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.
The Future of Internet Search – Project Syndicate Esther Dyson discusses the future of search as more action-oriented and vertical. I know that’s been the future for at least five years now, but I still believe. Great Bill Gates quote: “The future of search is verbs.” Bing!
Common as Air – By Lewis Hyde – NYTimes.com Robert Darnton reviews Lewis Hyde’s new book about considering intellectual property from a constitutional perspective. Sounds good!
The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama : The New Yorker Charles and David Koch are multi-billionaire Obama opponents and shadowy Tea Party supporters. They’re responsible for huge amounts of environmental damage, and funding bad science to cover that up. If they were from anywhere other than Wichita, they’d almost certainly be Bond villains.
[Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos
TorrentFreak](http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-failure-takes-down-creative-commons-video-100812/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)) An apparent case of copyright being used incorrectly and explicitly for censorship, where an anti-piracy group issued takedown notices to political videos over which it had no rights. The embedded video, “Du bist Terrorist” (“You are a terrorist”, includes English subtitles) is a good example of the strong anti-surveillance and pro-privacy sentiment in Germany; it was one of those taken down.
Copycats vs. Copyrights – Newsweek There are a couple of nitpciky points I’d make here — teachers advocate copying all the time, that’s how we learn; the “incentive” justification for copyright and patents is primarily associates with common law countries and isn’t universal — but all in all this is a pretty good mainstream analysis of the fashion copyright proposals. Brings common sense to the table, which is always welcome.
The Imbroglio Over the Ground-Zero Mosque — New York Magazine A really thoughtful article addressing the proposed Muslim community center two and a half blocks from Ground Zero. There has been a lot of ink spilled about it, but this article is really good.
The 72-Hour Expert A really funny and insightful article from P.J. O’Rourke about spending a few days in Afghanistan. Obviously I don’t agree with Mr. O’Rourke on everything, but his descriptions and interviews seem to be on point.
The Volokh Conspiracy » The High Cost of Copyright: An explanation of the real costs of copyright, by way of a recent example. A treasure trove of amazing original jazz recordings has surfaced, but will likely never be released for copyright reasons.
The most isolated man on the planet. – By Monte Reel – Slate Magazine An incredibly interesting story of the last member of an uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. He’s been given 31 square miles to live in, but shot the last person who attempted contact in the chest with an arrow.
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, and my (long) post is below.
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 long-awaited introduction of advanced search–including, naturally, search-by-license-type.
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 differences in meaning.
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. The program Shamantis used is called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch–it’s a powerful (if not particularly multi-faceted) program that is capable of real-time playback of songs stretched to one million times their original length without affecting the pitch, effectively making an audio texture out of any track, clip, or sound.
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 read is opposed to the framework, but there are a few interesting differences in their opposition.