:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 6.03.2005 ::
:: "Rubbish?" ::
Collector's Trove of Podcasts
From Wired News
A man makes it his mission to archive every scrap of online amateur radio, even though he thinks most of it is rubbish. By Ryan Singel.
A filmmaker who has been collecting digital artifacts for 25 years is amassing the world's largest collection of podcasts, though he has little interest in actually listening to them.
Jason Scott, a 34-year-old documentary filmmaker from the Boston area, has saved and cataloged more than 340 GB of online amateur radio since he started in February.
Scott is currently monitoring and archiving some 1,500 podcasters using a $300 computer running a handwritten script that automatically downloads audio files to cheap hard drives.
"Podcasting is the largest self-service anthropology project under way," Scott said. "I've learned the value in anything."
Scott doesn't podcast himself, nor does he think it is revolutionary. And he only listens to one out of every 3,000 files he collects.
Scott says the point is simply to capture history, even if most of it isn't very interesting today or the projects don't last very long.
Scott compares the historical worth of an ordinary podcast to that of a letter from a soldier in the Civil War to his wife.
"The actual content of that letter is boring like a LiveJournal blog or an audio blog," Scott said. "But what people might not realize is that the stationery he wrote the letter on had a watermark from a company that claimed it never gave aid to that side or he used a word we didn't know people used back then."
He added: "It's all this stuff you can't tell is important back at the time. You can't say it's all detritus because you don't know."
Read more here.
Related links:
Scott's early Internet audio file collection
Scott's Textfiles.com site
Scott's BBS DOCUMENTARY DVD SET
The University of California History Digital Archives
The Etext Archives
Scene.org
HackerMedia
posted by me
:: 1:23:00 AM [+] ::
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