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J.D. Lasica, Marc Cantor, the Internet Archive, and the folks behind Drupal have launched OurMedia.org, which they hope will become the hub of the grassroots media revolution. Robin’s already posted EPIC up there, so we know that when 2014 actually rolls around, we can look back and laugh at how far our predictions diverged from reality, as we perform remote upgrades on our Digital Consciousness servers and sip calorie-free nanolattes in massively multiplayer gridcaf

A fat girl’s rhapsody.

All right, just like last year, here’s all the 2005 National Magazine Award finalists I could find online. Excerpts or articles behind subscription walls are in brackets (I’m not sure if all the Atlantic articles I bracketed are actually behind subscription walls; but I figured it was safer to assume, so try them even if you’re not a subscriber.)

Vanity Fair was a strong contender in the awards this year, but puts none of its content online. (At least NMA-nominated columnist James Woolcott has a blog now.) If not for The New Yorker winning 10 nods and putting most of its content online, this list would be pretty useless. In fact, I didn’t include the Photo Essay category, because The New Yorker‘s entry, “Democracy 2004” by Richard Avedon, is the only one available online.

If you come across anything I missed, add it in the comments!

LEISURE INTERESTS

Golf Digest:

– The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Buddies Trip

National Geographic Adventure:

– [ Grail Trails ]

O, The Oprah Magazine:

– Attention Shoppers!

Runner

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. — Slate

Adrian Holovaty, in a post about the potential role of metadata in news, advocates creating a database of isolated, metatagged facts pulled together by automated news-munching robots.

First came Dan Gillmor, putting his book We the Media online a chapter at a time and inviting his readers to participate in the book’s creation.

Now, Creative Commons mastermind Larry Lessig has taken his already-published book Code online as a wiki, and wants anyone who’s willing to help turn it into Code v. 2:

Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code

needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is

using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the

creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online,

collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

Once the the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will

take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The

resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons.

Also intriguing is the platform he’s chosen for this wiki, Jotspot, which I’d never heard of before, but looks pretty cool. One hurdle for Web neophytes who want to create wikis is the bit of technical knowledge it takes to figure out how to set one up and make it all work. Jotspot boasts that it’s dispensed with those barriers to entry.

I am ever skeptical, but Jotspot’s starting off with a good, semi-high-profile project. And I’ve often wondered if wikis would become ubiquitous if the technology got a bit more democratic.

Anyway, enough of this blathering, go re-write Code!

(Oh yeah, and the collaboratively-editing-chapters thing was also done by J.D. Lasica, whose site was where I discovered this tidbit.)

Good Lord. This is so cool. (Flickr account required for full coolness. Via Collision Detection.)

OK, I wasn’t going to link to the State of the News Media 2005 report that’s been making the rounds, but then I took a look at the thing, and I saw that they start it off by describing EPIC:

In December 2004, a mock documentary about the future of news began making make the rounds of the nation’s journalists and Web professionals.

The video, produced by two aspiring newsmen fresh from college, envisioned a nightmare scenario – by the year 2014, technology would effectively destroy traditional journalism.

In 2008, Google, the search engine company, would merge with Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, and in 2010 the new “Googlezon” would create a system edited entirely by computers that would strip individual facts and sentences from all content sources to create stories tailored to the tastes of each person.

A year later, The New York Times would sue Googlezon for copyright infringement and lose before the Supreme Court.

In 2014 Googlezon would take its computer formula a step further. Anyone on the Web would contribute whatever they knew or believed into a universal grid – a bouillabaisse of citizen blog, political propaganda, corporate spin and journalism. People would be paid according to the popularity of their contributions. Each consumer would get a one-of-a-kind news product each day based on his or her personal data.

“At its best, edited for the savviest readers,” the system is “a summary of the world – deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, [it] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational.”

That same year, the New York Times would fold its tent and become “a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” the video concludes.

And it probably won’t be.

Ha! (Oh, and “bouillabaisse“? Best word ever.)

Among the acts I had the pleasure of seeing at this weekend’s Rogue Festival was a performance of the Canterbury Tales, told in rap (scroll down).

Baba Brinkman, a medieval-studies-grad-student-turned-professional-hip-hopper from Vancouver, laid down rhymes from the Pardoner, the Miller and the Wife of Bath in an Eminem-inflected lyrical flow, occasionally digressing from Chaucer to offer M.C.-ed treatises on hip-hop’s place in the evolution of language and the history of oral storytelling.

He got a standing ovation and rave reviews from all in attendance. In fact, the reaction from the ladies seating behind me is probably best described as “orgasmic cooing.”

So check out the videos and the audio samples, and definitely check this guy out if he comes to your town.

Have we all noted the new socially networked Netflix? Grand. Any Netflix users on here I can add to my friends pile?