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Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.

While the network gives people a voice that can be used en masse to try to affect change, the resulting proliferation of news sources has some very real challenges. It can fracture and lessen the impact of any particular voice and, because information can come from anyone and anywhere, it is hard to verify...

The world lost Walter Cronkite, who represented the TV news age. Now it's the Digital Information Age and the network is changing everything. Think about how much Cronkite had seen in his 92 years and then think about how the last few probably eclipsed all of the previous decades in terms of accelerated change, due to the proliferation of so many new outlets (cable and Web sites) and online tools...

In this new article, I've isolated three key traits we seek in journalism--expertise, diversity, and debate--and suggest how we might elicit them from the general public without mediation by journalists. The exercise is an example of the kind of practice that could emerge from a combination of new technologies and new habits.

The original practice and promise of open source software is unique. The software experience cannot be ported whole-hog into other areas such as sharing songs or organizing public forums. It's worth looking at what goes into creating open source software, and what unique traits of software make the open source process work well there.

Imagine CNN for the broadband era. A real time news network with bureaus/beats all around the world. Best of all, we're building it on the free or cheap.

The entertainment industry doesn't realize that there are two very different pirate profiles.

Creative Commons is more dependent than ever before on the funds of individuals. More and more people these days are grabbing pictures, text, and other random goods they find online and using them in their own presentations or creative efforts; some of us even build businesses on open contributions. All of us should be promoting the Creative Commons, which has provided licenses to support such sharing in 50 countries and is working with people in many more.

Rich Gordon, Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, discusses the Knight Foundation Scholarship for working developers to attend a one-year Master's program in Journalism. Gordon discusses the current trends in news and technology, and how developers will play an important role in the continued evolution of "news".

Yesterday's blog "Don't say the Internet has changed elections" was all about how elections still rely overwhelmingly on mainstream broadcast media. But an interesting inverse is that the mainstream broadcast media also rely on elections.

Dr. Andrew Weaver may be one of the most famous people you've never heard of. Weaver, a professor at the University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, is one of the world's leading experts on climate modeling. He was served as lead author for last year's ground-breaking report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and when the Discovery Channel needed someone to analyze the potential impact of their "Project Earth" geo-engineering schemes, they turned to Dr. Weaver for help. On the heels of the recent World Wildlife Federation report on vanishing sea ice, we thought it might be a good idea to chat with Dr. Weaver about the current state of the art in climate modeling, the political realities of effecting carbon reduction, and why certain proposed geoengineering ideas terrify him.