I slowly become a citizen journalist?

students bask in the sun on Parrish Beach

My column in the Phoenix today, “Lowering the price barriers to education,” would have been a lot better if it could have had hyperlinks in it 😛 Sigh… I’ll always be a blogger at heart. One link that should have been included is the Swat Book Buyback program, an attempt at starting a Swarthmore-specific website for selling and trading books with each other. Sadly, nobody has heard of it, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much traffic… hopefully people will actually start using it, if it actually works. Most people I talked to just used Half.com, which is an eBay project, and not Swarthmore-specific. Does the Phoenix have a linking policy? I feel like there should be more links in the online versions of their articles, but I can understand how this would cause editorial headaches.

I also began contributing to the Daily Gazette’s “photo of the day”… the picture you see in this post is my first submission (which was accepted).

I attend a live NPR radio show taping in Philadelphia

Chilling with Kembrew McLeod at NPR's live taping of "Justice Talking"
Chilling with Kembrew McLeod, originally uploaded by skyfaller.

I went to a live taping of the show Justice Talking today, where the topic of debate was filesharing, the Grokster case, sampling, and many other free culture issues. Kembrew McLeod, a free culture-y communications professor from UIowa, was debating Dean Garfield, a lawyer who currently works for the MPAA and formerly represented the RIAA in suits against Audiogalaxy and Kazaa. I managed to get in a question early on in the program, so you should be able to hear me if you listen to the show (called “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing“) in late April when it airs.

my breakdown of the event

Free Fiona!

This was in my away message for a while, but it’s still cool, so I figured I’d just dump it in my Livejournal…

Download the new Fiona Apple album that the music industry doesn’t want you to pay for!

the Free Fiona blog

SF Gate article
Download the album here
Bittorrent link

I’m still not sure that this isn’t some sort of publicity stunt, but I’ll assume that the story is true until I discover evidence to the contrary.