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Ran straight into Wes Felter at #sxsw yesterday right after he sent me an email I hadn’t seen yet suggesting we sit and talk. Which we promptly did. Very productive conversation.
Wes will also have cool ideas to share at the FSF Libre Planet 2009 Conference this coming weekend at Harvard’s Science Center. I’ll be there too.
Had a great breakfast with Rex at the Bouldin Creek Coffee House and Café in Austin this morning. It’s about 1.5 miles from downtown on South 1st. Found it on Yelp.
Great little place. I had two vegetarian egg variant tacos. One was a veggie chorizo thing (I forget the details), and it was outstanding. The cappuccino was good too. Service and atmosphere are both friendly and comfortable. Highly recommended.
Clay Shirky in Newsxpapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: …what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. Great essay. Required re-reading.
Until I hit SCAN on the little radio I carry with me on trips, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed KGSR/107.1 the last time I was here at SXSW. They’ve added some power since then (up from 39kw to 49kw), but their stream still plays hard-to-get. There appears to be no .mp3 stream coming from the station (so forget using it on iPhones*), and one can only listen live in the browser, with a pop-up window that doesn’t work (at least for me).
They do note that they are in “HD”, which is audible only on a few expensive radios that almost nobody has, since the radio industry decided that HD needed to be a proprietary play, coming to the world only by grace of a company called Ibiquity. I could get started, but it’s not worth it. (Go here and click on “buy a radio” and see what happens.)
Anyway, if you’re in town, give it a spin. As I said three years ago here, great radio lives.
*[Later…] Thanks to Rod K, I am now listening to KGSR on my iPhone. WunderGround Radio did cost $5.99, and it took me awhile to find where in the app’s vast directory tree the radio listings were stored, but once I got there I was very impressed. And quite surprised that one can listen to a Windows Media stream. I sit corrected on that.
I still wish KGSR also had an .mp3 stream, but it’s still good to be able to hear them in any case.
Tags: "Windows Media", Austin, iphone, KGSR, KGSR/107.1, music, radio, streaming
http://www.nytimesconversations.com/
Very slick. You can’t link to the flashy videos, or I’d point to the one with Padma Lakshmi‘s beautiful bod. T+A, complete with cleavage. Very nice. But very Times? Hey, when your whole industry is being bulldozed off the cliff… whatever works, I guess.
If you want to keep something in orbit around the Earth, you need it to be flying parallel to the surface at speeds exceeding those of bullets. Get high enough above atmospheric drag, and stuff will continue to orbit as long as the moon does.
The moon has been around for 4,530,000,000,000 years, give or take.
Humans have been throwing junk into space, and occassionally blowing orbiting crap into countless smithereens, for about fifty years. As a result, the risk of impact to large objects such as shuttles, observatories and space stations is one-in-a-few hundred.
Or, in the case of the International Space Station, one-in-what? Today the ISS was evacuated, just in case.
Since it’s obvious that it’s a bad idea to fill the orbital environment with junk that’s damn near impossible to get rid of, why do we keep doing it?
Because every species operates in its own flawed self interest, I guess.
Kathy Moran has a great line — “Blogging about productivity began to feel like drinking about alcoholism” — that somehow comes to mind as I point to The Free Beer Economy, which I just put up at Linux Journal, in advance of SXSW, where I’ll moderate a panel titled Rebuilding the World with Free Everything. The panel will happen next Tuesday, right after the keynote conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson, whose book Free: The Future of a Radical Price is due out this summer, and who will join our panel as well.
The gist:
So we have an ecosystem of abundant code and scarce imagination about how to make money on top of it. If that imagination were not scarce, we wouldn’t need Nicholas Carr to explain utilities in clouds with The Big Switch, or Jeff Jarvis to explain how big companies get clues, in What Would Google Do?
More to the point for us blogging folk, I’ll add Dave’s How I made over $2 million with this blog.
His point: He made money because of it. As I have with mine. Neither one of us, more than coincidentally, has advertising on our blogs. Neither one of us burdens our blogs with a “business model”. Nor do we feel a need to hire some outfit to do SEO for us. Good blogs are self-optimizing. That can go for their leverage on income as well, even without cost to one’s integrity.
As with so much on the Net, it’s still early. Much future is left to unfurl. The millipede has many more shoes to drop. So there is much fun left to be had, and much money to be made, even in a crap economy.
But hey, I’m an optimist. What else can I say?
Look forward to seeing many of ya’ll in Austin. I fly down tomorrow, back on Wednesday.
[Later…] I tweeted a pointer to the post earlier, and did something I’ve never done before, which was ask people to digg the piece. It’s kind of an experiment. Curious to see how it goes.
I’ve only had one post dugg to a high level before. It was fun for the few hours it lasted, but I’m not sure it did anything substantive (other than drive traffic to Linux Journal, which was more than agreeable). What I mean is, I’m not sure it drove a conversation about its subject. Hence, the next experiment. Applied heuristics, you might say.
Tags: "Dave Winer", Chris Anderson, digg, dugg, economy, infrastructure, integrity, Linux Journal, post
Love this line, from Dave: I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry.
Dave’s the only guy I know who reliably schools both the journalism and the tech industries, often at the same time. Well done.
So I shot a bunch of pictures of Niagara Falls from 35,000 above, on a trip last week from San Francisco to Boston. Click on the pic for the whole set.
Interesting to think that the falls are only about ten thousand years old. A blink in geologic time.
Tags: altitude, buffalo, Canada, falls, flying, goat island, hydro, hydro-electric generation, lake erie, lake ontario, new york, Niagara, Niagara Falls, Niagara Frontier, Niagara River, Ontario, rapids, river, us
Media Cloud is a Berkman project that has been in the works for a bit, and has just launched into the public space. More here.
It’s new and the folks there are looking for feedback. Enjoy.
