Free Culture readathon

I joined in AKMA�s "free culture readathon":

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig�s new book?

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we�re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (�perform�) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword.

I recorded the Preface of Free Culture which has me referring to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as 'my first book', which is a kind of lèsé majesté, or Lessig majesté.

I used the Audacity Open Source Audio editor for this, which works very nicely, and reminds me of SoundEdit from long ago.

Here's a QuickTime version for people on slow modems.

Life imitates code?

At Technorati, I've been writing 'spiders' - little bits of code that scuttle over the web indexing pages when roused. We normally have hundreds running around at once. So I was interested to see these spider hatchlings in the garden on Thursday, swarming over a web, trying to make sense of it.

Big picture of baby spider cluster

How prior would you like that art?

Jeneane's Phonecon made me smile, but the early days of telephony were full of inventive people trying out new services and business models.

With the Patent Office moving toward rejecting the Eolas plug-in patent on prior art grounds, maybe it's time for them to reconsider the Acacia and SightSound patents that take an obvious idea and add the word 'digital', and then go around shaking down anyone doing rich media online.

Alexander Graham Bell invested heavily in a company to send opera over the telephone for a fee in the 19th Century.

Live music over the phone was happening in 1877, and remote playback by telephone in 1888 and even remote paid playback of recordings over the phone on demand, from 1909.