Today is the day!  If you haven’t already click on the Bum Rush Now button in the post just below this one.  It’s just 99 cents to tell the RIAA where to go.

For far too long now the big record labels that comprise the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have abused their customers and their suppliers, the musicians. They charge too much money for product, and provide a lot of crap in return. And not nearly enough of that money gets back to the poeple who created the content that makes the business possible. Now a group of podcasters are trying to organize an effort to show that the RIAA is obsolete and unnecessary. Mark Yoshimoto Nemkoff of Pacific Coast Hellway created Bum Rush the Charts. The idea is to pick one band that has made their music podsafe (available to podcasters to use on their shows free of charge), and get as many people as possible to buy one particular song on one day to try and drive the song to the top of the iTunes chart, ahead of all the stuff that the RIAA is putting out.

The band that was chosen is Black Lab and their song Mine Again. Chrisopher Penn of the Financial Aid Podcast has set up a special iTunes affiliate account and all the commissions from purchases through that link will go to the Student Loan Network iTunes account. Black Lab has also committed half of any money they make to the fund as well. So for $.99 you tell the RIAA that they can take a hike, get a great song and contribute to help some kids education. All of this is going to happen on Thursday March 22, 2007.  I’ll add the appropriate link here on Thursday morning so make sure you come back to this post then and buy the song.  thanks

The very first AutoblogGreen podcast went live this morning.  My editor Sebastian Blanco and I will be doing these every couple of weeks and in the first one, we talk about some of the new green cars that debuted at last weeks Geneva Motor show and then run I interview I recorded with Martin Eberhard.  Martin is the CEO of Tesla Motors, maker of the new Tesla Roadster electric sports car.  You can find the podcast at this page.

Listening to the Canadian Podcast Buffet, Bruce Murray finally revealed the truth:

Perfectionism is procrastination disguised as quality control

There are several new podcasts available since I last put a note up here. Max has recorded a couple of MewzikCasts including one that is mostly christmas music last week. However, it’s totally non-traditional Xmas stuff. Go check it out. Also the the Ypsi school board podcasts continue. This week there’s two parts featuring the discussion of the Braves nickname at Ypsi High. Steve Pierce also has a video of the meeting up over at his site.

In recent days I’ve published a couple of new podcasts. First up is is the latest MewzikCast. Max recorded episode 21 last weekend and it features Danko Jones, Angel Vivaldi, and Chance. I also posted the recording of the this week’s Ypsilanti School Board Meeting. I lost the last five minutes because my recorder was full, but nothing much exciting happened then. There was some discussion of access by military recruiters to students. Apparently the recruiters had been getting essentially free reign to talk to students in the high school cafeteria and a new policy was going to be proposed to limit that access. It turns out there was already a policy in place, but no one was aware of it or enforcing it. There are limits on the access of employment recruiters to students in the school and the policy also applies to military recruiters. There was also a report from the community vision committee. The committee developed a vision for the Ypsilanti Schools and there is some good stuff there that I’ll right more about later. You can hear the audio portion of the report at the podcast site.

We’ve just posted a MewzikCast #20, featuring a new song from Ethereal, a classic from Chance and 3 brilliant songs from That Guitar Man from Central Park. Go check it out!

Max recorded a new MewzikCast last night featuring Uncle Seth, the MudMen and the Supersuckers. The MewzikCast has a new logo and a CafePress store is now open with stuff featuring the logo. Go check out the show.

The podcast of the meetings of the Board of Trustees for the Ypsilanti Public School District is now live. You can find it http://ypsischools.podshow.com/. The audio of the meeting is uncut and unedited. I’ll be trying to record all the public meetings of the board and posting on podcast site. Podshow provides free podcast hosting services. You can leave comments or discuss the events on the site by registering. You can listen to the audio on the site by simply clicking on the Play It button on the left hand side.
If you click on show archives you can will find icons for various audio players like iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. If you click on the icon of your favorite player the podcast will open in that player.

Finally if you want all the recordings automatically downloaded as they become available, you can subscribe with the orange xml button. Just click and drag the button to the podcatching software of your choice. You can use iTunes, Juice, Doppler and other software for getting podcasts. If you do this the podcatching software will periodically check the feed for new recordings and automatically download them and install them into whichever audio player you use. This works on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. You can learn a bit more about podcasting in this article on podcastalley.com. The podcasts are absolutely free and are just straight mp3 files. That means that you can listen to them on any digital audio player, not just iPods. You can also listen on the computer, on a cell phone that plays mp3s, or burn to a cd.

Subscribe to the podcast with this link YPSD Board Meetings
If anyone wants to assist in this project by volunteering to record some of the meetings or record meetings from the other local districts (Willow Run and Lincoln) please let me know.

… You’re making a good start on understanding. Always question everything, especially your most closely held beliefs. There is an excellent interview with Paul Kurtz (founder and chair of the Center for Inquiry) on this week’s edition of Point of Inquiry. During the interview he talks about free thought and inquiry and emphasizes that people should question their most cherished beliefs above all. If they don’t stand up to scrutiny then you should look for other answers. It is definitely worth 25 minutes of your time.