The BBC World Service has taken a look at the issue in a four part programme (on the web and in archived streaming audio) – Profit and Loss: The Story of African Oil. It looks at two countries where oil wealth has spectacularly failed to bring prosperity to most of the populations of the countries (Gabon and Nigeria) and two countries hoping to do better with their newfound income – Chad and Sao Tome.

Also see “earlier stuff”:https://blog.org/archives/000864.html on a similar topic (which is not too encouraging).

It always seemed a shame to me that the commercial nature of documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/ and “Outfoxed”:http://www.outfoxed.org/ meant that they would not also be available free – at least not officially – but Robert Greenwald who made Outfoxed found a clever way around this.

Rather than releasing his whole film he has simply released the raw interview material from it, allowing independent filmmakers or the curious to make their own use of it. An excellent use of “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/’s “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ license – I hope more journalists and their organizations start to adopt this practice.

Robert Greenwald’s comments and the interviews in a variety of formats are available on “archive.org”:http://www.archive.org/movies/movies-details-db.php?collection=election_2004&collectionid=outfoxed_interviews&from=thisJustIn

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/15/outfoxed_interviews_.html who led me to Lawrence Lessig who led me to “Torrentocracy”:http://www.torrentocracy.com/blog/archives/2004/09/outfoxed_torren.shtml and “Demand Media”:http://demandmedia.net//?op=displaystory;sid=2004/9/15/1612/10512

For Canadians who want to be annoyed by what they read

Originally uploaded by derb.

A great store display I came across about a year ago in a major chain bookstore in Victoria BC.

Incidentally, Flickr (which I used to add this picture to my blog) now supports drag and drop uploading of files from Windows XP, 2000, ME and 98 as well as MacOS and someone has hacked together a Linux uploader for Gnome as well.

I now have qualified to have a free Flickr Pro account (only for three months though I discovered!) so I don’t need you to ask me for invites any more – just sign up on the site or find someone who already uses Flickr and ask them to invite you. More info on Flickr and why you might be interested is here.

There are lots of photo sharing services around – (two years ago I did a “little comparison”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000385 of several of them which offer photo printing as well) – but “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ – which I started to try out yesterday – seems to be the Internet geek’s best choice (they’ve got Cory Doctorow, “renaissance geek”:http://www.craphound.com/bio.html advising them so it’s “turning up a lot on boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=flickr).

If after reading the description below, Flickr appeals to you and you want to try it out (basic membership is free), instead of visiting the site right away and signing up I would appreciate it if you could “email me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm and I will invite you. There’s an offer available at the moment – if I successfully invite 5 new people to join Flickr I will receive a Flickr Pro Account (valid until September 15th, 2004). Yes I have therefore a small interest in selling you on the idea but I already have other photo library accounts so it’s not a huge deal for me one way or another. Anyway…

The Flickr feature that first caught my attention is that it has an automatic ‘post to your blog’ feature (which I used yesterday). It also lets you post photos to your Flickr site and/or weblog via email and directly from camera phones. What’s more intriguing though is that it has a number of creative ways of organizing photos. Most photo sites make you sort pictures into albums. This one lets you attach pictures to several different groups, tag them by keyword, lets you and your Flickr-using friends pool and organize your pictures in interesting ways etc etc.

Geekily enough it also supports RSS in different ways so people can automatically know you have added more pictures and they have built in chat and messageboard facilities so people with similar interests can share pictures (yes there are porn-related groups as you’d expect but also groups like “Bonsai lovers”:http://www.flickr.com/groups_view.gne?id=36521982934@N01). I’m a sucker for organizations like this one that just don’t seem to know when to stop adding new features on the off chance that someone will use them. “ICQ”:http://www.icq.com/ was a bit like that – it’s a pity the full version isn’t seeing much development any more. Anyway…

There’s a quick overview of Flickr’s features “here”:http://www.flickr.com/learn_more.gne and a longer “get the most out of Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne guide but the best way to figure it out is to sign up and try out its features.

Signup is free. For the moment you can only sign up for their free account which lets you share either your most recent 100 photos or photos uploaded in the last 3 months (whichever comes first). It must be said this is not over-generous – “photo.net”:http://www.photo.net/ has a 100Mb quota, “Webshots”:http://daily.webshots.com/scripts/signup.fcgi lets you store 240 photos. Also at the moment the only software available for bulk uploading of photos is for Windows XP and MacOS X. Later they will have software available for more operating systems and premium accounts with more storage and capabilities (they are in beta testing at the moment).

P.S. I just discovered “Phil Gyford”:http://www.gyford.com/ has also recently “taken a shine to Flickr”:http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/08/25/seeing_the_light.php.

O’Reilly’s Digital Democracy Teach-In at the “O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference”:http://www.oreillynet.com/et2004/ is available in a “variety of audio formats”:http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collectionid=digidemo2004-gatekeepers&collection=conference_proceedings via “Archive.org”:http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php along with a few other conferences (mostly to do with technology).

I must confess the main reason I found it useful to listen to is that it renewed my passion for my subject by reminding me how much of what is said about (for example) the democratic importance of blogging I disagree with and would like to properly test empirically.

On the other hand the keynote speech at ETech by “Marc Smith”:http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/ (a sociologist at Microsoft best known for “studying usenet”:http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/Static/Default.asp was “fascinating”:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/02/11/etech_keynotes.html – “audio here”:http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=conference_proceedings&collectionid=etech2004-smith.

A Slate columnist (Chris Suellentrop) suggests that Douglas Feith – the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – is implicated with many of the more serious Iraq problems.

Or to put it more simply, according to “General Tommy Franks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2100899/ Doug Feith is “the f*cking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”

There’s also audio available of “Suellentrop making similar charges on NPR”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1908107 and “Feith subsequently responding to the criticism”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1909390.

Interestingly, I checked out links to the Slate article on “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fslate.msn.com%2Fid%2F2100899&sub=Go%21 – none of the twenty were from people trying to defend Feith. Perhaps there is something to the notion that people in the blogosphere tend to read stuff that reinforces their world view? And interestingly too perhaps thanks to the blogosphere the Slate article about Feith is #2 on Google after his official Pentagon page.

P.S. Sorry this is rather old and the blog hasn’t been updated in a while – my wife and I have been off in Sicily for a week or so (which also explains why I haven’t returned your email if you have written recently).

American NPR radio show The Connection interviews George Packer, who recently “criticised blogging”:http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/05/04_200.html in Mother Jones. Alas it isn’t really a very interesting article or programme. To summarise:
_George_: Political weblogs are addictive but offer little substance – they just offer opinions about opinions off the top of the authors’ heads without editing, thoughtfulness or useful additional evidence.
_Bloggers_: That’s not always true – check out these sites
_George_: Well, OK – some blogs are useful, but most are time wasting.

See “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.motherjones.com%2Fcommentary%2Fcolumns%2F2004%2F05%2F04_200.html&sub=Go%21 for lots more blog commentary about George’s Mother Jones piece (much of which seems to unwittingly support his thesis).

1) “BBC Radio 7”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/ – the BBC’s digital speech radio channel which broadcasts classic comedy and drama – now has a Listen again feature (audio on demand in other words). It is still streaming audio like the rest of the BBC’s offerings but
2) Someone at the BBC has decided to allow the “Reith lectures”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/ to go out “as MP3s”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/mp3.shtml as well as streamed audio, just as one of the first and most popular campaigns on their “iCan campaign site”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/G30 requested. It’s a pity they decided to record voice at 64Kbps only (so the file size is large). Even if you don’t want to listen to the Reith lectures visit the page where there is a form and register your support for MP3s!
3) The “News Quiz”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/newsquiz.shtml – a topical humorous discussion of the news similar to NPR’s “Wait Wait don’t tell Me”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/ – is back on the air.

Thanks to AudioBerkman I can download MP3s of people talking about the legacy of WSIS or an interview with John Perry Barlow. Now I can spend every last second of my waking life thinking about the social impact of technology…

“Free Culture”:http://www.free-culture.cc/, “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/’s latest invaluable manifesto on the need to reform copyright which has been “taking the blogorati by storm”:http://allconsuming.net/item.cgi?isbn=1594200068 is available for free in “lots of digital formats”:http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/ including “as audio”:http://akma.disseminary.org/archives/001253.html (which is how I intend to ‘read’ it).

Thanks to Tim Aldrich for the link