Web Watch

Another music site to play with: 8tracks.com.

This Internet radio lets you create eight-song playlists from your collection, publish them on the site or a personal webpage. You can share them with friends through Facebook. You can add descriptions and art. It’s legal. The licensing fees have been paid.

Time magazine named 8tracks to its list of the 50 Best Websites of 2011.

David Porter, a veteran of the online music world, founded the company in 2006. The site launched in 2008.

According to its vision statement: “8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture of the 1990s through today. DJs share their talent in taste making, providing exposure for artists. Listeners get a unique blend of word-of-mouth sharing and radio programming — long the trusted means for music discovery — on a global scale.”

Peter Kafka in Business Insider called it “our favorite new service” shortly after the site launched.

Here’s one mix we loved http://8tracks.com/maystephen/la-enorme-distancia.

Web Bits

They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve, by Douglas Quenqua

From Valley Girls to the Kardashians, young women have long been mocked for the way they talk.

Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. Right?

But linguists — many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude — now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize. Read more ...

A Mexican Education, by Bonnie Palifka

Monterrey, Mexico: I have come to the conclusion that growing up in cold-war America was a very privileged experience. As an economic historian, I am aware that much of humanity's history, like much of the present, consists of war, conquest, violent exploitation, and general nastiness. Most of this unpleasantness has been a result of economic ambition.

Today, the situation in northern Mexico, where I live and teach, is fed not only by the demand for illegal drugs in the United States and the ease of purchasing powerful weapons just across the border, but also by the masses of desperate, urban poor in Mexico who see no hope and no legitimate economic opportunity. At the same time, they observe grotesque wealth among their country's elite and in the upper echelons of the criminal organizations. Read more ...