Digging on Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky

wilco in LondonSky Blue Sky, the new album from Wilco, is severely growing on me. I admitted that I wasn’t in love with it upon early listens, thanks to day-long Web-streamings in March.

After purchasing the special edition CD w/ bonus DVD (of the songs performed and discussed in Wilco’s loft), and watching it with my nearly 1-year-old niece, I’m pretty hooked on many of these new songs. Yeah, the “angst” may not be there, but even Westerberg cooled out after a while and it didn’t make his songs any worse.


Awesome band shots from Shepherd’s Bush, London, May 20, 2007, by Mr Ush via flickr.

Below, listen to Wilco live at Northwestern University in Evanston, performing around an excellent interview with Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis for the excellent Sound Opinions program/podcast on American Public Media / Chicago Public Radio.

Google to Buy Feedburner for $100M

Feedburner, one of the most useful and valuable free Web services in my experience, is now part of the big Goog, where, one can only hope they dedicate at least as much energy to the service side of this product as they naturally would to innovating it.

Feedburner launched in Chicago in 2004 and quickly became the premier RSS feed-burner for blogs and even newspaper Web sites. I’ve published dozens of feeds for a variety of projects using their tool and have also used Feedburner to publish media-rich RSS podcast feeds.

This deal is all-but officially announced, and is rumored to be an all-cash acquisition.

Google may be able to boost Feedburner’s struggling publisher’s ad network, but my main concern again here is Google’s imperfect track record in keeping these ma & pa startups alive (of course, Dodgeball wasn’t nearly as established as Feedburner is when it was purchased).

Community Blog Bloggin’ & Freedom of Geographic Information

Community blog aggregation, commentary, analysis and tying it into a network or publication’s own coverage would seem to be an excellent way to drive more visitor’s to a Web site.

In Seattle, the rags were too slow to get community-driven on their own, so KING5-TV’s Cory Bergman (of Lost Remote fame) took the lead. The Citizen Rain blog aggregates Seattle blogs, essentially creating a forum for citizen-driven content while increasing authority via external link distribution.

In the Bay Area, a rather large victory for Freedom of Information in relation to geospatial data. Dan Gillmor writes:

The California First Amendment Coalition has won a crucial lower-court ruling that Santa Clara County must provide — at cost — its geographic “base map” of real estate boundaries in the county. The county had been saying it would charge tens of thousands of dollars for information collected on behalf of residents, using taxpayer money.

While the free availability of such public data enables dynamic mapping of UGC it is also important to recognize how crucial it is that this data remains publicly accessible. In the UK, for example, there are considerable efforts lobbying for access to such data, including The Open Geodata Manifesto and Free Our Data.

Also, Charlie Szymanski and Maurice Tamman’s (of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune) excellent IbisEye is relaunched for the ’07 Hurricane season and it’s smoother and more user-friendly than before. (h/t Lucas).

photo by Spappy.Jones used under Creative Commons 2.0 license