The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 1 Comment
Lots of new archives have been coming online lately. So, why not give them a quick mention.
CSPAN: This week, the American cable network finally completed the digitization of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C-SPAN program aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in [...]
≡ Category: Life, Media, Psychology | ≅ 2 Comments
A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania spent a good six months studying The New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, hoping to figure out what articles get shared, and why. And here’s what they essentially found:
People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles [...]
≡ Category: Media, Web/Tech | ≅ 19 Comments
Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier are facing off in a friendly, public radio smackdown, debating the pros and cons of open/free culture. (Listen to the audio below). As a quick refresher, Nina Paley got a good amount of press last year when she created Sita Sings the Blues, a prize-winning animated film, and then released it to [...]
≡ Category: Media, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
What is open video? And how does it promote free speech, participation, diversity and a more engaged media sphere? Get the answers from Amy Goodman (Democracy Now), Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing), Nina Paley (Sita Sings the Blues), Yochai Benkler & Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Berkman Center), among others. This is a mission to get behind. Excellent [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
A good find via Lifehacker. Maggwire is a relatively new site that will do two things for you. It will direct you to free magazine content online (a good thing). And (perhaps even better) it will learn what you like to read, and then start feeding you content based on your preferences. If Maggwire can [...]
≡ Category: Media, Science | ≅ 5 Comments
Back when Richard Dawkins (Oxford University) published The God Delusion in 2007, he made a fairly unexpected appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Quite the contrast in characters. Now that he has published his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, it was time for Dawkins to meet up with the bumptious one again. Here it goes. [...]
≡ Category: Art, Media | ≅ 2 Comments
No one tells a better story than This American Life, the award-winning radio program coming out of Chicago. And no one is better positioned to explain the art of great story telling than the show’s host, Ira Glass. Above, Glass gives you his thoughts. And this clip comes in 4 acts. For more, get Act [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 3 Comments
A very quick fyi: If you haven’t already, you should spend some time at Arts & Letters Daily. It is essentially a meta site that gathers links to the “most intelligent, provocative, and illuminating news stories, critical reviews, political essays, and commentaries published online.” Updated six days a week, the site is divided into three [...]
≡ Category: Education, Media, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
News from the Wired Campus Blog:
PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.
Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Late last week, we featured the free audio and text versions of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Today, we highlight a conversation that recently took place at The Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, and it focuses on a similar question, really the main question preoccupying many business leaders these days : How [...]
≡ Category: Language Lessons, Media, TED Talks | ≅ 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 | ≅ 3 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 | ≅ 7 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.
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