Slashdot Mirror

I like
* CBC Radio 3 podcast: http://www.cbcradio3.com/podcast/standard/
* Jazz and Conversation: http://feeds.feedburner.com/quietfm/FEhS

I use Google's feed reader: http://www.google.com/reader/. It has a simple but decent podcast interface with an audio player in the browser and a link to the MP3 that can easily be downloaded to your MP3 player.

I am not sure why this is news. It never really affected me in a big way until I started listening to the cbc radio3 podcast. It's a weekly podcast that features indie (for the most part) canadian music, featuring songs off of newmusiccanada. I have bought three cds from india artists in the last week, and each was about 10 bucks Canadian. It's a great way to bring together an indie audience and indie artists.

CBC's other ingenious programming that was spawned by Brand New Waves is actually www.CBCradio3.com An on-line, flash-programmed, media-zine, complete with streaming audio of candian underground and indepedent artists, as well as live concertns, streaming film, photography, animations, and other cool things of interest to the hipster and cultural elite alike.

I believe Zed is affiliated with Radio3 somehow.

I think the benefits of a public broadcaster is the ability to go out on a limb, and trailblaze; not just in content, but in the form of media. While the big media just keep buying up more radio stations and tv stations, and airing the same content across them, the public broadcasters are diversifying, and bringing new forms of media to a ever-more homoganized market.

Long live the CBC.

Personally I think we should cut all their funding since they run advertisements just like any other station

The CBC suffers from two sided criticism; if they don't air commercials, or big Hollywood programming they get criticized for looking unprofessional and being irrelevant. If they DO air commercials and big Hollywood progamming then they get criticized for using up public tax dollars for what private media could accomplish more easily.

They can't win.

What a lot of people don't realize is that not only does the CBC play a valuable role within Canada (as all good public broadcasters should), but they actually usually provide programming and use methods that are miles ahead of private media.

a good example of this, is the radio "station" http://www.cbcradio3.com/, which displays mostly Canadian, independent, underground music, art, photography, writing, and other wonderful things, all well picking up a few Webby Awards http://www.webbyawards.com/ along the way.

Another great site is Just Concerts, which features professionally recorded bands from all over the world (though principally Canada) performing live in Canadian venues and studios.

Admittedly, it's not open source, and so a little off topic, but think of it as the equivalent in the music world.

thanks for the love.. zed is a commercial free (!!!) showcase of independent talent.. the thrust is on hilighting canadian film makers through short films, but much of our content is international.

personally, I adore CBC radio 3's programming and wicked web presense.. there are definitely cool things happening there.

Radio 3
Just Concerts
New Music Canada

Whine all you want about government funded media, but I would take the CBC over the pablum that "Clear Channel" puts out any day.

Do people still play boardgames?

No matter how hard they try I have yet to see a strategic PC game with the same psychological bantering and name-calling as Axis & Allies. For the real geeked-out board gamers, here's an article about obsessively in-depth strategy game

The issues with safari and flash are not new to panther - I get the same issue regularly on jaguar, where the cursor doesn't update properly. Occasionally, with large flash files (streaming music in particular seems to do it, like cbc radio 3), Safari will unexpectedly quit.

It makes it difficult to find easter eggs in homestarrunner animations without resorting to the tab key.

The definition, by the FCC, of 'broadband' is, as mentioned, a connection with at least 200 kbits of one-way bandwidth.

By comparison, the Canadian government defines 'broadband' as (paraphrasing) 'an internet connection capable of sustaining real-time two-way streaming multimedia'.

I found that quite interesting when I found it out. Broadband in Canada isn't what broadband in the US is, and I can't really figure out why, but I have some ideas.

First of all, Shaw Cable, one of the largest broadband providers in Canada, owns Fiberlink, Canada's largest coast-to-coast optical data network. Since people they peer with use them for traffic as much as they do, they don't have to worry about capping customer bandwidth - resulting in me being able to get 600kbytes/sec sustained download on 200+ meg compressed binary archives. Real transfer people, not magic numbers. I knew someone who colocated a server in Vancouver and ran an IRCd for an IRC network, and I, an hour and a half drive away, had (I kid you not) 6 millisecond pings to his server, 8 hops away. I've gotten 450kbyte/s from kernel.org, ftp.de.debian.org, and the University of Tokyo. It's all very well done.

Secondly, the networks in Canada aren't owned by many people at all. Shaw's one (Fibrelink), then there's Telus, BCE, and Aliant, Videotron, Rogers, and a few others that own the broadband scheme, but really, that's not much. Compare this to the US - how many companies are there? Well, less now, since they all went around buying each other up, but the ones that do exist aren't healthy companies anymore.

And thirdly, a backbone in Canada really only requires going from Vancouver to Montreal with stops in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Handy. But that only counts for Canadian sites though...

Factor in that Canada is too cold to do anything in for half the year (not that that stops anyone), and you have more of a hint, but it's not really until you look at some of the other initiatives that people are coming up with that things become interesting.

First of all, you can go to the CBC or CTV websites and watch news clips and listen to live radio. You used to be able to even watch CTV Newsnet online and interactive, watching the regular feed or picking stories that interest you. You know the weather and headline tickers at the bottom and sides of the CNN channels? Click on them, and get new clips about weather or the election. It was truly interactive video, and it was great.

CBC has always had a Radio One and Radio Two, but online, you can visit CBC Radio Three, an online-only magazine about... well, all kinds of stuff. Not everyone's bag, but well-done nonetheless, with a background soundtrack and interactive stories that you can help yourself to.

This month's isn't interesting, but it's neat.

It's all about interactive media, and that's what people are interested in. Aliant is now starting to offer online digital radio and TV channels to its customers for ten bucks a month - and they're good channels, that people will pay for.

Broadband isn't taking off in the US because people aren't being told what to do with it - because there's nothing to do with it. In Canada, people are saying to themselves, hey, look, I can do things, I can make things, I can watch TV online, and the companies are realizing that it doesn't cost them bandwidth to deliver to their own customers, and they can spur development onward. In Canada, there's a reason, so people sign up.

--Dan

On the other hand, it was good to see The CBC won 3 Webbies with CBC Radio Three.

Radio 1. Talk/News.

Radio 2. Classical/Jazz/Blues/Alternative.

Radio 3. Indy. Wicked.

Free streamed concerts by cool bands.

Nice new-media convergence, combines musical, visual and performance arts.

Canadian Indy specific.

Campus Radio Stations are just as easily targeted to payola as anyone else (both in Canada and the US). What's worse is that Campus Stations subscribe to the Campus Music Journal's New Music Report, which is a Music Industry Magazine. This is where the whole formula behind "college first, corporate next" comes from, especially when it comes to alternative rock (largely in part by the success of Nirvana).

Seeing that I currently work at a small Campus Station in Canada, I can tell you the major differences between campus radio North of the border is that revenues of these stations are traditionally much less, and there isn't a station that is really much interest to CMJ. CMJ has a rating system for stations, where 1 is the LPFM college stations and 5 stations are the stations found at large college stations in the US. The largest stations in Canada are still only a 4 and the average campus station in Canada is a 2.

The Canadian Music Industry (If you can call it that, usually US success has to be obtained before anything else happens) has its own journals to determine what should be played, and payola happens here too. For example, to play and chart the latest Strokes CD (Which I thought sucked!) they sent us a ton of promo stuff to try and woo us and claimed to be my friend. The Strokes did get airplay because someone liked them, but all the extra crap wasn't necessary.

Of course, if you don't believe me about how the industry is invading everything but the pirate radio stations out on the fringe, check out A Rancid Amoeba's website and read both "Some of your friends are already this fucked" and "Bubba: The College Radio Music Director Webzine".

Radio in the US doesn't completely suck though. I heard that the Pacifica Network has recently solved some of their board troubles and should be back to bring good radio to the US. Also, I should also point out that CBC in Canada is government owned and rarely bends to the Music Industry rules. I recommend checking out 120seconds.com and CBC Radio 3.

http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive2.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive3.ram

http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive2.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive3.ram

http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive2.ram
http://www.cbcradio3.com/ram/cbctvlive3.ram