palewire

One of my favorite mashup producers, Mark Vidler, has apparently decided to call it quits. If you visit his Web site, you’ll find a free-to-download compilation of some of his more notable creations. I recommend checking it out.

In an email blast he sent out last week, Vidler suggested that he may go even further, posting an exhaustive collection of all his work online. I hope it happens. But, failing that, this set is a good retrospective. It includes some of my favorites (”The Weather Episode,” “Shannon Stone”), though there are still some great tracks missing (”Jet Lady Joe”).

Five years or so after the online bootleg fad got going — oh, boom selection, we were once young! — the novelty has certainly worn off. But I think Vidler’s best work holds up well.

A good Go Home Productions track is greater than the sum of its parts. When Vidler introduces hip-hop to a Rolling Stones riff, it doesn’t feel like a campy gimmick (See: Girl Talk). It’s as if a sort of pop vertigo has set in and you’ve hallucinated your way into an alternative universe.

I think that’s largely due to Vidler’s skill at songcraft, something you don’t hear often accredited to pop artists who build their work from other musicians’ primary materials. Cut and paste may be easy, but doing it this well ain’t.

A ritual stop on my regular tour of DC blogs is The Worldwide Standard, an online outpost of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard.

Even if you’re not a DC newsjunkie, you’ve probably come across TWS’s editor, Bill Kristol, at one time or another. He’s on cable news all the time, serving as one of the Bush Administration’s leading supporters.

I like to follow the site’s blog, which is tended by editor Michael Goldfarb and a team of bloggers, to keep tabs on conservative opinion. The content has an interesting focus on military matters, so it’s also a good way to skim my way into what’s going on in the circle of military bloggers (”milbloggers”) that have bubbled up in Washington over the past couple of years.

One of the site’s regular features is a post called “Required Reading” that provides a short list of links and maybe a picture or video.

In the spirit of a previous post I made analyzing the links to online outlets offered by one of TWS’s political opponents, I wrote a script this afternoon to fetch all of the TWS’s “Required Reading” lists and add up what sources we’ve been pointed to the most.

If you click here, you can download a spreadsheet ranking the different sources. It totals all the links from posts they’ve tagged as Required Reading, which stretch back to February of this year.

I’ve eliminated all of the internal links to Weekly Standard’s own material, so those aren’t even in the running.

At the top of the list is the Washington Post, followed by a number of publications with a reputation for conservative editorializing. Fellow Rupert Murdoch properties, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal finish ahead of the NYTimes. And a number of military-oriented organizations, foreign policy wonks and blogs pepper the rest of the list. The national security blog at Wired and BillRoggio.com have been particularly popular. You’ll also find a couple regional newspapers and a few other oddballs. Unlike my previous study, there are, sadly, no referrals for my employer, The Center for Public Integrity (Hey, guys. You might like my military aid database!).

Any thoughts? Anything I screwed up? Overlooked?