Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Nancy Baym.

Ada Lovelace day is a day to celebrate women in technology/science/maths – a way of redressing the still-apparent imbalance in the representation of the role of women in the past present and future of the various strands of technology. One strand of it is people blogging about women who have influenced them and their tech/science/engineering/maths-life. […]

Greenbelt: Actively Doing Nothing.

August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbelt. Sometimes it feels like the banks are closed in honour of it. For 19 of the last 21 last-weekend-in-Augusts I’ve spent my time in a field (til ‘99) or racecourse (the fest has been in Cheltenham for 11 years) engaged in four simple pleasures: soaking up great music encountering […]

CC-Style Music Licenses For Small Businesses?

Much has been made of this article in the New York Times about the work of the BMI in enforcing the law that any business in the US playing music (radio, CDs, spotify, live etc.) needs to pay a public performance license, the cost of which is based on the size of the business. There’s […]

Adding A Soundtrack To Your Blog

One of the wonders of the ‘tearable web’ (cf. David Jennings book, Net Blogs and Rock n Roll) is that we can put our music and video up in sharable, widgetized formats that allow them to become elements in any site that wants to help us spread the word. So, for you bloggers, here’s a […]

MP3s, eBooks, Digitizing and ‘The Experience’

So, the iPad is here – massive Dom Joly iPhone? half a laptop? eReader? The Daily Prophet for Muggles…? I read a couple of people on Twitter making claims that it was going to ‘kill books’. In response I tweeted this quote from Douglas Adams, which I got via Neil Gaiman: “Nothing is as good […]

Bandcamp Directory For The Stevie-Connected

You may or may not have seen my post this morning about Bandcamp over at stevelawson.net. Since posting it, I’ve had lots of tweets from friends whose music is on it, so let’s start a directory of entries – post a link to your bandcamp page in the comments, with a little bit of info […]

Free Albums – Screw The RIAA

Having just read the story of Joel Tenenbaum, who has just been fined over $600,000 dollars for downloading 30 songs, I’m incensed by the insanity of the RIAA – the Record Industry Association of America. While it claims to be “the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a […]