MP3 Blogs

Noah Adams talks with technology correspondent Xeni Jardin about a new method of digital music trading. Using so-called MP3 “blogs,” music fans trade and comment on songs that are often unusual twists on familiar favorites. A yin to this yang.

Plus ca change

Alex Tabarrok takes us back to the future, via 1900:

There is a widespread prejudice against the newspapers, based on the belief that they cannot be trusted to report truly the current events in the world’s life on account of incompetence or venality. But in spite of this distrust we are almost altogether dependent on them for our knowledge of widely interesting events….The function of the newspaper in a well-ordered society is to control the state through the authority of facts, not to drive nations and social classes headlong into war through the power of passion and prejudice.
The source? The American Newspaper: A Study in Social Psychology (JSTOR) by one Delos Wilcox writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science…. July 1900.

What makes America Great!

Via AP:

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. (AP) – Hundreds of local residents and some from across the nation have turned out to provide a vast array of free aid since Hurricane Charley ravaged the area on Aug. 13.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said that as of Friday 77,000 households had registered for disaster relief in Florida. The Red Cross is preparing 125,000 meals a day and says an estimated 2,200 families have been housed in shelters.
But it is the unofficial aid stations that have become a lifeline for many people.
Hurricane victims need travel only a few blocks on some major thoroughfares before seeing hand-lettered signs offering free water, ice, sandwiches, diapers, blankets and toiletries. Many Good Samaritans just pull up at the first big intersection they see to distribute their aid.