First Kiva payment back

A few months ago I lend money to an organization in Bolivia through kiva.org. Now I got my first payment back. 8,40USD of 25 dollar. I think after next payment I'm going to loan the money forward.

Cost of war (in money)

Show me the money

thanks.

How UG becomes part of popular culture

Got this really interesting link to a documentary of popular culture for teenagers.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/

See the movie first and then read the rest of this post.

The very same day but earlier I downloaded a program to my computer from Last.fm. This program is synced with my iTunes and then it sends all the data of my playlist to last.fm´s database. Then you can listen the same kind of music from the internet for free. You can also get in touch with people who listen to same kind of music etc..

Nice idea, or at least I thought so before this documentary but now I see this program only as a tool that probes my privacy and collects information of young people and their taste in music. This information is then used to decide what will the next big trend be. So putting it simple, it's trying to see into the future to make more money.

I could be naive and think that by contributing to this system and trying to direct it to a certain direction (genre of music) people would think with their brains not with their mirrors. But when you think about it it's not going to happen. If by some miracle the next trend would be Finnish reggae music that would encourage people not to buy stuff all the time, what would happen? Well, that would be bad business for Viacom and other big networks and that would make them invent a new trend that cherishes the idea of buying stuff.

I believe some trends can be good but the sad thing is that new trends are waiting for us when new spring comes. That means that if every 10th trend is good for the society we have to wait 9 springs before it's here again and even then it's only temporary. I think hippies were ok. They did some good stuff but also some not so smart things. But at least they stopped a war. How long do we have to wait for a movement/trend that actually makes our young people think instead of making them shake their asses on TV? 5, 15 years?

Anyway, I decided to remove the program from my computer since it's main purpose is not very nice according to my values. Often these things we think are free are quite the opposite. By using last.fm's program we give them information. Information is more valuable than gold to these big companies.

I did some research and found out that last.fm is UK based company that was founded 2002. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m (US$280m), making Last.fm the largest European Web 2.0 purchase to date. (wikipedia)

Extra info of Last.fm and it's policies
read this(june 22 2007)

And CBS of course is owned by Viacom. Suprise suprise. They didn't buy this company so they could give teenagers free music! And as you remember from the documentary, they own MTV etc.. So they bought Last.fm to get information. They paid 280 million dollars from this company that is free to use. I wish it was so but it ain't.

(sorry, this post is written in a hurry but hopefully you got the point)