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Welcome to RSS in Plain English. The Internet has problems. Technorati says there are 50 million weblogs, and as you can see, it's going up. This is overwhelming. Today's show is about a new and efficient way to keep up with all this cool stuff that's happening on the Internet. I'm going to talk about two ways that you can keep up with what's happening on the Web. There's the old slow way - Boo. Then, there's the new and fast way - Yay! Here's the difference between the new and the old way. This is you, and here are your favorite websites. You log on to your computer, and you're looking for something new. You go out to your favorite blogs. Anything new? No. You go out to your favorite news sites. Anything new? Nope. Every time you look for something new and its not there, you've wasted valuable time. This is the old way. Now, let's consider the new and fast way, which is simply taking these arrows and turning them the other direction. This means the new things from blogs and new things from your news sites come to you instead. It's like Netflix compared to the video store. So, what we're talking about is using a single website that becomes your home for reading all the new stuff that's coming from your favorite websites. There are two steps to getting started. The first step is you need a home for reading new posts. This is a website called a reader. It is free and all you need is an account. I use a site called Google Reader. It looks like this. My favorite sites are listed on the left, and on the right I can scroll through all the new posts from my favorite sites in a single place. So, to complete step one, you need to sign up for a reader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, My Yahoo! are good places to start. Step number two, is to set up a connection between your reader and your favorite websites. Setting up these connections is called subscribing, and it's really important. Nearly every blog and news site offers the ability for you

Topic 1.1: Music: I Want My MP3 (Breathes in, breathes out) So I didn't always make my living from music. For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. I was a self-employed living statue called the 8-Foot Bride, and I love telling people l did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life? Hello. I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower and some intense eye contact. And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing as they walked away. (Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. And my eyes would say, "Thank you. I see you." And their eyes would say, "Nobody ever sees me. Thank you." And I would get harassed sometimes. People would yell at me from their passing cars. "Get a job!" And I'd be, like, "This is my job." But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. It was consistent. And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls. This was me on piano, a genius drummer. I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection

This is interesting because it points to a common business strategy online these days, that is, build a network of users through free/freemium model and then, when there is a large enough base, change the business model to generate revenue. Quite a few internet businesses run on the investment income initially and only start pulling in revenue later on. Worth thinking about in term of the economy category (you all remember that you need to try to keep community, power, economy and identity in your head somewhere when doing your readings and other work in this unit?) - if we depend on these services for our music etc, are we thinking enough about the fact that these are not provided out of altruism but are commercial ventures and thus, the shape of the platform and network (and hence, our experiences) are determined by the profit imperative? Pandora also restricted its free service, moving to closer to the 'freemium' business model. At this point, it appears to be at a level that probably won't impact significantly on most. However, I'd like you to consider the implications of having a commercial service like this become embedded in your lives (and many many of the internet services we have are profit-based) against those larger questions of the unit (see the interpretive and critical perspectives in particular)--economic and political aspect