Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.
NYTimes: Why Bandwidth Is the Oil of the Information Economy - by Tim Wu
David Byrne and Brian Eno have just finished a new record. While it’s unclear when the new album will be out, Byrne says listeners will be able to download one of the new songs next week.
There are so many things that are awesome about this video, I had to start a list.
I’m a regular reader of “FP Passport,” Foreign Policy magazine’s blog; I find it an interesting and convenient roundup of international news. Today they launched a new feature, “Must Reads,” which is a linkblog of unannotated news stories. Unlike Warren Ellis, I like linkblogs because it provides pointers to a lot of information that I don’t feel bad about ignoring. One thing I don’t like about linkblogs (and high-volume, high-noise blogs in general) is that they tend to crap up my primary newsreaders with high item counts. I have a couple of strategies for dealing with this, which I may detail later, but I think del.icio.us’ network feature is a great way to monitor high-volume link streams.
I just added “Must Reads” to NetNewsWire, and I noticed that it’s just a del.icio.us feed. I would have just added del.icio.us/foreignpolicy to my network on del.icio.us if I had known. Fearing poor reading comprehension on my part, I re-read the blog post announcing the feature, and re-assured myself that there was no mention of it as a del.icio.us feed; it has the pretense of being a feature of the site, rather than a scrape of another service.
This is something I would have just mentioned in the comments of the post – if it had a comments section, instead I’m posting it here. Anyway, del.icio.us has proved to be a popular and useful site for many Internet users, and I think it would have been kinder to readers to let them know they could read the linkblog through a variety of interfaces, including via the del.icio.us site. I imagine there are business reasons Foreign Policy would like to hide its use of del.icio.us, but I think it does a disservice to its readers.
English transplant ortho_bob celebrates “North Austin Idiots in Cars Day” with a LiveJournal post detailing two ugly interactions with motorists.
There are many things I would like to see on TV, but this is not one of them: Watts launches African-American channel - Politico.com
JC Watts represented Norman, OK in the US House when I was in college at OU. He was a former OU football star and a Republican. If I remember correctly, the local NAACP protested his fund-raisers.
I’m not up on all the various online video providers out there, but I found complete episodes of Fox’s version of The Ben Stiller Show on Truveo, which appears to be an AOL subsidiary. Here’s Episode #102, which features some amusing garden tool commercials.
This guide to intellectual property rights from the ALA has a really cool Flash UI that mimics those cardboard calculators for particular algorithms like calculating percentages. The interface is really quite striking, but I wonder how many undergrads would have seen a tool like this in real life. It might a case where the interface metaphor doesn’t translate to its audience. ALA: PDTool