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New Manila feature: Mail-to-Weblog.  MedicineNet.Com unveils over 1000 new fabulous totally not-funky RSS 2.0 feeds. Very nice. Thanks! Via LibraryStuff. Harold Bloom: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for distinguished contribution to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life." Bloom is in the Lydon archive in three parts. Great stuff.  Scott Rosenberg: "Scanning the blogs this morning I came across an interesting dustup between Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Since I'm sharing a panel with them at BloggerCon next week this naturally caught my eye." Mike Lockwood tells the story of his last day at Apple working on the Dylan project. And there's a list of Apple history stories told by Apple insiders. A gold mine of now-it-can-be-tolds. Here's a serious question. Is anyone else doing Lydon-style interviews? I'd settle for the BBC World News available in MP3 form. I'm all caught up on the Lydon interviews and I want to go for a walk. I'm looking for news shows that are distributed over the Internet in MP3 format. Any clues?  Eugene Volokh is the latest confirmed presenter. He will lead a Day 2 discussion on weblogs and law. Chris interviewed Volokh, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Three years ago today, OPML 1.0. Cornell Daily Sun: "Between 50 and 100 Cornell students gathered on Ho Plaza for the University's first-ever flash mob." Glenn Reynolds is now part of the special Lydon RSS feed. Screen shot of Radio's enclosure prefs page. Disclaimer: My friend and Harvard associate Chris Lydon is a former WBUR star.  I'm listening to the WBUR pledge drive this morning. I paid them $120 in April, a generous amount according to the station. So I listen to the pledge drive guilt-free. They say we get both sides of the story on WBUR, but then I just realized, we don't, they don't explain how they spend our money. This morning Jane Christo, the general manager of the station, is pitching us. How do I call in and ask questions on the air? How much salary does Ms Christo draw? How many execs are there at WBUR and what are their salaries? And how about the talent, how much of my money do they get? I suspect that public radio in the US is like most other industries, execs control the money, and get most of it, and don't do very much for it. A search for "Christo" on wbur.org returns no matches. The navigation system on the website appears to have no information about the management of the station or its finances. I admit to being a neophyte here. What reporting responsibilities do public radio stations have? How open do they have to be? I'm trying to reach Ms Christo by phone right now. I explained the purpose of my call to the receptionist. I've paid up. I'm listening to Christo pitch us, saying in general terms how much it costs to provide the news, and I'd like to know how much she costs us. I asked to be transferred to the studio so I could ask her myself. The phone has been ringing, but there's no answer. I think I got transferred into the bit bucket. I called back, and she said "They didn't pick up at the studio." Okay I knew that. So she transferred me to the assistant general manager. He said he has to go on the air in four minutes and asked for my number, which I gave him. I suggested we could talk about this on the air, and he laughed. I said I was serious about it. Personally, I think all WBUR subscribers would find the answer to the questions about station finances very interesting. It also seems the management doesn't want to discuss this. I then called the official pledge line, 800-909-9287, and talked with one of the volunteers. I asked for an accounting of how my money is spent, she said she didn't know if it was available. I asked if she'd be interested in seeing it, and she said yes. That's one of the cool things about putting volunteers on the phone, since they aren't getting paid, they're not scared of the truth. You can call too, but I'd recommend only doing so if you've already contributed to WBUR, or are seriously considering it. You can also call your local NPR station and ask the same questions. Enclosure Extractor allows you "to easily extract and download enclosures from newsfeeds." BBC: "MSN is closing all its chatrooms in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia from 14 October, and changing the way others are operated globally." |
 
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