Rain and Media
This rain persists. All the gray day it fell, pausing only for a brief time at evening when the clouds settled and shrouded the dripping woodlands. It returned with nightfall and has since filled the darkness with steady drumming. Even the cricket that is sheltered from the rain by the eaves of the house has been silent tonight. Standing on the porch, I sometimes hear a louder shower beating the nearby trees and passing gradually like a slow train. Now and then, such an intensified shower falls here, but the rain never ceases altogether. I find it restful.
Despite the temptation to do nothing but drift on these relaxing waves of sound, I did manage to accomplish something last night. I created an LJ feed for Darknet, a weblog mostly about new media and copyright issues, maintained by JD Lasica, author of the recently released book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" (two early capsule reviews here at Amazon.) Lasica was for many years an editor at The Sacramento Bee, and I recall reading a few of his columns in that paper. He is also one of the co-founders of Ourmedia, the web site which, with space provided by The Internet Archive, is providing unlimited free storage and bandwidth for the distribution of videos, audio files, photos, text and software. In fact, you can pick up a free PDF of an extended excerpt from J.D.'s book at Ourmedia.
I was a bit surprised that an LJ feed of the site didn't already exist, since J.D. Lasica is pretty well known in the geek world. Also, I was unable to name the new feed simply "Darknet" because that name was already in use at LJ, so I titled it
jdlasicadarknet. So far, I'm the only subscriber, but anybody who is interested in the ongoing conflicts between established corporate media and the emerging world of decentralized digital distribution might find this an interesting source of information.
Despite the temptation to do nothing but drift on these relaxing waves of sound, I did manage to accomplish something last night. I created an LJ feed for Darknet, a weblog mostly about new media and copyright issues, maintained by JD Lasica, author of the recently released book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" (two early capsule reviews here at Amazon.) Lasica was for many years an editor at The Sacramento Bee, and I recall reading a few of his columns in that paper. He is also one of the co-founders of Ourmedia, the web site which, with space provided by The Internet Archive, is providing unlimited free storage and bandwidth for the distribution of videos, audio files, photos, text and software. In fact, you can pick up a free PDF of an extended excerpt from J.D.'s book at Ourmedia.
I was a bit surprised that an LJ feed of the site didn't already exist, since J.D. Lasica is pretty well known in the geek world. Also, I was unable to name the new feed simply "Darknet" because that name was already in use at LJ, so I titled it
jdlasicadarknet. So far, I'm the only subscriber, but anybody who is interested in the ongoing conflicts between established corporate media and the emerging world of decentralized digital distribution might find this an interesting source of information.