mediageek

Month: December 2007

  • Newspaper-TV Combos & Lawsuit On the Way

    As expected, the FCC today voted down party lines to all but eliminate the cross-ownership rule [see PDF of the press release]. It was a last-ditch rush job by Chairman Martin since his lame duckness is about to set in with the end of the Bush administration. In his statement [PDF] Martin strenuously tries to…

  • Easier Listening

    I just installed a simple little Flash-based mp3 player over at the radioshow site so that you can listen to each week’s show without having to download it or mess with an external player. Let me know if you like or dislike it. If you like, you can listen to this week’s show right here:…

  • FCC Ready to Rumble on Tuesday

    The FCC’s having a big meeting this Tuesday, Dec. 18. The biggest item on the agenda is Chairman Martin’s attempt to rush through the near-total dissolution of the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban. It’s a plan he only revealed to the public and his fellow commissioners last month. As a result the public interest community, many Congresscritters…

  • Free DivX Pro for the Holidays

    I’m not the biggest fan of DivX because it’s not terribly useful for web distribution of video — especially if your audience isn’t particularly computer savvy. Nevertheless, DivX Pro is not a bad tool for compressing videos into the DivX codec, which is good for getting pretty high near-DVD quality video onto CD-Rs and such.…

  • Fresh Air Double-Ender Correction

    Last week I noted in a post about my interview with Michael W Dean that the NPR program Fresh Air uses the same kind of recording method that we used. What we did was talk over Skype but record our own voice locally. Then Michael sent me a file of his audio and I edited…

  • Conference Video: Making Effective Online Video for Education

    I moderated a panel on educational video at the Streaming Media West conference this past November, and video of that session is now up for viewing online at ScribeMedia.org. I was very impressed by the panelists, each of them bringing a unique perspective on the question of what makes effective online video for education. I…

  • Anarchy, Integrity and the Digital Marketplace, via a Double-Ended Podcast Interview

    Michael W. Dean is the former lead singer of the 90s band Bomb, an author of instructional books, podcaster and is probably most well known for his documentary DIY or Die about independent artists. I watched DIY or Die a year or two ago and had made a note to get Michael on the radioshow,…

  • Making the Most of Limitation

    One of the most continuously engaging and inspiring elements of DIY culture is the limitation. Of course, lots of creators would love to have millions of dollars to blow on equipment and 80 hours a week to dedicate to a project. But that’s not a reality for most people, and I think too much energy…