Day: August 23, 2004

I had MTV on in the background this morning as obscure Olympic coverage on Bravo and MSNBC was a bit lacking. Among the videos that flew by was an Ashlee Simpson video, which I’m sure isn’t new but it was new to me. I kept thinking one thing over and over while listening to the video for “Pieces of Me”: Jill Sobule.

Jill Sobule is an obscure almost-mainstream pop/folk girl whose big hit was “I kissed a girl” and also sung “Supermodel” on the Clueless soundtrack. She’s a pretty amazing artist and the stuff that has never hit the airwaves is so much better. I’ve got all but one of her albums and have seen her a few times at little coffee houses and college campuses.

I haven’t heard Ashlee Simpson’s entire album, but a few snippets remind me a lot of Sobule, while overall she’s got a sound quite her own.

If Tim O’Reilly is doing it, you can be sure that it’s probably a few years ahead of its time. In that case, in a few years I should expect that most of not all college professors will be rolling their own textbooks from a vast catalogue of content.

I’m a college student, and I’ve had to pay for my fair share of really expensive textbooks that have either sucked beyond repair or that I’ve just not used. That said, I hope that someday my textbook comes from SafariU.

The full article at Business 2.0 is going to be behind the paying subscriber firewall for another month or so, but it’s an excellent read. (When I subscribed it cost me all of a buck an issue.)

When in doubt, follow the alpha geeks.