Links and Resources

A handful of links you may find useful:

cylinders.library.ucsb.edu: Harry Smith fans, take note: this site is home to the Cylinder Preservation Project at the University of California Santa Barbara, whose mission is to preserve recordings done on wax cylinders. If you’re a fan of rare, unusual sounds—think field recordings, forgotten pop songs, vaudeville and the like—this site is a must-see.

www.acidplanet.com: User site for Sony Media’s Acid software.

www.aclu.org: Founded in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union has long been at the forefront of defending free speech and civil liberties.

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php: A rather large (come to think of it, vast would be a better word) archive of the various stuff to be found on the web, some of which has long since vanished from its original homes.

www.creativecommons.org: An outgrowth of Open Source, Creative Commons encourages collaboration by promoting sharing across media, cultures, and borders. I’m oversimplifying the heck out of it, but the site’s certainly worth your time.

www.edge.org: How to describe this site? It’s an online salon of sorts, with public intellectuals—or what passes for same these days—sharing their thoughts on what’s shaping the present, and may ultimately shape the future.

www.eff.org: Online home of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, an organization that promotes freedom of expression and writers’ rights in web-based and other electronic media.

www.engrish.com: Just for the fun of it, vernacular manslaughter from overseas (mostly Japan and China).

www.fark.com: Drew Curtis’s compendium of the wild, wooly, and newsworthy, from the world (and web) over.

www.freemusicarchive.org This site, coming soon courtesy of the folks at WFMU, promises to be one of the biggest sources, if not the biggest, of free (and legal) music downloads, most available under Creative Commons licenses.

www.idealist.org: A fantastic resource for the world of nonprofits. Jobs, volunteer opportunities, and organizational information are available for thousands of NPOs and NGOs worldwide.

www.msnbc.com: Arguably the best single source of news online. Note that I said single; if you want to sample a bit of everything from everywhere, then Google News (news.google.com) wins by a nose.

www.nolo.com: Not exactly a comprehensive legal resource (what would they do with all those used lawyers if it was?), but it’s a good first step to find answers to a wide array of legal questions. Nolo publishes thorough legal guides on a variety of legal subjects, and they do it in plain English, which isn’t something to take for granted.

www.slate.com: Less a magazine than a series of columns or blogs with a sense of purpose, Slate features an approach to news and culture that’s as quirky as it is varied.

www.theeconomist.com: Based in the UK, this magazine—in both its print and online incarnations—covers a broad spectrum of economic, political, and cultural issues. If the depth of its reportage is welcome, its breadth, especially at a time when American media seem downright parochial in their reach and outlook, is even more a breath of fresh air.

www.ubu.com: An online repository of art and culture from household names (Duchamp, Ginsberg, Fluxus), outsiders (LaMonte Young, Maya Deren), and those who are/were a bit of both (Kurt Schwitters, et al.)

www.utne.com: A sort of Reader’s Digest of the alternative (and/or overlooked) press. Thankfully, it doesn’t include the Digest’s steady diet of artery-clogging bad jokes, puff pieces, and articles that one day will be turned into Lifetime movies.

www.weeklyworldnews.com: The tabloid version of this paper folded not long ago, but it survives online, cataloging alien sightings, news of the weird, and all the Bat Boy news you’ll probably ever need.

www.wfmu.org: Free-form radio lives!