Unquiet Desperation

I don’t have any excuse not to follow congressional happenings anymore…and neither do you…

“Cory Doctorow:
OpenCongress.org is a new site that Web 2.0’s the US government, bringing much-needed transparency and accountability to the closed book that is the US Congress. It is the first project of the new Pariticpatory Politics Foundation (founded by the same young geniuses who gave us the Participatory Culture Foundation and its stunning Democracy Internet TV player). Co-creator David Moore describes it thus:

One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress website, Thomas, doesn’t do nearly enough to make Congressional information accessible — meaning that political bloggers didn’t have anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn’t a way for their readers to get the ‘big picture’ behind an issue. The lack of public knowledge about what’s really happening in Congress breeds apathy about political change in general.

OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political insiders and the public by bringing together official government information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org, and more — to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

Link

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from OpenCongress — ripping open the doors to Congress with Web 2.0, [Via Boing Boing.]

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Some podcasters have gotten together and organized a show of strength (hopefully) they’re calling ‘Bum Rush the Charts.’ On March 22nd, they’re urging everyone to go to iTunes and buy the song ‘Mine Again’ by Black Lab, an independent and podsafe band. The idea is to get an indie artist to the top of the iTunes charts. Between this and Gizmodo’s call for a boycott of RIAA music in the month of March, it makes me wonder: when do we get to start smashing and burning things?

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from Bum Rush the Charts, [Via Jonathan Coulton.]

“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”

- Lane Kirkland

A while ago, I launched a new podcast over at the Harping Monkey called Mainstage at the Monkey. On it, I’m playing music that is podsafe, meaning that it is either released under Creative Commons, or that I have permission to play music by those artists from the label (such as the deal that Magnatune makes with podcasters). While I had a small collection of podsafe music, I wanted to expose myself to more. I subscribed to several CC RSS feeds with enclosures, such as CC Hits.

I’ve already found several groups that I really like, and I plan on featuring them on the show. However…the interesting thing was that the more I listened, the less I found myself listening to the music that I’ve purchased from iTunes, or that I’d purchased recently from more mainstream artists. Now, this might just because the music was new to me, and was refreshing…something didn’t sound like everything else that the record companies excrete into our record stores.

This weekend, I got to thinking about that. Yes, my wife and I have three binders full of CDs…and most of them, we just don’t listen to. They’re more like an archive of our youth than something we refer to regularly. In fact, I hadn’t even ripped the majority of the CDs for my iPod. And when I looked at the music I was keeping in my iTunes collection, I realized I was rather sick of all of it.

So, on Saturday, I copied all 15 gigabytes of music to an external hard drive, and started a new iTunes Library, obliterating the old stuff. Then I started loading it up with nothing but podsafe music.

This is something of an experiment…I want to see how long I can go with just CC or Indy music. I find this whole trend of open exchange of art on the Internet to be very powerful…and I want to encourage it, be it music, books, video…whatever.

Two questions for everyone:

1) Would anyone be interested if I put up a page with a list of artists and albums that are in the library?

2) If I were to create an informal podcast of “What Chris is Listening to This Week,” would any of you be interested in listening? (Yes…you can see this in the sidebar, but if you could actually listen to it, would you?)

Update: I’ve found and modified a great set of scripts by Alex King which display reports based on my iTunes library. I’ve included them in my new Music Library page.¹

1. Stick that list in your pipe and smoke it, KJ! Ha! Automatic, buddy![back]

Warning: Not Safe for Work: Language, violence, and lightsabers.