I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.

April 28, 2009: Kickstarter is live! I wrote more about the launch here.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter’s a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)

I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They’re a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.

Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.

To help them on their way, they’re currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I’ve been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we’re looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.

If you’re interested, drop me an email or IM and I’ll introduce you!

After recording last week’s interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it’s always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.

Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.

The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.

This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.

Here’s how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes of setup per job.

Continue reading “Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk” →

First, the bad news. Two days ago, I received a polite email from David Winton, the director of Code Rush, asking me to take the out-of-print documentary off of Waxy.org. As promised, I immediately complied.

Now, the good news — In my reply, I asked David if he’d mind being interviewed, and he agreed! He’s an accomplished director and producer, the creator of the Big Thinkers series for TechTV, and the cofounder of Winton/duPont Films, located in San Francisco’s Presidio.

We had a wonderful conversation about the film, which revealed for the first time that he’s planning on not only re-releasing Code Rush digitally, but considering releasing the original outtakes (100 hours of footage) to the public domain on Archive.org.

I wish all my takedown notices were like this! Read on for the full interview, with selected clips from Code Rush, used by permission.

Continue reading “Interview with David Winton, Director of "Code Rush" Mozilla Documentary” →

Ethan Diamond, co-founder of the pioneering webmail service that became Yahoo! Mail, today lifted the veil on his new startup and gave me an exclusive first look.

Bandcamp is a free hosted publishing platform for musicians, taking the technical challenge out of setting up a site — transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics, payment processing, and so on.

Band websites are often pretty bad, hacked together by a friend of the band with Flash and Dreamweaver, or worse, by the record label. There are exceptions, but mostly, it’s a sea of Flash intros, popup windows, mystery navigation, and 30-second sound clips.

Bandcamp is trying to change that, giving every album and track its own page with clean URLs and semantic markup, with the accompanying SEO benefits. Even before launch, they’re topping Google results for many searches for song titles of participating bands.

As an infoviz geek, I’m particular fond of their analytics and audio visualizations. Detailed stats let bands track recent activity on their songs and albums, including where people are coming from, trend tracking, and which songs were skipped, played partially, or played in full. A number of real-time audio visualizations in Flash are available on each song’s page, which can be shared and embedded on other websites.

Like Oddpost, the team’s small and nimble — only four people, all splitting engineering and design duties. Co-founder/CTO Shawn Grunberger (also formerly with Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail) and two engineers working from Seattle and Vermont round out the distributed team.

Ethan was kind enough to sit down with me on launch day to talk about their inspiration and process developing Bandcamp.

Continue reading “Oddpost Co-Founder Launches Bandcamp, Publishing Platform for Musicians” →

Election coverage, natural disasters, and Wall Street meltdown got you down? Let’s go back to a simpler time — 1984! It’s morning in America again, and the dawn of a new information age.

Fortunately, one unlikely celebrity couple is here to guide us through the brave new world of spread sheets, data banks, and modems. In Computability, an instructional VHS tape from 1984, comedian Steve Allen and actress Jayne Meadows “take us on a light-hearted but detailed tour of the ways a home computer can change your life by simply using the correct software packages to suit your needs.”

The video was originally inspired by the couple’s Grammy-nominated “Everything You Wanted to Know About Home Computers,” a vinyl LP released by Casablanca/Polygram Records in 1983. The LP’s completely unavailable, but thanks to Sammy Reed’s wonderfully strange podcast, I was able to recreate the full album. (Stream it below or download the 11 MB MP3.)

Continue reading “Computability: Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows' Computer Video from 1984” →