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.