That’ll Do it:
No Saturday Morning Shards this week as I’m off to Ireland. i get back on Monday the 15th, jet-lagged and painted green. Oh and a year older. On Aug. 7, I turn 31 years young.
See you soon.
What kind of snob am I?
What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla (via Bookslut)
Pretty accurate actually.
Edwards at XM:
Former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards will host his own show on XM Satellite Radio every morning at 8 AM. Though I’m waiting a few years for the next generation of XM (where you can download from it to your Ipod), this is a big step for XM, a reach towards traditional radio and NPR listeners and not simply music wonks looking for, say, an all-klezmer station and Buddy Guy basement tapes.
21st Century Meghan Daum
Writer par excellance (and Gen. Text contributor) Meghan Daum just launched her website and wrote a very funny article about it (via The Elegant Variation).
Obama!
Did you hear that sound? It was Barak Obama knocking it out of the park at the Democratic National Convention.
Full text of his speech.
Librarian at the Party:
Jessamyn West of Librarian.net was one of the 33 bloggers invited to the Democratic National Convention. A library blog! How cool is that? Her postings will show up here.
Halo Day!
The Virtual Book Tour has hit the open road again for a one day invasion of several distinguished blogs. See here for a complete list. The touring author is MJ Rose, novelist, thinker and friend. Her book is The Halo Effect.
I’m happy to be at the controls for today. Please let me know if any of ya’ll have questions.
Launch. Again?
I’ve been waiting patiently for an eternity in web time (maybe a year) for a mac version of Launch.com, Yahoo’s customizable radio station that not only streams your favorite music but suggests songs based on your favorites as well. Plain old streaming radio doesn’t do this because you usually have to choose a station by genre (who only listens to one genre?). iTunes only lets you stream what you already own (where’s the discovery in that?). Rhapsody and Launch both do this but are Windows only, a not-so-subtle line in the sand to the galloping hordes of iPod users.
Via the Mp3Blogs aggregator, I found Last FM, which might be the answer to my prayers. It works through iTunes, it lets you create your station and will suggest based on how closely your stations matches other like you.
I haven’t quite figured out how it works yet. Like I tried to play my friend James’s station and my friend Josh’s and all I got was a one minute sample track and nothing telling me what I was listening to. (*loud hint*) Perhaps these two can help me out.
Media Rolls On:
Interesting article in Online Journalism Review about how alternative weekly newspapers have been asleep at the online switch while ceeding their market share in localized content and funky personal ads to online properties like Craigslist and local music blogs.
Though it devotes the majority of the piece to papers who are getting with the times, I was drawn more to its opening paragraphs which surmise that maybe alternative weekly, born in the revolutionary crucible of the 1960s are one or two information revolutions removed from now. This doesn’t explain Mother Jones and Alternet, founded by the same kinds of 60s revolutionaries as most alt-weekies, but who embraced the web immediately. The article doesn’t mention them either.
I’ve had the same curiosity about zines, arguably an alternative weekly of one. Zines are the ancestors of weblogs, undoubtedly, the most important difference being some degree of permanence. Weblogs have archives you can peruse, usually the entire history of the site. Back issues of zines go out of print the minute the box from Kinkos is empty. Zinesters move and often have, at best, a Hotmail or AOL email address. Zines almost never have websites, which is fine for a self-published journal but torture for a zine reader and suicide for the art’s history. Thanks god there are some zine libraries and a few responsible distributors. Otherwise, the whole zine explosion of the 1990s would hold roughly the same cultural significance as the Pet Rock.
I’m reminded of what someone in 12-step once told me.
“We must take change by the hand or it will take us by the throat.”
Indeed.
Saturday Morning Shards #4
What’s been on my mind this week
Margaret Cho has been uninvited from performing at the Democratic National Convention. Here’s her take on it (via Min Jung).
In response to me asking my friend Wendy to “Name some lesbian comics!” she said “Dykes to Watch out For”.
I really like bands with lots of people in them.
The Democratic National Convention is coming up.
Reader’s Circle.org is a nationwide directory of book clubs and reader’s circles.
The world needs a better documentary film blog.