8 Ways to Sunday

For those who missed some of the speeches and presentations at the Democratic National Convention last night, the official DNC web site has video and transcripts available. Video is only available for the following headliners, with transcripts for everyone else:

• DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe
• President Jimmy Carter
• Vice-President Al Gore
• Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton
• President Bill Clinton

Video is available in both low and high bandwidth flavors, in QuickTime or Windows Media format. There are also audio-only MP3 files, but those links seem to be broken at the moment. (more…)

[Getting my press credentials] meant following an intestinally-coiled set of fenced-in paths, with uniformed guards stationed every hundred feet, and mufti-clad security people betrayed by the coils plugged into an ear. (When we can embed electronics directly into our cortexes, security folks are going to sign up to become our first ‘borgs.) The Boston that birthed our liberty is not recognizable the behind the chain links fence that line every walkway. And our Boston is least visible in the disgraceful “Free Speech Zone” that, with its barbed wire and decaying metal girders, stirs racial memories in some of us in which we can hear dogs barking as a train ominously approaches.

David Weinberger for boston.com, the web site of The Boston Globe

Other takes on the FSZ:

• LA Weekly’s Joshua Bearman finds bubbly PR executives more of a threat to democracy than the Zone
• Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” has a hysterical segment on the Zone that you can view online. You’ll need the Real Player plugin, and with the site being bombarded at the moment you may only get the audio and a slideshow.

Download it: The Party Party — Dick is a Killer (3:52, MP3/192kbps/5.31 MB) Unfortunately, I’ve had to take down this song due to the heavy toll it was taking on my bandwidth allowance (7.3 GB in March 2005 alone). You can still find the song on the Party Party web site or the artist’s AudioStreet page.

I believe that god made me a woman.
I feel it in my heart,
And this bitch’s voice must be heard.
A sex change is the only certain way
To preserve the sanctity of marriage.
We are living in historic times.
We are living in a time of great change.
Our leadership and resolve
Can light the way for others.
And having come this far,
And in the unfolding of the years,
This country has a new friend
Called Shirley W. Bush.

…

May God continue to bless America.
Word.

from The Party Party — Dick is a Killer (lyrics)

Believe it or not, those words all come from the mouth of President George W. Bush. Sampled and remixed over a loopy techno dance track into a tale of homoerotic obsession, war and corruption, they form the foundation of what may be the most hilarious political parody song of recent times. (more…)

In what may be a growing movement for small local news outlets, The Bakersfield Californian has recently launched a new “open-source” weekly paper for the Northwest Bakersfield area. Almost all of the content for the regularly-updated web site of The Northwest Voice is contributed by its readers, with the best articles picked by editors for publication in the free weekly print edition. Revenue for the paper comes from the sale of classified ads in the printed paper, plus some online advertisements on the web edition.

The publisher of the Voice, Mary Lou Fulton, is documenting this experiment at a web site she calls Open Source Journalism, where she provides links to similar efforts elsewhere on the web and gives advice on how to make such an endeavor work. The meta-newslog CyberJournalism.net (a better site than its cheesy moniker implies) has published an article on Fulton’s participatory journalism effort and an interview with the publisher. An article at Wired News, which was the impetus for this entry, provides further details and some comments from Fulton and others.

As someone who’s considered getting into the group/participatory newslog arena but hasn’t yet had time to pull it off, this has all provided some fascinating food for thought. If my plans in that direction ever pan out, I’ll definitely be integrating some of the ideas these articles present.

I just learned that my budget has been mostly spared from the inevitable round of cutbacks this fiscal year, losing only $300 instead of the $2,300 I’d feared it might. Better yet, I persuaded the Powers that Be to put my APRA conference budget under my own control instead of making it part of the pooled departmental training budget. This means I’m definitely going to Toronto next month.

Better brush up on my rendition of “O, Canada”!