links for 2009-10-28

Links and quoting direct excerpts is good for the whole media ecosphere

After more than two hours of debate, council members voted 12-0 to approve the $7.25-million contract that would move all 30,000 city employees to Google's so-called cloud over the coming year.

Where is here? (City? State? Neighborhood?) How do you translate that to search? Outside.in tries: For the past six months, our team has been working incredibly hard on an entirely new platform for outside.in, one that allows true geographic search at lightning speed. It went live on the site late last week. Now every page at outside.in contains two search fields: "what" and "where." This lets you do all kinds of queries that are impossible on other platforms that aren't natively aware of geography. You can do Radar-style queries: show me everything related to "crime" or "playgrounds" within one mile of my home address. You can search an entire neighborhood: "music" or "condos" in Adams Morgan, DC. Or you can search an entire city.

Terrific profile of Gillis. EXCERPT: He uses just two programs: Adobe Audition to cut up and manipulate individual samples, and AudioMulch to turn samples into loops and then combine loops into songs. For Gillis, the first stage in the creation of a Girl Talk song is the easiest one: listening to tons of music, whether it’s the local hip-hop station or his parents’ old James Taylor records, keeping an ear out for possible samples, anything from the perfect half-second squeal of guitar feedback to a piano intro or percussion breakdown that he can pluck out and turn into a loop. (While working on Feed the Animals, he collected 8,803 samples, which he sorted into sixty-nine different folders on his laptop.)