Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 15:34 - Category: Unfiled ;
Skype allows you to make phone calls anywhere in the world from your PC for about 2 cents an minute. You can receive calls too, plus there’s voicemail and file transfer. Calls can be made to/from a Skype number or a regular phone number.
All you need is a headset (mine was $20 at Radio Shack) and you’re set to go.
If you have Skype, I’m polizerosbob.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 10:26 - Category: Unfiled ;
Time magazine said today that it would provide documents concerning the confidential sources of one of its reporters to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. agent, Valerie Plame.
The decision by a major news organization to disclose the identities of its confidential sources appears to be without precedent in living memory.
New York Times ‘deeply disappointed’ with Time decision.
All the more reason for blogs, podcasting, and creating alternative channels of media and distribution. Mass media often is too timid to even attempt to rock the boat, this craven decision by Time being just one more example.
Blogs and podcasts have an inherent political element even if a particular blog isn’t political. Simply by being a part of a now fast-growing alternative media system, blogs challenge the established media powers. In the next few years, as blogs and podcasts become part of the mainstream Net, it’ll be fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maybe, in five years, we won’t need Time Magazine to tell us the news. Ditto for TV. Maybe we can do it ourselves.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 09:24 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
The Archive has a stupendous amount of information available, all free, legal, and available for download. Their Wayback Machine has 40 billion archived webpages starting in 1996. There’s 20,000 music concerts (of which 2600 are the Grateful Dead), full length movies, video, software, Democracy Now - and much more.
Ourmedia.org, which is just getting started, is providing way for anyone to publish their media to the Archive in a blog-like format with their own page to display it. Here’s mine. Just two photos so far, Eddie Vedder and Susan Sarandon speaking at an antiwar demo in Hollywood in March 2003.
My entries are published using Creative Commons, you can choose others. Everything published becomes part of the permanent Archive and thus part of the Internet culture at large.
This is an amazing idea. Check it out.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 08:59 - Category: Unfiled ;
iTunes now supports podcasting, and the increased traffic is still melting down the normal distribution channels.
After trying multiple times on Wednesday to get Adam Curry’s latest podcast through iPodder or off one of his websites and getting dead servers instead, I finally well duh, did it through iTunes where it downloaded fast. They must have a huge pipe indeed … However it appears Apple, as it sometimes their wont, doesn’t play well with others.
Morning coffee notes from Dave Winer
It turns out that iTunes does export its subscription list, in a weird format I’ve never seen before. It is XML, so it’s process-able. But why not use the
standardsame one everyone else does?
BTW, I’ve been watching for any evidence of acknowledgement from Apple, haven’t seen any yet. Do they acknowledge that they didn’t invent this? Or do they only look out for the creativity of those who force them to? (Or their own.)
It’s important for the bigco’s to get that they’re receiving innovation, for free, from the small developers and bloggers they often have such disdain for. Whether they acknowledge it or not, however, let’s not us forget it.
Update:
Apple’s RSS Extensions Slammed By Podcasting Community.
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