Noteworthy

If you're looking for a good laugh (and occasionally a philosophical point) check our Waiter Rant. It started as a professional servers blog, and has since changed sites off the blogger server, while still maintaining its content.

Additionally, in the process of constructing our video, Dan and I made use of the huge amount of web-hosted video and images at The Internet Archive. Though most of the downloaded video never made it through our final cut, its an immense library of information and content. I have used the Live Music Archive for several years with great success. It's basically a gigantic collection of live recordings made by fans, of artists who allow free-recording at their concerts. Admittedly, these files can be large and require varying open-source programs to decode or unpack before playing.

If your interested in a artist who has been around for a few years, but has a rather devoted following, my man Martin Sexton has several years of show available. Including the concert I attended in Minneapolis at The Pantages a few years back. Remember, the content is about what you'd expect from a high-tech audio geek totting recording equipment and a tripod mounted mic into a concert hall.

The rapid expansion of vlogs

This particular entry was inspired by yet another article from the New York Times. This time from yesterdays paper. The piece entitled TV Stardom on $20 a Day, continues the discussion on the rapidly growing culture surrounding video-blogs (vlogs) and some of the numerous implications for the increasingly frustrated and oversaturated viewers market. As the author suggests, "the rapid expansion in the number of vlogs and Web sites offering video podcasts strongly suggests how bored viewers are getting with standard commercial TV: a growing number of them are willing to seek out alternatives online, or just create one themselves."
As the author correctly asserts, the implications and possibilities abound. "In the right hands, vlogs can become microdocumentaries of surprising beauty, wit and intelligence." Moreover, because of the ease and speed with which high-quality content can be produced and distributed additional questions of authority, agency, etc. seem to pop-up as quickly as each new vlog entry.

For instance, the Minneapolis correspondent for Rocketboom, Chuck Olsen, has a section entitled Minnesota Stories (which is definitely worth a look) and maintains a video diary Secret Vlog Injection, which recently featured a video discussing "copyright issues and the philosophical difference between the world-views of the vloggers and traditional media companies."

The reliability of web-based content

Last Sunday's New York Times ran an interesting piece on the issue of "trustability" when reading content on-line. These questions, which certainly are not a recent phenomenon, have been again raised after a "Mr. Seigenthaler...read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he 'was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby'." The article is entitled Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar. Though I don't find the author of the articles point to be particularly enlightening (or assertive for that matter) it does raise some interesting questions of authority, authorship and responsibility. Specifically, who takes responsibility for specific truth claims, documentation, and opinion pieces, and what are the consequences of this responsibility.

As I write this I realize that I have not yet formed a full opinion on the matter. Just offering up some thoughts and resources for the community.