PC Magazine has published its 'Top 100 Classic Web Sites' list for 2008 and I have spent the last hour surfing the 'net, learning lots of new things, and adding lots of new feeds to my Google Reader :)
Awesome.
Umar Saif & Distributed Web Caching in Pakistan
One of my seniors from undergrad alma mater, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), is working on a project that implements a distributed web caching system in order to increase download speeds in developing countries.
Mason Inman explains in an article in the MIT Technology Review:
Sounds like a good system (the article goes into detail about how it works) and here's hoping it's a great success.
Mason Inman explains in an article in the MIT Technology Review:
Internet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.
Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.
Sounds like a good system (the article goes into detail about how it works) and here's hoping it's a great success.
Photos in the Cloud: Picasa Web Albums
So, after trying out both Flickr and Picasa, I decided to go with Picasa Web Albums for my photos-in-the-cloud solution. Yes, that is yet another bit of my life that I am entrusting to Google. And, yes, I'm fine with that.
Why did I go with Picasa? Because Flickr, though really awesome, only lets me make three albums (or 'Sets') in its free version while Picasa lets me make as many as I want.
I do have a 1GB web space limit with Picasa but that's more than enough for my purposes. Heck, I'm using only 22MB at this time! And once I get a digital camera, take lots more photos, and find that I need more space -- though that won't be for a while because I don't take that many photos -- I can always buy some from Google. Quite cheaply, too. And it'll be shared with my Gmail space, which is awesome. My videos, meanwhile, will go on YouTube so I'm good there as well. And my audio is on SkyDrive so that's not an issue either.
Of course, I could have gone with something like SmugMug, which has no limits on web space or number of albums, and I could have installed an open source photo gallery on insanityWORKS.org, which can then be fully customized, but I didn't. That's because I quite like Picasa's web implementation (it's easy to use and I love it's geo-tagging capabilities) and I really like the Picasa 2 software that you install locally (both its photo organization abilities and its easy-to-use image editing features).
So, behold: my Public Gallery on Picasa Web Albums.
Lifehacker's Top Five Note-Taking Tools
Lifehacker Australia has a good roundup of the 'Five Best Note-Taking Tools' available today, as judged by its readers. I've written about note-taking before and Lifehacker's post just reinvigorates my pining for a tablet PC (*sigh*). Soon, soon.
I Finally Get to Use Yahoo! Pipes
I've been wanting to find a use for Yahoo! Pipes for a while now but I guess I'm rather unimaginative. Today, though, I removed the RSS application I was using on Facebook and entered my blog's RSS feed directly to my Wall (thanks to Friend of a Squid who alerted me to this nifty bit of functionality).
Unfortunately, Facebook only lets you add one feed to your Wall in that manner. I, on the other hand, have two blogs. What to do? Well, combine the blog feeds, of course! How to do that? Why, through Yahoo! Pipes, of course!
So that's what I did -- you can see the Pipe's output here -- and I now have both my blogs on my Facebook wall. Woo hoo!
Moving Photos to the Cloud
Having moved all of my e-mail to Gmail, I am now ready for my next move-stuff-into-the-cloud project.
This time I'm moving all of my photos to either Flickr (where I already have a small presence) or Picasa (which I haven't yet installed on my current laptop). I don't know which I'll end up going with but I'll start by giving both a try and seeing how things go.
I'll keep y'all posted on what I'm up to.
Jazbah.org
Laila Kazmi's Jazbah.org -- a site about "Pakistani women who have worked hard to achieve great goals and made significant, positive impacts in their societies" -- has been around for a number of years but I've never gotten around to mentioning it on this blog. That's mainly because, even though it's a great resource, it's not updated very often and most of the profiles on it are a few years old.
However I visited the site again recently thanks to the Muslimah Media Watch -- I was commenting there on how it's only blogs like MMW and PakPositive that ever seem to talk about all the good things going on in developing countries -- and figured I should give it a mention. It's a good site and the events and books sections seem to be active, which is cool. Make sure you take a look.
Urban Prankster
The people from Improv Everywhere have a new site called Urban Prankster which covers "pranks, hacks, participatory art, flash mobs, and other creative endeavors that take place in public places in cities across the world." Make sure you take a look.
[Via Laughing Squid]
[Via Laughing Squid]
Signed Up With GotRadio.com
I wrote about GotRadio.com a few weeks ago: that I was impressed with it and was considering signing up for its paid service. Well, after listening to it regularly for almost two months now I went and signed up with it today and, guess what, I'm even more impressed!
Why? Well:
- The higher-quality audio makes a big difference
- The player interface is much cooler and you can do many more things with it (more than just skip to the next track in the playlist)
- I like that I can create channel blends (to play different kinds of music at the same time) as well as playdecks (which are custom playlists)
- I like that I can both 'favourite' and 'block' songs and artists
- I like that I can see the next/previous five songs in the my current playlist
- Importantly, I love the music discovery benefits that you get from a radio station, particularly one that's tailored to your specific tastes and moods
The best part is that it doesn't cost much: US$4.95 per month or $26.95 per year.
So, if I was highly recommending GotRadio.com earlier, I'm even more highly recommending it now!
All E-mail Successfully Moved to Gmail!
It's done: I've moved all of my e-mail over to Gmail. Folks at Google, please don't let me down.
So how did I go about doing it? Let me tell you...
Step 1: Rationalize E-mails
I had almost 2GB of e-mail data and many thousands of e-mail messages in my Thunderbird Profile. I knew a lot of that was crap, redundant, and no longer needed so the first thing I did was whittle this down to about half a gigabyte of data and under 10k of e-mails.
The cool thing with Thunderbird is that you can sort your e-mails by attachment. That made it easy to find messages with big attachments and then either get rid the attachments while retaining the text or delete the e-mails outright.
I also deleted tonnes of other e-mails that I knew I wouldn't need in the future. Indeed, as you may have gathered, I was brutal in my deletion criteria.
[Related post: Creating a new E-mail Taxonomy]
Step 2: Rationalize Contacts
Next, I exported all my contacts from Yahoo! Mail and Orkut and imported them into Thunderbird, which is my central contacts repository (I even have my old Outlook contacts in here) and is the easiest to mess around with. I then went through that list: updating, removing duplicates, and deleting old contacts.
I also went through my list of Facebook friends and, for those who weren't already in my address book (only 3 or 4 of them), I added their e-mail information as well.
I then exported that updated list into a CSV file. This file I imported into Gmail. For the heck of it -- and to test how well it worked -- I also imported that file into my Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail accounts. It worked just fine.
Step 3: Upload
Uploading thousands of e-mails to Gmail isn't easy. There are two things you have to watch out for: First, it's safer to upload e-mails (i.e. drag them from a local folder into a Gmail IMAP folder) in smaller batch sizes: ideally under 30 e-mails at a time. Second, don't start uploading the next batch immediately after the first one has finished uploading: give it a few seconds. Why? Because the Gmail IMAP system has spam-blocking and load-controlling algorithms built into it. If you flood it with e-mail uploads -- either too many or too fast -- it locks you out for a short period of time, which is a real pain.
All of this makes uploading e-mails a long and somewhat tedious process though it's not the end of the world. In fact, I did most of it in the background, which made it quite easy to do: I'd be working on other stuff and, every few minutes or so, I'd Alt-Tab to Thunderbird and upload another batch.
Step 4: Use
Now comes the fun part: actually using the new system (which I described in an earlier blog post). I now access all my e-mail either through Thunderbird (via IMAP) or a web browser (usually Firefox). Meanwhile, I've stopped Thunderbird from automatically checking my POP accounts. Instead, all those are POP-ed directly into Gmail, which has the additional benefit of drastically reducing the spam I get.
I still use Thunderbird when sending messages from my MBS account since I use a different e-mail signature for that but, otherwise, I've found it easier to move entirely to using Gmail's web interface. Not having both an e-mail client and browser open all the time also consumes significantly fewer computing resources which, on my ancient laptop, is a real blessing.
What I do lose from not using an e-mail client are the event reminder pop-ups that I used get but I've found a workaround for that: I've configured my Google Calendar to send me a notification via e-mail and I've installed Gmail Notifier so I get a pop-up when that notification e-mail arrives. It's not quite the same thing but, like I said, it's a workaround.
Conclusion
All in all, I am very happy with my decision to move to Gmail and the way in which everything has worked out so far. Here's hoping things continue to go this well in the future.
Oh, one last thing: When I do get a new laptop (tablet PC, actually), I might start using an e-mail client again. What I'll do then is configure IMAP to maintain offline (i.e. local) copies of all my Gmail folders. That way, I'll get the best of both worlds: e-mails available locally and in the cloud, both always synchronized. Also, you can never have too many backups, can you? :)
So how did I go about doing it? Let me tell you...
Step 1: Rationalize E-mails
I had almost 2GB of e-mail data and many thousands of e-mail messages in my Thunderbird Profile. I knew a lot of that was crap, redundant, and no longer needed so the first thing I did was whittle this down to about half a gigabyte of data and under 10k of e-mails.
The cool thing with Thunderbird is that you can sort your e-mails by attachment. That made it easy to find messages with big attachments and then either get rid the attachments while retaining the text or delete the e-mails outright.
I also deleted tonnes of other e-mails that I knew I wouldn't need in the future. Indeed, as you may have gathered, I was brutal in my deletion criteria.
[Related post: Creating a new E-mail Taxonomy]
Step 2: Rationalize Contacts
Next, I exported all my contacts from Yahoo! Mail and Orkut and imported them into Thunderbird, which is my central contacts repository (I even have my old Outlook contacts in here) and is the easiest to mess around with. I then went through that list: updating, removing duplicates, and deleting old contacts.
I also went through my list of Facebook friends and, for those who weren't already in my address book (only 3 or 4 of them), I added their e-mail information as well.
I then exported that updated list into a CSV file. This file I imported into Gmail. For the heck of it -- and to test how well it worked -- I also imported that file into my Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail accounts. It worked just fine.
Step 3: Upload
Uploading thousands of e-mails to Gmail isn't easy. There are two things you have to watch out for: First, it's safer to upload e-mails (i.e. drag them from a local folder into a Gmail IMAP folder) in smaller batch sizes: ideally under 30 e-mails at a time. Second, don't start uploading the next batch immediately after the first one has finished uploading: give it a few seconds. Why? Because the Gmail IMAP system has spam-blocking and load-controlling algorithms built into it. If you flood it with e-mail uploads -- either too many or too fast -- it locks you out for a short period of time, which is a real pain.
All of this makes uploading e-mails a long and somewhat tedious process though it's not the end of the world. In fact, I did most of it in the background, which made it quite easy to do: I'd be working on other stuff and, every few minutes or so, I'd Alt-Tab to Thunderbird and upload another batch.
Step 4: Use
Now comes the fun part: actually using the new system (which I described in an earlier blog post). I now access all my e-mail either through Thunderbird (via IMAP) or a web browser (usually Firefox). Meanwhile, I've stopped Thunderbird from automatically checking my POP accounts. Instead, all those are POP-ed directly into Gmail, which has the additional benefit of drastically reducing the spam I get.
I still use Thunderbird when sending messages from my MBS account since I use a different e-mail signature for that but, otherwise, I've found it easier to move entirely to using Gmail's web interface. Not having both an e-mail client and browser open all the time also consumes significantly fewer computing resources which, on my ancient laptop, is a real blessing.
What I do lose from not using an e-mail client are the event reminder pop-ups that I used get but I've found a workaround for that: I've configured my Google Calendar to send me a notification via e-mail and I've installed Gmail Notifier so I get a pop-up when that notification e-mail arrives. It's not quite the same thing but, like I said, it's a workaround.
Conclusion
All in all, I am very happy with my decision to move to Gmail and the way in which everything has worked out so far. Here's hoping things continue to go this well in the future.
Oh, one last thing: When I do get a new laptop (tablet PC, actually), I might start using an e-mail client again. What I'll do then is configure IMAP to maintain offline (i.e. local) copies of all my Gmail folders. That way, I'll get the best of both worlds: e-mails available locally and in the cloud, both always synchronized. Also, you can never have too many backups, can you? :)
Creating a New E-mail Taxonomy
I truly am a geek. I am working on a new taxonomy for my e-mails (all of which I'm moving to Gmail, by the way) and...well, I'm having a really good time planning it all out!
The thing is: I'm a very nested-folders type of person so switching to the labels-and-search model is a little scary. Why is it scary? Because, other than the default folders (inbox, sent mail, etc.), I currently have 172 -- yes, that's one hundred and seventy-two -- folders in Thunderbird. And I'm trying to cut that down to about 15.
The reason I can do this (quite easily, in fact) is that most of my existing folders are second-level folders: one for each mailing list that I subscribe to, one for each MBA course that I'm taking, etc. So really I have just 37 top-level folders. Actually, even that's too many because, back in the day, I gave sites that I'm a paid member of their own top-level folder so those will now go. I also have a couple of temporary folders in there. I've been meaning to do a good folders rationalization for a couple of years now but I've just never gotten around to it. I guess this is my chance.
The good thing -- which is making this move much less scary -- is that, having used Google Web Search and Desktop Search for years now, I'm pretty confident that, even with 15 folders instead of 172, finding old e-mails shouldn't be much of a problem.
The New Taxonomy
The key change I'm making to the taxonomy is that my labels will not be about who the e-mails are from -- the taxonomy I've been following since the mid-90s that has served me well -- but what the e-mails are about -- the taxonomy I started to move to a few years ago (and which, obviously, I use for my blogs).
This lends itself well to the whole labels concept because an e-mail can be about more than one subject. So, for example, an e-mail sent from my sister about an Internet meme will get the 'Funny & Forwards' label. However, if she also wrote some family stuff in that e-mail, I'll also attach the 'Family & Friends' label to it. Neat, huh?
The challenge, of course, is in coming up with those few, most useful labels. Here's what I've come up with so far:
Just twelve?! Not bad, eh? :)
Of course, as with any taxonomy, I expect this one to evolve over time. So far, though, I think it's an accurate representation of all the e-mails I currently have in Thunderbird. And if it isn't, I'll probably tweak it as I upload my e-mail to Gmail (either that or I'll delete the e-mails instead!). Meanwhile, I'm quite pleased with this list. Now...let the uploading begin!
For the two people who read this blog: what taxonomy do you use for your e-mails?
The thing is: I'm a very nested-folders type of person so switching to the labels-and-search model is a little scary. Why is it scary? Because, other than the default folders (inbox, sent mail, etc.), I currently have 172 -- yes, that's one hundred and seventy-two -- folders in Thunderbird. And I'm trying to cut that down to about 15.
The reason I can do this (quite easily, in fact) is that most of my existing folders are second-level folders: one for each mailing list that I subscribe to, one for each MBA course that I'm taking, etc. So really I have just 37 top-level folders. Actually, even that's too many because, back in the day, I gave sites that I'm a paid member of their own top-level folder so those will now go. I also have a couple of temporary folders in there. I've been meaning to do a good folders rationalization for a couple of years now but I've just never gotten around to it. I guess this is my chance.
The good thing -- which is making this move much less scary -- is that, having used Google Web Search and Desktop Search for years now, I'm pretty confident that, even with 15 folders instead of 172, finding old e-mails shouldn't be much of a problem.
The New Taxonomy
The key change I'm making to the taxonomy is that my labels will not be about who the e-mails are from -- the taxonomy I've been following since the mid-90s that has served me well -- but what the e-mails are about -- the taxonomy I started to move to a few years ago (and which, obviously, I use for my blogs).
This lends itself well to the whole labels concept because an e-mail can be about more than one subject. So, for example, an e-mail sent from my sister about an Internet meme will get the 'Funny & Forwards' label. However, if she also wrote some family stuff in that e-mail, I'll also attach the 'Family & Friends' label to it. Neat, huh?
The challenge, of course, is in coming up with those few, most useful labels. Here's what I've come up with so far:
- Friends & Family -- e-mails about (you guessed it) friends and family
- Funny & Forwards -- jokes, forwards, memes, etc.
- Life Admin -- e-mails from banks, utilities, ISPs, etc.
- Lists & Sites -- e-mails from mailing lists and sites I am a member of
- LUMS -- old e-mails from my undergrad days as well as current alumni-related e-mails
- MBS -- all course, admin, alumni, etc. e-mails
- Music -- old and, in the future, new band-related e-mails
- Nadia -- a whole separate label for my wife since she is, after all, more than just a friend or family member
- Saved Stuff -- stuff I want to keep for future reference that is not a funny or a forward (i.e. articles and the like)
- Sites & Projects -- stuff about non-work websites I maintain or about various projects that come up
- Temp Bukkit -- e-mails that I'll catch up on the weekend but want out of my inbox for now
- Work -- all work-related e-mail (I presume I'll be maintaining another taxonomy in my work e-mail account)
Just twelve?! Not bad, eh? :)
Of course, as with any taxonomy, I expect this one to evolve over time. So far, though, I think it's an accurate representation of all the e-mails I currently have in Thunderbird. And if it isn't, I'll probably tweak it as I upload my e-mail to Gmail (either that or I'll delete the e-mails instead!). Meanwhile, I'm quite pleased with this list. Now...let the uploading begin!
For the two people who read this blog: what taxonomy do you use for your e-mails?
Switch to Gmail & IMAP?
I have three primary e-mail accounts: Melbourne Business School, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and insanityWORKS.org. I also have three secondary ones: The University of Melbourne, Gmail, and Hotmail. I forward UniMelb to MBS, Gmail to Yahoo!, and I check Hotmail via a browser periodically. I POP mail from my primary accounts to my laptop and I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. That is:
When I'm away from my laptop, however, I usually only check my primary accounts. To do that, I use the MBS webmail interface, Yahoo!'s excellent webmail interface, and I POP my insanityWORKS mail into Yahoo!. That is:
This system has worked well for the last seven years because I've always had one primary computer to work on (which, for the last four years, has been my laptop). Now things are starting to change and I'm tempted to (a) move all my e-mail online and (b) move to one primary e-mail account (Gmail) and five secondary ones (all the rest). That is:
Here's why...
Three Major Changes
First, I've become a lot more mobile and I increasingly want access to all my old e-mails (and some of my data) regardless of where I am and which computer I'm working on. This wouldn't be a problem if I was to carry my laptop (and, therefore, all my e-mail and data) with me everywhere I went, but that's not something I want to do all the time. Also, in the future I want to use my phone to access my e-mail and I simply can't do that with my current setup.
Second, cloud computing has come a long way over the last couple of years and Yahoo!, which is by far my preferred e-mail provider, lacks a number of cloud computing features that I really want. For example, Google Reader is much better than Yahoo!'s RSS reader and Microsoft's SkyDrive is much better than Yahoo! Briefcase. I also prefer Google's Calendar to Yahoo!'s, I really like Gmail's labelling mechanism, and Microsoft's Live Mesh sounds very exciting as well. In other words, I want to start using cloud computing-like services and Yahoo! alone isn't giving them to me.
Third, we live in an increasingly connected world. My current system of downloading all my e-mail to my laptop works well because it assumes that I'll be doing a lot of e-mailing (and, in general, computing) offline and from one computer. Increasingly, that is not the case. Instead, I now use communication tools like Facebook and Twitter for which you need to be constantly online, I don't limit my e-mail usage to just my laptop, and I even access the 'net and my e-mail through my mobile phone (though I don't do much of that right now because it's really expensive on my current phone plan!).
Two Implications
This means two things. First, I am seriously considering moving all my e-mail to the 'cloud'. I want this for seamless and synchronized e-mail access across multiple computers and devices. And since I am frequently online (or at least in mobile phone signal range) not being able to access my e-mail because I don't have an Internet (or mobile phone) connection is no longer an issue.
For this to work, though, I will need an IMAP-based e-mail solution and not a POP-based one. IMAP will not only let me sync my e-mail across multiple computers and devices, it will let me work offline (before re-syncing) as well.
Second, because of that IMAP requirement, I am seriously considering making Gmail my sole primary e-mail account. In fact, I'll start to POP e-mail from all my other accounts into this one as well (see diagram above).
Why? Not only is Gmail the only one that offers IMAP (which is why it should be my only e-mail interface), it's free and it gives me tonnes of storage, great calendar integration, and excellent e-mail search capabilities. It is also reliable, universally accessible, and, once I switch, I won't have to take regular backups of my e-mail folders any more.
I could, of course, use other (paid) IMAP services, but I think I'd be better off using Gmail for all the additional benefits I get from it.
One Decision
So I have a big decision to make. Do I move all 2.1GB of e-mail archives off my laptop, out of my direct control, and into the cloud? Some people have done that and are happy with it. Others didn't have such a great time. Until I try it myself, I don't know how things will turn out for me. What might be useful, though, is if I was to do a bit of e-mail housekeeping before uploading everything to Gmail. Doing that would be a pain up-front, but it would make life a lot easier going forward.
Actually, maybe the bigger issue is this: should I commit myself to using only Gmail (via IMAP) from this point on? I guess another way to think of this is to ask myself whether this is better than the status quo. That is: should I commit myself to using only my laptop (with occasional backups) to store all my e-mail? Or, to get the best of both worlds, does it make more sense to store my e-mail both on Gmail and to maintain a local copy of all that e-mail in Thunderbird as well? The answer, in theory, is pretty obvious. Naturally, it's much harder to go ahead and actually implement the solution.
I think I'll start off with a baby step: I'll activate IMAP on my Gmail account and will start using that with Thunderbird. I'll even try uploading copies of some of my old e-mails into Gmail to see how it goes. If that goes well, I'll spend the next few weeks moving all my folders over one-by-one. Before I know it, I'll be good to go. Let's just hope things go as smoothly as I've just made them sound!
The WGA Strike: Analysis of the Fundamentals
Want a deeper and most awesome analysis of the recent WGA strike? Read Matt Prager's essay on Lawrence Lessig's blog.
Comments Peter Gabriel Songs
I've been listening to a lot of Peter Gabriel recently so, while surfing through PG-related stuff on the 'net, I came across Brigitte Jellinek's Comments on Peter Gabriel Songs site. The title pretty much sums-up what the site is about and, if you're a big PG fan, it's definitely worth a visit.
Adobe Media Player Content is Awesome!
OMFG! Adobe Media Player has MacGyver, Twilight Zone, and Star Trek TOS episodes! And it's not GeoIP locked!
Internet Radio Explorations: Got Radio
I used to be a huge shortwave radio buff in my teens [1] but that was before cable TV and the Internet came to Pakistan and became affordable to the general public. I never really got into Internet radio, though. I was never in a situation where I could. At home cable TV ruled because we got our first satellite dish antenna a good ten years before broadband and at work I never got the time or the bandwidth.
The one time I did get into 'net radio was when I was working for InterActive Communications and I would listen to Radio Free Virgin quite a lot. Even then, I'd only tune in when I was working late because during the day I was office DJ -- playing music from our pooled CD and MP3 collection via large speakers connected to my workstation -- and, besides, there was rarely enough bandwidth to get a good, high quality stream going before 6pm.
So it's only recently -- thanks to having broadband Internet but no cable TV at home and full days on my laptop at work or university -- that I've really started to get into Internet radio...and there's a lot of catching up to do. So far I've used both Windows Media Player and Real Player to explore radio stations and that's been a lot of fun. I've also checked out Australian stations, NPR, VOA, and, of course, the BBC (with its really nifty iPlayer). They've all been good too.
I'm still in 'net radio investigation mode, though, and I'll share my thoughts on it as I learn more. For now let me just recommend to you Got Radio which has a really good selection of music channels, all of which are on-demand (i.e. if you don't like a song you can press next and move on to the next track in the playlist). The quality of the stream isn't all that great for an audiophile like me (though it sounds alright on my Altec Lansing laptop speakers) but the music selection is really good. And if you sign up (US$4.95/month or $26.95/year) you get a high quality, ad-free stream instead. I don't think I'm quite ready to do that yet, but it's something I might consider for the future.
For more on Internet radio in the future, stay tuned to this blog.
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[1] Ooh, now that's an idea for another blog post: my days as a shortwave radio buff. I should write about how I got introduced to the BBC back in the late '80s (my father used to listen to their MW service every morning and evening) soon after which I became a real radio geek, building SW antennas and keeping a logbook and all.
Ah, the good old days...listening to the latest news, talk, and music from the BBC, VOA, Radio Australia, Radio Moscow, and everything in between. Of course I had a lot more free time in those days. Time enough to sit for hours on the balcony listening to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, live coverage of the '92 Olympics, and music from all over the world.
Lolcats to Dogs, Graphs & Politics
One of my favourite place on the 'net is the lolcat site I Can Has Cheezburger. In case you don't already know, these fine folk also have three other equally funny sites:
- I Can Has Hotdog -- for loldogs
- Pundit Kitchen -- for lolpoliticians; or a place where you can "cook up pictures for your political blog"
- GraphJam -- for, well, lolgraphs; or, more accurately, "Pop culture for people in cubicles"
They also maintain Speak LOLspeak, which is the "The Definitive Lolcats Glossary" and an invaluable resource.
And then there are three other funny, but more specialized lol-related sites:
- The Lolcat Bible Translation Project -- Teh Holiez Bibul
- LOLCODE -- Programming the LOL way
- Loltheist -- Blasphemy is Teh Funneh
There are, of course, many, many more of these sites but those three are, in my opinion, the funniest of the lot.
Good stuff!
Peter Gabriel & Technology
Peter Gabriel, one of my all-time favourite musicians, continues to be at the forefront of technology usage -- particularly when it comes to technology for music and human rights:
- Back in 1993 he launched Xplora, the first music and multimedia CD-ROM created by a musician
- In 1999 he helped set up OD2, which was one of the first online music download services (and is now owned by Nokia)
- This year he is MIDEM's 2008 Personality of the Year (more on PG & MIDEM from Reuters)
On the human rights side:
- In 1992 he co-founded WITNESS, "an international human rights organization that uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations"
- In 1999 he started TheElders.org, which is a "new gathering of world leaders who [have] come together to guide and support our 'global village'".
So it's no surprise that he is involved in recent areas of music technology as well:
- First there's we7, which is a free, ad-supported music download community
- Then there's TheFilter.com, which is a music, video, literature, and news discovery service (more in this CNET article by Greg Sandoval)
Both sound really interesting and I'll write more about them once I've played around with them a little more.
[More PG: Wikipedia, Last.fm, Real World Records, WOMAD]
Movie Sessions & Times in Google Australia
As of today, you can search for local movie sessions and times through Google Australia. Awesome.
And it's really simple to do, too. For example, type in "sweeney todd in melbourne" and off you go.
Wolfgang's Vault, Police Tour
Next Saturday Nadia and I will watch The Police live in concert at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). While looking for news, information, set lists, and videos of the current tour I found two interesting things:
Tracking Tours
First, the place to go to for the low down on The Police's 2007-2008 tour is this blog. It contains set lists, reviews, and videos and is, basically, the perfect way for us to get all psyched-up for the upcoming concert.
While I was there, by the way, I discovered that other bands' tours have been documented in a similar fashion. And after going through those sites, I now really want to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert as well.
Wolfgang's Vault
Second I discovered...well, a gold mine of live music in the form of Wolfgang's Vault, the largest online collection of historical concert recordings (and musician interviews). Ranging from concerts performed between 1960 and the late 1980s (so far), the Vault lets you stream thousands of hours of audio for free over the Internet (though you need to register with the site first) and the number of artists up there is immense. I've just spent the last couple of hours listening to Bruce Springsteen, U2, The Police, Peter Gabriel, and Tracy Chapman to name just a few. This site is awesome! :)
FYI: Bill Graham (originally, Wolfgang Grajonca, hence the nickname which then became the site's name) was a music promoter who virtually invented the modern concert business in the 1960s [1]. Graham died in 1991 and, in 2003, an entrepreneur by the name of Bill Sagan bought Graham's entire archive of music and memorabilia for over $5m. He's since starting putting all of the audio bits online (legally, of course) where anyone can access it. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
If there's only one website you visit this week -- and assuming you're a big music fan -- make sure it's this one.