Glenn Fleishman has released Take Control of Sharing Files in Panther a $10 ebook that covers quite a lot of ground. I’d love to see more of this type of publishing.

I’ve been grooving on the Grey Album for the last couple of days. (This post from Mathowie reminded me to look for it. I had heard about the project about a month before that, but hadn’t thought to look for it where Matt found it.) The concept is pretty simple, Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z’s Black Album with only samples from The Beatles White Album. The resulting full cd of music is a phenomenal combination of the two, and I would say that it is greater than the sum of its parts, but I have too much respect for the original works. The more familiar with The White Album you are, the more nuggets of listening goodness there seem to be for you. It really is pretty amazing what Danger Mouse managed to create.

Now, having said that, there is a point I would love to make about this. This work cannot be released through normal music distribution channels. The samples would never be cleared, or the sheer cost of licensing them would make it impossible to released. Danger Mouse has taken two pieces of art, and combined them into a new beautifully crafted piece of art which stands out in it's own right. Increasingly, I have been seeking out these types of musical quiltworks. People like Z-Trip and Reset are creating phenomenal pieces of work that is purely derived from source material they could never get clearance for through legal channels. I am forced to wonder how many of these pieces of art that our current music sampling and copyright laws are costing us. There is a capitalistic governor on artistic creations of this kind. It's truly a shame. It is a stark example of what Mr. Lessig has been railing and fighting against for years, and it makes me realize just how important the ability to create derivative works can be.

Is it a bad thing that the fact that Kerry is a Red Sox fan makes me not want to vote for him?

Since last summer, I have become somewhat addicted to reading Y The Last Man every month. I, for years, collected and read comics, and got away from it over the last few years. I’m not certain what drew me to this particular book, but it is quite good. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the store after work today to pick up this month’s issue, it was sold out. I’m guessing that means I’m not the only one who has noticed how good this particular book is. There hasn’t been a single bad issue yet. Frankly, it would make a fantastic movie as well, so I’m waiting to hear that it will be one.

Heh. I posted the above post, and then went looking on Google for more information about the comic. I found this page, which explains that the book has been optioned by New Line Cinema.

In the grand tradition of the many quality television shows that I have enjoyed, but were then cancelled after their first season, ESPN has decided not to make a second season of ‘Playmakers’.

I want! You can now order the P900.

create your own visited states map

Where the hell are my manners? I forgot to point out Scotty’s new thing, Signs of Danger: the Internet archive of funny danger signs. Check it out, take some pics and submit them.

I went to see the SuicideGirls Live Burlesque Tour with an old friend and a new friend last night. It was a lot of fun, and they(the girls) seem to be having a genuine good time. Personally, I enjoyed the night quite a bit. I don’t think it was quite what some of the people that went were expecting, but most everyone seemed to really enjoy it. The finale, which included the use of chocolate syrup and whipped cream, was a sight to behold. Hint: If you don’t want syrup and whipped cream all over you, don’t get right up front for the show.

I definitely agree with Wes’s take on the whole binary nature of friend/not-friend status on social software networks. In fact, this is something that I have heard non-technical users complain about with regards to social software. There are different types of friends, and different levels of access that you are willing to allow people to your junk, whether that junk is professional or personal. I would like to think that someone would go that extra step in mapping these relationships.

sofa is, without a doubt in my mind, the best iTunes add-on that I have seen thus far.

WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” via xBlog

I’m a friendster, I Tribe.net for fun too, and I recently got LinkedIn, but no one has invited me to orkut yet. (hint hint) :-)

My brother’s newest EP, 9, got a nice review over at MELODIC.NET

Wow, The Office, one of my favorites, won two Golden Globes tonight.

Bitshift Audio is giving away a collection of free loops for Garageband.

iTunes Music Store RSS Generator Hell yeah. Now if they would just catch up to the rest of the ecommerce world with some sort of affiliate program, I would be quite happy.

The LiliPod is a watertight case for your iPod. Seems like a good idea. I haven’t found any hands on reviews yet though.

I like the layout and columns of the Feedster Top 100 feeds much better than the Share your OPML Top 100 list. Everything you might want to do with one of those popular feeds is right at your fingertips.

Steven Johnson notes that his new book is shipping. He says, “In many ways, the tone of the book will be familiar to those of you who read Emergence – it’s popular science with a literary gloss.”

Emergence was one of my favorite five books that I read in 2003. It led me to read a few more books, and there are a couple still waiting to be read. So I am very much looking forward to receiving my copy of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life.

Apple SoundTrack Updater 1.2

New bed = oversleeping. This is a bad thing from some perspectives, but it also tells me that my bed purchase and mattress choices were good ones. I can’t believe what a difference it makes. I will stop babbling about my new furniture now, well, after I tell you that the new dresser has made getting dressed in the morning a pleasure. Okay, I’m done now.

What happens when a 1/2 million volt switch fails

Andy’s Researching the 2004 Oscar Screeners shows just how far video sharing has come. This must be some truly scary shit for the movie folks. Now, let’s see if they have put the extra time they’ve had since the Napster explosion, and the lessons learned from the music folks, to good use in working through the problem. I mean, really, they need to look at their content distribution system very carefully here.

The one really huge difference here is that movies, far more than music, draw a premium price during their initial run. Meaning, you can go to a theater and see a movie, but you can't take it home until several months later. This definitely works against the movie folks when it comes to sharing. This time period where they create this "artificial" scarcity is also the time period where pirates are most likely to want the film. Obviously, the theater experience is supposed to be a premium viewing experience from a screen and sound perspective, but this is being eroded as time goes on and home theater gets better and cheaper. Theater owners who have been overcharging us for everything from tickets to popcorn may find themselves the first set of business victims of this new content sharing battle. After a film''s theatrical run, there is a long gap until it is commercially released as a for-sale product. The scarcity during this time period is even worse than the scarcity during the theater run, thus, sharing will continue during this part of the movie's lifecycle.

So really, the movie business has two issues where the music business had one. During the initial theatrical run and the ensuing time period until the commercial release of the movie on DVD, there is no legal way to take a film home, and so, sharing during this time period of a movie's life will still be an issue even once their equivalent of the iTune Music Store is launched. Of course the second problem is some sort of electronic distribution like the iTMS, and I have seen several companies working on this problem already. In all cases, they are going about things the way that pre-iTunes Music Store online music ventures were done, with Draconian DRM, limited access time, and no ability to burn to DVD or CD. I predict that these ventures will be equally unsuccessful as the early online music distribution was, and that they will have to come around a bit, despite the lessons learned in the music sharing battles, which, of course, continue even now with legitimate online music distribution only making partial inroads. They should cut out the middle man, and begin rethinking the way the distribute movies now, or the next few years will be even more painful for them than the last few have been for the music companies. It definitely looks like the hardware companies are well on their way to creating a device demand for this content.

I’ve updated the RSS feed for this site to include the full text of each post. I made this decision based on my own experiences using NetNewsWire. I would rather be able to peruse the entire entry via the newsreader, and I am guessing that others would want to do the same. Finally, I can only imagine that when I get an RSS reader for my Sidekick, I will want to be able to read full posts from it, as the overhead of then visiting sites would be a pain in the ass.