Monday, September 8, 2003

Best new eJournalism tool

The Panasonic RR830 is the world's best cassette transcription machine. I've had one for years. Love it. Use it every day.

But I no longer record interviews only on cassettes. When I'm on the road, I use a Mini-Disc recorder. Somehow I can make MP3s files with it (haven't figured it out), but I still don't know any MP3 transcribers that you can operate with a foot pedal.

So I went looking a minute ago for something that might work instead, say, with F keys. And I immediately found a MP3 Transcriber Tool, a small Java app that I just downloaded between the last sentence and this one, and started using at record speed. (Amazing, truly amazing.) I'm listening right now to one of Chris Lydon's interviews. Good Gravy, this tool is so simple, and it completely rocks. Wow. Just... Wow.

Congrats to java.cs.vt.edu, at Virginia Tech's Cener for Human-Computer Interaction, which created this thing. Much appreciated.

Bruising for a Cruising

I'm whipping myself to get stuff done before the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, which departs this Saturday from Seattle. I fly up there Wednesday.

Meanwhile, I don't have time for much more than to put up a series of links as they catch my interest.

Emergence as Practice, and The Calculus of Political Power, by Mitch Ratcliffe. Deep, thinky and highly sourced. Book-grade stuff on "the politics of a densely networked self-organizing society," among other (trust me) interesting things.

Jeneane Sessum: Ketchum Comes Unclued and ByeBye BigPR. Voice to voice, we are changing the face of PR and marketing. You heard it here first.

Brad Kava on Bay Area radio moves. He laments the gradual loss of autonomous native South Bay radio stations. It's true, and a symptom of a larger malaise: the homogenization of commercial radio in general. Sad.

Camp Delta inmates will talk for burgers. Perhaps if they dragged a few through Waziristan...

Rock in Peace

Warren Zevon has passed. I met him, sort of, at Brian Linse's party a year ago last summer. (Here's Brian's report, with a pic of Warren with Dawn. And here's Dawn's blog today.) Everybody was talking about this really cool L.A. blogger, Tony Pierce, whom I'd never heard of before. I figured the short skinny guy with the longish blonde hair who looked a bit like Warren Zevon must have been Tony. Later I was set straight and felt pretty darn stupid.

Shortly after that, we learned from Brian that his good friend had untreatable lung cancer. Still, he went on to make a great album. Buy it. (That's using Warren's own link.)

He was one of the best songwriters of any generation (including our own — we're both 56). Put on a helluva show, too. Mr. Bad Example was one of our best.

Here vs. Nowhere

In Online or Invisible?, Steve Lawrence of the NEC Research Institute provides numbers to substantiate the obvious: That exposure on the Web is a Good Thing if you want your stuff to be read and cited. Sez Steve:

Free online availability facilitates access in multiple ways, including online archives, direct connections between scientists or research groups, hassle-free links from email, discussion groups, and other services, indexing by web search engines, and the creation of third-party search services. Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, author and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.

Thanks to Lucas for the link.

Losing more good ones

Sad to read on Ruby's blog that her grandfather, Allan Rakoff, died on September 1st. My heart goes out to Ruby, her mom (there she is with her dad in this pic), and the whole family. I've been there. Still am, in fact.