In a recent Utne Reader article, I wrote about crate-digging bloggers who are posting all kinds of obscure and fascinating world music on the web. But I only scratched the surface of the websites doing this kind of excavating. Nathan Salsburg at the self-described music “blob” Root Hog or Die has gone deeper and come up with an amazing list of websites and blogs that run a huge gamut of sounds. Visit the site to check out the whole smorgasbord, but here are a few of my favorite nutshell descriptions:

FarsiTube : Outfitted like that one site with all the videos, Farsitube also has a prodigious music section, with tunes running the gamut from classical, folk, rock (from killer psych to the chintziest and most vapid of ’80s material), to contemporary pop. You kinda just have to jump in and start clicking …

Honking Duck : A digital hillbilly goldmine of banjo-hyper-collector Jim Bollman’s stacks of 78s.

Iranian.com: America might be Ahmedinejad’s “Great Satan,” but he should keep an eye on the electric guitar riffs gracing some of the unbelievably guiltily-pleasurable pop tunes available here.

Juneberry: The Roots Music Listening Room : Lock yourself in your room with a Coleman camper stove and some cans of soup and an internet connection and this website and maybe we’ll see you later.

Public Domain 4 U: The title’s an anticipation of how Prince’s catalog will be described in 50 or so years, but this totally sketchy looking site is actually a nice little stop for some wonderful old-time and blues tunes.

Source: Root Hog or Die

Image by  oddsock , licensed under Creative Commons.

Will the death of journalism mean the end of democracy?  The newest issue of Mother Jones provides us with a rundown of depressing statistics about the state of media:

- 43% of Americans say it would hurt civil life “a lot” if their local newspapers closed.  Yet when asked if they’d miss their paper, 42% say “not much” or “not at all.”

- By one estimate, an entirely Web-based New York Times could generate only enough money to support about 20% of the paper’s current staff.

- The editor of the New York Times Magazine says a typical cover story costs more than $40,000 to produce—and that excludes editing, art, and fact-checking. That’s more than Mother Jones’ story budget for freelance writers for an entire issue.

- The top 10% of bloggers earn an average of $19,000 a year.  For all bloggers, the median is $200 for men, $100 for women.

Source: Mother Jones (article not yet available online)

I’ll list everything. My wife passed away 7 years ago. Our apartment was at Bloor and Dundas. I had 2 children who I thought would help me. Instead they said: "There’s the door."

So begins Homeless Man Speaks, a blog started in October 2006 by Tony Clemens, the titular homeless man, and Philip Stern, his friend of 9 years who helps him type everything up. “Tony was aware of the Internet, though he hadn’t used it—or even seen it,” writes Stern in Spacing magazine.

Among the many blogs about homelessness out there, such as LA’s Homeless Blog and Homeless Family, Homeless Man Speaks stands out by featuring conversations between Stern and Clemens, instead of straight news or advocacy information. The collection of introspective vignettes read as if the two men are standing on the street, in front of the coffee shop where they met; the reader becomes a passerby, walking just slowly enough to overhear an episode.

While Homeless Man Speaks has allowed an otherwise marginalized man to tell his story, the caveat, of course, is to remember not to rely on this type of media for the whole story. Clemens himself points out the limitations of the Internet:

PHILIP: That fire you told me about, the one that’s supposed to have happened yesterday, the one you told me about.

TONY: Yeah the one we were going to write up on the blog.

PHILIP: I googled for a news story about that fire but I couldn’t find anything anywhere.

TONY: Sometimes I think that it should say in the Bible that not everything is on the Internet, if you know what I mean.

Photo of Tony Clemens courtesy Jim Allen, from Irked Magazine.

Tech-savvy men often bathe in the media limelight, from Rolling Stone and New Yorker profiles to the reality TV show Beauty and the Geek, where male nerds fraternize with plastic-looking women. Girl geeks, on the other hand, tend to receive little more media attention than the glow from their monitors. Last month, the New York Times briefly disrupted the media stagnation by reporting on the predominance of female bloggers and Web page designers. That abundance of female representation may be a positive sign, but the article also points out that women hold only 27 percent of computer- and math-related jobs . Even if girls are creating more online content, experts stress “the profound distinction between using existing software and a desire to invent new technology.”

All of the blog posts and online profiles made by women don’t amount to much, according to Nicole Cohen in Shameless magazine, so long as the creators of Web 2.0 continue to be young men like the founders of YouTube, Google, and Facebook. “Access to information and tech knowledge carries with it great political, economic and social weight,” Cohen writes. “If women are left out of the discourse about information technology and new media, you can bet we’re left out of the production and sharing of social and economic power, too.”

One of the problems with encouraging women’s participation in tech fields is the invisibility of tech-savvy women in mainstream media. Geeky guys on Beauty and the Geek and in Judd Apatow films (The 40-Year Old Virgin, Superbad) are celebrated for their nerdiness. Even if they’re not making billions of dollars, the geeky guys are visible, lovable, and have a shot at beautiful women. Meanwhile, their celebrated girl-geek counterparts are nowhere to be found.

The affirmation of IT boys has begun to irk geeky girls, many who want some acceptance—sans make-overs—of their own. In the Winter issue of Bitch (article not available online) Sarah Seltzer writes that Beauty and the Geek encourages beautiful women to “look for the inner worth of all the men around them—not just the beefcake—and value them appropriately.” Men, however, are not encouraged to do the same.

—Lisa Gulya

Image by Mary-Frances Main, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Knight Citizen News Network recently released its Top Ten Rules for Limiting Legal Risk, a guide for bloggers and citizen journalists. The list offers specific advice for following the precepts set by traditional journalism, but it’s tweaked to fit the instant, blogocentric world of the new New Journalists. It's interactive, with a wealth of in-depth explanations, videos, and quizzes.

—Morgan Winters

  Image by dcdailyphotos, licensed under Creative Commons.