Blog Torrent

Blog Torrent is a way to offer large files on your website without using any storage or bandwidth.

UPDATED: You really should check this software out. Erik and I both downloaded and installed it and had our own BitTorrent trackers/servers going on our sites within 5 minutes. I’ve uploaded a couple BeerCasts and couple Mobius Mixdown’s there… enjoy. If you get it installed and upload some stuff, drop a note in the comments with the URL.

Tutorials - Creating Torrents and Uploading to Trackers

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to BeerCast with us last night at Subeez Cafe here in Vancouver. It was a great venue for doing this, and I’m pleased with the way our first shows turned out doing it on our own. (I ended up buying audio recording gear so that I’m equiped to do this as well as podcasts and interviews on the event blogging side of things).

We started off a little slow with “Culture is Boring“, but hit our stride by the time we were discussing “Reality TV” in segment 3. If you only listen to one though, make it “Dating Tips for Geeks“, which turned out really funny and you might actually get a few good tips.

DOWNLOAD: Between Thought and Expression - Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash

This 1969 session features tracks from a CBS Studios session in Nashville, TN that did not see an official release. A Japanese company released these discs from an unknown source. The bonus tracks are taken from The Johnny Cash Show.

One of my favorite websites is PBS Frontline. They currently have 45 full-length shows available to watch online at www.pbs.org/frontline. I’ve posted here in the past about a couple of the best episodes I’ve seen including Douglas Rushkoff’s The Persuaders and The Merchants of Cool. Here’s some info about several recently uploaded episodes I watched this week.

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
FRONTLINE explores the relationship between U.S. job losses and the American consumer’s insatiable desire for bargains in “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” Through interviews with retail executives, product manufacturers, economists, and trade experts, correspondent Hedrick Smith examines the growing controversy over the Wal-Mart way of doing business and asks whether a single retail giant has changed the American economy.

“Wal-Mart’s power and influence are awesome,” Smith says. “By figuring out how to exploit two powerful forces that converged in the 1990s — the rise of information technology and the explosion of the global economy — Wal-Mart has dramatically changed the balance of power in the world of business. Retailers are now more powerful than manufacturers, and they are forcing the decision to move production offshore.”

A Company of Soldiers
In November 2004, a FRONTLINE production team embedded with the soldiers of the 1-8 Cavalry’s Dog Company in south Baghdad to document the day-to-day realities of a life-and-death military mission that also includes rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, promoting its economic development, and building positive relations with its people.

Filming began three days after the Fallujah campaign was launched in November 2004. There was a surge in violence as an insurgent group, thought to have come from Ramadi, launched a series of ambushes and attacks in Dog Company’s sector.

The Way the Music Died
In the recording studios of Los Angeles and the boardrooms of New York, they say the record business has been hit by a perfect storm: a convergence of industry-wide consolidation, Internet theft, and artistic drought. The effect has been the loss of billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and that indefinable quality that once characterized American pop music.

“It’s a classic example of art and commerce colliding and nobody wins,” says Nic Harcourt, music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW-FM. “It’s just a train wreck.”

In “The Way the Music Died,” FRONTLINE follows the trajectory of the recording industry from its post-Woodstock heyday in the 1970s and 1980s to what one observer describes as a “hysteria” of mass layoffs and bankruptcy in 2004. The documentary tells its story through the aspirations and experiences of four artists: veteran musician David Crosby, who has seen it all in a career spanning 35 years; songwriter/producer Mark Hudson, a former member of the Hudson Brothers band; Hudson’s daughter, Sarah, who is about to release her first single and album; and a new rock band, Velvet Revolver, composed of former members of the rock groups Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, whose first album will be released in June.

When I’m hanging out online I love to watch TV in a little window on my screen in parallel with whatever else I’m doing. One of my favorite sites is PBS:Frontline. They have like about 25 full-length documentaries available to view online…. 1-2 hours each broken up into 4-6 segments. They just released 2 new ones this week.

Truth, War, and Consequences

Did America rush into a war in Iraq for which it was unprepared? Could the current volatility in Iraq have been prevented? And was the White House’s rationale for war based on faulty and exaggerated intelligence reports?

Chasing the Sleeper Cell

“In the past 24 hours, federal authorities have identified, investigated and disrupted an Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American soil,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Larry Thompson announced on Sept. 14, 2002. It was a sobering announcement that sent shockwaves through America.