Michael Castellon

I think one of the most widely dismissed global issues today is the Chinese government’s control of media. That control becomes even more apparent when you introduce electronic media and content, which can be freely produced by nearly anyone with an internet connection — unless you live in China:

[Edwyn] Chan, who was raised in Hong Kong but today calls Chengdu, Sichuan, home, realized that doing anything that involves politics could mean trouble, but he also believed this was an opportunity to see whether blogs, which have not yet caught on in China, could translate. Within four days of launching kangri.blogku.com, he reached more than 10,000 people. He also drew the attention of the Gong An, the Chinese police in charge of monitoring the net.

Instead of shutting him down, however, the Gong An told him if he wanted to continue he would have to remove the more heated posts, which he did. Not in keeping with the freewheeling, stand-up-to-authority ethos of the blogosphere in the West, but it sure beats prison.

Mark Cuban has more good thoughts on music downloading:

By offering music so economically, Yahoo has changed how the RIAA should and can spread Piraphobia around the country. It should also change the perspective our politicians have about the subject as well. How can the Attorney General divert resources to save the music biz 5 bucks a pop? How can bills be proposed that try to save the music industry 5 bucks a month?

On a long enough timeline, anything that is ever dubbed “underground” will eventually succumb to the far less cool tag “sellout.” It happened to Grunge, it happened to The Stones, and it even happened to Tarantino. It only makes sense that podcasting would be next:

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. announced Monday it will launch a daily four-hour show featuring podcasts, or amateur programming of digital audio files distributed over the Internet.

The program will be produced and hosted by Adam Curry beginning May 13. Curry is a former MTV personality and co-developer of the technology, which makes it easy for Net users to download podcasts to portable music players.

Curry will produce the show from his home in a suburb of London. It will be carried on a Sirius talk channel and “feature highlights and insights from the world of podcasting and showcase new talent and artists from around the world, including new music,” Sirius said in a written statement.

Podcasters are abuzz about which shows will be picked for lucrative contracts with Sirius and other outlets that will likely jump onto the podcasting bandwagon. What these people don’t realize is that any content delivered over the radio, as opposed to RSS feeds on the internet to an iPod, is little more than, well, a radio broadcast. And radio broadcasts, even satellite radio broadcasts, just aren’t as cool. Radio DJs haven’t existed within the realm of hip since the early 1980s, when they too sold out and let record companies strong-arm stations into believing what was good music. Thus, the dismal state of radio today.

It’s like when blogging became wildly popular last year. Even CNN started a blog, and within days people realized a blog on CNN is just, well, an online CNN article. The attempt to even jump on the commercialization of podcasts is unhip by most standards, unless you own one of the outlets that will profit from making podcasts available to those with not quite enough technical know-how to work an RSS feeder and want to feel like they’re listening to an actual podcast.

Rebecca MacKinnon has an interesting post today:

Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times has now posted his excellent essay originally written for the Wall Street Journal about how the role of technology in China’s recent anti-Japanese protests. The government certainly allowed these protests to happen, and even encourages the rise of anti-foreign and especially anti-Japanese nationalism in Chinese cyberspace as a way of deflecting people’s frustrations away from their own government. Nonetheless, Xiao believes that the internet and wireless technology that made these protests possible will ultimately do more to break down the Communist Party’s control – despite all the impressive efforts to control and filter what Chinese people can see and do on the internet.

This is my 20-gigabyte fourth generation iPod. I have almost 2000 songs on it, and I use it to store and transport every digital picture and electronic document I own, including my portfolio and my website.

It works seamlessly between my notebook PC, which runs WinXP, and my Mac-Mini, which runs Mac OSX Tiger.

I wished it looked as cool in its protective case as it does out of its protective case.

Here are some pictures of iPods all around the world.