Category: Miscellaneous

I recently subscribed to Salon, and though I realize the sun is setting on that little rag, I did it because I like Joe Conason and because Arianna Huffington told me to do it.

As part of my $30/yr subscription I get a few free goodies, including a subscription to the decidly conservative and boring US News and World Report. I was pleasantly surprised when they sent me a reverse-invoice offering to unsubscribe me and pay me $20! Naturally I took them up on their offer. I’m thinking about not subscribing to the The Weekly Standard, the National Review, and American Spectator next. Sort of reminds me of farm subsidies for intellectuals…

There’s an interesting article over at Wired about how Google and blogging in general are responsible for the trend of larger blogs picking up themes and even direct quotes from smaller blogs without attribution. What’s even more funny about the story is that they mention one of the items that we blogged months ago as an example: the Giant Microbes stuffed toys, for which I’m fairly certain we were as much of an original source as anyone can be on the Internet.

But the point of the article is that smaller sites get no attribution for trendsetting or coming up with the stories, and to counteract that researchers have come up with a system designed to find the original sources called “irank”. Aside from the incredibly bad name, we think this is a good way to upend the Google hegemony, especially since we think we’d be “among the rankest,” and that’s just where we’re used to being.

Pete Rojas, former editor of the online gadget blog Gizmodo has gone out on his own to start Engadget, which is for all intents and purposes a complete copy of Gizmodo. That’s too bad; Gizmodo under Rojas’ stewardship was the premier gadget blog, but has turned of late into a simple rehash of press releases. Engadget looks like it’ll be the same as the old Gizmodo, with the crafty editorial tone that Rojas brought to it, but it also doesn’t seem to be anything more than gadgets. That leaves both competing in the exact same space, biting entries from one another in a “blog blogging itself” circularity. Pity.

In any case, we here at StreetTech wish Rojas and the team at Engadget luck in their new project. We’ve already readjusted our bookmarks..

A group of Cuban wannabe-refugees have been turned back to Cuba after trying to flee in a 51 Buick converted into a boat, with nicely built prow and all. The same folks tried to do the same thing last year in a flat-bed truck similarly converted, but were turned back then as well by the hypocritical asylum / immigration policies of the United States.

Netscape’s new $10/mo. dial-up service has teamed up with City Year, a non-profit organization promoting national service, to auction off 200 internet accounts, including an early hold on selected coveted short email addresses. The problem is the names that you can bid on: Barbie, Chas, Willy, Sue, and of course Nate are all listed, but when it comes to names from different cutlures that make up our melting pot there are only two: Luis and Juan. Is there a Satish, Adanna, Huong or Amed? Nope. Sorry.

MoveOn.org helped fund a documentary called The Truth Uncovered, which details the various positions that the administration has taken on the Iraq war, and exposes the flops in those position and the lies they were based on. Apparently many people have been buying this video and then screening it at home for friends and neighbors, and MoveOn has set up an interactive map of those parties. It’s interesting to see where the parties are being held not just because they are the most likely areas for vehement opposition of the President’s handling of the war, but because the map shows the effect of a viral marketing campaign. The video is available for $15 (DVD) from TheTruthUncovered if you want to “get infected” yourself.

Most folks who swap music files are a little scared of the consequences, but this guy in a posting on TechTV is completely fearless because he’s set up what amounts to a mobile pirate swappers’ delight: an 800GB RAID server in his car that connects via WiFi to open networks around his home town of San Francisco. Not only is this guy chintzing the record labels (something we have only a little pity for here at ST) but he’s definitely taking advantage of open WiFi networks, and that’s something I don’t cotton to. The potential consequences of using someone else’s open network for illegal activity are huge, and could put a serious damper on the free WiFi movement.

Universal Music Group, the company that controls about 30% of the legitimate music business in the United States, has announced that they are reducing the price of their CDs by as much as 30%. With similar moves expected by other labels and retailers, CDs may cost as little as 50% of their current price in just a short time. Expect similar price cuts from pay-per-song retailers like iTunes and BuyMusic.

Universal dropped the price in response to the overwhelming pressure from peer-to-peer file-swapping networks that the company says are responsible for the flagging sales of their artists’ albums.

Some commentators have speculated that this is the beginning of the end for not just music labels like Universal, but for music as we know it. Without profit, they argue, there is no incentive to produce music, and with little profit nothing but bad music will be created. Others counter by saying that there is little in the way of good music being produced anyway, and that P2P systems have acted as a sort of “corporate disobedience” that forced record companies to drop price-fixing schemes. With the reduction in price, perhaps more people will be willing to pay for higher quality recordings and extras on a CD, and not P2P as much. And perhaps the reduction in price will actually encourage more artists to self-publish and reduce the role of record labels in deciding who will be tomorrow’s “american idol.” Of course, some think there’s no room at all for music labels in the traditional sense, now that the cat is out of the bag with P2P file sharing, and that the demise of the record companies is only a few years away.

What do you think? Is this the first sign that record companies are going under, or will they survive in some mutated form? Is the price drop going to change your music buying/downloading habits? Will the end of record companies mean “good” music like Justin Timberlake will get lost in the quagmire of independant artists? Or is all this just a temporary fix until the record companies force Congress to enact even tougher standards to combat music piracy? Leave a comment about what you think the future of music is…

It’s my birthday. Please post a link to the strangest, geekiest E-cards you can find below. No viruses please.

The New York Times has an article in the Circuits section today on an MIT student who has created a very cool device for “green” consumers: a barcode scanner that draws on an internal database to give users information about the corporation that made the product, such as whether they pollute or use sweatshop labor. The device, housed in an old geiger counter and called the Corporate Fallout Detector, is made by James Patten. Of course being a Media Lab student, James didn’t just make it just display the data on a screen — instead the device rattles like a geiger-counter at Chernobyl when scanning products from companies with bad reputations. I can’t wait for someone to make an program for a Palm that does the same — can you imagine scanning a can of soup just as somebody else is looking at the same brand and your PDA starts ticking like it’s a meltdown?! Drag out your old CueCat, it’s time to hunt corporate scum!