Monthly Archives: August 2010

Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's – Aug. 23, 2010 A (reportedly) rare look at Trader Joe's, grocery darling. It's owned by Aldi Nord, which is a story in itself. "Trader" Joe Coulombe "doesn't remember" how much he sold the chain for in 1979. (tags: traderjoes food fortune business aldi article grocery shopping) Michael [...]

Amid ongoing budget woes, LA unveils nation's most expensive school with $578M price tag – latimes.com There are so many goofball facts in this piece about the country's most expensive school (named after RFK) being built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. The talking benches line killed me, and the fact that Trump wanted [...]

Germany to roll out ID cards with embedded RFID – International Business Times Germany's ID cards will have mandatory RFID chips beginning November 1. This is a bad idea. (tags: rfid surveillance germany goverment privacy article id) The Imbroglio Over the Ground-Zero Mosque — New York Magazine A really thoughtful article addressing the proposed Muslim [...]

Over the last four days, the SoundCloud blog has posted a series of interviews with Creative Commons users on the site. I think they’re all interesting, and not just because I conducted three of the four of them. I was really floored, though, by the last one we ran, interviewing the musician and sample maker [...]

Last week at Drumbeat Berlin, I had the pleasure of seeing Gabriel Shalom present on a project called Junto. We discussed the project that evening and the next day, and agreed that we should each post our ideas on the new perspectives the Drumbeat audience provided. He put together a video blog post about it, [...]

I’m very proud to have been involved with SoundCloud’s major feature release today, which includes (among other awesome things, like a track tag explore page) deeper integration and support for Creative Commons licenses. Among the changes were the addition of prominent CC badges to track players, the development of a CC landing page, and the [...]

Der Spiegel has posted on their website an official English version of that article that I translated last week. Interesting to compare and contrast: the official translation is more confident (i.e. more willing to deviate from the original structures and phrases in order to improve flow) and consistent with tenses, but there aren’t any significant [...]

There’s been a lot of slowed-down action on the web in the past few days after a particularly hilarious slowed-down version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” generated over half a million plays on SoundCloud yesterday. Shamantis, the artist behind the recording, pulled off the hitherto considered impossible feat of making Bieber sound like Sigur Rós. [...]

If you’re in Berlin and interested in the open web, tonight’s Drumbeat event at Betahaus is not to be missed. The conversation kicks off at 7:30. Hope to see everybody there!

It’s been one week since Google and Verizon announced a policy framework proposal that would do away with traditional network neutrality in the mobile space and possibly prompt the establishment of a second “premium” internet. Apparently this proposal has touched some nerves, and there’s been a lot of great writing about it. Nearly everybody I’ve [...]