Just a few Interesting Things: dafont, bnn, the real news, publicbroadcasting, the invisible, and parakey.

dafont- a font site with a good interface for seeing what your text will look like and what it’s licence dictates before downloading.

linux journal article on Ardour- super long, descriptive and still useful despite being written a while ago. still useful bc of the comments that have been posted, keeping it up to date. community organic authorship- just a mini example, but always cool. ardour, fyi, is free and open source multi-track recording software. we’re into it.

blogger news net- news written by bloggers. one amoung a great many blog-and-get-some-of-the-ad-revenue sites, with an international news focus. i got this email bc I have a blogger account (i assume- but not necessarily):

I am the editor at Blogger News Network (www.bloggernews.net). BNN is a group blog on a massive scale, with 100+ contributors. It is our aim to be the Daily Kos of the blogosphere’s political center - minus 80% of the adolescence and 90% of the crazy, and with some common sense thrown in. BNN presents news, analysis and editorial writing from contributors all over the world, and attempts to give space to multiple responsible points of view. Vitriolic sites have a place and they certainly spice up the debate, but they also coarsen the discourse. BNN aims to counter that trend by being a place for respectful discussion and commentary on the events of the day.

The purpose of this e-mail is to invite you to use BNN as a resource in your own blogging. Our high post volume and breadth of coverage means that if you are looking for a blogger’s take on an issue, the odds are pretty good you’ll find what you want and more. (You can access our search box on the BNN main page, or you can just type in http://www.bloggernews.net/index.php?s=Your Search Text) You can find a post to cite with approval, and probably one to heap scorn on, too. We invite both!

you can email the editor from the site about becoming an author.

real news- another news network intending to find balance in the swings of influence and opinion- a tv/internet channel created by citizen videographers who submit video and are paid for what’s chosen. 30-some page business plan that is very convincing, but does leave me wondering what’s holding them up, especially since their budget is so high and they have gotten some impressive corporate and citizen invesment already. not to be at all snarky, because i respect what they’re doing, but i feel like they could at least be blogging regularly, or using one or all of the many video services that already exist to start getting the real news out there. it’s a good goal, but i feel like the hour is getting late, you know? anyway.

justin from publicbroadcasting.ca and the dark knights of the ogo pogo mailing list told me about Real News, and he’s been pretty cool in my knowledge of him, so they may well be on the right track.

touching the invisible at SAT- art/technology exhibit here in montreal, from the Smart Studio in Sweden. here ’till the end of november and it looks like it’s their only north american stop.

blake ross and parakey- blake ross is the super young guy who played a major role in firefox, and parakey is his new project. parakey merges your computer with the web, leaves you in charge of all permissions with the tick of a box. it’s open source thinking, seeing countless layers and stages possible between seemingly inseparable processes. but it’s not fully open source- the dude’s trying the corporate investior route- and it depends on a client side download which, given how much allpeers is annoying me, i’m dubious about, so all told it’ll be interesting to see how parakey works out.