On Rob Walker’s Murketing blog I came across a spot-on point that I’ve observed but not seen mentioned in most articles and blog posts and agitprop regarding the user-generated content “revolution.” Talking about the preponderance of user-submitted ads for the iPhone on Youtube, Walker notes:
“As noted there, the winners of Firefox’s contest both happened to be […]

McSweeney’s is in the hole for $130,000 due to problems with their distributor (the death-knell for indie publishers throughout 2007, it’s looking like,) and selling off a bunch of their catalog titles at huge discounts to try and dig out of the hole:
More info and links to the sale here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2007/6/12agoodtime.html
Via the Punk Planet blog: http://www.punkplanet.com/sinker/blog/mcsweeneys_makes_the_call_for_help
Do yourself […]

In my never-ending, and rather new, initiative to atone for an ill-spent youth obsessing about music and media issues, I am embracing a science dilettantism that demands that it is my duty to direct your attention to amazing, fascinating, and heretofore undiscovered intersections of science and culture, science and media, and science and politics in […]

Okay: I am no fan of DRM or the DMCA. I think that’s been well-established. But equating the user revolt at Digg with MLK’s march on Washington suggests that people are getting a bit too puffed up on this whole user-generated-content “revolution” that is allegedly happening:
“I have thought about this and equated it with Martin Luther […]

Yeah, I remember those UCSC days, all of us clutching our Derrida Readers and copies of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, bemoaning the University’s increased focus on the “hard” sciences. It was a liberal arts school, we would exclaim, a place for the stern unpacking of dense literary and political theory. Despite my attempts at iconoclastic […]

Awesome little Youtube documentary by Alan at Fall Of Autumn about how offset printing works. Awesome, because words printed on a page are always way better than pixelated text belched on a screen by some ADD-addled digg’r.
Direct Youtube Link

In the first of a series, I’m going to post longer transcripts for some of the more interesting interviews I’ve conducted over the past year. Below is an interview I conducted last year with Suw Charman of the British advocacy group Open Rights Group about DRM technologies and filesharing for the DRM article I wrote […]

Disregarding all the BS rhetoric hurled back and forth between record labels and file-sharers, I’m often surprised the most by the reluctance of unsigned or unsung independent bands to post free samples of their music online. I’ve found that often unsigned musicians are even more proprietary than musicians with some sort of record label support […]

The Postal Increase for publications was posted to Metafilter today, and typically the techie neo-libertarian douchebags are quick to make an appearance. Like this one, for example:
“It’s called business. Either you have customers willing to pay for your product above the cost of producing it, or you don’t. Market conditions are always changing and always challenging. […]

We are living in a time in which all the methods of distributing independent periodicals are falling apart before our very eyes. The very viability of independent print publishing — with its in-depth, well-researched articles for which individuals are compensated for their efforts — is at risk, and despite reams of hype, no one has demonstrated a successful model […]

Continuing at an average of one podcast every three months, I’ve posted a new Someday Coming Down podcast! To subscribe to the podcasts paste this link into iTunes or your RSS reader: XML or to just download this one save this mp3:www.warningsignrecords.com/SCDpodcast5.mp3
It’s a black heart session with music by Jon Langford, Hillstomp, the Devil […]

Fascinating piece in Slate providing an overview of the history of health insurance, from its philanthropic beginnings to its current “medical-industrial complex” status, and what politicians are missing in the fruitless and endless debate over the increasingly dire health care crisis this country is deep in: A short history of health care