# The iTunes Music Store was released in Australia today.

The Good

• Lots of Australian content on the store from day one
• I can now legally get hold of a whole lot the songs that have been rattling around my head, but that I didn't want packaged with a whole album of filler.
• It's just nice that I no longer feel like we're the only Western civilisation without an iTMS.

The Marginally Good

• AU$1.69 price for singles is better than I feared it might be, but even taking GST into account, we're still paying 15% on top of the US$0.99 standard.
• Similarly, the AU$17 standard for albums is significantly cheaper than you'd pay for a full-price CD, but a lot more than you could pick one up for at, say, Dirt Cheap CDs

The Bad

• Sony are still throwing a tantrum over the iPod eclipsing the Walkman, so anything up to a quarter of the music which should be in the store, isn't
• All EMI albums seem to be "per song only", which means you can't buy the album... which leads to a rather ludicrous situation when you take album-only tracks into account. (Note: As of Friday 28th October, this is fixed an EMI albums are available for purchase.)

iTunes Music Store Australia scores a dismal 6 out of 10. Which would be really bad if all the other Australian digital music stores didn't rate down around 2.

# Via Danny Ayers, some "Web 2.0" backlash:

"We’ve gone from having no control over the source, to having no control over the entire application." -- Rektide, in comments at O’Reilly Radar

I've noticed that whenever I have a photo on Flickr that I want to embed in my blog, I make a local copy and link to that. Flickr may well out-last the Fishbowl, but at least the continuing availability of my webserver is something that I have a say in.

# I made two posts to the Atlassian Developer Blog yesterday, proving that if you play your cards right, you too could be paid to put stupid things on the Internet when you should probably be coding.

• Wherein Charles makes up some flimsy excuse to link to a Kevin Marks post about tagging and keywords
• Wherein Charles makes flimsy apologies for the encroachment of marketing on that sacrement of development - the version number.

(See also Mark Pilgrim: "A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word 'motherfucker.'")

# The other week, BRW named Atlassian Software Australia's third-fastest growing small business for 2005. Well, the third-fastest of those businesses that let BRW see their numbers. Over three years.

Still, if I hadn't spent all that time putting stupid things on the Internet, maybe we'd have cracked #2?