Google to put newspaper archives online

If you’ve ever tried to look up a news article written before 1996, it’s as though those events never happened — my few articles from prior to the Web exploding onto the scene posted here are my only early articles online … for now.

Following in the footsteps of its earlier moves to digitize book content (but hopefully avoiding some of the missteps that attracted the ire of some publishers and authors), Google is digitizing older newspapers and putting them online. The goal, of course, is yet more content they can put ads alongside, although some newspapers are looking forward to selling people reprints of classic issues.

Although Google is starting with the largest newspapers, the company says it plans to reprint smaller newspapers as well, and is working with microfilm companies to accomplish that.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see my old work from the News Messenger or Dear Newspapers online (and I’m not entirely sure if I want to see all those articles again — I had a bumpy first few years as a writer and as a reporter), but I can certainly see the value to an informed citizenry whose digital memory, at the moment, only extends back a maximum of 13 years.

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Michael Franti and Spearhead – “Say Hey”

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Liz Phair and The Matrix

Not great art, but consciously so.

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Black Kids – “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You”

Fun song. I’d love to hear this covered as a more traditional rock and roll tune.

(more…)

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The first word

This afternoon, in the immortal words of Sir Mix-a-Lot, I “stopped at Taco Bell for some Mexican eatin’.” James took to it like, well, a kid to messy food, as you can see.

This was necessarily followed by a bath.

Lucky and Hanna came in to see what was going on and James took a break from playing with his armada of bath toys to stand up and see who it was.

“Cat,” he announced, articulating it loudly and clearly as he sat back down.

He’s been working on “cat” for a while now, but the T phoneme has escaped him until now, turning “cat” into “caaaaaaaaaaaah.” Not today. Today, it’s official: He’s got his first word, and it’s “cat,” with a T, thank you very much.