Ellnora | The Guitar Festival is this insane thing organized every two years by the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three days of events include Alex De Grassi, Keb' Mo', Bill Frizell, Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Natalia Zukerman and Erin McKeown, Richard Julian and Jim Campilongo, Ani DiFranco, and much more guitar madness and badness.
Speaking of which, kicking things off is the baddest bunch of Champaign-area guitaristas ever assembled under Krannert's roof. On Thursday, September 3rd, 2009, 5 to 8 pm, Krannert hosts the Pre-Ellnora C-U Guitar Superstars. A star lineup of artists and songwriters will each perform one or three songs of their choosing, backed by Champaign's acclaimed rock/blues/roots band The Delta Kings and an eight-piece vocal chorus lead by the Lightening Twins (Kathy Harden and Rena Day...oh my god they're good!).
Rehearsals are already too much fun. The event is free in the big lobby at Krannert, where they will be serving happy hour food and drinks. Don't be silly and miss this unprecedented event.
I started a Flickr group to share photos and video related to the Pre-Ellnora C-U Guitar Superstars, and uploaded my images of the rehearsals thus far. Feel free to join, upload, and share at http://www.flickr.com/groups/pre-ellnora-guitar-superstars/. Then play yer guitar!
You know, there's a thing going on in our economy where large entities with lots of money try to set the rules to get even more money. In the view of liberal capitalism this behavior is entirely rational on their part. In my view it sometimes just really pisses me off. So I've decided to do something about it: Write snarky comments on a blog hardly anyone will ever see.
The intent of microappleyahoogoogleplex.com is to focus on the information technology sector, since it's one of my main areas of operation these days. And when I'm not battling with my Windows XP box to the right of my desk, I'm battling with my Mac on the left. I love using Amazon S3 for big media file storage, but I just know someday they're gonna take my first-born. Google is of course the most wonderful corporate creation in the entire universe, and I want to make it perfectly clear to Googlebot that Google is of course the most wonderful corporate creation in the entire universe. Can I have my PageRank now?
There's lots of potential for fun with this, so please tune in to microappleyahoogoogleplex.com often!
Categories: Blogging • Personal • Politics • Technology • Websites
I've lost count of how many times I've lost count of my photos. I have so many freakin' photos it's impossible to imagine anymore how many I have. Time to do something about that!
The answer came to me in a flash one night as I should have been sleeping (or organizing my photos): I'll put them on my website! But which one? I sort of started a gallery here on openwebworks, but this isn't really the appropriate place for a personal photo collection. I could just put them on Flickr or Picassa, which I probably will do at some point. But I want to retain control over the server space where they will reside, and I want to play with the CSS and different ways of presenting them with cool JavaScripty things, like different slide shows and lightboxes. I want to catalog them and have fun with them in various ways.
The answer: webotography.com.
Categories: Media • Personal • Photography • Websites
This site was developed to support the WILL-TV documentary Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency, airing on 110 or so PBS stations this month. The design is pretty simple and spare, but I added a bit of JavaScript mojo in the form of the lightbox variation called multibox, by Samuel Birch. Check it out by playing some of the videos on the home page, or clicking the image thumbnails in the photo gallery.
Too busy making projects lately to keep updating the blog. Let me quickly mention pbcoreresources.org, a site to support ground-up development of the PBCore metadata standard.
PBCore is for exchanging information about audio/video objects, and in the online realm, the a/v objects themselves. A PBCore record is an XML document based on the PBCore schema, describing the intellectual, administrative, and technical details of a media object. Like an RSS/podcast feed, only in much (much...) greater detail.
If you want everything official and technical about PBCore, pbcore.org is a great starting point, including links to all the authoritative PBCore sites and cool projects, including pbcoreresources.org.
Categories: Media • Metadata • Technology • Websites
A conspiracy among public media web developers, percolating for the past four years, has emerged in PubForge.org.
PubForge aims to link public broadcasting with the open source community to develop software and best practices for public media on the web. We set up PubForge.org as a focal point for collaboration, documentation, and shareable code, and we hope to bring together a growing number of folks interested in enabling open media in the public interest. We kinda think the web should be a great place to pursue the mission of public broadcasting: education, enlightenment, democracy, etc.
Trouble is, most public radio and TV stations have very limited web staff and skills. Like William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. We aim to distribute the future of public media more evenly. Wanna help? Go to the PubForge site and get involved.
Categories: Media • Technology • Websites
This is a nice little website I put together to support a video documentary entitled Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit. The doc was produced by John Paul and Denise La Grassa, and premiered on WILL-TV on September 9th, 2008. It's truly a great story about the beginnings of college and pro football, and the events and people who got the ball, er...rolling. Turns out the construction of Memorial Stadium was a foundational event in the history of American football.
So check it out, eh?
In November 2007 I met by chance one of the most intelligent and calmly energetic persons in the world of media. Peter Kaufman founded Intelligent Television, a catalyst and organizer for innovative media projects, documentaries, research, and events. Intelligent Television taps into so many areas vital to educational and humanly-useful media, it’s impossible to throw a dart and call it one thing. Two Oscars in 2008, for example. We’ll see some great things from INT in the coming years.
Meanwhile, here’s a site I built for Intelligent Television. It will be radically terraformed in the next couple of months as we embark on a new designadigm…
Just won the 2008 Illinois Webmasters Cool Site Award for Content. The site contains 16 years of video archives from WILL’s TV program Prairie Fire, a series of stories about Illinois people, places, and history. Lotta work: We digitized, cataloged, categorized, encoded, and published online some 500 pieces of video from 3/4” tape, Beta, and DVCPro. I started building this site in December 2006 using ExpressionEngine, the first time I used this particular CMS.
Here’s the site: Prairie Fire on WILL-TV
Almost forgot: Each episode and segment video archive has an associated extensive metadata record expressed as structured data, in this case in PBCore format. Ingest in good health.
I only work there 60 hours a week.
WILL is the public broadcasting station at the University of Illinois. We have a proud tradition of public service and innovation in broadcasting. Now we are struggling to go beyond ‘broadcasting’, like everyone else in ‘broadcasting.’
Didn’t make the end-of-May 2008 deadline I set for the new site, but it went live on June 2nd. Not really bad eh? Here it is.
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