How to Make Your Podcasts More Mobile

in Podcasts, Web/Tech | August 6th, 2007

That sounds like a strange propo­si­tion. Pod­casts are inher­ent­ly mobile, so what can make them more mobile? Appar­ent­ly myPod­der can. It’s a free, cross-plat­form soft­ware pack­age put out by Pod­cast Ready that has two notable advan­tages. Once you reg­is­ter and install their free soft­ware, you’ll no longer need to down­load pod­casts first to your com­put­er and then to your mp3 play­er. Instead, you’ll be able to down­load them direct­ly to your MP3 play­er via the inter­net and cut out the mid­dle step. Beyond that, myPod­der lets you update your mp3 play­er from any­where you can get an inter­net con­nec­tion. Now, you’re no longer forced to update your pod­cast col­lec­tion from one loca­tion (as is the case with iTunes). It’s all free, so give it a good look.

If you’re gen­er­al­ly won­der­ing how to work with pod­casts in the first place, please see our Pod­cast Primer.

The Fifteen Minute Book Machine

in Books, Business, Media | August 3rd, 2007

A cou­ple of years ago I met Jason Epstein in pass­ing and he excit­ed­ly described his new project: a machine to print On Demand Books. The plan is final­ly bear­ing fruit: the Espres­so Book Machine was demon­strat­ed at the New York Pub­lic Library on Wednes­day. Three of the machines are out in the wild, and I sus­pect many more will appear if the pro­to­types live up to the hype.

The idea of books on demand is a lit­tle eerie but emi­nent­ly effi­cient. Pub­lish­ers and book­sellers waste mil­lions of dol­lars, tons of fuel and forests of paper ship­ping, return­ing and trash­ing unsold books every year. And if a machine like this isn’t too expen­sive to run, it could rev­o­lu­tion­ize edu­ca­tion in less acces­si­ble or wealthy parts of the world. The real ques­tion is whether such a machine might do to book­stores what Net­flix has done to video rental stores. The Espres­so machine can only print paper­backs, so for now I think Barnes and Noble is safe. And even if the shelves are replaced with dig­i­tal brows­ing dis­plays one day, many cus­tomers will still want to enjoy their pur­chas­es with an over­priced lat­te and pas­try. The social spaces of book-read­ing have yet to be destroyed by Amazon.com or the blo­gos­phere, so I think they’ll sur­vive a new kind of espres­so machine.

What Book Changed Your Life? Par­tic­i­pate in a Group Project. Tell Us and Become Eli­gi­ble for a Prize .

Check out our col­lec­tion of free audio­books.

What Books Made a Difference? (Yes, We’re Talking to You)

in Books | August 2nd, 2007

We’re try­ing out some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent today, and we hope that you’ll par­tic­i­pate because by giv­ing more, you’ll get more in return. (So far we have 18 peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ing, now it is your turn.)

We want to draw on the col­lec­tive wis­dom of our read­ers and find out what great books you’ve read, and which par­tic­u­lar one made a dif­fer­ence in your life. That is, what book has led you to look dif­fer­ent­ly at lit­er­a­ture, think­ing, career, love, friend­ship, death, or what­ev­er you con­sid­er impor­tant?

At some point lat­er next week, we’ll bun­dle the sub­mis­sions and post them for you. We’re hop­ing that this will give every­one a list of great and impor­tant books to read.

If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate, please make a sub­mis­sion in the com­ments below, or via email. In what­ev­er you write, please list the name of the book and the author, and then men­tion why the book mat­tered to you. (Your expla­na­tion can be as brief or as long as you like.) When we post the replies, we won’t use your names unless you oth­er­wise con­sent. And we’ll oth­er­wise pro­tect the pri­va­cy of your email address­es.

Final­ly, we’ll ran­dom­ly select one name from all of the sub­mis­sions, and send that con­trib­u­tor a nice $50 gift cer­tifi­cate from Amazon.com.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you, and thanks for tak­ing part.

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Straight Talk about Stem Cells: Another Stanford Course via Podcast

in Online Courses, Science, Stanford | July 25th, 2007

Last week, we men­tioned The Future of the Inter­net. This week it’s anoth­er course avail­able as a free pod­cast : Straight Talk About Stem Cells (iTunes).

The course was taught by Christo­pher Scott, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Pro­gram on Stem Cells in Soci­ety and the author of Stem Cell Now: An Intro­duc­tion to the Com­ing Med­ical Rev­o­lu­tion. Orig­i­nal­ly taught with­in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, the course was designed with the gen­er­al pub­lic in mind. So it should be quite acces­si­ble. You can now down­load three of the total five lec­tures. Two more will be com­ing soon. (Get it on iTunes here.) Here is the orig­i­nal course descrip­tion for the course.

Biol­o­gy’s Brave New World: Straight Talk about Stem Cells

No area of sci­ence holds such promise for treat­ing dis­ease and improv­ing human lives as stem cell research. But no area of sci­ence caus­es such fun­da­men­tal eth­i­cal con­cern and such fero­cious polit­i­cal con­flict. In this short course, stu­dents will learn the fun­da­men­tals of stem cell biol­o­gy, and study how these pow­er­ful cells could be used to make func­tion­al organs, treat dia­betes or repair spinal cord injuries. With the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy firm­ly in hand, we will jour­ney into the deep reach­es of the con­tro­ver­sy and exam­ine the inter­na­tion­al explo­sion of stem cell research and how law and pol­i­cy are affect­ing long-held Amer­i­can dom­i­nance in cell biol­o­gy. New sci­ence often pro­vokes a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of eth­i­cal stan­dards. Stem cells have reignit­ed the debate about the embryo, abor­tion, and sci­ence run amok. We will leave the shrill rhetoric behind, dis­cussing the ques­tion at the heart of the debate: How, as a soci­ety, do we bal­ance our respon­si­bil­i­ties to the unborn and the sick?

Check out our larg­er col­lec­tion of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es.

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University Course Collection Now Updated with RSS Feeds

in Uncategorized | July 24th, 2007 Read More...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex .…

in History | July 24th, 2007 Read More...

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part III: The iPhone

in Apple, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | July 20th, 2007

(Con­tin­ued from Part II)

The most recent major for­ay into the world of cul­ture­box­es comes in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent size and mar­ket niche: the Apple iPhone. It may look dif­fer­ent, but it has all the hall­marks of a cul­ture­box. The iPhone wants to deliv­er video, audio and the best of the Web; it hopes to rev­o­lu­tion­ize its mar­ket; it requires month­ly ser­vice fees and a hefty price-tag to use ful­ly.

Just like Microsoft and Tivo, Apple has had some strug­gles in get­ting their new device to live up to its promis­es. The bat­ter­ies on many of the iPhones are not liv­ing up to expec­ta­tions and some stan­dard phone fea­tures seem to be miss­ing. The new phone pur­ports to com­bine the roles of iPod and cell phone more ele­gant­ly than any oth­er device.

Music. Video. Con­nec­tion. The Tivo, Xbox and iPhone all want to sell us cul­tur­al ser­vices through an inte­grat­ed sys­tem of dig­i­tal con­trol. Record or pur­chase con­tent from the autho­rized dig­i­tal store and watch it on the autho­rized device. All three com­pa­nies know that the suc­cess of their prod­uct depends on main­tain­ing a del­i­cate bal­ance between defend­ing the walls of their dig­i­tal king­doms and allow­ing in enough out­side con­tent to remain flex­i­ble in uncer­tain mar­kets. All three box­es can be hacked and manip­u­lat­ed, of course, but their man­u­fac­tur­ers are count­ing on the vast major­i­ty of cus­tomers to play along and pay along.

Just as the box-mak­ers strug­gle to cut deals with con­tent pro­duc­ers to make their dig­i­tal offer­ings appeal­ing to con­sumers, the “tra­di­tion­al” cul­ture indus­tries are des­per­ate­ly strug­gling to embrace new forms. The New York Times reviews videogames as well as plays, and just about every major media insti­tu­tion has launched some kind of blog, web video ser­vice or pod­cast so you can con­nect with the crit­ics on what­ev­er cul­ture­box you pre­fer.

Cul­ture served up on box­es is very dif­fer­ent from pub­lic per­for­mance or ephemer­al newsprint. We can save up hours and hours of it; we can car­ry it around or dupli­cate it. When we build up a library of music and videos, we own cul­tur­al objects in a way that was nev­er real­ly pos­si­ble before, when the best we could do was own per­ish­able phys­i­cal media. We can replay, refor­mat, share and col­late favorites, and we can use our rank­ings and rat­ings to find new works. A lot of the most excit­ing tech­ni­cal advances have had to do with con­nect­ing cul­ture­box­es, but that so far that con­nec­tiv­i­ty most­ly goes to pro­vid­ing bet­ter cul­ture for solo view­ing. The three devices dis­cussed here all hope to change that.

The reign of cul­ture­box­es is in many ways the per­son­al, dig­i­tal ver­sion of some­thing that hap­pened in the late 18^th cen­tu­ry: The birth of the mod­ern muse­um. The idea was to gath­er art, knowl­edge and his­to­ry togeth­er and frame them appropriately—saving up cul­ture for you in vast mar­ble box­es. Today’s per­son­al cul­ture­box­es will nev­er replace the­ater or muse­um-going, but they extend the same promise of cul­tur­al lit­er­a­cy (have you fin­ished The Sopra­nos yet?). These days the promise is affil­i­at­ed with brand name dig­i­tal empo­ria.

Like the Xbox, Tivo, and iPhone, many of the first muse­ums want­ed to be every­thing for every­body, offer­ing vis­i­tors his­tor­i­cal relics, bio­log­i­cal spec­i­mens and strange devices in a mish­mash of art, sci­ence and hokum. No won­der the Xbox­es are on the fritz: they’re try­ing to cap­ture all our total­ly con­flict­ed inter­ests in just one device. Even­tu­al­ly we’ll fig­ure out what dig­i­tal con­tent real­ly belongs in our pock­et on a two-inch screen, what needs to stay in the liv­ing room, and what to keep out of the box entire­ly. I should have some time to think about it while my Xbox gets repaired.

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 2: Tivo

in Media, Technology, Television, Web/Tech | July 19th, 2007

The online mag­a­zine Slate runs most of its arts and cul­ture sto­ries in a sec­tion called “Cul­ture­box.” Iron­i­cal­ly, it’s tak­en the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try sev­er­al years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gad­get is mar­ket­ed as a cul­ture­box, from the shiny iPhone to the pio­neer­ing Tivo to the hot-run­ning Xbox 360. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, adver­tis­ers and pro­duc­ers every­where are think­ing about how to sell us sleek­er, bet­ter box­es and the media that go with them.

The trou­ble is, nobody is quite sure what the cul­ture­box should look like or what it should do. We can all agree on video, audio and some kind of stor­age func­tion. But do we want our media pock­et-sized or on a big screen? Is the goal to enter­tain us on the com­mute or to build up a library of cher­ished media objects? More impor­tant­ly, when we say “cul­ture” do we essen­tial­ly mean tele­vi­sion or the whole panoply of forms? Are cul­ture­box­es just TV by oth­er means or are there gen­uine­ly new cul­tur­al forms on the hori­zon?

Last week Microsoft announced that Xbox 360s are fail­ing in unprece­dent­ed num­bers: A dra­mat­ic exam­ple of Cul­ture­box Anx­i­ety Syn­drome. The new gen­er­a­tion of videogame con­soles allow us to do so much more than blast­ing aliens—video on demand, HD and Blu-Ray DVD play­back, online chat­ting and music library man­age­ment are just a few of the roles these par­tic­u­lar cul­ture­box­es want to serve. The com­plex­i­ty is clear­ly an over­load: the New York Times argues that the $1 bil­lion Microsoft is set­ting aside for this prob­lem implies that between a third and half of Xbox 360 con­soles could get the cul­ture­box blues. Now a high-lev­el Xbox exec­u­tive has announced his res­ig­na­tion, though few peo­ple think it’s a pun­ish­ment since the plat­form is gen­er­al­ly sell­ing well.

Per­haps I’m only writ­ing because I use all these gad­gets and my Xbox recent­ly suc­cumbed to “red ring of death” syn­drome. Iron­i­cal­ly, it only freezes up when I use it to load a videogame. But there is a broad­er issue here: the trans­for­ma­tion of cul­ture from some­thing we expe­ri­ence in con­cert halls, movie the­aters and oth­er shared pub­lic spaces into some­thing that we do on the couch or on the go.

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 1: The Xbox

in Business, Media, Technology, Web/Tech | July 18th, 2007

The online mag­a­zine Slate runs most of its arts and cul­ture sto­ries in a sec­tion called “Cul­ture­box.” Iron­i­cal­ly, it’s tak­en the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try sev­er­al years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gad­get is mar­ket­ed as a cul­ture­box, from the shiny iPhone to the pio­neer­ing Tivo to the hot-run­ning Xbox 360. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, adver­tis­ers and pro­duc­ers every­where are think­ing about how to sell us sleek­er, bet­ter box­es and the media that go with them.

The trou­ble is, nobody is quite sure what the cul­ture­box should look like or what it should do. We can all agree on video, audio and some kind of stor­age func­tion. But do we want our media pock­et-sized or on a big screen? Is the goal to enter­tain us on the com­mute or to build up a library of cher­ished media objects? More impor­tant­ly, when we say “cul­ture” do we essen­tial­ly mean tele­vi­sion or the whole panoply of forms? Are cul­ture­box­es just TV by oth­er means or are there gen­uine­ly new cul­tur­al forms on the hori­zon?

Last week Microsoft announced that Xbox 360s are fail­ing in unprece­dent­ed num­bers: A dra­mat­ic exam­ple of Cul­ture­box Anx­i­ety Syn­drome. The new gen­er­a­tion of videogame con­soles allow us to do so much more than blast­ing aliens—video on demand, HD and Blu-Ray DVD play­back, online chat­ting and music library man­age­ment are just a few of the roles these par­tic­u­lar cul­ture­box­es want to serve. The com­plex­i­ty is clear­ly an over­load: the New York Times argues that the $1 bil­lion Microsoft is set­ting aside for this prob­lem implies that between a third and half of Xbox 360 con­soles could get the cul­ture­box blues. Now a high-lev­el Xbox exec­u­tive has announced his res­ig­na­tion, though few peo­ple think it’s a pun­ish­ment since the plat­form is gen­er­al­ly sell­ing well.

Per­haps I’m only writ­ing because I use all these gad­gets and my Xbox recent­ly suc­cumbed to “red ring of death” syn­drome. Iron­i­cal­ly, it only freezes up when I use it to load a videogame. But there is a broad­er issue here: the trans­for­ma­tion of cul­ture from some­thing we expe­ri­ence in con­cert halls, movie the­aters and oth­er shared pub­lic spaces into some­thing that we do on the couch or on the go.

The Future of the Internet: A New Stanford Course

in Online Courses, Stanford, Web/Tech | July 16th, 2007

Here is a new and free course to come out of a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­gram that (full dis­clo­sure) I help orga­nize. It’s called The Future of the Inter­net: Archi­tec­ture and Pol­i­cy (iTunes), and it’s taught by Ramesh Johari. The course, designed for non-techies, gets into the impor­tant ques­tion of whether the inter­net will remain “neu­tral” and freely avail­able to you and me. This course will appeal to any­one who has ever liked the work of Lawrence Lessig. (Please note that we’ll be rolling out a cou­ple more lec­tures in this course on a rolling basis.)

Check out the com­plete course descrip­tion below (and click here for many more free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es):

“The Inter­net today has evolved a long way from its hum­ble begin­nings as a fed­er­al­ly fund­ed research project. As a soci­ety, we find our­selves increas­ing­ly depen­dent on the Inter­net for our dai­ly rou­tine; and yet, the future of the Inter­net remains a mat­ter of vig­or­ous polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and aca­d­e­m­ic debate. This debate cen­ters around own­er­ship: who will own the infra­struc­ture, and who will own the con­tent that the net­work deliv­ers? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of this debate does not involve a sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion of the “archi­tec­ture” of the net­work, or the role that archi­tec­tur­al design will play in shap­ing the own­er­ship of the future glob­al net­work.

This course pro­vides a non-tech­ni­cal intro­duc­tion to the archi­tec­ture of the Inter­net, present and future. Stu­dents will be tak­en on a tour through the inner work­ings of the net­work, with a view toward how these details inform the cur­rent debate about “net­work neu­tral­i­ty” and the own­er­ship of the future Inter­net.”