It’s a rare occasion that I take the time to spend an hour perusing through someone else’s brilliant photos. When I ran across this set of photos from the Library of Congress, I took the time. The LOC has started a project of putting photos on Flickr and asking members of the popular photo-sharing website to provide information on the photos. It has turned out to be a successful project generating a significant amount of comments and information on some wonderful photos. It should be noted as well that in these decades color film cost about $5 per role in 1940s dollars.
Here are a few samples, but be sure to check out as much of the set as you can:
I’m not a fan of iTunes Music Store for purchasing music, because most of its music is protected by something called digital rights management (DRM). This technology forces you to acquire licenses for the content you purchased each time you move your music to a new computer. It also sets limits on how you can use the music you purchased. Microsoft also had a music store for a little while, and have now announced that after August 31, they will no longer be providing licenses for music purchased through their store. Unfortunately, this story illustrates the other big problem with DRM - dependency upon a corporation to maintain its capability to provide licenses.
I was recently linked to the New York Times’ blog Measure for Measure, which gives songwriters a place to describe the processes behind their art. One of my favorite artists, Andrew Bird, has postedtwice about the work behind a song from his upcoming album.
It’s fascinating to see the background behind someone whose work you enjoy so much. I knew Bird put a great deal of emphasis on his lyrics, but these posts have shed new light on his work.
Here is a sample of his to enjoy, and please take some time to read the background on his new song at the NY Times.
One of my favorite blogs Signal vs. Noise has a great post about the poison of urgency. It’s refreshing to see companies recognizing that you don’t have to be in the office 40 or 50 hours a week every week.
I recently attended the FOSE conference, and had the pleasure of hearing David Pogue speak. He is a wonderfully dynamic speaker, and I’ve enjoyed his vlogs and posts over at The New York Times for quite awhile.
Pogue’s speech focused mostly on technology trends, and he mentioned something that I hadn’t heard a lot about - wifi phones, specifically, the T-Mobile Hotspot. The phones are cell phones that work off regular cell towers and wireless routers purchased from T-Mobile (of course).
So, while you’re at home with your wireless network, you can use your cell phone without using your mobile minutes. If you need to leave your house, you just walk out the door and the call goes with you. Once the signal gets too low to work off your wireless router, it switches to a cell tower. Turns out T-Mobile is the only major wireless carrier that doesn’t also have a land-line business, which is probably going to give them a lead in this market for quite some time.
Something like this would have been really useful in college when Travis and I lived in St. Paul where it seemed our building was a bomb shelter for cell phone signals. “Can you hear me now,” wasn’t quite as funny back then.
This week Wired blog Listening Post highlighted some news from music tracking/recommending/streaming site Last.fm, whereby Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel claims allowing people to listen to full tracks from their site has increased music sales.
In just over two months it’s become clear that people will buy CDs and downloads if they get access to the kind of service we offer…No one else can give music fans this amount of music for free — but more importantly also drive their discovery, as we do through our unique recommendation engine…(As further proof,) minutes spent on site are up 118% month-on-month.
The site has seen its referrals to sales websites increase 119% since they were allowed to stream full tracks. While Last.fm did not publish actual sales numbers, it certainly seems that the more access to people to have to new music, the more they’ll purchase.
I ran across this site, by way of PhotoJojo, and I thought it was a great way to get some interesting photos. I might do another form of this in the near future.
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