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We the Media

I finished We the Media by Dan Gillmor last week on the flight to Atlanta.

It was a great book, and extremely topical at this time. Published last July, the book’s focus is grassroots journalism, through mainly, blogs. While the first third of the book is very high level, it’s a great starting point for folks who aren’t necessarily steeped in technology daily. The book shares some interesting history, just in the last few years, of how blogging and grassroots journalism can help hold Big Media accountable.

It also covered the ongoing fight around copyright, Big Media, with a focus on professional journalists and their role in the evolution of journalism.

Mr. Gillmor makes the point a few times that really sticks with me: most of the hundreds of thousands of blogs are too self-centered, nothing more than online journals. It’s those blogs that find a topic, and become experts through commentary, analysis, or news that really make a difference. And he’s right – those blogs I have bookmarked are exactly that, where my blog is nothing more than an online journal.

It was a very good book, easy to read, and the timing is definitely right. Mr. Gillmor has also released it under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to read it on the web without having to buy it in a bookstore. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.

Updated, again!

WordPress 1.5 is officially out, so it’s a good thing I I downloaded a nightly build a week ago to play with it. I’ve updated the site accordingly, and downloaded a few themes to play with as well.

I like the black, but spent two hours playing with the header graphic in GIMP, and didn’t really get anywhere. I’m going to leave the black theme up for now to see how I really feel about it. If I like it, I’m going to heavily modify it, including adding the links & meta back, probably adding a second column for that stuff, and seeing what I can do with the header graphic.

Get all of Napster for free

So yesterday I’m talking about Napster, and what do I see on BoingBoing today but a link to a how-to on burning all of Napster – for free.

There I go again being ahead of the curve. But seriously, sign up for the Napster 14 day trial, download Winamp 5 and a couple of plugins, configure them, and stream the albums on Napster. The plugins will take the stream, and convert it to wav, which you then burn. The only catches are that one, it works in real time, so you have to listen to the music, and two, you have to provide the CD-Rs.

From the site:

Three computers, one fast networked drive, and a few dedicated people: Turning Napster’s 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

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Have fun!

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Busy Weekend



living_room, originally uploaded by silwenae.

Mom & Dad came up to visit, with Dad coming up to box out the basement in preparation for getting the ceiling drywalled. Spent all of Saturday, and half of Sunday working in the basement getting the soffits built and put up.

Now it’s time to get some tinning done from the heating & cooling guys, finish off the electrical, get the insulation up and then have the drywallers in. Need to get it all done ASAP so we can get the drywallers in before the new housing construction season starts.

It was a good way to finish off a fairly lazy vacation with some good old-fashioned hard work.

See all the basement photos on my Flickr site.

Napster 2 Go Reviews Start

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post review of Napster to Go. Let’s just say WaPo found it… wanting. Napster’s PR firm has been running full steam lately with numerous mentions in the press (after their post-Super Bowl Ad) where they’re trying to show the math hat an iPod with 10,000 songs = $10,000 or Napster can get you the same thing for $15 / month. That is, $15 / month for forever. Because once you stop paying your songs go poof.

Now I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, that loves Napster for their streaming service. He’s had various MP3 players over the years, but they were clunky, so he bought an iPod mini mid-last year. Loved the Apple experience when it came to digital music – he’s fairly technical but Apple made it easy to get and transfer music. Yet he comes back to Napster to use their radio stations. For $10 bucks a month (or whatever it is, somewhere in that ballpark) you can listen to any song Napster has. You want to burn it? Just like iTunes, that’s 99 cents please. So Napster to Go will be the premium version of their monthly fee based service.

I can see both sides – if you have a Microsoft powered (codename Janus) player, or in Microsoft marketing speak, Plays for Sure, Napster to Go can fill up your MP3 (or should I be saying WMA?) player until you stop paying for Napster. That’s pretty cool – I can get thousands of songs to go work out to, or listen to my car, my choice of songs, for $15 month. Compare that to Sirius or XM, and it could be a better option that satellite radio.

But on the on the other hand – DRM makes bad business sense as I’ve noted before. Think about it, as Xeni points out so eloquently on BoingBoing:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

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I’ll let you figure out the allegory on your own.

  • in Sports
  • 1 min read

ESPN.com – NBA – Stein: Spree, Sam sulk season away

ESPN.com – NBA – Stein: Spree, Sam sulk season away. Marc Stein is a wise man – and he’s absolutely right. In light of Flip’s firing today, I point you to this analysis that all T-wolves fans should be thankful that Spree rejected the Timberwolves contract extension offer (3 years, $21 meelion) and haven’t signed Sam to one.

I agree with his analysis that Sam & Spree are far more to blame for the lethargy of the team than Flip. Sure, Flip has given KG some latitude, and Flip’s bizaare substitions were questionable, but at least Flip was doing something to inject energy into the team.

It will be interesting to see McHale coach the team – something he’s never done, but there is no questioning his breadth or knowledge of the game.

Here’s to a better second half.

Why I love Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu on another computer today – my gaming box.

Threw in a 20 gig HD I had laying around, threw in the install disc, and 20 minutes later had a fully functioning dual-boot system.

This will enable me to get back to one of my goals – learning PHP and dedicating 2 nights a week to it. Pulled up synaptic, installed screem & bluefish, and I’m ready to go!

I even installed gnome-blog so I can blog to my hearts content right from my desktop.

In 20 minutes I had a fully functioning linux install, up to date with all security fixes, and patches necessary. Apt-get a few things, had MP3 working and I was surfing away.

My only 2 complaints: This brown theme does nothing for me, thoguh I love Gnome’s Industrial theme. And ran into my first major Ubuntu bug. I’m running an Intel 865 chipset board, using the onboard sound. Sound works in Gnome, but a few of the games I installed have no sound. Must be an ALSA / OSS thing. I tried installing a few ALSA plugins, but no luck yet. I’ll have to throw Doom3 or UT2k4 on here and see how it fares.

Upgrade Complete

I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 1.5 gamma. Used last night’s nightly build, and everything seems to work. There’s a few bugs in the admin section, but they’re just visual.

I’ll have to mess with the visual settings a little bit, the categories tree structure has been replaced by an alphabetical list which I don’t care for. Oddly enough, in the admin section it’s still in the tree form. Oh well.

Changed the theme. Was using Kubrick for WordPress 1.2 – and they made that the standard theme in 1.5! That just won’t do. So I downloaded ShadedGrey from WP-Themes.info.

Will have to play around with it a bit more, but so far so good.