The Pentagon began podcasting on Monday. The 5-minute segments, delivered as radio-style news reports, are produced by the Pentagon Channel, a cable TV channel for military news and information that the Department of Defense launched in May.

http://news.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029694,39194015,00.htm

arguably the best browser for the Mac, Camino has finally reached v1.0 (albeit beta). You can grab it here:

http://www.caminobrowser.org/

http://www.allofmp3.com/

an album for a little over a buck? Legal? Morally reprehensible? A ragin' deal? You make the call...

I've outlined some of my recent thinking about the cultural condition we find ourselves in today at this page on varnelis.net. In a nutshell, if modernism was followed by postmodernism, the latter is in turn followed by network culture. This parallels the development from publics to counter publics to networked publics.

To claim the centralized nature the riots that have plagued France for the past 13 nights seems to be a tactic employed by those attempting to deny the legitimacy of rioters rage. Those like Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the rioters “la racaille

Net browsing used to be mostly about just surfing site after site for information. But in the last few years, people have also used the Internet to be networked to each other as well as to produce and share things within [w:networks]. Flock, the latest open source [w:Web 2.0] browser that has just been launched (still in developer preview version, though), seeks to address this new social phenomenon.

Functional Anatomyof the Human Brain (PSY146S)
Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain, taught by Professor S. Mark Williams, is an introduction to the structure of the human brain and spinal cord. In order to study the organization of the major neural systems underlying sensory, motor and cognitive function, students are faced with the formidable task of learning myriad new and unintuitive terms to describe brain structures. To facilitate this process, students will use photo-enabled iPods to access a visual glossary of human neuroanatomy. This glossary was created by Professor Williams and his colleagues, Professor Leonard E.

I could tell something was wrong as soon as I saw my friend's eyes. It was back in 1997, and he'd been playing the recently released Final Fantasy VII. That afternoon, he'd gotten to a famously shocking scene in which Aerith, a beloved young magician girl, is suddenly and viciously murdered.

He looked like he'd lost a family member. "I'm just totally screwed up," he confessed as he nursed a lukewarm beer at a local bar. Nearly all my friends were playing Final Fantasy VII too -- so, one by one over the next week, they all hit the same scene, until every nerd I knew was sunk in a slough of despond.

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

#2 in a series, #3 overall. Another episode of "Song, Interrupted", this time listening to how sleigh bells signal the death of the protagonist in a pair of Steely Dan songs.

Sleigh Bells of Death