links-of-interest: May 2005 Archives

My initial impression of the concept of Podcasting was, “great, now instead of not only inundating my mind with reading material provided to me by the blog and old media world, now I have to get used to another form of media... podcasting. Ugh... the last thing I want is for someone to have to listen to my voice, too...”
Well, two podcasts have proven me completely and utterly wrong: TWiT.tv's podcast with the gang from the real Screen Savers and an unbelievably kick-ass podcast from Vinylpodcast.com. Vinylpodcast.com had a funky fair use song called Lemuria that was simply great - not an everyday song for me, but nonetheless fun to listen to. One of the things you most often hear Larry Lessig point out on his blog and in his books is how media (songs, shows, movies) will eventually fade into the background of culture - making it lost culture - because no one has the rights to provide people access to it. It is great to see that the twit gang is also paying attention to such issues by releasing their content under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike copyright. It also looks like many others offering up their own podcasts are following along in the same grain. It really is amazing what the technology of the internet is bringing to our culture. It lightens my heart to think that there remains an avenue to defeat the inevitableness of government oppression vis a vis micromanagement laws.
While I don't see myself subscribing to too many podcasts, there are certainly those which will have caught my attention. (Also, if you are looking for a good podcast client for the Mac, take a look at ipodderx.com.)