Coverville Citizenship and the Future of Paid Media

Given all the raging debate about paid media online – whether users (or consumers, if you prefer) will pay for access to content, whether paywalls and micropayments have a place, and the like – it’s refreshing to see an independent podcaster demonstrating the value of well curated content and the willingness of folks to pay for it.

Coverville's Original Logo

Coverville is a podcast hosted by Brian Ibbott and recorded in his home near Denver, which features cover songs and the topic of covers generally. He does a fantastic job, hosting theme shows like originalville (in which he plays the original versions of songs people mostly know by a famous cover) and cover story (in which the whole episode is devoted to covers of and by a specific artist). Check out the Wikipedia entry on Coverville for a sense of how popular the show’s become.

(more…)

Code Monkey Go To Job

This summer Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow interviewed Jonathan Coulton. As a fan of both, I downloaded the podcast for later listening and then forgot all about. Finally got around to that “to listen to later” folder this morning, and would encourage you to check it out.
(more…)

Convergence, Open Source Style

The Free Open Source Internet video platform sponsored by the Participatory Culture Foundation and formerly known as Democracy Player has relaunched as Miro.

Head over to GetMiro and download the Public Preview 1 (v. 0.9.8) release.

Miro is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and pre-packaged for a number of Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, with Debian and Gentoo coming soon) as well as source code for the true DIY.

Miro lets you:

• Play virtually any video file, across different platforms
• Download and play full screen, high definition video
• Subscribe to video podcasts, video blogs, any rss feed with enclosures
• Locate new video content using the Miro channel guide
• Download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and others
• Download BitTorrent videos and watch them in the same application

Miro’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner framework, and is an excellent example of cross-platform, non-proprietary alternative approach to taking Internet-based applications beyond the browser context, without losing the open, standards based approach that made the web successful in the first place.

Enterprise 2.0 on Open Source

In addition to the Optaros whitepaper (“Assembling Enterprise 2.0“) I mentioned the other day, those interested in the topic of Enterprise 2.0 and open source should check out my colleague Jeff Potts’ podcast interview with Ian Howells of Alfresco.

In Jeff’s description:

In this podcast we discuss some of the details behind the Liferay-Alfresco-Roller solution Optaros recently implemented for one of our clients . . .

Or Ian’s:

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are hot on everyone’s lips at the moment. In this Podcast I interview Jeff Potts, of Optaros, about an Alfresco application they have delivered that brings together:

• Alfresco outside the firewall
• Alfresco inside the firewall

• Alfresco for document management
• Alfresco for Web Content Management

In this Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 project, Alfresco is integrated with:

• Portal – Liferay
• Blog – Roller
• Tagging – Alfresco

Specifically we discuss:

• The goals of the project
• Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and characteristics of these types of projects
• The components used in the solution
• The consumerization of IT – Web 2.0 Components within the Enterprise
• How to find out more