The failure of the New Orleans levees was explicitly and repeatedly predicted. But failure to assign value to the information made it useless.

Technology always affects art, and search technology is no exception. Listening to a band called Tilly And The Wall, I wondered if, consciously or not, their style might have been influenced by search-engine optimization. This after all is a band that features a glockenspiel player and a tap dancer.

Don't be fooled: They may call it country, but the tech is cutting edge. A look inside the process of recording an album in Nashville, with MP3 examples.

"I am predicting 50 years of chaos," says digital media thinker Clay Shirky. Sounds about right, though I'd guess it could be 50 years of chaos crammed into as little as 10 years. Hey, it'll be just like the '90's again.

Discussions of new digital media business models get around to filters pretty fast. But what's the new model filter for mojo? That is, the mystique that makes a large number of people want to buy a piece of pop culture.

"Information wants to be free" strikes me as basically a religious proposition. In the day-to-day world, I think we always decide what's private property and what isn't, and the information/object dichotomy is not the main point.

Not everyone believes the numbers in the widely reported NPD study that claims iTunes is the 2nd-most popular digital music service.

For paid music services to succeed, free doesn't have to be impossible, just inconvenient. iTunes is super-convenient and so feels like a better value than free for its users. But does the value proposition work across generations?

The hotel clock radio is hurting the economy: It's waking millions of us up at the wrong time and making us very cranky.

A useful overview of ways to quiet down a PC on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today (6/2/05).