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style portal
Via the impeccable taste of invisible shoebox I found linkdup, one of a growing breed of hand-edited portals where the decisions are based unashamedly on the subjective aesthetic judgements of the site administrators. Here’s the manifesto: THE THINKING… Design, content and technology are coming of age on the web and this maturation continues at a…
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MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare has now officially launched with hundreds of online courses. Dilettantes, start your engines! More seriously, there is some really interesting material available, including video “lectures” by staff and guest speakers. Is it just me, or is MIT dead sexy?
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MP3.com: The Company Without a Past
Further to the mp3.com thing, I thought I’d link to their artists’ page from about 1997 or so through the brilliant Internet Archive Wayback Machine. No luck, though – mp3.com has blocked robots. Very interesting, especially as I have previously accessed their archived pages this way (only a couple of months ago I think). I…
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MP3.com Abandons all Pretence
An ongoing discussion has emerged in response to a post by Lawrence Lessig about mp3.com’s betrayal of its founding principles (or at least its founding sales pitch to artists). (Thanks to Art Machine for the link to this story.) Apparently Lessig (the guy behind Creative Commons) received nothing but a brusque ‘cease and desist’ from…
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Organarchy
Just got this link via email: an interview with John Jacobs in Cyclic Defrost. It covers heaps of topics, e.g. activism, protest music, mash-ups, filesharing…here’s an excerpt. Intro: John Jacobs has been an important part of argumentative thinking: through groups like the Jellyheads and Vibetribe, techno agitators Non Bossy Posse, video manipulators Subvertigo, and currently…
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Open Source Music Projects
Creative Commons calls for producers to remix Bm Relocation Program’s song, Superego Exchange. Successful remixes will end up on the next Creative Commons promotional CD. Details here. Australian youngsters (
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Jenny Everywhere
From the My Favourite Things Department… A bunch of creative people have done something very cool with Tom Coates’ Open Source Comicbook Character meme (see here for the collaboration behind it all). The result is Jenny Everywhere, aka The Shifter: She’s open source! She’s multidimensional! That’s right, the character of Jenny Everywhere may be used…
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P2P as Market Research
At the same time as the RIAA is playing dress-ups in jackboots, other sections of the music industry are catching on to the potential of the wealth of data being generated by users of P2P clients. It’s all a bit hypocritical and understandably hush hush, but for the last two years a media research company…
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Creative Networks: Smaller, Better, Smarter
Tom Morris has responded to my previous post on “mass amateurisation” with a thoughtful piece on the personalisation and decentralisation of the web: While personalisation and decentralisation may be just buzzwords at the moment, with the rise of the independent web we might see these becoming much more important: your own agent search engine finding…
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RIAA Settles With 12-Year-Old Downloader
Via Slashdot, an update on the RIAA’s legal nastiness looks like the RIAA has rushed to settle with 12-year-old Brianna LaHara, after serving her with a lawsuit on Monday. It looks like her single mother will be paying a $2,000 fine to the RIAA for her daughter’s song-swapping, which they had thought was legal. Said…