Culture and Society

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland is airing a closed-circuit feed from the Induction Ceremony from the Waldorf Astoria in NYC tonight. My great pal Johanna Hoadley is webcasting the event live from the Rock Hall: 8:31 p.m. Ahmet Ertegun, founder and chairman of the …

Toronto Star Internet columnist Peter Howell is coming a bit late to the blog game, but late is way better than never: I was skeptical about Weblogs – “blogs” for short – when I first heard about them, and why I’ve never really followed them that closely. Blogs looked like …

Researchers have created music that responds and alters itself depending upon the state of mind of the listener: The application, under development at MIT’s Media Lab Europe, uses biometrics to control what the listener hears. As the listener relaxes more, different instruments start to play. The system could be employed …

An awful lot of people, especially music fans over, say, 30, aren’t particularly eager to give up CDs, but they also like some of the advantages of the Internet digital jukebox, especially purchase-by-the-song (these used to be called “singles”). On Tuesday Starbucks will announce a new service where customers can …

With MP3.com gone and uncertainty about what (if anything) is going to replace it as the central clearinghouse for unsigned and indie music, a number of contenders for the throne have emerged. Here is another one – Mperia: So what is Mperia? The long version: Mperia is designed to let …

Attention: all you short filmmakers. No, not you Marty, you may be short but your films are long. I’m talking about films of 8 minutes or less. This is for you: The Imagine Cup is a worldwide tournament challenging the globe’s best and brightest students to use technology to enhance …

The Grey Album episode may turn out to be a watershed moment in popular culture. We shall see. Since we participated in the Grey Tuesday protest (although we didn’t host the album), we are on the organization’s mailing list. I just got this: Dear Grey Tuesday Folks, Grey Tuesday has …

Jim Louderback provides a lively and understandable description of how phone service works, with an eye toward the VoIP future: To understand how VOIP works, we first need to understand POTS. Remember the tin can-and-string intercom systems we all dabbled with as kids? The original telephone network was more like …

AGAIN, we are at the cutting edge of the zeitgeist – USA Today notes that the “adult” entertainment industry often leads the way in technology: Online pornographers have been among the first to exploit new technology for more than a decade – from video-streaming and fee-based subscriptions to pop-up ads …

For the latest round of RIAA lawsuits against alleged file sharers, they tried to lump over 200 in a single suit. A federal judge said no on Friday: The Recording Industry Association of America grouped 203 so-called “John Doe” defendants — “John Doe” because their identities are not yet known …