September

The last chance to submit proposals for the Emerging Technology 2006 conference is this Monday, September 19. The overall theme of the conference is the progressive trend toward making technology useful, helping us rediscover what’s meaningful instead of overwhelming us with information. But it’s just a theme, so don’t let it hold you back if you have a great idea.

This year, I’m honored to be sitting on the program committee with such geek luminaries as Clay Shirky, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, and Rael Dornfest. (I’m not sure how that happened, but I suspect a bug in Rael’s committee nomination code.)

Anyway, get those proposals in! I promise to selfishly try to design a conference that I’d want to go to.

We added badges over at Upcoming.org! This is something I’ve wanted to do since the site launched, but didn’t have the time or resources to pull off until now. Read more about the change, along with Gordon’s formal introduction to the community.

Neat, huh?

My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.

It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.

One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.

Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.

Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)

Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)

Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.