A group of folks, led by Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze, has filed a comment on the FCC’s proposal that it give away some public spectrum to be used for national Internet access, with the requirement that the provider censor it down to what’s safe for a five year old. Wendy and her friends produced what I think is an outstanding, thorough, and legally-based criticism of this plan. (I’m proud to be one of the many signatories.) [Tags: fcc censorship wendy_seltzer ]

I choked up merely reading a transcript of it on my cellphone on a bus.

[Tags: obama berlin ]

Must-see photo, shared by Dave Winer. Click on the largest size your bandwidth allows…

HuffingtonPost today announced that, in addition to its usual front-page layout, it’s aggregating its content around 75 (so far) top-level topics. For example, here’s the Barack Obama page. This takes a page (so to speak) from the NY Times Topic pages, which pull together the NYT’s topic on something like 3,000 topics. The NYT Topic pages not only give a centralized place to read about something, they also give people a place to link to, which apparently happens a lot given the strength of those pages in Google rankings. Likewise, the Huffpo “Big News” pages can be linked to and are widgetized.

I’m not sure how the new HuffPo pages differ from the old pages you’d see when you clicked on a tag. Presumably, there’s been some level of hand editing, but I’m not sure

[Tags: huffington_post huffpo ny_times media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

More links that have come up at the Berkman discussion about keeping hard journalism sustainable:

snagfilms.com

reelchanges.org

glam.com

Some sites that have come up at a confab in progress at the Berkman Center about sustainable models for journalism:

Spot.us for public support of particular stories

Jay Rosen’sKiyoshi Martinez’s journalism.me

Dan Gillmor on helping the almost-journalists

The “iTunes of journalism”: Mochila

[Tags: berkman journalism media ]

The first in a series of three short videos from the Digital Natives project of U of St. Gallen and the Berkman Center that tells the story of Zack McCune, a Brown student (and Berkman intern) who “won the DMCA lottery” and was sued by the RIAA. It’s nicely done product by summer interns Nikki Leon and John Randall, and it’s a cliff-hanger…

[Tags: berkman st_gallen riaa dmca digital_nativescopyright zack_mccune ]

Jon Udell talks about his interview of Dan Bricklin in which about Dan talks about his experience entering the world of audio. Jon says:

When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that.

As a coda, Jon uses the story of the production of of that very interview as an example of the routine complexities of audio.

Too true. I’m often tempted to record an interview but then I remember just what a pain in the butt it would be to edit it, even with my very low standards for audio quality.

So, is there something wrong with the idea of writing software that:

1. Converts spoken audio into text (presumably using existing tools)

2. Lets you use an editor to delete pieces of the text and move other pieces around, as you would with a low-end word processor

3. Uses the edited text to edit and output the audio

Even if Step 1 worked only moderately well, this application would turn editing spoken audio into a trivial task, no harder than (in fact, exactly the same as) editing a text file.

Does this software exist? Is there a good reason why it doesn’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t?

[Tags: jon_udell dan_bricklin podcasting ]

When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.” Mmm. But, I like it, so shut up.

In fact, we just bought the “light” version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original. I can’t figure out whether its name should therefore be:

1. “I Can’t Believe I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”

2. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not Butter”

or

3. _______________________ (fill in the blank)

[Tags: puzzle ]

I find I’m not watching The Daily Show nearly as much as I used to, I think because Bush has dropped out of the scene so much that I don’t need the emotional release Jon Stewart was providing for me.

I bet I wouldn’t be as fanatically devoted to The West Wing now if it were still on.

The Bush Departure: Taking the comedy, leaving the tragedy.

[Tags: jon_stewart daily_show bush ]

This was passed along by Jacob Kramer-Duffield, a summer intern at the Berkman Center, for no reason other than that its a summer Friday.

Tags: bunnies pancakes

Here are David “End to End” Reed’s comments to Congress on Net neutrality. They were apparently well-received.

I am an admirer of Marco’s. His new project is trying to explain what’s important and real about the Internet. Its page is here,. It’s in Italian, but I am confident in recommending it without having read it. (I’m still on the road, and only have 3 minutes left on the free hotel wifi before its 15 mins are up.)

Spending an interesting day in Milan in conversation about whether Web-based social networking sites/services are going to continue to shape our expections about SNSes (and sociality), or whether the ubiquity of mobiles will wag this dog. The social roles of SNS on the two platforms are so different. One creates my presence, the other announces my temporality.

(Hint: Don’t try blogging on ytour blackberry on a bus.)

Not only that, I am famous for being unknown.

This video is just weird, and pretty funny, although being the butt of the joke undoubtedly affects my judgment. That is, being skewered skews…

Apparently, I’ve been punked ut good.. Good one!

I’m in Milan for an afternoon, and then in Madrid for some part of a day, and then home. Blogging may be lighter than usual.

I’ve been in Milan several times before. Every time I see it, it seems like a different city. I’m not sure if it’s seasonal, because of the accidents of the parts of town I see, or one of the great pleasures of a failing memory. But, my, what a beautiful city it was this afternoon! [Tags: travel milan ]

Before paper, what did the wings of moths look like?

[Tags: puzzle ]

My friend Hanan Cohen in Israel reports that because of the pettiness of the prime minister’s fraud, he’s now known as LOLmert.

[Tags: israel olmert ]

Tim Spalding, founder of the estimable LibraryThing, is calling on us all to create an open shelves classification project to replace Dewey and his pals. LibraryThing is a brilliant implementation of a what a library built on a social network of readers can be, so I’m excited about Tim’s new idea.

[Tags: library taxonomies tim_spalding librarything everything_is_miscellaneous ]