Image note: My partner, Annie, swiftly caught Gilberto Gil’s concert song list as this one was about to be thrown by one of the roadies at the end of the show.

I attended Gilberto Gil’s concert at the 4th & B in San Diego this past Monday. The turnout was quite impressive. I did not take my digital camera as I thought the audience was not allowed to take footage, but upon arriving, I noticed cameras everywhere; people were not hiding them and were using them freely, from cell-phones to small digital video-cams.

I later learned when reading an article in the Union Tribune that Gil actually promotes the recording of his concerts by the audience for later upload to video websites such as Youtube. Gil embraces new technologies as a way to communicate and spread his message, which as Brazil’s Minister of Culture includes a sense of responsibility for Brazil’s music history. It seems that Gil is fully in tune with Remix Culture.

Image taken by Annie Mendoza

He delivered a two hour strong set which included original material as well as covers. The songs that stood out are three of perhaps the most recognizable songs in the world: “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, “Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and “Something” by the Beatles. He did a little twist on these songs to show the complexity of current global culture. “Three Little Birds” was played in Bossa Nova Style, “Girl from Ipanema” in Reggae, and “Something” was a fusion of both music genres.

Image taken by Annie Mendoza

Below are a number of links to Gilberto Gil’s concert in San Diego, so you can judge for yourself what a great performer Brazil’s Minister of Culture is.

Three Little Birds:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vis6r-vil-Y
Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8UTrYbx09M4
Part 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hqzN7GWXnhc
Part 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1XCFKF5C9_Y

General links of San Diego concert:
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=
gilberto+gil+san+diego&search_type=&aq=f

Text source: Library of Congress

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. The lecture will be available at a later date as a webcast at www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/.

(more…)

Image and text source: Wall Street Journal

Published on May 19, 2008; Page A13

Note: Also see the comment written against this article titled, Books Have a Bright Future, Not Just a Digital One

After a long hiatus, online bookseller Amazon is back trying to encourage us to read in a new way. Its Web site now features this description of its Kindle reading device: “Availability: In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.” This good news for consumers comes after the first batch of the devices sold out in just six hours late last year.

This seems like a fitting time to ask: If the Internet is the most powerful communications advance ever – and it is – then how do this medium and its new devices affect how and what we read?

Aristotle lived during the era when the written word displaced the oral tradition, becoming the first to explain that how we communicate alters what we communicate. That’s for sure. It’s still early in the process of a digital rhetoric replacing the more traditionally written word. It’s already an open question whether constant email and multitasking leaves us overloaded humans with the capability to handle longer-form writing.

Read the entire article at Wall Street Journal

Image Capture: Remix Theory

Text source: NYTimes
Scroll the list of the 10 most popular Web sites in the U.S., and you’ll encounter the Internet’s richest corporate players — names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google.

Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation.

With 2 million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia ”anyone can edit” stormed the Web’s top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.

And so, much as how its base of editors and bureaucrats endlessly debate touchy articles and other changes to the site, Wikipedia’s community churns with questions over how the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the project, should get and spend its money.

Read the entire article at a  NYTimes

Image and text source: Wired

Originally published: February 25, 2008

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn’t take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits (“shave and save” campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley’s gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

Read the entire article at Wired.

Image source: Google Video

I recently found a video of Lessig discussing his position on Free Culture at the 23C3 in Berlin in December 2006. In this video Lessig refers to Remix Culture/Free Culture as Read/Write Culture. This video shows his thinking process in the development of his latest term. Some of his propositions found in his three major books are revisited briefly. One good thing about Lessig is that he does not repeat his book examples; instead, he uses more recent material and discusses the history of radio, BMI vs. ASCAP. Lessig’s last book, Code 2.0, was published in 2006, so this video serves as a decent update about his position, given that he lectured at the end of the same year. Worth spending 1:15 on google video.

Image and text source: NYTimes

Published: February 10, 2008

REDMOND, Wash. — TUCKED away in a building on this forested corporate campus, John Montgomery and his team of 17 programmers might be more at home in Silicon Valley than at Microsoft.

Compared with its tenacious Internet competitors like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is generally still viewed as being more of the shrink-wrapped software generation than the Web 2.0 world.

In Silicon Valley today, software is increasingly delivered as a Web service, it is often put together by teams of programmers who might be scattered on three continents, it’s often free to users, and Web surfers usually do the testing soon after the first prototype is complete.

By contrast, Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Read the entire article at NYTimes

Image source: Business Week

Text source: The News Hour

Originally aired: January 17, 2008

Google.org, the philanthropic division of Internet giant Google, Inc., announced plans Thursday to distribute $26 million in grants to support initiatives in a variety of fields, ranging from disaster prevention to renewable energy. Larry Brilliant, head of DotOrg, discusses the company’s efforts to expand its charitable giving.

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, Google’s efforts to become a big player in the world of philanthropy. Ray Suarez has that story.

RAY SUAREZ: With the unofficial corporate slogan “Don’t Be Evil” and a high-flying stock value, search engine giant Google is using its vast wealth to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges: global warming, disease, and poverty.

Just as Google says it strives to be a different kind of company, so, too, is the company’s charitable arm, Google.org, trying to be a different kind of charity.

The company has said it will dedicate 1 percent of its profits annually to its philanthropy, after getting it started with three million Google shares. At the moment, that’s worth nearly $2 billion.

Here to tell us more is Google.org’s executive director, Larry Brilliant, a physician and epidemiologist who worked on the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox. He’s also a co-founder of the online community The Well.

Read or view the entire feature at The News Hour

Image source: The Equity Kicker

Text source: 60 Minutes

Originally aired January 13, 2008

Note: I saw this on CBS last night and thought it was worth keeping in the archive for possible future reference for several reasons. First, the myth that “the young will lead” in the computer age is promoted eloquently; Facebook’s CEO is only 23 years old. Also, the frenzy that made the WWW so popular before the dot.com bubble burst of 2000 is kept alive with eloquent distance, while excitedly stating that Facebook is perhaps the next “Google”; and to accentuate this point they show Mark Zuckerberg in a large shared office space echoing the early days of the internet boom, particularly in San Francisco; his office is in Palo Alto, not too far from the former dot.com haven. But the most interesting part is to see Zuckerberg struggling to create actual revenue and hitting a wall that other online entities have encountered in the past when they try to make hard cash out of community based sites. Wikia and Shopwiki are two obvious examples. Perhaps Zuckerberg’s most interesting remark is when he explains why Beacon, which was not well received by the Facebook community, did not work. He actually does not know why. And when asked about the role of ads in Facebook, he resorts to a common argument that any business owner uses when asked about the pressure of making money: “I mean there have to be ads either way because we have to make money,” Zuckerberg says. “I mean, we have 400 employees and you know, I mean, we have to support all that and make a profit.”

(CBS) Are you on Facebook yet? The site is up to 60 million users so far, with a projection of 200 million by the end of the year.

If you’re not on Facebook, here’s how it works: you set up a profile page with details about yourself and then decide who gets to see it. Friends use their pages to share personal news, exchange photos, team up on political causes, or just play long-distance Scrabble. It can be a useful tool or an addictive waste of time. Either way, Facebook is having a dramatic impact on the World Wide Web and it’s estimated to be worth $15 billion.

As Lesley Stahl reports, sitting atop this growing company and directing an Internet revolution is a young, geeky computer programmer who created the site only four years ago.

The face of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, the mogul who’s guiding its extraordinary growth. What everyone wants to know is: Is he old enough to be running a company some people say is the biggest thing since Google?

“I’m 23 right now,” Zuckerberg tells Stahl when asked how old he is.

“And you’re running this huge company,” Stahl remarks.

“It’s not that big,” Zuckerberg says.

During her visit to Facebook’s headquarters, Zuckerberg helped Stahl set up her own Facebook page, with a profile of her likes and dislikes. They added her friends and family, and within a few minutes, she got a friend request.

“Here’s a guy I haven’t talked to in two years and I’m so thrilled to hear from him,” Stahl remarks.

Read the entire feature at 60 Minutes

Image source: Customer Evangelists

Text source: ZDnet

Original post: November 23, 2005

Two pieces of otherwise unrelated news flew past my eyes today while I was hydroplaning through my RSS Aggregator. The first was Amazon has apparently launched, or is just testing out, ProductWiki – a way for Amazon users to enter “customer editable product information” that will appear alongside “most, if not all, of the items the company sells”. I haven’t seen any confirmation of this in official Amazon sites or PR, so consider this an unconfirmed rumor at this point. But it’s certainly a fascinating concept, for anyone and everyone to be able to add information to Amazon product data. I assume that it would be additional data and wouldn’t replace the official manufacturer and retailer data (can you imagine the outcry otherwise).

In another more substantial piece of news, washingtonpost.com has released a “Post Remix site”, with the witty nickname mashingtonpost.com. They’re doing this “to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.” Some interesting mash-ups that people have done already: News Cloud (a tag cloud), Ripped from the Headlines! (a daily news quiz), world map interface, thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment stories, and washingtonpost.com search results via RSS.

What do Amazon ProductWiki and mashingtonpost.com have in common? They both let users remix existing content and create new content. This is what Web 2.0 is all about, folks.