Thursday , March 28 2024

Culture and Society

The Collective Intelligence At Work and Play

Henry Jenkins has a perceptive analysis of the “collective intelligence” of the Internet and its bearing on Survivor – really: The Survivor winner is one of the most tightly guarded secrets in the country. Some say that the show’s producer, Mark Burnett, engages in misinformation campaigns, planting misleading information in …

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Apple Movies

New movie-editing software goes on sale June 14: Apple, based in Cupertino, California, had unveiled the software in April during the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas. Final Cut Pro 4 will sell for about $999 [$911.99 from Amazon!!] Apple, like many personal computer companies such as No. …

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Sold Up the Digital River

Verizon runs out of options and has to reveal the names of four customers suspected of illegally uploading [article mistakenly says “downloading”] digital copies of songs to the RIAA: The nation’s largest telephone company was ordered to surrender the names to the Recording Industry Association of America by the U.S. …

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As Goes Wal-Mart, So Goes the Nation

Have you heard of RFID (radio frequency identification)? Wal-Mart has: Inventory management technology that uses wireless signals to track products from the factory to store shelves is set to win a major new ally next week: Wal-Mart. The retail giant is expected to throw its weight behind RFID (radio frequency …

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Play Along With Partch

Companion site to “American Mavericks” series produced by Minnesota Public Radio offers opportunity to play eccentric musical instruments virtually online: American Mavericks (www.musicmavericks.org), a new Web site focusing on unorthodox classical composers, allows visitors to hear [Harr] Partch’s music, read one of his manifestos or, by tapping on a computer …

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Blabbing on the Beeb

Hey, that was fun. I was just on the BBC Five Live Up All Night radio show – up all night alright, it was almost 3am there (10pm here) – with host Dotun Adebayo. We talked about Pearl Jam leaving Epic Records and its ramifications – the producer caught the …

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Microsoft Grabs “networked interactive entertainment system” Patent

This seems, uh, overbroad: If your company is thinking about delivering interactive video-on-demand cable-television programming or movies via satellite to consumers, maybe it’d better start thinking about paying royalties to Microsoft first. That’s because Microsoft has just been granted exclusive United States patent rights to a “networked interactive entertainment system” …

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Pearl Jamming

Pearl Jam leaving Epic is potentially a VERY big deal – please check out my commentary on MSNBC.com: Bands come and go from record labels in a revolving door of euphoria and dejection, so when the news came out that Pearl Jam had fulfilled its contract and was leaving Epic …

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Vanishing Record

Maybe my dad isn’t so crazy for printing out every flipping thing he does on the Internet, including email: Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and …

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