After serious deliberation with a secret cabal of expert judges, we’ve reached a consensus. And now, the winners of the Dave Winer Remix Contest!

Grand Prize: Ralph Brandi, “Smoking Weblogs”. Catchy beat, good musicianship, great samples. The “D-W-I-N-E-R” chorus is brilliant, and I can’t get it out of my head. Plus, cowbell!

2nd Place: Scott Mulligan’s “Goofin’ On Dave Winer”. Musically, the best of the bunch. The instrumental breakdown might be a bit too long, though.

3rd Place: Matt Canale’s “This Is Not A Morning Coffee Note”. The only one to use Dave’s voice as percussion. I was wrong; Exsend’s “Hi, It’s Dave Here” used exclusively Winer samples for all percussion. Therefore, a tie!

So, that’s it. Thanks for playing! I’ll contact the winners about your prizes, the increasingly-worthless currency of the web.

Yesterday, Dave Winer shut down the free Weblogs.com, inciting the wrath of his many critics and attracting media attention from Wired, News.com, eWeek, and Slashdot. Dave redirected every one of the 3,000+ Weblogs.com sites to this entry, with a 9-minute MP3 explaining his motives. (Full transcript.)

Brian Dear remixed the audio into a catchy number that I call “People Just Love to Jump Up and Down” [.MP3, 1.95 MB]. It’s good, but I know you people can do much better.

So consider this a call for entries… Remix Dave’s speech and e-mail/IM me a link to your MP3 (or Dropload the entire file), and I’ll gladly host it for you. Three Gmail invites to the winner, and one each for the two runner-ups. Have fun!

Entries:

Dan Dickinson – I’m Sorry (Dave Winer Remix).mp3 (7.6 MB)

Matt Canale – This Is Not A Morning Coffee Note (rcade Deep House Mix).mp3 (5.7 MB)

Ralph Brandi – Smoking Weblogs.mp3 (5.3 MB)

Phil Ulrich – Audio Thing.mp3 (5.7 MB)

Scott Mulligan – Goofin’ On Dave Winer.mp3 (3.6 MB)

Exsend – Hi It’s Dave Here.mp3 (1.9 MB)

June 17, 2004: Greetings, Scripting.com readers!

June 18, 2004: Feel free to use Dave’s second audioblog posting [.MP3, 4.3MB], now dubbing the shutdown as a temporary outage, into your remixes. Here’s a transcript.

June 22, 2004: The winners!

If you’re wondering why I haven’t updated my site in the last five days, here’s why: the birth of my baby boy, Eliot Andrew Baio.

Updates will be sporadic while I learn the best ways to swaddle, the physical properties of meconium, and the complete works of Dr. Harvey Karp.

Reagan’s body is being prepared for burial at Gates, Kingley & Gates Funeral Home, about five blocks away from our house and less than a block from our hospital, where we’ll be delivering our baby in the next week or so.

When we walked by the area earlier today, four full blocks of Arizona were closed down, with news crews swarming the area since 2pm today. I’ve never heard so many helicopters.

June 13, 2004: An anonymous comment in this entry inspired the launch of the new Republican 2004 presidential ticket: Vote Bush/Zombie-Reagan.

As predicted, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was camcorded and leaked online today, moments after the Friday matinees ended on the East coast. The NFO file released by UTi indicates that this may be their last release because of “not so recent but still evident events.” (Arrests? Increased security?)

The sample image distributed with the movie pokes fun at Warner Brothers’ attempt to thwart piracy by issuing military-style night-vision goggles to theater ushers. I guess it didn’t work very well.

June 5, 2004: Here’s a 50 second sample (MPG, 8.1 MB) of the bootleg video. As you can see, the video and audio aren’t very good, and the aspect ratio is bad.

High demand forced the official Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer offline, so I’m mirroring the high-quality Windows Media trailer right here.

• WMV: Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer – High Quality (25 MB)

Update: Apple is hosting the Quicktime trailer, and the official site is hosting both trailers again.

Five days after the assassination of John Lennon, radio engineer Rob Grayson compiled a montage of every Beatles song in alphabetical order and aired it following a ten minute period of silence.

• MP3: Rob Grayson’s “Beatles A-Z” (16 minutes, 9.1MB), from December 13, 1980.

The production effort involved is impressive, done entirely on tape. You can read more about it on the Rob Grayson Collection. Some of the comments are good, as well.

The Lennon tribute is a small part of Reel Radio, a massive archive of pre-1989 Top 40 Radio audio clips. Many are hour-long unedited radio broadcasts, like this Alan Freed broadcast from March 23, 1955, or these two Don Steele broadcasts from a couple months after I was born. Try using the search engine to find a clip from your year of birth.

Unfortunately, the clips are all in RealPlayer format, so be sure to install Real Alternative before you go, so you don’t have to deal with that bloated piece of crap.

Wayne White, a Chattanooga-born artist living and working in Los Angeles, buys mass-produced thrift-store/garage-sale lithographs and paints amazing 3D word-art onto them. His use of typography is stunning, reminiscent of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library covers.

The Clementine Gallery in New York has two high-quality photo galleries of his work, from 2002 and 2004. My personal favorites: I Love the Whole Fucking World, Take Your Forms Wrestled form the Void and Get the Hell Out, Painting that Came to Life Only to be Mocked-Forgotten, and Luv Hurtz.

In his professional life, he’s an acclaimed commercial artist, famously known as the art director for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight,” and the Snapple bottle puppet commercials. He was also the voice of Mr. Kite and Randy on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, where he was a set designer and puppet maker. ArtForum reviewed his artwork in late 2002. More information, including more images and a bio, is available at the Western Project.

Cameron Marlow posted Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community, an excellent research paper discussing methods of determining the influence and importance of weblogs. Basically, he shows that the number of permalinks to a weblog may be a better indicator of authority than blogroll frequency. Many newer weblogs — including mine — appear to have more influence than older, more established weblogs. This theory goes against Clay Shirky’s widely-accepted conclusions about power laws and inequality in the blogosphere.

Cameron expects debate, so go read the PDF and give him your feedback.

Shrek 2 debuted in wide release yesterday, though probably a bit wider than Dreamworks wanted… Shortly after the first matinees had ended on the East coast, the entire movie was released into private file-sharing networks and then onto Usenet.

The NFO file bundled with the release explains that it’s a new releasing group called MPT, or “Movie Premier Team.” The file claims the movie was released in theaters on Tuesday and on the Internet today, but I saw this posted no later than 4:30PM PST yesterday, which indicates their timezone may be at least eight hours ahead of the U.S.

The video is a Telesync (“TS”), a camcorder video with a direct audio source, usually recorded from in-seat headphone jacks provided for the hearing-impaired. (Without sourced audio, a video is usually called a “Cam” instead.)

The quality of camcorder videos is surprisingly good. This one-minute 10MB sample file was uploaded separately to demonstrate the quality of the complete video. (If you have trouble playing it with Windows Media Player, try the excellent Media Player Classic.)

It’s a testament to the efficiency of the bootlegging community, that a feature film can be captured, encoded, released and distributed on the Internet within hours of its commercial release. For what? As far as I can tell, “MPT” doesn’t get anything more than bragging rights, though their release will inevitably be downloaded and commercially released on the DVD black market overseas, and possibly domestically. Who’s to blame, the non-profit teen playing the releasing game or the big-time bootleggers getting rich off of piracy? Eh, probably both.

Me? I paid a ridiculous $20 to see it on the big screen last night with my wife, but it was worth it… The baby’s due in around three weeks, so it’s the last time we’ll be going to the movies for a while.