I’m tuning into some podcasts, finally. Today on my 11 mile bicycle commute (something I need to get back to doing regularly), I carried my iRiver in my pocket and listened to Rael Dornfest – Rules for Remixing, a session from the ETech Conference.
It made for a nice ride in. My only flub was the wind inside my helmet made it hard to hear the audio without cocking my head sideways (making it harder to see traffic), and when I stopped to up the volume and accidentally skipped to the next track. I had to go back and start Rael’s speech again (the interface on the iRiver is intuitive for about 3 people, likely the ones who made it).
An energetic speaker, Rael makes a case that the culture once limited to hackers, people who pried open technology, tinkered with the parts, and created something new, is now a wider phenomena he classifies as “the Re-Mix” culture. Citing a long list of examples from web technology to Amazon to RSS to telescopes, he makes a good case of it. He chides the music industry for “not getting it” what the customers where asking for “We like your product, we just don’t like the way it is packaged” and praises FireFox/Thuderbird for “almost making Windows a usable platform” (I am ducking tomatoes as the Windows lovers rev up their ammo– he said it not me).
Too bad he did not cite our RipMixFeed or RipMixLearn work, but it may be better to work in relative obscurity.
The point is, from Tivo to Podcasting, people are doing the rip/mix thing for what matters to them the most, and they are not heeding the little “warranty void” stickers.
