Ack, I missed All Things Considered

"PublicRadioFan.com An extensive customizable list of (almost) all public radio stations that offer streaming audio and what they have playing now and in the future." [MetaFilter]

Another totally awesome service! I've been listening to a lot more talk radio and NPR shows thanks to Replay-Radio, software that lets you record audio streams off the web. You can even schedule recordings so that they're waiting to be transferred to your MP3 player.

(Special note to the lady that came up to me after last week's A/V panel to bemoan the loss of Talk of the Nation in Chicago - there's a stream listed here you can use!)

Disclaimer: the folks that make Replay-Radio gave me a free copy, but my brother liked it enough to shell out the money.

Feedroll is a most excellent resource for displaying external headlines on your own web site. It's currently in beta, but there are several predefined sources (BBC News, Yahoo News, etc.), but best of all is the fact that you can enter the URL for almost any RSS feed to produce a snippet of Javascript code you can insert into any HTML page.

For example, by filling in a couple of boxes, you could get the code to display TSL headlines on your own pages like this:

Uncheck the "compact" box and you can get the full feed to display. A very nice service for those of us that love RSS but don't know all of the ins and outs of the specs! [via Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

(Hopefully the code won't kill any news aggregators....)

Everybody Has More to Store

"As they've moved to Web-based computing, built heftier networks, and begun using more electronics products, businesses, schools, and other organizations have started to crank up their storage purchases. Some of the impetus comes from new government rules such as the Sarbanes-Oxley financial-disclosure law that requires corporations to keep data and e-mail much longer.

Mostly, it's a logical outcome in a society that's becoming digitized to the hilt. In the 1990s, the amount of information that companies stored digitally increased by 65% to 75% annually. Steve Duplessie, founder of consultancy Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass., estimates that over the past two years, that growth rate accelerated to 85% to 90% -- a trend that's likely to continue." [BusinessWeek]

When you start adding up the number of documents, digital pictures (from digital cameras and cameraphones), music files, home video, etc., plus the need to back all of that up, storage needs are going to keep increasing every year out now because consumers are going to start rivaling businesses for storage needs. My newest PC at home has two hard drives for a total of 120GB of space, and it's amazing how quickly I can go through that. Give me a megabyte and I take a gig. At work, I keep saying that my time is better spent doing things other than cleaning out old files because the cost of storage is so cheap now.

On the data side of it, you don't really need researchers to tell you that New Data Says There's Lots of New Data, do yoU? I didn't think so, but here you go anyway.

"On Monday, researchers at the University of California evaluated, and contributed to, the information glut with the release of their report 'How Much Information? 2003,' which pegs the quantity of new information stored in 2002 at 5 exabytes, or 5 quintillion bytes.

That, said researchers at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, amounts to the print collections of the Library of Congress--500,000 times over.

Still, while large, the 5 exabytes of stored information pales in comparison to the amount of information transmitted electronically in 2002, which the study estimated to be 18 exabytes.

The vast majority of that total--98 percent--was sent over telephone networks, both wireless and landline, in the form of data and voice....

The U.C. researchers estimated that stored information had doubled since its last study, which looked at the year 1999 and was released in 2000....

Unsurprisingly, computers won out in the storage category: 92 percent of newly generated information was recorded on magnetic media like hard disks.

Paper, by contrast, accounted for a hundredth of a percent of the total. The study's authors pointed out that the amount of information stored on paper, while dwarfed by that stored by way of other media, is still increasing.

Nationally, the United States produced a plurality of the stored information--about 40 percent, with fully half of that stored on magnetic media." [News.com]

And it's all in your inbox and sitting on your desk, right? The press release and full report are available from the Berkeley site if you're not already drowning in too much data (the PDF is 100 pages long)....

Ernest Has ‘Way More Time Than I Do Lately

"And doing great things with the time he takes — so check out his blog entry pointing to a wide range of discussions on the DMCA exceptions that were posted today by the Librarian of Congress: Ancillary Works on DVD DMCA Exemption Denied" [Furdlog]

Ditto and "what he said." If you've noticed a slowdown at LawMeme, it's because Ernie's posts are on his personal blog now, and he must be foregoing sleep in order to post as often as he is at The Importance Of (RSS feed here, although I'm going to take a moment to plead with Ernest to provide a feed with the full text of his posts!). He's really been on a roll the last few days.

On a more depressing note, make sure you follow the link above to Ernie's post and read up on the four DMCA exemptions ruling, too, because today our government again decided that we do not have a right to "fair use" of the digital files we purchase. Not surprising given the way the entertainment industry has framed the debate and paid for legislation over the last decade, but discouraging nonetheless.

If legislators were forced to vote today for the "right of first sale" of digital files, which is the exemption that has traditionally allowed libraries to circulate physical materials, I wonder how many of them would blindly sign it away without a second thought to libraries. If public libraries didn't already exist, would we be able to start them in this day and age? My guess is no.

Here's something fun to do next time you're at Best Buy or anywhere else that carries PDAs like the Sony PEG-UX50 - work through the menus until you find the pictures taken with the devices built-in camera. Better yet, find the video clips. It's pretty funny to watch clips of people staring at the device with a quizzical, "is this thing on?" look on their faces, especially when they keep moving their heads in closer and closer to the lens. Minutes and minutes of endless fun....

reliving my past. When I opened Rhapsody this morning, Cake by the Trash Can Sinatras was staring me in the face. Now that's how you start a day!

And if you're not a Rhapsody subscriber, you can listen to some free MP3 downloads from the TCS site (there are some videos, too). If I have a chance to install iTunes at work today, I'll see if the album available there, too (I imagine it is).

"...ever stopped to think and found out nothing was there?"