Fifty People, One Question: New York from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

We asked the same question and it took us somewhere new. Gone were the lazy days of summer. A cool breeze swept the streets with leaves under foot and the familiar hustle of the city. Welcome to autumn in New York.

It’s a simple question and the answers can lead us anywhere. So go ahead, ask yourself…

Visit http://fiftypeopleonequestion.com and post your response.

Take Away
Watch this when you’re looking for inspiration; and when you need a refresher on the types of people you could possibly be designing for.

Hi everyone, Ira Glass here. It’s a sad fact of life that our free podcast and streaming aren’t really free. They cost the public radio station we work at $108,000 a year. That’s just for bandwidth. That’s not the cost of servers, or people to update the website, or anything else.

If you’re someone who listens here all the time, or who gets the free weekly podcast, your listening is paid for by all the people who contribute to Chicago Public Radio. They’re carrying you and everyone else who listens online.

Might you consider chipping in? A $5 or $10 contribution would cover all the listening you could possibly do in a year, plus a bunch of freeloaders who’ll never pitch in. If you’re feeling generous—and love merch—$50 will get you a poster from our last tour; $75 will get you a This American Life kite; $100 will get you the Chris Ware Lost Buildings DVD; $500 will get you all of those, plus our love. Okay, that last part’s a lie. You have our love already. Expressed in the form of a documentary radio show.

First off, I whole heartily support This American Life. If you listen to this show, DONATE HERE. If you haven’t heard the show, check it out here. It has been sad recently, to see some of my friends lose their jobs around me. But, I have been through that before during the .com era. I have never seen this sort of widespread job loss though. It is now truly heartbreaking to see public institutions like PRI suffering from this shitty economy.

I do think there is a better way for PRI’s This American Life to stay afloat. By licensing their content as creative commons, and allowing users to distribute it themselves through various social web techniques (peer-to-peer, mirrored sites, blog posts embedding the content, etc) , TAL would reduce their bandwidth costs to almost $0.00. This would allow donations from the public to support the people actually producing the content for the show. Evan Prodromou, the co-founder of WikiTravel, also brings to light this point in a comment on their site [read more from Evan here].

TAL already has a good hand in new media; distributing it’s content through podcasts and on their website archive. My hope is that the tough times that we are experiencing, will help bring to light other possibilities that new media has to offer. I don’t think I would listen to them weekly, if it weren’t for my ability to listen to them when I please. I hope these financial constraints that we are seeing, will help bring about change in business models that people may have been apprehensive about before.

With TAL being a well respected show with a large following, that is partially supported by the public, making these changes shouldn’t affect their bottom line as much. Supporters of TAL will help see them through with their donations. While reducing overhead costs should be able to help them retain staff in these tough times and keep the podcasts free for the users. I for one would give them twice as much as my initial donation, if I knew that they were taking the steps necessary to reduce overhead, and focus on what matters- the programming.

TAL’s wikipedia page even brings the podcast funding issue to light. It mentions how another popular show, Democracy Now, is able to distribute it’s podcast without incurring the added bandwidth cost.

For now, I’m hoping that this will only be the start to an ongoing dialog. I’ve written TAL and asked them for a comment on this matter; and I’m hoping that they will respond.

In the mean time, we wish This American Life all the best of luck. We heart you, and you have our support.

UPDATE: This article has been edited as originally we thought TAL was distributed through NPR.

UPDATE: There is also a discussion on this matter on their Facebook page here.

Lawrence Lessig on the Colbert Report, 1/8/09:

“Artists have gotten no more money, businesses have not gotten more profit, and our kids have been turned into criminals.” – Lawrence Lessig

I agree with Lessig. Remixes and mashups aren’t going away. It’s time that Congress developed ways to address the new medium, rather than fight it. Artists including Yo Yo Ma have warmed to the idea, and encourage remixes of their work. Great collabs crop up daily on the music blogs and beyond. See last week’s Jaydiohead; a Jay-Z and Radiohead mashup by Minty Fresh Beats that, despite what Pitchfork had to say, had people including the likes of Carson Daly talking it up.

I enjoyed hearing Lessig briefly explain his “hybrid economy” theory. Hybrid economies are seemingly more prevalent than we think. This blog is a hybrid. Particularly if we chose to sell ad space on it. So we feature content from other places like Comedy Central on this blog which is built off of Wordpress – a platform that I did not partake in the creation of. When the copyrighted content is fused with the editorial I write, it creates a new piece of work with additional opportunities for revenue.

I believe that artists should get paid for their work and all derivatives thereof. Just as Comedy Central tracks the embed of the above video, and Wordpress created the backbone of this blog, each creator deserves a fair share of what is rightfully theirs. If Congress could learn to move forward with that idea instead of fighting the very idea of a collabration, remix, mashup, or hybrid project…well…that would be good.

Earth911 just asks you what you want to recycle and where you are located; and it does the rest.

Recently I was organizing my medications and realized that a lot of them had expired. People used to recommend flushing expired meds down the toilet to prevent children, pets, and others who might abuse them from getting access. It’s recently been discovered that water supplies have trace amounts of medications in them because of this; so flushing is no longer the recommended form of disposal. I wasn’t sure what to do with my meds, so I looked up online about how to properly dispose of them.  Within two clicks on Earth911,  I found some great resources on what to do.

Click here to see their section on medication waste disposal.

Of note, Earth 911 also has a business arm as well. Their business site includes information on waste assessment, recycling, green purchasing, energy conservation, etc.

Earth 911 is a simple and effective resource for finding information on all sorts of ways to reduce, reuse and recycle. They are now the first place I check before throwing something in the trash; and if I question whether or not an item can be recycled.