online database of news articles and other text documents, after determining that the user had downloaded millions of articles in the span of a few months.

It turns out that the user in question was (probably) building a very large census of news articles and other text documents for a computer content analysis, using a script that scraped the articles from the password-protected Factiva database. I can totally sympathize: As some of you may remember, I also carried out a very extensive content analysis of news articles from China's Xinhua News Agency for my thesis, and was frustrated by the manual processes involved in getting samples and query results from LexisNexis Academic.

There's another new post on my Computerworld blog that might interest anyone who pays for online music: A proposal to revamp the per-song and per-album pricing model from a flat fee (e.g., iTune's 99 cents/song scheme) to a scaled pricing model that actually evaluates whether or not you value the song.