Good music from Nashville*: Even if you don’t know what a dobro is, you’ll enjoy this NPR Weekend Edition interview with Jerry Douglas, the dobro-virtuoso. Also, if you’re an Alison Krauss fan, be sure to click on the stream of her funkadelic cover of L.T.D.’s “Back in Love Again (iTunes Link)” off Douglas’ new CD, Best Kept Secret.

*For the next week or so, I’ll be posting some short items about Nashville music that is good but not like the commercial suburban country being featured in New York City this week (although Jerry Douglas will be in New York). It’s music you won’t hear on “the mainstream radio machine,” as my favorite podcaster, Candace Corrigan calls it.

Required reading: “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic.” Key quote: “Restraint is a beautiful thing.”

(via: Seth Godin)

On-demand: Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has a page-one story (it requires a subscription, but I predict it will be a free feature by mid-day tomorrow) about CBS and NBC striking deals for 99¢ on-demand replays of certain programs on Comcast (CBS) and DirectTV (NBC).

Quote:

“Two big TV networks, CBS and NBC, struck deals with cable and satellite providers allowing their viewers to watch popular shows anytime they want, the latest sign of how quickly technology is upending viewing habits and reshaping the industry’s longtime model.”

I am a reluctant Comcast Digital subscriber, but it took six months and four technicians to figure out why I couldn’t access the on-demand feature. The fourth technician was there to fix something else but wouldn’t leave until he figured it out — he took it as a personal challenge. (It had something to do with a bad wire coming from the street to my house).

Perhaps, on a rare ocassion I can see myself using the 99¢ option, but when I read the news I wondered why I’d pay 99¢ for something I could easily grab with the built-in DVR feature on my cable box.

Then I read this quote from the WSJ article:

“Of Comcast’s more than 21 million subscribers, 9.4 million have digital service, most of whom can get video on demand. But only 1.1 million have DVRs.”

Only one-out-of 20 Comcast subscribers have DVRs? Only 5%?

Other than the Internet, I can’t think of a technology that has changed my media habits more than a DVR. I didn’t realize I was so out-there-on-the-edge.

Camp-camp: Dave Winer has an idea called Hypercamp. It’s sort of an open-source newsroom, press conference. Anyone who wants to blog (or, report) it is invited. Anyone who has something to announce can come pitch it. And there is food.

Quote:

You don’t have to be a geek, just a blogger. Bring your laptop. A long table, lots of connectivity, soft drinks, fast food, and get this — if you have a story you want to tell, a product you want to announce, an idea you want to pitch, at each end of the room there are presentation stations, with 15 chairs in front, a podium and projector. You sign up to brief. Any blogger who wants to listen can, or not; their choice.

See you there.

It’s official: It’s 1999 2.0: I may be wrong (it happens all the time), but I’m having a hard time recalling a post-bubble launch of a new (not a dejazine) print magazine specifically for “those involved in the design, development, management and promotion of websites.” I do recall the rise and fall of several such titles during 1999 1.0.

Today, that’s happening (from the press release):

Website Services, Inc., today announced the launch of its flagship publication, Website Services Magazine…. “This is the first offline publication of its kind,” said Managing Editor Peter Prestipino. “There are other magazines that focus on niche aspects of the Web such as development or affiliate programs, or those which provide news or act as a who’s who of the Internet world, but WSM is the only publication that publishes information exclusively on how to effectively and efficiently run a website.”

Topix.net news/blog search: Topix.net has added 15,000 blogs to its “crawling, tagging engine” — and doesn’t segregate the blog results from the “news” results like Yahoo. Searching the word “blogs,” here are the results via Topix.net and Yahoo! news.

I think I’m supposed to say I like the Topix.net way, but I personally prefer the Yahoo! news display on the respective results pages. I think it’s more a usability issue than a philosophical one that is influencing my preference. On some topics, I tend to prefer bloggers as sources rather than traditional news sources. Personally, I like having them in separate lists. Again, this is just a personal preference — I understand and appreciate the argument that leads one to feel all sources should be integrated into one batch of results.

However, in one regard, I see that I am going to be a big fan of the Topix.net approach: I like having news & blog sources aggregated on the RSS feeds of certain keywords I track via Topix.net. This probably makes no sense to anyone else, but for some reason, on a web page, I like separate results. On an RSS feed, I like combined results.

(via: lots of people, including Michael Arrington at techcrunch)