Curated by interesting people

Ian Shepherd is a mastering engineer, Blu-ray/DVD author and musician. He runs Mastering Media, dedicated to making things look and sound great, and the Production Advice website where he helps people unlock the potential of their music. He is passionately opposed to the so-called CD 'Loudness Wars', and in 2010 founded Dynamic Range Day to help raise awareness of the issue. You can connect with Ian on Twitter, where he spends far more time than is sensible.

Video

I can't choose. Here are three:

Jill Bolte-Taylor - My Stroke Of Insight
 

Jill is a neuro-scientist who suffered a massive stroke. In this talk she describes that experience and the insight it gave her. This video is great, but contains "spoilers" for one of the best books I've ever read - if you're prepared to take my word for it, just go ahead and buy it instead. Both are fascinating and deeply moving.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of Pentatonics

Music is often called a universal language - in this video Bobby MsFerrin demonstrates the truth of that. I love this video so much I wrote a blog post about it.

I Met The Walrus
 

"In 1969, the 14-year-old Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room for a quick chat. It went like this..."

Music

In 2004 Brian Wilson finally released a re-recording of his unfinished masterpiece "SMiLE", intended to be the successor to "Pet Sounds" (1966). Great as it was, it uses modern instruments and recording techniques, and crucially, it doesn't have the Beach Boys singing on it. Luckily, a group of mind-manglingly dedicated fans have used out-takes and fragments from the original recording sessions to create this amazing reconstruction of the way it might have sounded sounded originally.

The 2004 version is superb, but this version is simply magical.

http://www.earcandymag.com/purplechicksmile-2005.htm

Photo

This is an "interactive" 3D image of the moment of Obama's inauguration, constructed from over 600 crowd-sourced images. This was a bittersweet moment even at the time, remembering Labour's 1997 election in the UK - I'm an optimist and still have my fingers crossed, though. You'll need to install Silverlight to view it, but it's worth it.

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/

Website / article

It's easy to be sceptical or cynical about online campaigns and petitions, but Avaaz genuinely seems to be getting results on issues I care about.

Twitter

@timprebble

I've found more cool things via Tim's feed than any other - like the "Walrus" video above, for example. He has his own "Curated by" post here.