Disqus - Latest Comments for atduskgreg

Re: Recap of the Squirrel Hordes

atduskgreg — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:22:40 -0000

So awesome! Would love to see some screen captures of your debug screens for the detection and classification. What do the squirrels look like to the vision system.

Re: Android Chief First Tweet Sums Up Google’s Problems

atduskgreg — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:05:12 -0000

Appealliing towards people who enjoy tinkering with computers and simultaneously their corporate masters sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's traditional strategy for Windows...

Re: MEGAZORD

atduskgreg — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:56:41 -0000

Dude. Woah. What is that and where did you get it?

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:54:00 -0000

I'll see your hopeful anecdote and raise you a disturbing one. I was talking tonight with a friend who recently graduated from one of the top photo journalism schools about this and her perspective gave me a whole new area to worry about: the training of reporters. Journalism schools are in a state of real panic, she said. They've been painfully slow to adopt to the online world. In her time in school, I helped her learn more about blogging and web technologies than the mainstream of her classes. Their problem is that the field is historically based on apprenticeship. While there's certain technical skills and philosophical principles they can teach you, their main virtue is that they can put you in real newsrooms to do some real work collaborating with more experienced journalists. Where should they be sending students nowadays? There are a few people at papers who get it and are well-prepared for the future, but not everyone can intern with Rob Curley or at Monocle.

The collapse of the papers is going to rip the guts out of the journalism schools both in terms of the opportunities they can offer their students and their actual budgets. My recently-graduated friend said it's already happening, and photo journalism programs are significantly better off than their text-based counterparts since their skills have wider application.

The death of newspapers also means the collapse of the whole tradition and infrastructure for training journalists. If you're a young person who's interested in finding out the truth about the world, who do you go to to learn about that? What tradition do you plug into so you don't have to invent everything from scratch for yourself?

I'd like to take this and rephrase it as an opportunity, but I'm not quite sure how. Maybe laid off journalists should run conferences and training programs for bloggers to do knowledge transfer on some of their tradition. Some of that will happen naturally as former LA Times reporters and such go to work for the Huff Post, et al. I guess part of what I'm saying is that the online world in addition to holding high the values that it has brought to journalism of equality of access and a high degree of interactivity needs to get off its high horse somewhat as it absorbs the talent from the disintegrating newspaper world so that it can learn from they 150 years of tradition and best practices that group embodies.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:52:37 -0000

See, here's where I come off the rails a little bit. I agree that the big papers are in major financial troubles, but I think the idea that they are going to actually completely disappear comes from a little bit too much us vs. them schadenfreude. They may take on a very different form, either as smaller entities or non-profits, and they will probably be fully online, but I don't think the three or four crown jewels of american journalism (NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, etc.) are all going away completely.

We do still need a new model, though, I agree, because it's a much bigger world than it used to be and these guys can't catch everything even in their current state, let alone in their future reduced one. I think the place to start looking is probably the conversation we're having above: try to observe what is so productive about these places newsrooms and then make it easier for places (real or virtual) to continue to exist in the future.

The one element I have a hard time imagining being preserved, though, is the authority of these papers that is so important to their successful reporting on some of the big stories. On the really big stories, you're always going up against huge institutions: governments, corporations, etc. And in these kinds of fights you need more than just the reporters. You need lawyers and politically connected editors-in-chief and you need money. And you need the prestige of a big institution. However Dick Cheney may feel about the NY Times, for a lot of people in politics and other fields, they represent The Fourth Estate -- Journalism as Check on Power. And that makes people think twice about completely strong arming them. It will be a long time, I think, before any blogger achieves that kind of stature or prestige. There's something more than sentimental about the destruction of the kind of histories these papers embody.

Even if someone can solve the collaboration problem we're talking about in the thread above, these institutions play a really important role as institutions and something will need to take their place for journalism to play the civic role we've come to expect from it.

As I've said a few times in this thread, if it turns out that an online model can't keep the NYT in business then that means that the civic value that newspapers provided in in excess of its market value, i.e. if it is possible to fill the consumer demand for news and information without playing the role of Fourth Estate, then we need to find some other way get that civic value, we need some other, likely non-commercial model to fund that stuff. Remember, we really care about it. After September 11th, NPR was the number one morning drive time radio station across the country for months. Maybe we need a public financing model for text-based journalism as well as audio.

The model is not necessarily going to be a commercial one.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:35:56 -0000

That is a good and really hard question that I think gets to part of the core of the issue. The problem is that the newsroom is not about explicit collaboration. It's not like open source where we all get together to scratch some particular common itch. Newsrooms are about ambient collaboration. Multiple reporters on different beats in the same section sit across from each other and ask passing questions, relying on each others' deep knowledge of their beats (and, importantly, the intuitions and contacts that come with that). Further, if one member of the newsroom has a question that cuts across subject matter into stuff covered by other sections, they can just walk over there and ask. I can't find the link right now, but I remember reading about Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the reporters from the SF Chronicle who broke the Barry Bonds doping story, and how they talked with the medicine and science reporters at their paper extensively while working on the story in order to understand the difficult technical underpinnings of the story.

Even at the level of authorship, so many stories are wirtten by pairs or teams of journalists who collaborate to cover a single story as it evolves over time. It's important to distinguish between a single article and a "story". When journalists refer to "covering a story", they mean doggedly following an evolving set of facts or events through an on-going series of articles. This is exhausting fatiguing work and being able to dynamically add additional man power (in research or writing or politicking, wherever it's needed) is extremely helpful and having a close collaborator who believes in the story as much as you do is often essential.

Finally, there's the collaboration vs. competition element. Every reporter in the newsroom wants to be the one to break the big story. Once big stories start to pan out, everyone wants to work on them and be a part of them. This creates an entrepeneurial environment where each reporter is frantically trying to find a lead on a story that's even bigger and more important than their peers, but once someone finds one, it gradually accumulates additional collaborative resources to it and the newsroom comes to together to land it.

I can imagine online collaboration tools that would make this kind of collaboration easier, but it will be some time before they are good enough to be as frictionless as just having a bunch of people sitting in the same room every day for years being paid to work together.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:16:05 -0000

Fred -- It would have been hard for an individual blogger because it was such a collaborative effort. The lead came from someone in the newsroom who covered the city hall beat and had done so consistently for years and in the process created lots of deep contacts without worrying about having to publish stories every week. Another collaborative element related to that is that part of the reason I was running down this story in this way was to preserve the beat reporter's contacts. If he'd showed up at the meeting, the person who'd told him about it would have gotten in trouble and possibly stopped feeding him this kind of information in the future.

If I had been solo, or even a freelancer, the mayor could have strong-armed me more effectively. When my paper's editor called her back over the issue, she was forced to become extremely civil. She might not have cared about alienating me, but my paper was one of the three main news sources in town; she can't completely burn that bridge.

And none of this even includes the collaborative writing and editing process in which a great amount of the communal knowledge of the paper makes its way into the story to make the background better informed.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:48:42 -0000

The problem is that in a world that can't produce a market that keeps the NY Times in business who exactly is commissioning this stuff? There's a large freelance writer's market right now but that mostly consists of writing copy for corporate promotional publications and the like.

The newspapers' problem isn't that they're paying too much for their reporters' health care and retirement. Having the reporters on staff isn't the problem. It's paying enough of them to work together on anything of serious import. And you can't do it as effectively on an as needed basis. Beat reporting, which is the heart of professional journalism, doesn't produce profitable stories predictably and it doesn't work on as-needed basis. It only works because some shlub worked the police blotter beat for ten years out of ambition to work his way up to something better, and he inherited the beat from some similar shlub who had it before and so on.

There are tons of freelance reporters out there right now. But for the most part, they are not the ones who break the big stories. They do lots of really important feature work; they're the ones who follow up on what life is still like in Katrina three years later, etc. They do the human interest stuff and the physically adventurous stuff. But the real grind work is done in newsrooms.

People think the danger here is losing physical newspapers or reducing the total count of reporters, but the real irreplaceable when newspapers collapse will be the end of newsrooms. It's going to take a long time to figure out the education, training, apprenticeship, and collaboration models to equal what is embodied in the modern newsroom.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:57:22 -0000

Pete -- That's a great question and it has a very simple answer that is incredibly relevant to this thread.

VCs don't fund journalists.

There's no chance of a 10x return on investment in journalism. VCs fund technology that has substantial leverage, i.e. where a relatively small amount of work by a small group of people over a short time period can produce monetizable value for a huge number of people over a very widespread area for the foreseeable future.

But serious journalism has no silver bullet. It's always going to be the kind of endeavor where the only way to do it is to get a group of talented well-trained people together and let them work hard at it with enough support day in and day out.

Denial of this fact and the attempt to imagine journalism as a web-scale business is exactly what drives web-utopians to constantly try to answer this question in terms of aggregation: "if we just got the algorithm right then we could transform this pile of blog posts and twitter messages into a piece of investigative journalism". It's like expecting commenters on Instructables to design and implement the Three Gorges damn.

The model you're proposing is a great one for a small business. And I'm sure that in the coming years after the imminent utter collapse of print journalism we're going to see a lot of journalists doing exactly that. They will just not be able to reach the scale both of investigative achievement and reach seen in the golden age of newspapers. It's like, after the fall of the Rome, there were plenty of pockets of lettered civilization across the western world for the next few hundred years, but we still call that period the dark ages.

Conversely, though, they may be able to do some exciting things with data manipulation and with crowd-sourced open research in ways that the NYT and TPM are pointing towards now. I don't want to be completely pessimistic. And the biggest and best of the current journalistic institutions will manage to stick around in some non-profit style public interest form. Watch what happens when the Tribune Company moves to shut down the LA Times in the coming months. That will be a really interesting test case to see if a coalition of wealthy Angelinos can save the paper in a reduced public interest mode or if it collapses completely spewing all of its reporters out to try to do exactly what you're describing here.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:39:33 -0000

Also, by the way, just in case nobody noticed, the NY Times, that paragon of doomed out-of-date old school print journalism, is also, as of the last year, producing the best most innovative uses of the web for journalism. For example, they just this week announced their "Congress API" http://open.blogs.nytimes.c... which "lets developers access information about Congressional representatives and their votes." Just the latest in a series of very innovative data- and interactive-driven initiatives they've done from doing transcript visualizations of the presidential debates and states of the union to graphing the financial meltdown data.

A number of years back that "In the year 2014, the NY Times goes offline" video http://idorosen.com/mirrors... made a big splash and the NYT became Example One of how the old newspaper outlets didn't "get the web" and this would be their downfall. At the time, that was a somewhat fair assessment, since the NYT had much of their content behind a paywall, never linked to outside sites, etc. But, in the last few years, the paper has transformed itself into one of the most creative and prolific producers of cutting edge uses of web technology for news creation and propagation.

That transformation is a really interesting story that not enough people know. It starts with Rob Curley at the Lawrence Journal-World Online. The LJW is a very forward thinking college town paper (run by a near non-profit style family owned business) that embraced the mission of local journalism through web technology with a gusto not seen anywhere else for years. Curley's IMA Keynote awhile back is an entertaining barn-burner and a must listen for anyone interested in this topic: http://itc.conversationsnet... Django was invented at LJW to meet the demands of rapid deadline-driven mini-application development. The transformation of the NYT's digital strategy was lead by LJW alums and other Curley devotees. It started with removing the paywall entirely, including the the complete back archive, and has continued into deep investment in open technology (how many other papers have published major open source software components) and participation. If the NYT can't survive the new information economics created by the web, then that is terminal evidence that the public interest role of newspapers is surplus to their economic value and so must be supported in some other manner, i.e. as a non-profit entity like wikipedia or npr.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:15:30 -0000

Everybody cites Woodward and Bernstein because it's the only example of reporting that most laymen are even remotely familiar with. And by telling my own, very small scale reporting story above, I was trying to point out that while few of us may have Woodward and Bernstein's impact, their method of working is standard operating procedure in professional journalism. It is how important stories are discovered. There's not another way of doing it that anyone has discovered so far (though like I said, the TPM crowd-sourced document research model has exciting prospects).

Every headline you read in the NYT that is surprising, from their coverage of rendition and illegal gov't prisons to their piece breaking Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal is the result of this kind of tenacity. In professional journalism, tenacity is routine; it is institutionally supported; it is mandatory. Granted, as their budgets have collapsed and they've been out-competed for advertising dollars by pseudo-news-o-tainment such as Fox News, much mainstream journalism has become less professional. It's important to distinguish between those two attributes. Just because un-professionalism has become mainstream doesn't mean that professional has become less effective or important.

With regard to be quoted accurately, unless you make your own recordings of your interviews (a highly recommended practice, by the way), you have no idea if you're being quoted correctly. And if the reported is making a recording, then you almost definitely are being quoted correctly. There is major psychological effect of seeing your spoken words on the page in a context created by someone else causing the speaker to experience a sense of denial around having said them. Usually, what that feeling implies is: that's not what I meant, rather than that's not what I said. And that's because if the reporter is doing their job they are not simply transcribing and amplifying your view of things. They are questioning it and running it up against hard facts and data and contrary opinion. They are double checking every one of your claims and even, and especially, your implied claims. They are filling in the picture around you. If you went into the interview hoping to get your message across unchanged, you will not be happy with the result. If the discovering and spreading some portion of the truth on the issue the reporter's covering is important to you then you should "bother". If what you care about is what good the coverage will do you, or getting your own message out directly, then by all means put out press releases instead.

On the other hand, we've all had the experience of reading pieces on areas where we have particular expertise and finding things wrong with those stories. If you find one of those to be especially egregious, that is a great reason to get in touch with the reporter to correct him. You'll more than likely end up being a contact for future stories on that topic, whether quoted or to help with background understanding. If you having topics you care about treated knowledgeably in public matters to you, then speak up to those who are reporting on them. A recommendation, I'm trying to model with my actions here :)

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:42:23 -0000

Pete, the problem with this is very well-captured in Dan's comment above. The very best reporting is almost always done by teams of reporters. Not to mention assignment editors, researchers, copy editors, beat reporters, and photo journalists. You just can't aggregate coverage like that together after the fact. At its best it is cohesive and coordinated. And not just in a weak sense of the story coming out 10% better, but in the strong sense of some stories never being reported at all without that kind of coordination -- the medical beat reporter gets a tip from a local doctor that some of his peers are juicing athletes, etc.

It's not a coincidence that the best two or three papers in the world break almost all of the important stories. There's a huge multiplier effect in concentrating talent and resources, not just for old fashioned economic efficiencies, but for implicit knowledge sharing and explicit improvised collaboration.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:33:17 -0000

The idea that a governor or mayor's own point of view about a story is important goes straight to the heart of what the blog & aggregate model misses over traditional journalism. Someone mentioned Watergate above. Expecting blog & aggregate to replace Woodward and Bernstein implies an expectation that the Nixon whitehouse would have just blogged the Watergate story themselves. Look how well that worked out with the Bush administration. When investigative journalism budgets shrink, an entity with good message discipline can keep incredibly huge disastrous secrets.

Really impressive journalism is about extracting stories that people don't want told. That takes time, money, and institutional support with at least enough firepower to stand up to the institutions that are trying to keep the secrets in the first place.

A small personal example. A few years back, I was working on a story for my local Portland alt. weekly. It was about an unannounced plan the city government was working on to transform an old sports arena. One of the beat reporters on the paper heard about a meeting the mayor was having with a bunch of the players involved. So, I went down to city hall and sat in the meeting room a half hour before the meeting was scheduled to start. In theory, all city council meetings are open to the public. People started trickling in. Major executives from big local corporations and real estate developers, eventually some city council members, and the mayor's staff. When the mayor's chief of staff came in, he got a concerned look on his face, came over, asked me who I was and why I was there, and quickly ran out of the room. A few minutes later, the mayor came in and pulled me aside. She chewed me out for ten minutes about how did I know about this meeting and what was I doing there. She claimed it was a private meeting and I had no right to report anything that went on there. Being well-enough trained as a reporter, I didn't argue with her. I just agreed to her deal that I could stay as long as I didn't print anything that happened in the meeting. Then, I kept really good notes. The next day I wrote up my story in consultation with the rest of the news staff. We decided that some of what happened in the meeting was relevant and, by consulting the paper's lawyer, that it was probably illegal for the mayor to bar the public from the meeting. So, the editor of the paper called the mayor up to tell her that we were running with the story including quotes from the meeting and if she wanted to argue about it, she could come down to the newspaper's office to explain why she'd attempted to intimidate a reporter in order to illegally make a gov't meeting private.

Almost every stage of that story would have been extremely difficult for me to pull off as an individual blogger, from the fellow beat-reporter's contact which had been earned after years covering every aspect of the city's bureaucracy, often in ways that produced no printable stories for that week's paper to the legal and authoritative backing of the paper as an institution (the mayor might not have cared how much she pissed me off, but she certainly couldn't completely burn the bridge connecting her to one of the main journalistic outlets in town). Even the beat aspect of the story is more institution-specific than it seems as first, since one of the reasons that I went on this long-shot controversial story instead of the reporter on the beat, was that I could push some buttons and piss people off without hurting his connections that brough us information; we were working as a team.

Blog & aggregate is at best analysis and at worst printing press releases. In a few very specific cases it can be more, like the crowd-sourced document analysis that Talking Points Memo did to help break the Alberto Gonzales attorney general firing story, it can offer something new in the world of journalism that is extremely exciting. But it is not going to replace the real workaday desperately important public role of journalism on any scale from small to large.

Contrariwise, the old model for funding real journalism is dead and is not coming back. This year is going to finish off a lot of the wobbly papers. A new model for funding this work is going to emerge, but I highly doubt that it will be advertising based. I think that much of it will enter the non-profit sector. The best newspapers, like the NY Times, are almost in that sector already, run as extremely publicly minded operations by rich families. Journalism has social value in surplus of its economic value. That suprlus must be funded in some non-market-driven way or be lost.

Re: Grabb.it TV: Videos for songs popular the week of March 12, 1994

atduskgreg — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:35:32 -0000

Does anybody else remember the rumor that Ace of Base were Natzis or Natzi-sympathizers? I don't know think I ever knew if it was true or not, but it was definitely rampant in my middle school. I remember giving my stepsister a hard time for liking them because of it. Can anyone verify its truth or is it just one of those random memes that spreads for no reason?

Re: http://macintosh-155.local:12547/1996/12/7.html

atduskgreg — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:26:20 -0000

The electronic freedom of information act was signed this week.

Re: Discuss tinydb

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:42:33 -0000

Ah, sorry for the idea duplication here. Now that I've read the full thread, I see that you're already totally on the right track in regards to update and auth!

Having the option for nested fields by sending in strictly validate json or xml sounds great to me as well. I'd love to use tinydb to send around JSPF-encoded music playlists and having nested fields is vital for those: http://wiki.xiph.org/index....

Re: Discuss tinydb

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:06:24 -0000

I notice that the current behavior is that if I POST to _write with _url set to be the url of an existing tinydb entry and any fields set (included in the existing tinydb object or not), my post is successful and the url that's returned redirects me to the tinydb url I passed in as _url, but none of the data is updated. Obviously there are security concerns for letting existing data be changed by any party at any time (especially with the XSS issues others have pointed out), but once you add an authorization layer (something as simple as basic auth might do the job) updating in this manner would be a great feature.

Re: Discuss tinydb

atduskgreg — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:55:16 -0000

This is awesome! I was wondering if there's anyway to do update? For example if I POST to an existing tinydb url will it add the new fields/update the existing ones?

Re: http://macintosh-155.local:12973/tmpl/

atduskgreg — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:05:40 -0000

Re: All posts for a forum?

atduskgreg — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:31:24 -0000

Cool. Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea approximately when the update will go through? It's kind of an essential feature for my project and it would be nice to be able to schedule around it. Thanks!

Re: Fluxtumblr

atduskgreg — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:06:36 -0000

This does look interesting. The other nice thing they're doing that I'm always shocked not to see more of in concert films is cutting to the music. It makes for such a visceral connection to the music and definitely contributes to that sense of cleanliness you mentioned.

Re: Fluxtumblr

atduskgreg — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:59:20 -0000

I don't know. I'm not that into the "raw and rockin'" songs on In Rainbows. They feel very undercooked compared to both the really restrained funky stuff like All I Need and Reckoner as well as the classic guitar songs of The Bends-era when this kind of thing used to be the band's specialty. The hooks are weeks, the structures are flat and undramatic. This style is obviously fun for them (just look at how good of a time Thom is having on the drums in that video), which is a nice change after how serious they were for a while there, but it feels like treading water to me. One of the few ways Radiohead could sink into irrelevance would be to be seduced by the comfort of this kind of thing away from what must be the much harder process of writing songs that push new stylistic directions while still hitting hard on hooks.

Re: Fluxtumblr - Making The Nature Scene

atduskgreg — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:19:41 -0000

I definitely think you're right about the power of that sense of community and it's presence in early 80s NY. But there's two caveats: first of all, don't get any fantasies, the people in that scene were very self-conscious -- they had a great appreciation for themselves as Important Artists or Budding Stars. I mean, we're talking about a world that included both Madonna and Glen Branca, for goshsakes.

Second: that feeling of a tight-knit community where Things Are Really Happening is just rare. There's a reason we can name most of the places it's happened recently: from SF in the 60s to Manchester in the 80s to Seattle in the 90s, etc. The blend of enthusiasm and quality that's required to get a bunch of really great people doing strong work in a particular field but without the self-consciousness unfettered ambition that makes things ugly is really delicate.

I might be biased, but I happen to think it's going on in Portland right now. There's a ton of great bands many of whom have national reputations. There are even more really good bands that are loved to a greater or lesser extent locally. Everyone pretty much knows and likes each other.

I feel like the only reason that the scene doesn't get more attention nationally as a coherent scene is because of how much musical diversity it includes:

The Decemberists, Shins, Modest Mouse, Malkmus, Quasi, Spoon, Thermals, YACHT, Menomena, The Gossip, M Ward, Blitzen Trapper, Mirah, The Joggers, Talkdemonic,Tara Jane O'Neil, The Chromatics, Panther, New Bloods, Builders and Butchers, Nice Nice, Au, Copy, Horsefeathers, White Rainbow, and on and on.

We really have a significant portion of the contemporary indie scene. And given our size compared to a New York or other "major city" the density is incredibly high. I'd also square our lesser known bands off against any city's around the world. Go to a random show or house party here and you'll see people who like each other making better music than you'll find pretty much anywhere else.

The self-conscious snarky success-obsessed thing may get here one day and it is definitely presumptuous to compare us to the NY of SY, Talking Heads, Blondie, et al, but for now we don't have anything like New York's problems and I think we have the best music anywhere.

Re: Fluxtumblr

atduskgreg — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:57:17 -0000

Can you believe they were playing this kind of thing in front of the Lollapalooza crowd? I don't think any band this far out has ever been as popular as SY was in the wake of Bull in the Heather.

Re: My mp3 blogging (continued)

atduskgreg — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:54:39 -0000

If I may be so immodest, I would suggest using my site http://grabb.it as an easy way to publish an mp3 blog that you can then re-syndicate to your tumblr (and anywhere else you want). Grabb.it lets you search for music and listen to the songs that other people are talking about. Then, when you find something you like, you can write a post about it right there on the page and we'll send your post to your own mp3 blog either on Grabb.it (mine's here: http://grabb.it/users/greg ) or your existing tumblr or blogger blog (mine's here: http://idfdz.tumblr.com ). We use an embedded player so your readers can listen right in line and provide mp3 permalinks so the ones who want can download the tracks for offline listening. I think it might be just what you're looking for...