NC native novelist, Michael Parker reminds me of the time when Raleigh radio was regional and interactive. In his essay “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way” published in today’s NYTimes Magazine, Michael brings back memories of the Ask Your Neighbor show on WPTF (I think). Ask Your Neighbor was at once local, regional and national. National in the sense that there were versions of AYN all across the country. The one in Detroit continues after 43 years!
Category: Alumni and other friends (Page 38 of 38)
News and Observer has a nice very brief piece on WUNC radio and General Manager Joan Siefert Rose by Danny Hooley in their Lifestyles Section today. Part of the story is Joan’s direction to make the content of WUNC more available to a national audience (ala Minnesota Public Radio or Michigan say). Amongst the changes in that direction is the hiring of a Business and a Health reporter (hope that they give a boost to those two programs in the J-School here). This spring, WUNC will become the southeastern bureau for the national program “Marketplace.”
Two other projects will be a youth voice radio and an indepth look at poverty in North Carolina; both are scheduled to begin this spring.
We all know and love, although with some reservations, OrangePolitics.org here in Orange County. NandO also has a story on a community blog in Johnston County called 4042.com. It’s not really a blog, but it is a discussion board setup that allows — for better or worse — anonymous postings and spirited threaded discussions. Already the regular complaints and compliments are being aired in the report, but amusing to see another view of community blogging.

Larry Alford is leaving UNC’s Libraries after 30+ years there. Any one who has had the pleasure of working with Larry understands what a loss this is to the UNC community and what a great gain Larry’s move to Philly and to Temple will be. One does not make an appointment with Mr. Alford or with Larry Alford. One makes an appointment with Larry. There is no other Larry.
I wish him the very best and we all will miss him. There is little, if anything, that has to do with the Academic Libraries that has not felt Larry’s intelligent touch.
In related news, Herald Sun copyeditors implicitly accuse UNC of breaking child labor laws. “New chapter for librarian: Alford, 45, to lead Temple Univserity’s system” says the headline. Larry may look and feel 45, but he is 54. If he had started in the Libraries at age 15 or less… The great pictures of Larry do make him look as young as he probably feels.
Collegue and ever alert observer, Phil Meyer, writes to say that the New York Times and its future arethe cover story on the current Business Week. Further, the future is red but not rosy. Not all of the Times’ troubles are tied to their mismanagement and missing oversight of reporters like the infamous Jason Blair. Many are the problems of a paper-based information source trying to make the move to the Internet. More people read the NYTimes than ever and more of us read it on the Net (disclosure: I get the paper edition too, but end up reading a good bit of the paper on the Net anyhow). The question is as always: Where is the Money? This is no small question since good journalism requires good money — unless you are me blogging in the public interest :->
The B-Week article ends:
The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. “The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn’t growing, and the one that is growing — the Internet — isn’t producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,” says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.
Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times’s journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America’s most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.
Now those are real challenges. Does Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma point to any answers?
In related news news, Phil points out that a lack of standards and a lack of copyeditors makes the Times less readable. For example, he says: “I wrote to the Times ombudsman to complain about Maureen Dowd’s affection of the British spelling of “whine.” She uses “whinge,” which will stop an American reader in his or her tracks. I was told that every op ed writer is entitled to use the spelling and grammar of his or her choice.”
As anyone who has read this blog knows too well, copyeditors can make a real positive difference. I miss them. They help make me sound smarter.
“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”
Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the “esprit de divination”). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
“The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a “who’s who” of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words.”
From John Brockman‘s Edge come some unexpected responses from some very smart people.
Patrick Herron wrote to tell me and others that he just taped a poem for WCHL AM to be played on air tomorrow (Thursday January 5) between 7 and 9AM to “WCHL Morning News with Ron Stutts.” I can say without giving anything away that the poem is about Patrick’s friend, Marine Jonathan Kuniholm.
Listen in! Unfortunately WCHL doesn’t webcast but they do archive so the poem may be available later.

Frank Kelly Freas who was famous for his many sci-fi illustrations, LP covers, and for his work at Mad magazine, died in his sleep at age 82 on January 2nd 2005. Freas won 11 Hugo Awards for his illustrations, but will remain most famous to me for his Alfred E. Newman images in Mad from the early 60s. Note that there is no resemblance between Newman and Larry Lessig pictured below.

Will Eisner, whose Spirit inspired and even nurtured many comic/graphic artists, died at his home in Florida last night. Eisner invented the terms graphic novel (having done the first serious one) and sequential art as well as exemplifying the kind of serious storytelling that could be done in the comic/comix genre. Just to cite one example of Eisner’s influence, Michael Chabon says that:
I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier.
On New Year’s Eve day, we went out on the Eno River to my friend, Sylvia Garrard,’s land to take part in the River Watch Program. The idea is to scoop up whatever macroinvertebrates you can find in dip nets and count them. The presence of difference kinds of invertebrates indicates the water quality. Needless to say this is a more fun project in July than in December, but New Year’s Eve this year was unseasonably warm and wonderful — still the water was cold. We found a wide selection of cadis fly larvae, stone fly larvae, dragon fly larvae, crawfish, gill snails, river pennies, a leech, mussels, and more. All this shows that the river along Sylvia’s land is in fine shape.
While we were there we also found lots of beaver work had been going on recently some of it very ambitious. Sally took the pictures.
Dan Coleman’s column from the Chapel Hill Herald about Carrboro poet laureate Patrick Herron is up on Orange Politics now.
A few selected highlights from the past year of ibiblio.org
Grants and contracts: We received contracts for streaming video in support of the NASA education site. We also received an IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services) grant in support of digitizing films for the Folkstreams project. We’re up for a much needed server refresh via an IBM SUR Grant which will be reported in January.
Radio on the net: We celebrated the 10th anniversary of Internet radio with WXYC with music, panels and interviews as well as a free CD for download (from ibiblio of course). We now stream 6 stations and will likely add two more early in 2005. We also participated in the first IPv6 continuous streaming of radio on Internet2 with WXYC and WCPE.
Speakers and visitors: ibiblio visitors and speakers for 2004 included Cory Doctorow, Doc Searls, John Hood (of John Locke Foundation), NC Senator Eric Reeves, bloggers Eric Muller and Corey Dauber, and others. Many ibiblio speakings are available for watching online including the WXYC panel.
Press. We’ve collected our press information including recent articles on ibiblio as well as technical information in an online press kit. One important new item there is Jessamyn West’s article from OCLC Systems and Services: International Digital Library Perspectives. Vol. 20. Number 2 (2004) “Free as in Tibet: ibiblio’s cultural cultivation and community creation”
We have two maturing free software projects. Lyceum is an open source blogsphere and Osprey is a peer-to-peer enabled content distribution system using Bittorrent. An very early version of Osprey is already in use for the WXYC CD downloads and a few other selected offerings.
Bandwidth: We still have to shape our bandwidth use and have with very good results. Even so we regularly use 300 – 400 Mbs. That’s a 100% increase from last year. We’re looking forward to an increase in 2005.
Storage: We’ve just added a NetApp filer which will provide highspeed file access that we desperately need, This is an additional 5+ terabyes of storage.
Management: We have a new CIO for UNC, Dan Reed, who comes to us from UIUC and NCSA. He’s very supportive of ibiblio and I expect we’ll have some opportunities arising from his RENCI projects soon.
We also have a new Dean of Information and Library Science, Jose-Maria Grifiths.
The search for a new Dean of Journalism and Mass Communication is underway as I type with campus visits by the finalists scheduled for very early 2005.
Staff: John Reuning and Fred Stutzman are our two full time employees, sysdamins and project leaders. Nancy Wilson, Josh Myer, Sean Slovney, Max Gustashaw, Patrick Herron, TJ Ward, Bret Dougherty and Adi Unnithan are with us as student employees. Sean and Max have just graduated. Nancy is expecting her first child in January.
Conferences: John and Nancy presented at the Libre Software conference in Bordeaux in the spring. Paul and Fred were among the select invitees to Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp. Fred was a presenter at the American Library Association’s Information Commons Summit. Paul was among the invitees to the Wired/Creative Commons’ benefit concert by Gilberto Gil and David Byrne. Paul and Dr. Helen Tibbo presented at the Imaging Science and Technology conference. Paul was a speaker at IBM University Day and among the 3 UNC faculty invited to meet with selected members of the IBM Academy. Fred was a panelist on the Future of Music in the Triangle. Paul spoke to visiting Jordanian journalists.
Other honors and milestones: Contributor Jessamyn West of Librarian.net was an offical blogger for the Democratic National Convention and was featured in many news stories.
Contributor Pamela Jones (and company) at Groklaw won the Linux Journal’s Editors’ Choice Award for Best Non-Technical or Community site.
Collections: we continue to add important collections of all kinds from video tutorials to health care to poetry festivals to software to Tibetan culture. No slowing down there.
Anton Zuiker returned to school after some time in the Peace Corps spent on a tropical Pacific island in Vanuatu. Luckily for me, he came to UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication to study Medical Journalismand to get evangelize for blogging.
Anton was in my first Virtual Communities class where he presented the work he had done on his family blog/website the Zuiker Chronicles.
All of that is a lead-in to saying that Anton has a nice article on paper in this week’s Independent in the Front Porch feature about Survivor and Surviving in Vanuatu.
I may have seen fried Mars bars, sold as Milky Way in the US, in Edinburgh, but one thing is for sure there was a lot of frying going on in those pubs and takeouts. For some reason, it took a mention on Jay Leno’s show to send health officials out looking for candy friers. The health scientists verified that 1 in 5 fish and chips shops fry Mars bars. Batter ’em up. Drop ’em in. Sell ’em for 70 p. Reported somewhat sensationally by the nearly unbelieving Times. Also covered by the BBC.
Miles, we missed this treat whilst in Scotland. But you can try this at home.
Reconnected with old friend, poet, book designer and friend of many beatniks, David Southern, through a request for help in finding an open source replacement for the late Dyna-web SGML search engine. David is working on the Carlyle Letters project at Duke University Press. The solution and the connection is close at hand. I believe that Nassib Nassar‘s Amberfish will do all that Dyna-web did and much more.
In a kind of intellectual barter, David pointed me to “Breakfast Comix” by Tom Raworth who I met years ago at David’s digs out in the county. Loaded with post-structuralist and poetic humor. Even more post-beatnik visual humor on Tom’s site.
The most recent legal challenge to the current state of the information commons is that of Brewster Kahle of Archive.org and Rick Prelinger of Prelinger Film Archives. They, with the help of the Stanford Law Center for Internet and Society, contend that the copyright law as it now exists locks up works that have been abandoned or otherwise should have and could have been returned to the public domain. This locking up of such works is, they allege, unconstitutional. They point out that they are not up for taking works that the authors actually want and that are in publication, but rather works that are now out of print and whose authors (or owners) are impossible to find.
They lost in District Court without a hearing, but have appealed to the 9th Circuit.
Wired News has a good brief article. Stanford Law refers to the decision as a setback [longer paper in pdf available there]. Lessig was somewhat involved and his commenters have more to say on his blog. Slashdot covered the story earlier and of course the chorus of commenters was loud there ;->
Important things first, the Bandwidth CD (23 songs and 1 historic commentary on webcasting from DRS-3 in Switzerland) is available for bittorrent downloading at http://torrent.ibiblio.org/. Thanks to John Reunning and Tim Ross.
The whole panel was broadcast and webcast on WXYC thanks to Fred Stutzman and the very special and very necessary help from Brian Russell. Brian’s mikes and DAT recorder stepped in when the Carolina Union didn’t show with the equipment that Fred needed and had asked for. If you heard the panel on air or on web, it’s Brian and Fred who made it real.
Bret Dougherty did a topnotch job of keeping us all talking and mostly on topic. John Streck of NCSU’s CENTAUR Lab did his best to keep me honest about how IPv6 works and what it has to offer. He was a good sport and a great resource speaking on the tech side of networking and more. David and Michael reminded me what fun it was to work with them. Both are passionate, wise and often intentionally funny. The audience was great too with good questions. PJ Disclafani of WXYC pulled the whole celebration together well. Nice to see friendly faces including Ruby Sinreich of Orange Politics.org, animated animator Eric Knisley of HellCar and Mickey Death fame plus nice people in David’s entourage too numerous and too nice to name here.
UPDATE: Fred and Max did a great job of digitizing the panel from Brian’s tapes and have it online!
Fred Stutzman was a presenter and panelist at the American Library Association’s Information Commons conference in Cerrittos, California this week end. He’s filed a good outline/report of all the talks on The Explainer — Here are the postings in order:
- Fred’s talk – Explainer at the ALA Information Commons
- First Session – Commons spaces with Peter Levine, Brian Campbell and Dan Lee; Kathleen Imhoff, Wayne Pearson and Jessamyn West respondents.
- Comments and Suggestions – Panel One by groups. Mitch Freedman, Jeremy Frumpkin, Mary Kadera, Tom Phelps, and Barton Lessin leaders
- Panel 2 – Creation and Preservation of the Commons – Tom Moritz, Peter Hirtle, Mary Kadera with Ann Weeks, Fred (!), Howard Besser, and Tom Phelps respondents.
- Panel 3 – Policy Issues for the Information Commons Rick Weingarten, Lee Zia, Jeremy Frumpkin with Mary Minnow, Rick Emerich, Charlotte Hess, Nancy Kranich respondents
- Final thoughts (with more to come).
Other blogging attendees include:
Confessions of a Mad Librarian, Jessamyn West at librarian.net and
Peter Levine
But most everyone agrees that Fred’s postings are the best (Go Fred!).
Miles Efron sucks it in and visits a Mexican bakery in honor of Dia de los Muertos. Despite his experiences with bad LA Mexican bakeries, he takes in and refers us to pan de muertos. Was this a conversion experience?
In our neighborhood as the spooks were slowing down under the weight of their sweet loot, the power suddenly went out! There was a slow dimming then total darkness as we stood in the street trying to decide if people without lights would still be up for treating — or if tricking were in order. The good spirits prevailed and treats continued to flow until a few houses later the lights came back on. Had to reset all the clocks twice today.
My beloved wife, Sally Greene, is in Denver blogging about the National Newspaper Association meeting there. She has discovered ethernet connections in the hotel and discovered that community papers don’t care for bloggers anymore than they like buggers. News flash: they can’t see a profit in blogging or even putting information on the web.
The most important part of the entire Convention is this: my mother-in-law and Gilmer Mirror publisher Sarah L. Greene will receive the Emma C. McKinney Award.
Two of ibiblio’s most popular contributors got some great press in the past couple of days.
librarian.net‘s Jessamyn West was written up in Wired in an article called “Don’t Mess With Librarians “. Since at least 1993 when Jessamyn began putting the rarin’ back in librarian, we knew not to mess with them.
Roger McGuinn, whose FolkDen project is approaching its tenth year, was the subject of a very nice interview in Christianity Today called “No Ordinary Folk”.
Roger is also the subject of an interview by the Creative Commons folks now posted on their site along with another interview with DJ Spooky
David McConville did his dome thing at Burning Man.
In the meantime, the media, local and international, can’t get enough of Ruby! Locally, she won a Village Pride Award given on the occassion of the one year anniversary of her local political group-blog, orangepolitics.org. Internationally, she had her letter read on the BBC Newshour.

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