Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I went to a concert last night. Not my usual low-budget bar-crawl, but a real show in a real concert hall – Rockwell Hall at Buffalo State College.

I saw Roger McGuinn, best known as a founder of The Byrds, although that seems so inadequate a way of describing his talent and influence on modern music. (Even though my wife didn’t know who he was…) I have been wanting to see him for a while now. He played the same venue a year or so ago, but I couldn’t get clear to go. Continue Reading…

Recently, the Copyright Royalty Board set new rates for internet radio to pay to play music. Acting in a way that greatly benefits the Recording Industry, who must be rubbing their hands together in glee right now counting their profits, they set them so high it will make streaming radio on the internet prohibitively expensive for even the largest entities. Even large new media outlets like NPR, AOL Radio and Live 365 are threatened by this.

Here’s what one blog, Linux Journal had to say:

In a move that recalls the Vogons’ decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won’t be inconvenienced by something it doesn’t know, like or understand.

Read more about this and how you can take action against it:

Save Our Internet Radio
Save The Streams

At this point the only possibility is to persuade our government to change this action. Contact your Senator and Representatives and tell them you don’t want internet radio to be priced out of existence.

How this affects podcasts isn’t clear, but you can bet they will either try to apply this to it, or come up with something just as bad soon.

I went to a conference – actually, an un-conference – a couple weeks ago in Toronto about podcasting. It was called Podcamp Toronto and was held at Ryerson University right in downtown Toronto.

I had a great time, of course. I’ve always liked Toronto ever since our days in high school when my class went there for a class trip. We liked it so much, we went twice, two different years. We went to Crystal Beach one other year, and I don’t remember the fourth, so Canada in general was pretty popular.
Continue Reading…

Yes, I listen to Leo religiously. KFI, CFRB (I could actually receive that one myself, but getting the podcast is so convenient.) This Week In Tech, Security Now…

I just can’t get enough. Continue Reading…