From the daily archives:

Friday, June 9, 2006

Our Media

by Frank Paynter on June 9, 2006

“Free storage and bandwidth forever” sounds too good to be true, but….

Not enough attention or credit has been given to JD Lasica’s OurMedia project. Opening today, the Learning Center:

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We’re starting out with the subjects of Personal media – Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you’d like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines. This is media training of the people by the people.

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Gay Marriage

by Frank Paynter on June 9, 2006

My ineptly pseudonymized friend “Kerr Mudgeon” has been whacking away at the gay marriage issue all week at his blog on the contrary.

He opens the series on a serious note with an essay titled “The Case for Gay Marriage.” His follow-on essay asks “What next? Are we going to have to let them marry their dogs?”

The curmudgeon is a bit of a prude for all his objective observation and risque language. He believes in love and commitment and I think even in moderation. In his final essay on the topic, “Heather has Lots of Families,” he observes,

Most first marriages in America end up in divorce. Many couples are in second or subsequent marriages. The median length of an American marriage is now a mere 8 years. So much for the idea that marriage is a lifelong commitment.

Over 1 million children each year have parents who have just divorced.

Like me, the curmudgeon is offended by the self righteousness and the hypocrisy at the roots of the right-wing so-called “christian” opposition to the formal commitment of marriage between same gender people.

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True or false?

June 9, 2006

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

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Network neutrality set-back

June 9, 2006

Declan McCullough writes about yesterday’s House rejection of net neutrality.Â He quotes Representative Markey, whose amendment offered the best hope for maintaining an IPÂ commodity market unpolluted by monopolistic practices:
“The future Sergey Brins, the future Marc Andreessens, of Netscape and Google…are going to have to pay taxes” to broadband providers, said Rep. Ed Markey, the [...]

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Three bags full…

June 9, 2006

John Palfrey will lead the “making money” discussion at BloggerCon. Looking at the cursed power law, there would seem to be three subsets to examine: the asymptotic risers – those few who aggregate attention in a mass media modality; the inflectioneers – people with blogs to be found around the inflection point of [...]

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