Audio...

Online Audio Editing

A number of innovative webapps have been popping up that make it easy to upload, mix, edit, and store sounds. SpliceMusic has a 5 minute demo of how it works. All the content is available under a CreativeCommons license, so it can be freely shared. JamGlue has a very slick Flash webapp along the same lines. Both webapps allow you to download your final mixed audio as an mp3 file, or play it from their site.
http://splicemusic.com/
http://www.jamglue.com/

Free Audio Content

ccMixter is a part of the CreativeCommons and provides access to thousands of freely available sounds and music. The freesound project is a collection of links to many sounds available under cc licenses and uses innovative search techniques from AudioClas to aid discovery. Magnatune uses a juried review process to keep the quality of their audio selection high, and provides a venue for artists to sell their audio, or give it away.
http://www.ccmixter.org/
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
http://magnatune.com/

Dabble DB

Google got the ball rolling by putting spreadsheets online as a webapp, but Dabble db puts data management to a new level by making the process of creating, exploring, and visualizing data using an online webapp. This 7 minute online demo gives a good overview of how easy they’ve made it.
http://www.dabbledb.com/

Pandora

Pandora is a great free online “radio station” (listen-only, no save) which uses some software developed by the Music Genome Project that has developed rated a set of attributes that has been used to rate thousands of songs. They ask you to identify music you like and they match those attribute to create a personal playlist containing songs the software “thinks” you will like.
http://www.pandora.com/

Pew Report on PodCasting

The Pew Internet Life folks have released another survey report, this one finding higher number (12%) of Internet users downloading podcasts up from 7% just six months ago. The distribution was relatively even across age and income, but nearly twice as many men listened as women. These are promising figures, even though only 1% listens daily.
www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_podcasting.pdf

BubbleShare

BubbleShare is an interesting webapp that makes it easy to create online slide shows by uploading your own photos, recording an audio track directly on the webapp, and adding cartoon-like bubble captions to pictures (kind of like Beavis and Butthead). Good potential for simple digital storytelling projects using stills, as a precursor to using DigitalStoryTeller, iMovie, MovieMaker, or Photo Story 3.
http://www.bubbleshare.com/

Deep-Linking Ruled Illegal

The common practice of linking directly to content on someone’s website when they explicitly ask you not to, was ruled illegal by a Texas judge. This is the first judgment about this kind of deep linking of content and while the defendant was clearly in the wrong in this one, it sets the stage for stronger copyright enforcement in the future.

---

Audio of the Week

Malcolm Gladwell on "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking" Are our judgments influenced by the amount of information used in arriving at them? Does more information lead to better judgments? Gladwell is as engaging a speaker as he is writer and it’s worth listening to, even if you’ve read the book as he cites new cases.
50 minute Presentation at 2005 South by Southwest Conference www.itconversations.com/shows/detail478.html (audio)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316172324/stagetoolscom (book)


Book of the Week

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky. As one of the founding fathers of AI, this book updates his notion of the mind as a collection of lots of smaller processes he talked about in his 1988 book “Society of Mind” (a great read).
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743276639/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill