Aaron Swartz has an idea worth thinking about for helping artists get paid out of a tax on technology: "Here’s the key to my proposal: when you pay the tax you get a vote." Assuming it works for music, does it work for other kinds of creative output as well? [via Andrew Grumet]
Clay Shirky said
"with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative
people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune."
Cory Doctorow says:
"luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free gets me
more paying customers than it loses me." A bunch of new stories are
available for download, and they're just as great as his others. [HubLog]
I’m toying with a small project that I think is quite interesting. A while ago, I learned that Richard Gabriel had released his book Patterns of Software for free (PDF). It doesn’t say so on his site or in the PDF yet, but his intention (I mailed him about this) was to release it under the same Creative Commons license that most of his other material is made available under. This gave me the idea to annotate it as I’m reading it.
Then I thought about publishing an RSS feed along with the annotated book, where each item would point to an annotation. This is an interesting variation of the weblog concept. The front page would perhaps aggregate the latest n annotations, which can be clicked to visit the annotated passage.
Peter has started annotating the preface to Gabriel's book here.
David Harris on the "Elingsh uinervtisy" memegraph:
[...] my Friday version spread pretty quickly through blogspace when it wasn't yet floating all over the web but the latest version which has only had a day to propagate in an already saturated web, hasn't made any impact, presumably because everybody already knows about it or people are just linking to the entry without copying the text now.
Too bad we'll have to wait a century or two before we can freely get sheet music for many artists who are alive.
There's other good news on the free music front. Robert Nagle's new Share the Music blog offers "Recommendations for Great Free MP3's and Music Sharing Technologies". His introduction states,
While writing my piece in which I call for more sharing of music, I realize that the heart of the problem is not really technological or legal, but journalistic. It’s very hard to find out what musicians are out there. The radio stations have strict playlists, sites like mp3.com are promoting an artist’s CD’s, and IUMA is woefully slow and hard to navigate through.
Makes sense. If musicians could all take a cue from Brad Sucks and start posting mp3s of their work on a blog and spreading the linklove among themselves, I say the problem would be half solved.
(Do follow the link in that quote above - Robert has obviously been thinking about this a great deal.)
Phil writes that Radio Userland should now automatically ping whatever TopicExchange channel one links to. I'm testing it out right now by linking to the topics in weblogs channel.
(Pardon the jargon if you're here for the first time.)
Update: it worked! More impressively, if you compare the timestamps, the TopicExchange appears to have known about my ping before I even published the post. Gotta revisit my special relativity courses.
Now I wonder if it will ping again when I republish...
