Tom Waits: Road to Peace

by | Nov 12, 2006 | Uncategorized

I just downloaded and listened to the new Tom Wiats track “Road to Peace” (i got it free from eMusic.com, you can also get it from Pitchfork Media for free (Waits has released it for free along with a few other tracks). I had no idea what I was in for. The song is a ballad about the conflict in the Middle East, particularly the Arab Israelli conflict and the resent war between Israel and Hamas. It is defitely worth a listen. It seems like there might be a resurgence of the “political ballad”. Earlier this year, Neil Young released an entire album of “war protest” songs called “Living With War”. I’ve got to say though, as much of a Neil Young fan as I am, I found “Road to Peace” to be far more...

YouTube Named Time’s “Invention Of The Year”

by | Nov 7, 2006 | Uncategorized

Time magazine named YouTube “Invention of the Year” saying: What happened? YouTube’s creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It’s exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg – hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time – a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet. The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. The idea of a top-down culture, in which talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators ideas about what’s happening in the world, is over. People want unfiltered video from Iraq, Lebanon and Darfur – not from journalists who visit there but from soldiers who fight there and people who live and die there. The next revolution will be the aggregating of video content by subject into “shows”. All the searching for good videos takes too much time. Watchers of videos need an easy way to get a stream of good videos on topics they are interested in — they need “producers” to pull together these “shows” of videos and serve them up. Blink.tv allows users to search for video from multiple sources and it serves up a sampling of these videos. The service is not “intelligent” enough, however it is useful. Imagine an “anchor” introducing videos to you creating...

See the connections between corrupt Republicans

by | Nov 3, 2006 | Uncategorized

The DCCC launched a cool website that visually displays the links between corrupt republicans. Have any friends or family who are Republican voters? or who might be wavering? Send them this link. In other news, last night I saw Bil Clinton stumping for Patricia Madrid for New Mexico’s First Congressional District. The man is genius. He spoke articulately for nearly 40 minutes without notes. He is a rock...