≡ Category: Foreign Language, Media | ≅ 1 Comment
Today, we’re featuring a guest piece by Tony Yet, a Chinese student, who is helping lead an effort to bring TEDTalks to China. This is part of a larger TED Open Translation Project, which wants to move TEDTalks “beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated [...]
≡ Category: Media, Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
After 17 years of climbing the ladder, Dan Baum finally landed his dream job at The New Yorker. But things didn’t work out quite as he planned. On Twitter this week, Baum tells the story of his rise and fall. You can read a consolidated Twitter-style transcript here. A pretty intriguing look at what happens [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, History, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ 6 Comments
After Seth Harwood got his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he began publishing in traditional magazines and journals, as most young writers do. But those publications were slow to launch his career. Things changed, however, once he started publishing online. And they really changed when he released his crime novel Jack Wakes Up as [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Clay Shirky, who does a lot of good thinking (see his latest book) about the social and economic effects of internet technologies, has posted a new piece on the slow but steady demise of the newspaper. It’s an intelligent, not entirely lengthy, piece. Here’s a quick quote to whet your appetite:
Round and round this [debate], with [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 2 Comments
A little revolution is getting underway. The state of Virginia has published a new open source physics textbook under a Creative Commons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed textbook was produced in less than six months by a team of authors, which included “active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Media, e-books | ≅ 5 Comments
It took until February 26, but I finally got my backordered x-mas present - the Kindle 2 (check it out here). There’s a lot to like about it. It’s thin & light. The screen is very readable. It holds a ton of books (1500). It downloaded War & Peace in a matter of seconds. The [...]
≡ Category: Media, iPhone | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick fyi for iPhone users: The Public Radio Tuner, a free app available on iTunes, gives you (free) access to hundreds of public radio streams from across the US. Released in late January, the Tuner brings together feeds from NPR, American Public Media, and PRI, among others. This is a handy way to [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 2 Comments
What’s the main news story of the day? It depends on where you live.
Newseum has a handy web page that let’s you visually scan the front page of over 700 newspapers across 80 countries. Open this web page, click on a continent, then click on a dot within a particular geographic area, and you’ll see [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
From Harper’s:
In celebration of its 25th year, the Harper’s Index–12,058 lines spanning 300 issues–is now open to all for searching and browsing, with more than one thousand linked categories. Some starting points: Adultery, China, Beer, Vegetables, Sweets,American Men, American Women, Cats, Dogs, Frogs, Bears, and Pandas.
≡ Category: Google, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Just last month, Google announced that it was bringing the massive LIFE Magazine photo archive online. Two million photos are already uploaded, and another 8 million will be coming online soon.
This week, they’ve made a new announcement. The upshot? Google has reached an agreement with magazine publishers to digitize their historical archives. This will bring [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 1 Comment
RadioBeta is a newish venture that allows you to reach radio stations around the globe, to create your personal playlists, and listen to them for free. Just search by geography or genre, and then start listening in the player on RadioBeta’s website.
Obviously, you will encounter many stations on RadioBeta broadcasting in a foreign language. To [...]
≡ Category: Media, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quantitative or qualitative judgment, I am not sure. On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talking about how to avert a climate crisis, David Gallo showing amazing underwater creatures, and Ken Robinson describing why schools kill creativity (we’ve posted that one [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 1 Comment
Here’s a little something for consumers and producers of good cultural media.
BlogTalkRadio gives anyone with a computer and telephone the ability to create their own live radio show, and then later turn the broadcast into a podcast. So far, about 82,000 shows have aired on this free service, and about 2.4 million listeners [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 7 Comments
The German publisher Bertelsmann announced that it will publish annually a 1,000 page edition of Wikipedia starting next September. To be called “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” it will sell for 19.95 euros (or roughly $32 U.S.) and feature some of the most popular articles from the German version of Wikipedia. One euro per copy will [...]
≡ Category: Media, YouTube | ≅ 1 Comment
It’s perhaps a stretch to call this a piece of “open culture,” except that the footage, using time-lapsed video to show a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, accompanies a piece printed in the latest edition of The New Yorker — Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators.
Then, there’s this noteworthy fact: [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 2 Comments
Thanks to a new program called Britannica Webshare, web publishers — be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers who post frequently on the web — can now get free online access to Britannica and its 65,000 articles. Normally, this service runs $70 per year. For more info, read TechCrunch’s scoop on the new initiative. To sign [...]
≡ Category: Books, Business, Foreign Language, Media, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 2 Comments
One of our readers (thanks Scott!) pointed us to an intriguing video collection hosted by the University of Texas. Here, you’ll find an archive of the nationally televised program, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace (of later 60 Minutes fame) asking probing questions to [...]
≡ Category: Film, Media, Television, Video - Arts & Culture, Web/Tech | ≅ 6 Comments
One of the things they promised us in the heyday of the 1990s Internet boom was the end of television and a brave new world of high quality video online, on demand. Well, we’re still waiting. Youtube is great for short clips, but not designed for the technical (or legal) challenge of serving up whole [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
This week, UC Berkeley professor Paul Duguid squared off in a debate with provocateur Andrew Keen (author of the flimsy bestseller, The Cult of Amateur). At issue here is the question: “Is the Web 2.0 a Threat to Our Culture?” How did the well-attended debate go? Have a listen here and see photos here.
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≡ Category: Literature, MIT, Media, Weblogs | ≅ 2 Comments
For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Google, Media | ≅ 2 Comments
Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a good article on an emerging trend — universities bringing their lectures to YouTube. As you’ll see, we get a mention in the article.
We first began discussing this trend about a year ago. In this public radio interview aired last March, we talked about the sheer dearth of [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Podcasting is a new form of media distribution that’s done a good job of reviving old forms of media, particularly old radio shows. In the past, we’ve pointed you to several old radio broadcasts, including Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio drama that led many Americans to hunker down in basements, desperately hoping to avoid an [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Media | ≅ 2 Comments
WNYC’s latest On The Media (iTunes - Feed - Site) covers the crisis of traditional book publishing in a new media age. While Amazon rolls out the Kindle and more and more content comes out in pure digital form, we’re still publishing more books than ever before. One interesting note from the program is that [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Digital Journalist, a web site affiliated with the University of Texas, has posted 100 world-changing photographs by the iconic LIFE magazine. You can read the introduction to the collection here, or start with the first powerful image and then advance through a sampling of the other impact-filled images that topped their list.
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≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
In early October, The New Yorker magazine held its eighth annual festival in NYC. (Yikes! As I am typing I’m feeling my first earthquake here in California. Apparently 5.7 on Richter scale. Details here.) Anyway, the festival brings to the stage an impressive list of writers & artists (see the full schedule here). And while [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this month, The New York Times Book Review launched an online Reading Room that lets readers tackle great books with the help of “an all-star cast of panelists from various backgrounds—authors, reviewers, scholars and journalists.” The first reading starts with Leo Tolstoy’s 1200+ page epic, War and Peace (1865-69), and it’s led by book [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
As we’ve discussed before on this blog, one of the major casualties in the shifting new media landscape is the traditional investigative journalist–someone with the time and resources to research in-depth stories. In response to this problem a new group called Pro Publica is proposing a novel economic model: hire the journalists into a foundation [...]
≡ Category: Media, Stanford, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety [...]
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