Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” [Waxy.org] – Andy Baio’s extremely deep analysis of the use of samples in the latest Girl Talk album. While stats like “the album averages 19.8 songs sampled per track” should be really boring, the overall analysis is, for some reason, quite fascinating!
All Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder: Frank Miller Gives Batgirl Too Dirty A Mouth For DC Comics [io9] – “Earlier this week, comic retailers were notified that all copies of All Star Batman And Robin that they receive in this week’s shipments were to be destroyed instead of placed on sale. No futher explanation was forthcoming – until someone got a hold of a copy, and discovered that a problem with self-censorship had accidentally created a comic too dirty to be sold.” (Really, if you give Frank Miller a DC stock title to work with, what did you expect him to do?)
Facebook imposes site facelift [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Facebook’s facelift will become permanent for all its 100 million users, like it or not. Since unveiling the makeover seven weeks ago, Facebook had given users the freedom to stay with the old design or switch to the new one. Now everyone will be forced to change despite groups forming on Facebook to protest the move. “It’s pretty lame they couldn’t let us keep the old design alongside the new one,” said student Scott Sanders. His protest page called Petition Against the “New Facebook” is the most popular group with nearly a million supporters criticising the move from the old format.” (I beleive this is called ‘pulling a Vista’!)
Interesting links for August 7th 2008 through August 8th 2008:
Steal This Hook? Girl Talk Flouts Copyright Law [NYTimes.com] – “Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, makes danceable musical collages out of short clips from other people’s songs; there are more than 300 samples on “Feed the Animals,” the album he released online at illegalart.net in June. He doesn’t get the permission of the composers to use these samples, as United States copyright law mostly requires, because he maintains that the brief snippets he works with are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” principle …Girl Talk’s rising profile has put him at the forefront of a group of musicians who are challenging the traditional restrictions of copyright law along with the usual role of samples in pop music.” Girl Talk’s latest album Feed the Animals can be downloaded for whatever price users choose to pay (including choosing to pay nothing).
MisUnderstanding YouTube by Joshua Green [Flow TV 8.05] – “… popularity on [YouTube] revolves as much around what is “Most Discussed” or “Most Responded” as it does what is “Most Viewed.” … Understanding this is crucial to effectively accounting for YouTube as a diverse media space. This is not to suggest everyone comes to the site to post a video blog, but rather to come to terms with the fact that YouTube is built as much through practices of audience-ing as it is practices of publishing, and to realize the two as intimately linked. As much as the video blog, YouTube is ruled by the clip and the quote — the short grab or edited selection; these videos are evidence or demonstration of active audience-hood.”
Human rights group broadcast ‘pirate’ radio show in Beijing [Radio Australia] – “A human rights group has broken China’s tight control of the media by broadcasting a radio show calling for freedom of expression in Beijing. At 8.08am local time, the Paris based group Reporters Without Borders began a twenty minute pirate broadcast on Beijing’s airwaves.” [Via @mpesce]
It’s public so what’s the privacy issue with Google’s Street View? [The Courier-Mail] – Peter Black tells it like it (legally) is regarding Google Streetview in Australia: “What Google did was perfectly legal. They took photographs of houses, buildings and streets from a public place. If anyone can legally walk up and down your street taking photographs of houses, why can’t Google? They can. Once this is accepted, the argument then becomes one about people randomly caught in the lens of the camera. “Surely they don’t have a right to take a photo of me?” Yes they do. You can have no reasonable expectation of privacy, let alone a right to privacy, when you are in a public area, such as your street.”
