The zombie technology of the magazine suffers the final insult: Mygazines.com, a magazine-sharing site. The hard part in nailing them for this blatant copyright violation is that they’re trying the corporate ownership passed around by p2p trick. As it happens, the magazines are uploaded with all original advertisements, so what the publishers would need is auditable views on the site that their advertisers would believe. I really should get the old Party Fears up.

One of my other pastimes is Wikipedia. We’re all about the free-as-in-freedom content — not just no-cost with-permission, but wide-open to reuse, including commercially. This concept makes culture industry people’s heads explode, but we did make #8 website in the world that way.

The hard part is photos of entertainers. Bad live shots, fan snapshots and so forth under a proper free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Looking pretty isn’t the mission — reusable and remixable content is. So we’re hardarses about it.)

I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. The third-best shot of the shoot, say. I suspect the worst fan snaps would be an incentive. So where and how do we publicise this? (I’ve asked this before.)

(If you’ve taken decent photos of someone with a Wikipedia article but no good pic, we’d love ‘em. I’m slowly going through my own twenty years’ photos. CC by-sa is fine, and requires your name staying attached to the image details page. Follow in the steps of Joichi Ito.)

Magazines and newspapers are a zombie technology. But Esquire is trying to work past that. I give it three hours after hitting the stands that the cover’s repurposed as a general e-book reader, media player, game device, PDA, mobile phone, Linux desktop and probably coffee maker. Take that, Amazon Zune.

Lots more old Party Fears scans up, courtesy Nick Potter, who decided I was being a slackarse and so got on with it himself. Including #16½, which even I didn’t have a copy of. Cheers, mate. *pint* I don’t suppose there’s anyone with too much time on their hands interested in transcribing any of that small print?

The median live broadcast viewer age for the five US networks is over 50. Fox News clocks in with a median over 65. If they want the tasty 18-49 demographic, they need to get the cable and YouTube viewers. I’ve watched more video in the last year than the ten before that, most of it YouTube fripperies to amuse my baby daughter. The rest being Weebl & Bob. Wonder what the BBC iPlayer numbers are.

Clear Channel, the company working to ensure as absolute a playlist monoculture in the US as possible – and which is sniffing around radio in Australia – has blacklisted several hundred songs in the wake of the events of last Tuesday.

Included are songs about war, the word “Tuesday”, “Walk Like an Egyptian”, and even “Peace Train” and “Imagine”. According to Fucked Company, the list has indeed been confirmed as being for real.

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Factsheet 5, the magazine of fanzine reviews, is to recommence publication after a three-year hiatus.

The new publisher is Dwayne-Michael Alborn, a 22-year-old marketing student who was “interested in going into the catalog sales area … With the numbers we ran and the numbers Seth had, I’d say it’s a definite career opportunity.”

Factsheet 5 was started by Mike Gunderloy and ran from 1982 until late 1991. It was taken over by R. Seth Friedman, who published it from 1993 until 1998, covering the time of the zine craze of the ’90s.

Friedman has been trying to sell the magazine for some time, having stated in late 2000 that “if a new publisher is not found by the end of January 2001, the magazine, its web site and P.O. Box will be shut down for good.”

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or I’ll come around and rip your ears off personally.

(Or you could watch a tape as I probably actually will ;-)

“Long Way to the Top screens on Wednesday nights at 8.30pm, from 8 August to 12 September 2001.” Website at http://abc.net.au/longway/ .

Damn. I can’t wait for this one to be released on video. Did I mention the box of Dancing In The Street I just got, by the way?

Clinton Walker’s classic book on Australian post-punk indie rock, Inner City Sound, came out in 1982 and has been unavailable on the face of the earth for most of the years since.

However, some enterprising preserver of culture has recently seen fit to make available a bound photocopy of the entire book.

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