The current 'highwater mark' on weblogs.com is 1036 updated weblogs per hour. The number of weblogs appears to be growing at a spectacular pace.
While reading this infoanarchy article about the current copyright issues facing the entertainment and technology industries, a few things dawned on me:
We need a name for this conflict. Some candidates might be:
Hollywood vs The Valley
War against copying
No Winners
This conflict could continue for a long time, with many casualties along the way. Don't want to be a casualty? Step away from the speeding freight train.
If the Big Guys can't figure out how to collect money from online content, even with their draconian means, then neither can anyone else.
Weblogs are written for reasons other than profit. They are a tool, like a wordprocessor.
We better focus on what we can freely use of the internet,
And finally, file trading will always be a part of daily life, similar to masturbation, most won't admit it.
Weblogs and the people that write with them, copy each other's words frequently, sometimes even automatically, and have an informal crediting system of mentioning sources. RSS even carries 'source' information.
This system works by power of the hyperlink. If you don't credit me as a source, then I can stop linking to you, or write you up on my weblog etc. In the end, we both know that Hyperlinks are the Currency of the Internet.
Wow, an organic digital rights management system! Beautiful.
Dave Winer, writer of the longest running weblog Scripting News, has often written that the Internet is "75% a great writing environment and 25% cash register". I subscribe to his religion, as I also do with to all his company's products. I use them more than any other computer product.
Weblogs take up a lot of time. You have to read them. This is very restrictive, since you can't read weblogs and drive at the same time. Usually you spend that time with your cd player, mp3 collection or ... Radio.
I use Radio UserLand as my weblog tool. Until today I always thought the name was wrong for the product.
"What possibly can Radio have to do with writing a weblog" I thought.
Radio is almost dead. Clear Channel owns most stations and is making radio sound bland and uninteresting, if not impossible for small local stations to compete against.
Online radio is also battling legislation and economics that just won't make it feasible.
Weblogs are words, written with these new tools that enable desktop web publishing as simple as printing from Microsoft Word. "Weblogs are great, but they're not Radio" I've even said that alound at times. Was I right?
You bet your ass I wasn't.
The proof has been staring me in the face all along. What I write isn't just words to be 'printed' to the web, it's a script. A script on my own personal teleprompter, my microphone is located in the upper right hand corner of my screen... Why not read my weblog postings, and attach them to the written version?
Precisely what I'm going to do from now on.
How does this relate to radio? Well, it doesn't entirely.
Instead it opens a new form of communication, using weblogs as a bootstrap to literally lift our voices out into the open.
RSS has the capability to include a file attachment (called an enclosure), that newsreaders can use to automatically process the incoming file (like when it is downloaded, and what happens after it's received).
Currently Radio UserLand automatically downloads those files and drops them in a nice archive folder.
Here's a scenario:
For each blog post (my scipt) I record my words and attach them to the posting.
On my weblog, read the posting, or click to hear me read it for you. "Perhaps You'd like to hear all of today's updates?"
I'd love to set up my Radio UserLand so I could receive audio-posts automatically, or have them auto-loaded on my iPod.
I could create playlists of my favourite 'voices', and listen to them anywhere.
The best time to start is always the present, so I'm going to start audio-blogging for a while, develop some of the fucntionality I need, and see if this goes anywhere.
Seems to me you don't have to be a professional to read your own words. It will probably even make my writing better.
Stay tuned, to CURRY-FM!
7:57:59 PM 
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