June 25, 2005

Hyperlinks for iTunes

Here's something simple: why doesn't iTunes link to the web? While writing yesterday's post I really wanted to find the webpage from which I downloaded the Malcolm Gladwell talk that inspired the idea so that I could link to it. In order to do so, I had to go to the IT Conversations home page, do a search, click a couple of times, and decide which of two Gladwell talks were the right one.

It should be as easy to get from a track in iTunes to a webpage related to that track as it is to get an mp3 on the web into iTunes in the first place: it should only take one click. It would also be really easy to accomplish. If there was a "URL" item in the id3 tags, iTunes could then use it to provide links to the web. Bands and podcast-makers could fill these in with their homepages or pages specific to each track. If empty, the links could be auto-populated with the page from which the download originated by iTunes itself.

With podcast subscription capability soon to come it seems inevetiable that iTunes will become more and more connected to the web. The process began when it became a user agent in the first place in order to implement the Music Store. And this seems like a pretty obvious next step.

Note: It's not nearly as good as Apple doing it, but this would probably be pretty easy to implement hackishly right now via an iTunes plugin that searched the song's comment field for a valid url and then added an "open link in browser" item to its contextual menu.

Tagged: itunes, mp3, music, podcast, id3, tags, metadata, url, apple

Posted by Greg at 8:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 24, 2005

Why Learning Art Leads to Bad Art

Anyone who's ever taken or taught an art class knows that art education is at best more complicated than other kinds of organized learning. James Elkins, a brilliant art historian and professor of visual theory at the Art Institute of Chicago has even convincingly argued that Art Cannot Be Taught at all. I think that one of the reasons for this difficulty, at least in serious college and graduate level art education, has to do with the emphasis on teaching students how to talk about their work and evaluating them on how well they do so.

In a talk on Human Nature he gave at Pop! Tech 2004, Malcolm Gladwell told the story of a sociology experiment in which college students were given free posters to put up in their dorm rooms. In exchange, the students had to agree to live with the posters on their walls for three months. The students were divided into two groups. The first group was sent alone into the room with the potential posters, told to pick whatever poster they wanted, and take it home. The second group was given the same instructions with the addition that, before taking their poster home, they had to explain why they picked it.

When the three months were up, it turned out that the students in the first group still liked their posters. They'd largely picked reproductions of impressionist paintings and suchlike. The second group, who had to explain why they liked the posters they were taking, hated them, couldn't wait to take them down. They'd chosen hang-in-there-kitty-style inspirationals and pictures of sunsets. In other words, they'd chosen posters for which they could easily explain their affinity: 'it's pretty', 'it's happy'. Having to articulate their reasons for liking something had changed their criteria for choosing from whether or not they liked it to whether or not they could think of something to say about it, two criteria between which there is no strong reason to expect a correlation.

I think something very similar happens in most art education. As a student, you make work with a giant neon "Why?" hovering over your shoulder, always thinking about how you'll explain the things you make, communicate their meaning, in critiques and artist statements, and residency applications. The skill you master is being able to make work about which you are good at talking. This is not the same as mastering the ability to make work the even you like, let alone anyone else. I am very good at talking about working as a waiter at a a french dessert shop, but that doesn't mean that working there is the thing I most enjoy doing.

In the real art world, the artists that succeed are not necessarily the ones that are best at explaining why they make the things they do. Often times they are the ones who either are completely incapable of talking insightfully about their own work or intransigently refuse to do so, Jackson Pollack or Mathew Barney. The division of labor is split between people who make work that is liked (artists) and people who eplain why we like the work we do (critics). In my own experience both as an art student and an avid amateur, I've found that the items amongst my own work that I like best in the long run are the ones that just pop into my head as things I'd like to see rather than well-thought out concepts about what would make good or, even worse, interesting or meaningful work.

I'm not trying to advocate for unfiltered stream-of-consciousness in art making or the power of intuition or anything like that. The issue is simply articulability: there is plenty of good art that for which there is no pre-existing pitch and for which had the artist tried to come up with one, they could never have made the work. As Gladwell so effectively points out, one of the biggest obstacles to knowing what things we actually like are the things we think we like or those think we should.

Tagged: Malcolm Gladwell, art, education, criticisim, James Elkins, human nature, intuition

Posted by Greg at 12:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 21, 2005

Borenstein's Law

Around the time of my birthday in February, my dad came up and visited me in Portland. We had a great couple of days doing things in the city and spending time together. We don't always get along famously, but this time we did. One of the things we did while he was up here was start him a blog.

He's always written. Fiction, movie reviews, essays, whatever is on his mind. He's got one almost finished novel, one completely finished one, and enough insight squirelled away in old Word Perfect documents to make a Borenstein Reader not the worst buy in the college bookstore. He's been a defense attorney for more than thiry years from the Manson case through countless death penalty defenses and a successful argument in front of the California supreme court. One of the things he writes about is the law.

But he's never really had a public venue for any of it, so he wanted a blog. I helped him set one up on Blogger with the name he had all picked out for it: Borenstein's Law. Then months passed with no posts. I subscribed to the feed, but it stayed empty, until today.

I am not my dad's most generous critic -- he gives me his fiction to read and it starts fights -- but I have to say that this first essay is terrific. It takes on one of the central questions raised by his substantial experience in the criminal justice system, as he puts it, "Why our clients act the way they do?" Another way to say that would be: What is the origin of crime? A tough, if not outright intransigent topic that he takes on with clarity, insight, and, hard as it is for me to believe, wit.

So what's his answer to the question? I'll let him tell it:

It boils down to what I have called Borenstein's Law: our clients are more likely than others to act in ways contrary to their best interests. That is how they have become our clients and that is why they often lose their cases, and come to a bitter end.

And in reality, most of us have acted impulsively against our best interests at one time or another. Mostly, we get away with it. Drink and drive, unsafe sex, cheat on exams. Adolescence would not be worthy of the name without these "experiments." An athlete endangers career and the millions that he dreamed of and worked for all his life in order to get high with the homies. A man risks love, family, security for a fling. He might even lose the presidency over it.

Which brings us to a deeper question: why don't our clients learn from their bad experiences with the law? Why aren't they deterred by terrible consequences they know or should know are to come from misbehavior?

He proceeds to wrestle vigorously with these questions, but you the value of his perspective is plain: it lets you see people who commit even the most heinous crimes as human. Not with condescending pity or righteous anger, but with mundane compassion.

I don't know how many readers he'll end up with, but as for me, I'm hooked.

Tagged: borenstein, law, california, supreme, court, death, penalty, defense, attorney

Posted by Greg at 6:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2005

Batman Begins, Again: The State of the Blockbuster

I went to see Batman Begins yesterday with Cary and Will in the midst of a long day -- right between helping Chris, Lindsay, and Amy move into their new house, and a long shift closing the shop. After the movie, we got into an interesting conversation about blockbusters.

All three of us walked out of the movie thinking it was "pretty good" and feeling a sweeping sense of delight (relief?) totally out of proportion to the movie's quality. Our hopes have gotten so low for these kind of high rent summer 'event' movies that seeing one that plain doesn't suck exceeds expectations. The Daredevils, Electras, and Catwomen have really done a number on us.

I started reminiscing for the days when summer blockbusters seemed fresh, even exciting, or at least yielded even the most occasional surprise or variation in the formula. We tried to make a list of 'interesting' or 'mold-breaking' blockbusters and we got as far as putting Jurassic Park, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Blair Witch Project up as candidates before diverting into a discussion about the definition of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Now, with some more reflection, I think I can make a stab at explaining what's caused this case of Blockbuster Fatigue of which our perverse over-enjoyment of Batman Begins seems to be symptomatic. I think it may have been The Trilogies. Star Wars: Episode I, with its almost endless avalanche of hype came out in 1999 and the Sith are still in the final throes of acheiving their Revenge as I write this, six years later. In those six years, the three Star Wars movies and the three Lord of the Rings movies earned a total of almost 5.2 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales (with people still tearing Sith stubs at this very moment), putting all six movies in the top 25 all-time money earners (Episode 3's gross, not yet on that list since it's still going strong, is here) and accounting for almost five percent of total US domestic ticket sales during that period.

Basically, the story is that Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have sucked up all of the oxygen in the blockbuster stratosphere for the last six years leaving the aesthetics of these movies exactly where they were before The Trilogies appeared, only more atrophied, barely breathing. The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter aside (both are slightly choppy seas on the far edge of The Trilogies' sunami), Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are what scientists call a 'non-repeating phenomenon', which means something extraordinary and unexplainable that we're unlikely to see again.

When you subtract The Trilogies from the equation, the evolution of the Blockbuster Industrial Complex makes a lot more sense. In the late nineties, it had found the Comic Book movie as a kind of stable platform and formula on which blockbusters could be based and made sustainable (through sequels and slight variations on successful formulae), rationalizing what had, up to that point been the frightening purview of a small number of 800 pound industry gorillas (Stephen Spielberg and James Cameron) and incomprehensible grass roots media trends (The Blair Witch Project). Hollywood -- being, after all, a bank -- looks for predictability. It breaks new ground (or watches someone else do it) and then rapidly moves with formulae and franchises to protect it and monetize its every available inch. In the process it wears ideas out of their freshness. Formulas become cliches. Franchises get stale. Something new comes along.

We have, after all, since Jurassic Park (as good a point as any to mark the beginning of the contemporary blockbuster), had five Batman movies, two X-Men movies, two Spiderman movies, the Matrices, two Daredevil-related movies, the Hulk, and countless more forgetable others (including at least three Blades). We're right now on the verge of The Fantastic Four and Superman, the father of them all. This formula is stale. Even the best of these movies (like Batman Begins) are so bloodless that they feel more like actual zombies or vampires than any creature from their own genre. And some of them (Daredevil, Electra, Catwoman) have begun to fail at the box office, even with big name stars.

It's just that because of The Trilogies no one noticed that this blockbuster formula had shriveled up and died and it was time for a new one. Ticket sales were beyond strong (remember, this period we're talking about is the highest grossing one in the history of movies), the movies were relatively well received critically (at least LoTR was), and seemed full of variety (Wagner in space or in New Zeland or Mutants). Now that they're gone, though, it feels like we've been watching the same mediocre cardboard cutout comic book movie over and over for ten years. Look even at the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman movies. They seem like edgy art films, character studies compared to this new edition, which is amongst the best of this recent batch. Anyway, here's hoping that it doesn't take Hollywood too long to unlearn the lesson of the last five years and that we start seeing new kinds of blockbusters, rather than ever-more anemic versions of existing ones, soon.

Tagged: batman, begins, summer, blockbuster, comic, book, movies, star, wars, lord, of, the, rings, jurassic, park, daredevil

Posted by Greg at 6:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2005

Widget You Like to Know Where I Find the Time

Now, I know that this post completes a five-fecta of navel and semi-navel gazing posts about myself and projects I'm involved with, and I'll be returning to the pretentious and emotionless pseudo-essays you've grown to love shortly, but I had to write a brief note about the little show of geek bravado I put on last night.

Friday night, Cary made an idle email suggestion to the PDX Pop organizing group that someone might want to write a Dashboard widget counting down the days to the festival (and bringing you to pdxpopnow.com if you click) as a kind of silly and pointless promotional effort. Having written a Konfabulator widget in the past, this seemed just my speed. Last night, after getting home from work at 3:15am, I jammed for three hours and got it done. Putting together the graphic from a chunk of Tyler's design for the PDX Pop ballot took about a half an hour and the rest of the time was spent figuring out a quirk in Dori's javascript (Dori is the random stranger on whose Serenity Countdown widget code I based the date math).

By the time everyone else had gotten up in the moring the thing was working. Today, I uploaded it to the PDX Pop Now! website and submitted it to Apple for inclusion on their Dashboard download page. And now I'm proud to say you too can download the Totally Unnecessary PDX Pop Now! 2005 Countdown Widget. I just checked it for the first time after midnite on a day not the one on which I wrote it and. . .It still seems to work.

Tagged: pdxpop, dashboard, widget, countdown, portland, oregon, music, festival

Posted by Greg at 4:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2005

Disjecta In Progress

Today, I realized that there've been a bunch of really exciting things happening for Disjecta that I hadn't mentioned on here and so thought I would do a little survey of recent advancements.

If you haven't heard of it before, Disjecta was a gallery and performance space in Northeast Portland for the last four years. It hosted some of the best contemporary art in town during that period. Also, during its run, its staff helped put on The Modern Zoo, a temprary large scale exhibition of 125 contemporary Portland and Pacific Northwest artists held in the summer of 2003 in 120,000 square feet of wharehouse space in the St. John's neighborhood of Portland.

Late last year, Disjecta's space in Northeast Portland closed down due to a change in the building's ownership and Disjecta director Bryan Suereth, along with long time collaborators Sonya Masinovsky and Paul Mittendorf, began planning to expand Disjecta into a professional mid-level arts institution, the first of its kind in the city.

I have been part (to differing degrees) of the effort to acheive just that since last fall. Lately with the rise of PDXPop, I've had less time to spend on Disjecta and so have had to watch the project's recent successes in delight, if from afar.

The big goal for Disjecta all since about December been to raise enough money to sign a lease to occupy the Templeton builing, an historical building that occupies the first frontage on the eastside of the Burnside bridge in the center of Portland. After a somewhat difficult time getting started with organizing and fundraising (including doing setup work such as applying for 501(c)3 nonprofit status), Disjecta's staff, pulled off the coup of convincing the building's landlord to give them access to it for three weeks in order to show what they will be able to accomplish if their fundraising efforts do succeed. We are right in the middle of the first week of the occupation and what they've accomplished turns out to be pretty impressive.

They've arranged a truly staggering number of art events including exhibitions by Mary Mattingly and Theo Angell, a concert featuring Tara Jane O'Neil and the Get Hustle, and an art auction hosted by local art impresario AC Dickson and city coucilor Sam Adams.

The quality of these events has been widely acknowledged in the local press. Today, OPB Radio ran an interview with Bryan. This past weekend, the Oregonian Lifestyle section ran a feature on the project and the Mercury put it on the cover.

Now, whether the whole thing becomes a reality or not just depends on if all of this attention can be transmuted into gold before the month runs out. So, get down there and take a look at this vision of what the city's artistic future could be like while it lasts. And bring your friends with deep pockets with you so that it will.

Tagged: Portland, Disjecta, art, contemporary, OPB, Mercury, Oregonian

Posted by Greg at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Some Self-News

Something exciting happened to me yesterday: the good people over at UrbhanHonking invited me to move IDFDZ over there. UrHo is a blog ring that includes some of the most creative people in Portland so it is an honor to be joining them.

In addition to hosting great blogs, they just finished the first season of their smash hit "reality blogging competition," The Ultimate Blogger. UltBlo was funny and irreverent as well as involving and compelling, something few reality TV shows acheive. The competition sparked a log of interest across the net and deserved every character of it.

I'll provide more information about the timing and details of the switch-over when I know them.

Tagged: UrbanHonking, blog, Ultimate Blogger, UrHo, UltBlo, IDFDZ

Posted by Greg at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2005

PDXPop Now! Votin' and Promotin'

So, today is a very exciting day in the PDXPop-o-Verse. The online voting to help determine which bands will play the festival goes live. Click on over there, select your favorite bands, and we'll try and get them to play the festival. That's kind of the point of PDXPop, putting together a festival with bands (at whatever level of success) that people actually like, not just that have been picked by booking agents and PR reps, agents and maangers.

Also, there's a great little blurb about the festival and compilation in Pitchfork. Since we started this thing at about the peak of its hipness arc, getting mentioned on there has always been a kind of goal for us, and it feels really satisfying and reassuring to hit that landmark just as we're really getting into gear on this year's festival.

Now, go vote!

Tagged: pdxpop, portland, oregon, music, Pitchfork, compilation, indie, rock, free

Posted by Greg at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2005

PDXPOP Now! 2005 Compilaiton Tracklist Announced!

After much waiting, ear bleeding, hair pulling, and paperworking, the 2005 PDXPOP Now! compilation has finally gone off to the duplicator and printer. As with any process like this, there was a lot of great music that didn't make it and not every track on there is for everyone, but I think the overall level of quality and divsersity of stlye is pretty amazing.

Also I'm totally in love with the album art (the image here is the cover) by Portland's own Tyler Stout

So check out the list, keep an eye on the PDXPOP Now! website for upcoming announcements, including a release date for the CD (we're gonna have a party!) and the bill for the festival. Enjoy!

An asterisk denotes a previously unreleased track.

Disc One

• "Rollercoaster" - Sleater-Kinney
• "I'm So Low" - The Minders*
• "While We Have The Sun (4-track home)" - Mirah*
• "Pile of Gold" - The Blow*
• "Uh-Oh" - Nice Nice
• "To Destruction" - Dolorean
• "Radio Radio" - Swords
• "Clawz" - Please Step Out of the Vehicle*
• "Second Sickness" - Desert City Soundtrack
• "Evil Falls" - Holy Sons*
• "Windows & Walls" - Modern State
• "Daydreams With Daffodils (Stepperz Remix)" - YACHT*
• "Lovin' Machine" - Glass Candy
• "No Sound" - 31 Knots
• "Just Expect" - Copy*
• "Why'd You Have to Die?" - Toothfairy*
• "Descender" - Point Line Plane
• "These Trees Are For Resting" - Alan Singley
• "Mountaintops in Caves" - Talkdemonic
• "Chemical Reaction" - Spooky Dance Band

Disc Two

• "Alive With Pleasure" - Viva Voce
• "It's Over" - The Gossip*
• "God and Country (live)" - The Thermals*
• "A Plague Upon the White House" - Blues Goblins*
• "Sista Social Theme Song" - Menomena*
• "Gore Appeal" - Die Monitr Batss
• "To An Angel on No Condition" - Lkn
• "The Untold Story" - Myg feat. Mikah 9, Sleep*
• "Hi-Fi" - M. Ward
• "Emma" - Sexton Blake
• "Smallest Man" - Sunset Valley*
• "Move your Body" - The Snuggle Ups*
• "Freilechs Von Der Chuppe" - Shicky Gnarowitz and the Transparent Wings of Joy*
• "Laughing Gasping" - Wet Confetti*
• "What We'll Admit" - Jessica Jones
• "I Am the Only Master of the Ten-Key" - Binary Dolls
• "Cardboard Box" - Point Juncture, WA
• "A Gilded Age" - Norfolk & Western
• "Homebody" - Cajun Gems
• "All of These Things" - The Helio Sequence*
• "From My Own True Love (Lost at Sea) (Demo)" - The Decemberists*

Tagged: PDXPOP, Portland, music, compilation, Tyler Stout, CD

Posted by Greg at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2005

The Films of PES

There are two particularly powerful aspects of the best miniature-based animation: a kind of revelatory hyper-real perspective that comes from the relative size of the lens to the objects being represented (using a normal camera on miniature skyscrapers can give a level of detail and a texture of perspective equivalent to shooting a real skyscraper with a camera that is four stories tall); and the thrill that comes from recoginzing one material as the image of another (the moment when you see the puppet as both wooden and flesh, when you see the strings and simultaneously believe in its internal life).

The films of the PES animation collective profoundly excel in this second aspect. They make short witty stop motion films that tightly intertwine their materials with their subject matter, often in breatakingly surprising ways.

For example, in Kaboom, they give us a skyline made of oil cans, salt and pepper shakers, trophies, drill bits, tea balls, and old fashioned razors. The surrounding city grid is perfectly implied by loaded circuit boards. When the (peanut shell) bomb lands, shiny spherical Chrismas ornaments make for an especially cheery explosion. Rendering skyscrapers and bomb blasts with such transient and informal objects is a perfect match for the movie's apocalyptic narrative since it both underlines the fragility of even large scale human endeavors and simultaneously adds an irony of underemphasis to the destruction of the city, transforming it into a child's trashing of his model town.

This obsession with toys and brightly-colored baubles, is especially evident in another film, Fireworks.

This film follows the progression of a fuse setting off fireworks-launching coin wrappers whose amunition explodes into concentric bursts of children's candy and shiny change. At the start, two back-to-back yellow and orange candy corns make for a highly believable lighter's flame. The materials make physical the childlike wonder we feel at fireworks while playing with their sentimental and nostalgic resonances.

A third film, Wild Horses Redux (originally made as an ad for Nike), uses this material intelligence to explore classic themes of the Uncanny.

The film shows a team of toy football players stampeding across a furry landscape before passing through an opening into a cave with walls of meat (tunnels constantly recur in PES's films) before exiting back into the landscape and disappearing into the distance as the slogan "made to move" fades up along with the Nike "swoosh." All of the material choices, from the people represented by dolls (Hans Bellmer) to the furry ground with its exposed fleshy interior (Meret Oppenheim), use classic surrealist strategies for creating an Uncanny confusion between human and animal, living and inanimate. The frozen plastic football team rumbles like a herd of animals while the meat inside the cave implies that the whole landscape is itself a (formerly) living thing. All of these factors combine to create a confusion between a football game and a primal animalistic charge, which exactly fits Nike's larger branding aesthetic.

PES's films tend to last exactly long enough for you to notice what everything in them is made of and no longer (with the exception of Pee-nut, which rambles on trying to wring something more out of what is essentially a bawdy one-liner). Although this short format perfectly suits their reliance on these rich uses of materials, it would be exciting to see PES try to sustain a more complex story over a longer film, using multiple environments and sets of materials. With the right subject matter, PES could make a film that would find a place alongside The Triplets of Belleville in the growing niche in mainstream moviegoing for quirky and independent animation.

(via MeFi)

Tagged: PES, animation, stop motion, Nike, short, film

Posted by Greg at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2005

Guest Check PDA

A while back, Merlin Mann at 43 Folders came out with an idea that's since caught fire: the Hipster PDA. The idea was that, instead of using a complicated digital handheld that made you learn a secret scrawl and a special stylus to write things down, you could just use a piece of paper. And if you clipped a bunch of small pieces together (say in the form of index cards) then they'd be easy to organize or give away or do with what you will.

Recently, I've noticed friends of mine who work as servers (for example Chris and Amy) have been ending up with Guest Check pads at home, and they're using them. Sometimes they end up at home by accident, by ending up forgotten in a back pocket. Sometimes they get brought home on purpose because they seem useful or have useful notes in them.

What we've been finding is that they're great as PDAs.

(Here you can see some notes I took in my Guest Check PDA while working on the MFDZ player.)

You're used to carrying it in your pocket, so it feels comfortable there. The pages are perforated to rip out easily so if you need to give someone a note or organize some individual notes into a group by stapling them it's nice and neat. I haven't really done this yet, but you could use those boxes and categories at the top as organizational categories or space for metadata.

What got me started using the Guest Check pads as a PDA was using my pad at work for non-work-related things: giving out the name of the currently-playing band to customers who asked (especially when it happened to be a Music For Dozens artist) writing down ideas that occur to me, or taking note of some memorable thing that someone said or that happened. I started finding that at the end of my shifts I'd have pockets full of little notes that needed processing (that's another satisfing thing about the Guest Check format -- easy-of-rip-out-and-crumple makes for a very satisfying way to cross something off a to do list) and I just got used to building my whole system around it. I still use my Moleskine a lot of the time. It just feels more dignified, part of the luxury of wearing non-stainproof clothes and sandals on days when I don't have a shift. But when I need something that's totally utilitarian, that I'm not afraid to destroy or cross things out in the Guest Check PDA is like the comfortable pair of New Balances that I wear to work: they're a little worn and not as white as they once were, but they make it easier to get the job done.

You can see some more pictures of my Guest Check PDA in action in my relevant Flickr photoset. I'll be adding more pictures next time I get some time to shoot some of the pages I've got sitting around or when I generate more.

Tagged: hipsterpda, hipster, pda, Guest Check PDA, server, waiter, restuarant, service industry, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2005

Star Wars Arcade World Record Tragedy!

This past Monday morning, Brandon Erickson, a friend of Ethan and Cary's from college and a teacher in the Portland Public Schools, began an atttempt to break the all-time record on the 1984 Star Wars arcade game. I just read the following heart-breaking announcement on Ground Kontrol's site (the retro-arcade at which the attempt was made):

After over 54 hours of continuous gameplay, Brandon was overcome by a combination of fatigue and especially difficult gameplay and was forced to end his game just 18 million points shy of the 300 million point record and settle for second place...an amazing accomplishment in itself. Congratulations, Brandon!

Cary and I went and visited Brandon last night at about 10pm and he seemed to be going strong, using a back brace to stay upright at his stool and dependably beating the game every two or three minutes.

The most tragic part of Brandon's noble and quixotic quest was the fact that he has already seemingly been cheated out of a quite similar record. In February, he set the record for "Tournament" mode on the same game with 20,891,403 points. Then, one David Palmer "remembered" that he had, the previous year, scored 31,660,614 points. He could provide no other source of verification besides "witness" whereas all of Brandon's attempts have been verified on video and all the other top scorers seem to have been checked by referees. Check out Twin Galaxies for the unbelievable proof.

To now get so close to the unapproacable 300,007,894 record (suspiciously held by the same David Palmer) and not get there is just too much for one person to have to take (especially when the third-placers are so far back). Until that Palmer character can produce a video of either of his records, I'm going to consider Brandon the official IDFDZ Star Wars World Record Holder (for whatever that's worth).

If you want to find out more, you can get a DVD of Brandon's Tournament Mode record game and read an article about Brandon's record setting attempts in the Willamette Week and see Brandon's original announcement of his attempt on classic-games.com.

Also, Brandon (sort of) did the whole thing as a fundraiser for Portland Public Schools (I kicked my ten bucks in to his $746.25 total) and the contributions are still open. Email him at starwardspledge@gmail.com to contribute.

Tagged: Star Wars, world, record, arcade, video, game, Brandon Erickson, Ground Kontrol, Portland, Oregon, Twin Galaxies

Posted by Greg at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Best Of IT Conversations

I've mentioned IT Conversations here a few times before in the context of other subjects, but I recently recommended a bunch of my favorite episodes to a friend for a trip he was leaving on and he suggested I reproduce the list here. Some of these talks played a big part in getting me excited about some of things I've written about here, so I thought that made some sense. Here goes (it's in approximate order of "favorite-ness"):

George Dyson

the son of Freeman Dyson, on John Von Neumann and the origin of "hacker" culture.

Philip Greenspun

a web publishing pioneer and creator of Photo.net, one of the first online communities.

Neil Gershenfeld

chief of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms on the future of desktop fabrication: the coming ability of anyone to design, make, and build anything. Mind blowing.

Paul Graham

founder of Viaweb and excellent tech-essayist, about genius generally, and great hackers, in particular.

Bruce Schneier

a web and computer security expert. Sounds dry, but is actually filled with some rare rational insight on the post 9/11 security world.

Larry Lessig

creator of the Creative Commons. The material may be familiar but it's interesting to hear how much of a firebrand Lessig is, and how convincing.

Steve Wozniak

brilliant, nutty inventor of the Mac on his whole life story and interests.

Malcolm Gladwell

New Yorker reporter and author who investigates the surprising ways we think and make decisions

Cory Doctorow

sci-fi author, BoingBoing-creator, and EFF advocate on the problems of controlling complex systems and the threat to IT from Hollywood.

Clay Shirky

insightful stuff on new uses of cell phones. Short.

Doc Searls

One of the original bloggers talking about DIY IT.

This is only just a sample, click around on the site and you'll find a bunch more interesting things on any of a number of tech topics. Lots of good stuff to fill your iPod with.

Tagged: IT Conversations, podcast, tech, lectures

Posted by Greg at 1:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

Tutorial: Blosxom

I've been thinking lately about my experience learning to do things on the web (both in the past and the more complex things I'm trying to learn how to do now) and it seems that I'm in kind of a good place to write some really useful tutorials. There's some things that I know how to do that a lot of other people don't, but I only learned how to do them pretty recently and so none of the skills involved seem natural (and therefore not requiring explanation) to me. Also, I still remember really wishing that there had been clear explanations of these things around when I was trying to do them. Where "geeks" relish figuring out fiendishly hard technical problems without any help from anyone, I think there are a lot of people like me who just want to get things done with some web technology without having to re-invent the wheel themselves on every project. There may be a market larger than just me for tutorials aimed at "beginners" that don't talk down, that don't just walk you through doing things without explaining what's happening, and that do let you accomplish some useful things on the web while learning as much more as you can take about the larger contexts.

Recently, a non-technical friend with a growing interest in the web, asked me to tell him about the system I use to publish this blog. I thought I'd try to turn my response into my first tutorial aimed at meeting the criteria I just set out. So, without further ado, a tutorial on the blog hosting system, called Blosxom.

I run Ideas For Dozens via a blog hosting system called Blosxom (pronounced "blossom", but spelled with OSX in the middle). It was designed by Rael Dornfest, one of the guys who runs O'Reilly (a technical publishing, conference, and education empire).

The way Blosxom works is through plain text files and something called a CGI script (stand for Common Gateway Interface). Basically the CGI is a little program that processes the posts I write as individual text files into the blog that ends up getting displayed when you come to Ideas For Dozens. What that means in practice is that there's a file called blosxom.cgi that lives on my webspace (which is provided to me by Speakeasy, my service provider, and which I access through an SFTP program called Fugu [SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol -- i.e. a thing for moving files around which keeps your secrets]). Bloxom.cgi is just a text file has two parts, a human readable part at the top where you enter in information to set certain options and to provide details about your situation, and a bunch of code underneath that actually does the work and that I don't ever worry or think about (mostly because I don't understand it).

So, here were the steps for me to get my blog up and running:

1. I downloaded the blosxom.cgi script from their website
2. I copied it onto my Speakeasy hosting space using Fugu
3. I created a folder on my Speakeasy space called "blosxom"
4. I created files inside that folder called head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html (as instructed by the tutorial on the blosxom website)
5. I edited blosxom.cgi to enter in the name of my blog, the location of the folder that I'd created, and a few other things that it asked for (the Jefferson quote at the top, etc.)

Then, in order to post, all I have to do is to put a text file in the blosxom folder on my Speakeasy space. The blosxom.cgi script turns any text file in that folder into a post. It takes the top line of the file as the title and the rest of the post as the body. If I create folders or sub-folders in the blosxom folder and put posts in them, the script treats those as "categories" (that's why posts will say "/useful/web" at the bottom of them).

Now, having done all this will not result in a blog styled like mine. It will result in a plain text blog with the title at the top and the posts stretching the whole length of the window, and the sidebar stuff who knows where (although there is something appealing about plain html layout in its cleanliness). The last big step, which is where the styling and layout come in, is to edit the three template files you created in the setup: head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html.

Accomplishing this section of the setup is going to require writing some HTML and CSS, two flavorsx of "markup," the system for creating written instructions that determine the design and layout on the web. It is obviously somewhat beyond the scope of this tutorial on Blosxom to include a full tutorial on either HTML or CSS. Many excellent tutorials are available (W3Schools is a good place to start). That said, I'm going to give you a tiny taste of CSS just to explain some of the context of how it works within Blosxom (hopefully if you're not familiar with HTML or CSS it will be enough to almost give you a sense of how Blosxom works and if you are already fluent in them it will be more than enough to really annoy you).

The way blosxom displays your blog is as follows: it starts with head.html, then it displays all the appropriate posts (based on the options you selected in the cgi) using story.html as a template. Then it puts in date.html every time a day changes (i.e. between posts that were written on different days). And it finishes up by putting in footer.html at the bottom. The entire style of my blog comes from some CSS that I wrote that goes at the top of head.html. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a relatively new (3 years?) system for doing layout on the web. The way it works (in super-oversimplified-summary mode) is that you define individual styles, by dictating their design characteristics, at the top of your document and then apply them wherever you want on your page. Here's an example from my blog. At the top of head.html (because that's the file that the script is going to look at first) I wrote:

#sidebar {
            width: 20%;
            float: left;
            padding-left:.5em;
            padding-right:.5em;
            font-family: sans-serif;}

What's happening is that I'm creating a style called "sidebar" (which is, obviously, intended for my sidebar) with certain attributes. It should take up twenty percent of the width of the page; it should "float left," which means that other content should flow around it to the right; it should have internal padding (the distance of the internal content from its bounding rectangle) of one-half of a tab on the left and right sides; and it should use a sans-serif font.

CSS is not a very complicated subject but it is a very large and detailed one, so all I'm going to say about it here is to explain way you apply these styles in the rest of your page. All you have to do is put <div="sidebar"> before the content you want to be displayed in this style and then </div> when you want to stop displaying stuff in it. In practice, it looks like this:

<div id="sidebar">
    <h6 style="margin:0px; padding:0px;">ABOUT</h6>
    <hr>
    <img src="http://www.speakeasy.org/~gborenstein/profile.jpg">
    <p style="font-size: 10px;">
    I like things that work.
    <br>

. . .

    <hr>
    <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/"><img width="88" height="31" src="http://www.haloscan.com/halolink.gif" border="0" alt="Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com" /></a>
</div>

If you look at the code inside the <div> tags, you can see the beginning and end of my sidebar (I've skipped most of it since it's really long): the first line displays the word ABOUT and sets its size, margin, and padding; the third line (that starts <img src=. . .) displays that picture of me, etc. At the bottom of the sidebar, right before the </div> tag, you can see that I'm displaying the Haloscan logo as a link to their site (the <img> tag is surrounded by <a href> and </a> tags).

I find that the best way to proceed with CSS is trial and error. It's often hard to predict just what a change in a certain attribute is going to do, so you end up going ahead and making the change, checking to see if the result is what you want, and altering it if it's wrong. The advantage of CSS over old-fashioned table-based ways of doing HTML layout (for example, the At Dusk website) is that it is more "liquid", things move around more fluidly based on how big the things around them are. The disadvantage of this is that everything's position is dependent on everything else's.

The other word of advice I'd give for someone trying to style a Blosxom blog, is just imagine that the whole thing was one big text file with story.html appended onto the bottom of head.html and footer.html appended onto the bottom of story.html, and so on. That will often explain why strange things are happening to your layout.

Now there are a couple of other things that I do on my blog that I won't go into detail on here. The "ARCHIVES" section is run by a Blosxom plug-in that is pretty easy to figure out if you read the details on their site (I think I may also use a time plug-in to display the time stamp on each post, but I can't remember). Also, I display RSS Digest that parses RSS feeds and lets you style and display them. They explain how to use their service pretty well. And my Flickr images. come from a Flickr "badge" they provide, which is also not hard to figure out. There are a lot of things like that designed to help you display certain kinds of info on your blog.

So, I guess it makes sense to conclude with some of the pros and cons of blosxom. The good things about it are that the posts are just plain text, so you can create them offline in any text editor of your choice and you're not dependent on some bloated web interface or a program that you have to pay for. Also, you have as total control over the display as you would over any other webpage you might make. You don't have to fight a premade template or design via a limited set of options in a web form. It is also totally free (not counting hosting) and native to OSX. The disadvantages are that post management is basically non-existent. For example, recently I accidentally opened and re-saved an old post (Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ), and since the date/time was reset, it jumped to the top of the blog. There's no way to move it back now or manage post order in anyway as far as I know, which also means you can't do timed publication or any other sophisticated thing some other systems let you do (you could accomplish some of these things using more advanced operating system technologies [chron jobs] but if you're at that level of sophisticaiton, you probably didn't need this tutorial). Also, since there is basically no interface (bloated or otherwise) it doesn't offer any of the features that a lot of the more hand-holding systems offer: like automatic pinging of Technorati and other blog tracking services, category management, easily implemented search, etc. All said, Blosxom does provide a good combination of low price (being free), simplicity of use, degree of control, and relatively full set of features. It is not as strong in any single one of these areas as some other solutions (a full comparison of most options is available here), for me I found that it held the best combination.

Tagged: Blosxom, tutorial, blog, content management system, cms

Posted by Greg at 5:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

Braman Song Blog Online

Jon Braman, whose website I designed and whose music I recorded, has started an audioblog on my suggestion. Jon makes great ukele-rap and has a habit of calling and leaving songs as answering machine messages for his friends, so I thought Audioblogger would be perfect for him. I'm going to do a little jiggering to see if I can't get his audio posts to appear on his website as well. They're definitely worth listening to. Especially, the first one which is a capella. (You can subscribe to Jon's songs here)

Tagged: Jon Braman, music, audioblog, blog, mp3, ukele, rap, Audioblogger

Posted by Greg at 5:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

This is a test of SSI includes

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2005

I'm holding my commas: Update

The Great Comma Crisis of 2005 has ended. Plus, I now know all about the mechanical working of Powerbook keys. They've got two crossed loop-shaped bits of plastic which interlace at a jointed-intersection. The one closer to the top of the keyboard slots two small pegs into two small holes and the one close to the bottom of the keyboard has a bar that hooks under a protruding metal catch. Then, the key itself clicks onto the top of the whole thing and sits right on top of the weird jelly-like substances that actually triggers the keystrokes, and that I've probably now permanently polluted with my finger oils (though their already was a surprising amount of hair in there). . .

Tagged: comma, powerbook, keyboard, fixed

Posted by Greg at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I'm holding my commas

The comma/open-bracket key fell off my Powerbook's keboard. Now, whenever I want to type a comma, I have to press this strange jelly-like thing. Weird. It wouldn't be so bad if it was at the same level as all the other keys.

Tagged: comma, powerbook, broken, keyboard

Posted by Greg at 9:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ

Just noticed something odd watching a Quicktime movie in Safari. If, at any time while running the movie or after it's stopped, you hit cmd+BackArrow, instead of going back to the previous page as usual, the clip plays in reverse. In order to go back you've actually got to mouse over and hit the back button, which then works normally.

Although this seems like a bug, I've been having just the most fun with it playing things backwards. Check this out to get started. Let it load all the way through without watching it. Put the cursor at the end, hit cmd+BackArrow, and enjoy.

Tagged: Quicktime, backwards, video, trick

Posted by Greg at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

RSS Recomendations

If RSS is really "TiVo for the internet", when does it start making recommendations? TiVo is basically an aggregator, just like NetNewsWire. It keeps track of the shows you "subscribe" to, checks to see when new "items" are available, and downloads them for you to look at when you're ready.

One thing TiVo does that NetNewsWire doesn't is recommend shows you might like that are not currently amongst your subscriptions. No aggregaror does this, as far as I know. Although these recommendations don't always work perfectly and you may get stuck with TiVo thinking that you're gay (registration required), they seem like a pretty good idea.

Our aggregators know a lot about what we like. Mine knows that I read a lot of posts about music distribution, intellectual property, arts administration, and animation, and a lot of other posts that have podcasts from public radio shows attached to them. If NetNewsWire maintained a database of RSS feed providers (or collaborated with someone who did) it could tell me when someone started a new podcast about the administration of animation non-profits, say, or even if a single post appeared on some obscure blog about a new Creative Commons-licensed mp3-sharing site. If NNW, or one of the other news readers, didn't want to do it, it wouldn't be hard to create an online "RSS Registry" where people could submit their feeds with keyword descriptions and their individual posts with Technorati Tags via ping. Then a user could go to the site, enter the list of feeds they subscribe to and receive in return a new RSS feed that notifies them of new posts and new blogs that the Registry's recommendation engine thinks they might like. The big disadvantage of this system (that you would have to constantly return to the site to keep it updated on the feeds your subscribed to, weakening the feedback mechanism which would make it truly powerful) might be mitigated by the use of aggregator plugins that would keep your Registry account up to date. The plugin could also do things to refine your recommendations like keep track of the posts that had links you clicked. A big advantage of implementing the recommendations through a website rather than a service provided by an aggregator might be that the site could take advantage of the social network of its users to give better recommendations (i.e., "people who subscribed to this feed also read. . .") in addition to taxonomized (or, maybe, folksonomized) labels.

Some people might be concerned by the idea of their RSS reader starting to talk back, sending information about their interests off to some sketchy outside entity, just at a moment when so much brainpower is going into trying to figure out how to make money from syndication. But I think that there's something really powerful to be gained in the tradeoff: closing the feedback loop, getting more and more useful information with less work. And privacy concerns are just more of a reason to implement something like this yourself, so that it will be free, fair, and open rather than owned by one of the aggregators or someone even less trustworthy. Because with all the work, thought, and investment from people a lot smarter and more knowledgable than me going on in this space, someone else is going to think of this before too long and who knows where they'll take it.

Tagged: RSS, TiVo, NetNewsWire, aggregator, recommendations,

Posted by Greg at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2005

Quicksilver and Text Wielder: All of the Services

My mind is still a little boggled by this, but I'll try to explain it the best I can. Last night, I opened up the Quicksilver preferences to see if there were any new plug-ins available (in the new Tiger version, you get plug-ins from an internal menu rather than from their website). Specifically, I was looking for one that would allow me to ftp a particular file to a particular location (check out my last post to find out why).

Some new plug-ins had appeared (including the del.icio.us one, which I'd been waiting for), but nothing for ftp. One of the new plug-ins was called "Services menu module". Immediately, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

You see, a while back, I downloaded a little app called Text Wielder. What it does is make avilable more than 120 actions from the Services menu of every application. Most of them act on text: get a URL, search in any number of search engines, look up a map from a given zipcode or a zipcode from a given address (I think that one was why I got it in the first place), etc. You can also write your own actions.

So now that I can use any applicable service from within Quicksilver, I have all of these actions at my fingertips at all times. So, beyond having solved my instant-ftp problem (Transmit.app offered "upload file" as a service), I now have a very deep pool of things I can do with text (the number of options on text went from in the teens to 89). Plus I have the ability to create any new actions that I want, so the pool is actually theoretically bottomless. Just when you think Quicksilver's run out of new ways of blowing your mind, it finds those last few shards of attached skull and sends them skittering.

Tagged: Quicksilver, QS, Text Wielder, text, Services, OSX, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 2:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Upcoming

I've added a new section to the bar of contextual info at the left there, under the title of "upcoming". For a while now, I've kept a list of ideas for posts in a text file. Using the Quicksilver append trick, it's super easy to record a quick description of an idea in the moment I'm having it. Then, when I've got some time to write a post, all I've got to do is view that list (usually using Quicksilver's right arrow functionality) to see the post-seeds I've got sitting around to get me started.

For some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to display this very list on the site itself. At times my internal shorthand may be inpenetrable or the content may overlap with the summary of my del.icio.us posts that appear right below it (and often hint at my future plans for posts), but when thrown into the mix, the list will make the sidebar a pretty good snapshot of what I'm thinking about right now. Hence you can point me to links or send me your thoughts ahead of time in order to contribute to posts, not just in comments, but before they're even written. Just another step towards making this blog into more of a conversation instead of a monologue that reverberates into empty space.

Right now, I've got a couple of technical glitches getting in the way of having this working as smoothly as I'd like: Speakeasy doesn't seem to actually support html includes even though they say they do, or, more likely, I'm doing something wrong (even though I'm using the syntax everyone seems to recommend: <!--#include file="file.html" -->), or, even more likely, some setup remains for me to do to get SSIs working in general on my Speakesy space. Either way, it's not working right now. Ideally, I'd like the workflow to go as follows: edit my "toblog.html" file with Quicksilver; then ftp the file up to its proper location with either a widget or, even more preferably, with QS itself. Soon, soon, soon.

Tagged: plain text, Quicksilver, QS, SSI, Speakeasy, upcoming, posts, blog, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc

I had another, lower-fi, idea yesterday in the car on the way to the airport that could supplement the idea of distributing music through local wifi networks. I call it "Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc":

Since I first discovered podcasting back in December or January, I've started to accumulate a pile of CDs that I've listened to once and never plan to again. What happens is that, since I haven't yet iPod-ed my car, I end up burning CDs of podcasts that I want to listen to in the car (or at work, or any other non-headphone-safe zone). Then they just sit around filling up my room and occasionally tempting my housemates into bending them until they explode into clouds of dangerous shards.

The library (or some other public place, like a cafe) should set up a system where people with content-filled discs that they no longer want can drop them off to be found by people who are looking for something to listen to. The things have gotten so cheap that it would be like the Give-a-penny, Take-a-Penny system at convenience stores, a kind of physical analog to online peer-to-peer networks. To bastardize a phrase from Nicholas Negroponte, we would be 'trading atoms in order to trade bits'.

In the midst of all the work to get cultural products to flow freely through the web, it's easy to forget that most people still find their music, books, and movies on little bits of plastic and trees floating around out there in the world.

Tagged: CD, music, podcasting, lo-fi, distribution, wifi

Posted by Greg at 4:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Very Local Music

After I told him about my idea for bloggable public space, my housemate/bandmate, Cary, thought of an interesting extension to it. In addition to creating a community bulletin board-style blog, the venues could use their wifi hotspots to distribute music. Just as the Austin Wireless City Project did during the recent SXSW interactive media conference, these businesses could set up Rendezvous networks and use them to allow customers on their wifi networks to listen to a particular set of songs they made available.

So, you'd sit down in Pix, open your laptop, fire up iTunes, and you'd see a shared-playlist with songs from Laserhawk, Strength, Amy Subach, and, of course, At Dusk (all bands with members who work at Pix). There might also be some promotional songs of the upcoming PDXPOP Now compilaiton.

At SXSW, they took things a step further. AWCP actually set up a central server that each of the businesses could access which would then in turn make the songs available to their customers. Ever since BMI started threatening to sue Pix over our practice of playing music in the shop, we've (mostly) converted over to playing only local music for which we have explicit permission from the artists. Sarah, my boss, has talked about setting up a network of local restaurants and cafes that have received similar threats from BMI that would share a common library of permissioned-music. Using this Rendezvous system, we could make that metaphorical network into a literal, or at least digital, one.

Tagged: SXSW, wifi, music, hotspot, Pix, Patisserie, Laserhawk, Strength, At Dusk, Portland, Austin, TX

Posted by Greg at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

Personal Telco Project

This isn't my normal kind of post. There's not really an idea here, more of just a standard-practice blogish act of pointing to something cool on the web. But, it does relate to a previous post on bloggable public space and it's for a good cause, so here goes: the Personal Telco Project

In the last couple of years, I've heard over and over from various sources that Portland is "the most wireless" city in America -- that is, the city with the greatest wifi penetration per capita -- and that it had become such largely because of a grassroots effort. But I'd never known anything about the particulars of PTP until reading their website just now. They work with businesses and individuals interesed in setting up publicly available wifi nodes and have so far created more than 100 nodes around the city. They provide technical know-how, education, and maintenance and channel volunteers and enthusiasts of whatever technical level into useful activities. They also hold weekly and monthly meetings as well as "play days" (educational/technical/bullshit sessions).

From their site, at least, they seem to be a relatively well-strucutred and highly functional non-profit, which, as a person currently working to turn an organically organized local cultural organization into a real and lasting 501(c)(3), I both admire and envy.

It would be cool, if UrHo takes me up on implementing my bloggable public space idea, to partner with PTP to accomplish it. Also, we should have a wifi node at work, but I guess we'd need to get the wired internet there first.

Tagged: Personal Telco Project, wifi, portland, internet, access, telco, PTP, free

Posted by Greg at 3:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 30, 2005

Text: Plain and Simple

In the last few weeks, a trend has been growing towards simpler web design that looks more and more like unstyled HTML. Influential designer Tom Coates recently switched over to an extremely simple, almost austere, format for his blog and philosophized about it. Two days ago Ben Hammersley joined the fray with his essay on why simple is the new black.

I've been feeling a similar desire to simplify things when it comes to all of the web designing I do and I think it has a couple of sources. First, doing more and more of my online reading in my RSS reader means that my eyes have gotten more and more used to plain unstyled text, making the graphical web feel like a loud and shiny carnival show, when I click over to it. Sometimes, that's what I'm looking for, but it's not necessarily the most efficient mode for information transfer.

Also, as I've been using my text editor for more and more projects, it (rather than Microsoft Word) has become the thing I reach for to make daily text documents for whatever purpose. And thus, when it comes to printing things out, I find myself using HTML and CSS. Even though, on first glance, this sounds more difficult, since I've gotten to the point where I don't have to really think about the markup too much, I actually find that making documents this way can be simpler and, believe-it-or-not, faster, than using a behemoth like Word since SubEthaEdit doesn't fight me at every turn.

Finally, this shift towards the look of unstlyed HTML (because that's really what these new simple designs are approaching) fundamentally jibes with the practice of the alpha geeks. Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann have argued that the tips and tricks alpha geeks come up with end up eventually trickling down to the rest of us because they're the ones that first encounter new problems (spam, organization or large amounts of email and files, constant interuption from IM, etc.) and because they're more likely to have the tools to solve them. For all kinds of reasons, alpha geeks seem to love plain text it helps them "see the trees for the forest, so to speak, without the GUI getting in the way of their work." This applies equally well to the reading of web pages, especially blogs which can prickle with tiny design elements just the way GUI apps suffer from feature bloat.

Basic HTML (or something that looks like it) is a way to reduce the amount of "GUI" on the information that you're trying to get to (or, conversely, to distribute). After all, even though the graphical web is a great thing, when it comes to text, I think that the book has got it beat.

Tagged: plain text, 43folders, lifehacks, Tom Coates, Ben Hammersley, plasticbag, HTML, web, design, style, simple plain, text

Posted by Greg at 5:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 29, 2005

Bloggable Public Space

For each of the wifi hotspots around town, especially in public places with particular cultural cache or communal access, there should be a blog that anyone can post to. The catch is that you should only be able to post to the blog while you are actually in the physical space. So, to give a Portland example, you could only post to the Pioneer Square blog while you were accessing the wifi network that covered Pioneer Square.

The technical details are a little bit over my head, but I bet someone smarter than me could set up a blogging system that would only accept posts from computers connected through the particular IP addresses on those wireless networks (or something). Each blog would then become a kind of record of the physical space. If something interesting happened there people would record it and otherwise, the blog would just become an accumulation of different people's impressions of the place. We could supplement the entries with web cams of each of the places. As more and more of the cool places around town come online the network of blogs could grow making for a kind of virtual folksonomic map of the city's culture.

Tagged: blog, public, space, wifi, communal, city, urban

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2005

Google SMS Tipsheet Hack

A couple of posts ago (though more weeks than that do to my recent, and even more recently terminated, unplanned blogging vacation), I wrote about my discovery of Google SMS. I have since been using it happily and effectively to, for example, find the address of a karaoke bar while driving out of a bowling alley parking lot during someone's birthday party.

Yesterday, I found a little hack that will make Google SMS even better. First of all, it turns out that the system does more than just yellow pages-style lookup. With special commands, it does movie showtimes, weather conditions, trivia, stock quotes, etc. These commands are multiple and though intuitive, rapidly become fiendishly difficult to remember as they accumulate. Handily, Google provides a tiny little PDF crib sheet, thusly:

Now, taking a page from 43 Folders' Amazon Wishlist Hack, I immediately printed this out, cut it loose from it's sheet of paper, folded it in half, and dropped it into the accordion folder of my Moleskine so that I always have it with me. As Merlin says, "Swish."

Tagged: Google, SMS, 43folders, moleskine

Posted by Greg at 5:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Making Stuff

I have a kind of obsession with being able to make stuff and with people who already can. It's not something I'm especially good at, making stuff. Now, I can write, play, and record songs. I can research and write newspaper articles. I can draw and paint pictures and take photographs. I can make websites. I can make websites that do things. I can make widgets

What I can't do is actually build anything in the three dimensional physical world. When I try to measure out and cut parts for a simple box, say, it always ends up as a non-euclidian (and therefore non-assemblable) hyper-box. I can't solder together circuits that work (mostly I make solder bridges and melted breadboards). When it comes to the kind of making that results in useable devices, gizmos, or doodads, of whatever complexity, I am pretty hopeless.

Lately, this divide between things I can and can't make has been seeming both more important and more bridgeable because of the omnipresence of Neil Gershenfeld. He's in the first issue of Make Magazine, on a podcast on IT Conversations, the author of a book that showed up in my mailbox. Unlike me, Gershenfeld can definitely make things. He is an MIT prof, runs the Center for Bits and Atoms, and teaches a class called How to Make (almost) Anything.

Gershefeld does "fab" -- Personal Fabrication. Basically, he's developed a system for combining a set of high tech tools usually used for rapid protyping of potential industrial products that allows people to design and build technologically and aesthetically sophisticated devices, for example Revolver, a three dimensional display made by spinning a single clear plane filled with embedded LEDs. Or a web browser for parrots. Or a sound proof backpack that will save your screams for later. He teaches relatively non-technical students (for MIT) to use these precision tools, which is apparently pretty easy to do -- in the IT Conversations talk he mentions being able to get someone started using most of the tools in a day.

Gershenfeld thinks of the Fab Lab, the $20,000+ worth of machines used in these kinds of processes as equivalent to the mainframe stage of the development of personal computers. He imagines a day when all of these tools become intigrated and miniaturized to the point where they can sit on your desk and become part of your normal life, just like the personal computer did, doing for manufacturing what the desktop publishing revolution did for graphic design and production. People will design and build quirky devices that just they or their friends and family will want to use. What will be the manufacturing equivalent of the family newsletter that was the pride of so many early desktop publishers? Also, I wonder about the "prosumer" market that this kind of revolution will create. Just as in music there are now many fine gradations between professional products and services and cheap eaasy to use lo fi toys I wonder what kinds of high level, professional grade manufacturing will be available to us all for only a small investment before too long and what objects we'll simply be able to "print out" on our desks.

Imagining this future, I wonder if learning to use laser and waterjet cutters, injection molding machines and microfabricators, will finally mean that I'll be able build a box where all the sides fit together flush.

Tagged: MIT, CBA, Center for Bits and Atoms, Personal Fabrication, Fab, MAS863, Gershenfeld

Posted by Greg at 2:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Google Calling

Today at work, I was stuck with the day shift. Since I also closed the shop last night, I was operating on even less sleep than is normal for the highly-unnatural-for-me nine-thirty a.m. start time, which is never much to begin with.

So, in my semi-zombified state, I was pleasantly surprised to learn something new and seemingly quite useful when a former co-worker who now works at the Verizon store in the Lloyd Mall stopped in for a sandwich on his lunch break. Since I've recently learned some Flash for MFDZ (check out the new in-browser play buttons for the streaming audio of every track), I was asking him some things about text and graphical web browsers on cell phones imagining what I could develop to make Music For Dozens content available on them (this may be somewhat jumping the gun when we have, basically, no customers that aren't also parents of our artists, but it never hurts to be prepared, right?).

In the course of the conversation, Jobie showed me something really interesting: you can text message Google with a search query and they'll text you back with the results. Google calls the service Short Message Service (SMS) and the number for it is 46645 ("GOOGL on most phones," according to their website). Normally I would see this kind of service as another example of a technology looking for an application -- text messaging, in this case, which I've only ever used as a novelty to zatz someone I was already most likely sitting next to -- but Jobie, who spends his days selling people cell phone extras like text messaging packages, had a pretty airtight reason for its usefulness: the cost relative to 411 Connect calls. Verizon charges $2.99/mo. for 100 text messages. 411 Connect calls, on the other hand, cost $1.25 each. Looking at the bill that came today, this past month, I used exactly 2 of my available 100 text messages. That leaves 98 text messages that could have been used for 411 Connect calls, or $122.50 worth of 411 Connect functionality for $2.99. I actually made four 411 Connect calls for a total of five dollars, or about a seventh of my total bill. Which now feels like a lot for a function I could have accomplished with features I was already paying for.

It seems with this kind of economic logic (along with the cache that comes from its position in the storied Google Labs), Google SMS would be much more talked about than it is. Granted it doesn't connect the call for you, but as a trade off, it's much more flexible: giving you a larger number of results on broader search terms if you want them (all the results for "pizza 97214," for example). Anyway, never having previously been a person who wanted his phone to do anything other than make phone calla, I could feel another side effect watching Jobie demonstrate this feature: I could see it acting as a gateway drug to getting comfortable with text interfaces for web data on the phone and therefore leading into using it to check email and read news headlines, and check RSS feeds, and . . . suddenly this simple thing in my pocket feels a lot like a platform.

Tagged: Google, SMS, Short Message Service, text messaging, cell phone, Verizon, mobile

Posted by Greg at 1:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2005

The Wired Tower and the Digitally Collaborative Thesis

Right now, I'm in the middle of reading an inspiring text book. Philip Greenspun is a long standing MIT denizen, a leading advocate for the construction of web-based communities, and the author of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (which is what I'm reading) as well as Software Engineering for Internet Applications, the only college level computer science text book on building web applications. I had never heard of him before listening to Doug Kaye's recent rebroadcast of an IT Conversation featuring Greenspun last night on the walk to work. It included some inspiring talk, since the ever-casual Greenspun built Photo.net, an online community with a quarter of a million users, by accident in something like 1994 to answer questions arising from the photos which accompanied his online travelogue, Travels With Samantha. Also, since the stated purpose of his Software Engineering for Internet Applications course is to teach the student how to build Amazon.com by him or herself, his experience has some applications to the current process we're going through making version 2.0 of Music For Dozens.

Anyway, the point of this post, besides praising Greenspun, was to talk about an idea I had a while back of which his writing put me in mind. It's a good idea, and one I'm now not entirely unqualified to try to execute. The background: at Reed College, my alma mater, every senior completes a senior thesis as part of the requirements for graduating. In most departments theses consist of an extended essay and research project, a kind of mini-dissertation. Mine was called "It's Not Just Academic: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Marketing of Genre". It is 231 pages long with four appendices and 25 illustrations. There's a copy of it sitting at the far right end of the shelf above my desk bound in blue hardback and a number more in my dad's closet in LA and others scattered with other relatives, friends and advisors. Plus, as part of submitting the thesis for graduation, the library gets two copies, one of which they display in the Thesis Tower and one of which they store.

Throughout college, I would often, when bored of the airless art history basement, find myself on the second level of the thesis tower thumbing through the shelves for interesting or, especially, old theses. I remember looking through a political science thesis that conducted structural analyses of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy and was written in 1936. I would always come back to an amazingly fat two volume physics thesis dated over an impossible five year time span in the late seventies that had something to do with the grinding of lenses and one of whose volumes consisted entirely of tables of numbers. I was fascinated by them and many others.

My idea is this: both the entire content of the Thesis Tower, every word of every thesis written by a Reed grad, and the entire thesis process should be brought online.

First, the existing theses: The Reed library catalogues theses by title, author, and major, but they don't enter them into the larger library system on any level. I don't think they go out for Orbis or Inter-Library Loan. Also, while it is very unlikely that I will pull a particular thesis off the shelf because of a sitation of it in a book I'm reading or a recommendation from a faculty member of other student (the normal things that drive people to academic books) the group of them, when taken together, consistute something of a powerful database of knowledge.

Since most theses are narrow and relatively expert monographs on a particular subject which passed through the rigorous editing of the thesis process (about which, more in a minute) they are proximally authoritative and information rich. If combined, their full texts would constitute a kind of searchable encyclopedia students, and anyone else with an interest, could access through the web. A music major writing a paper on Wagner could do a search on Parsifal and find every reference to it in every older music thesis as well as English theses and French theses on the original myths which constituted it and German theses on Wagner's role in the intellectual history of the third reich as well as theatre-lit and art history theses on Wagner's theatre, Bayreuth, and it's role in the performance culture of 20th Century Europe, etc. In addition to all of these references, the search could return a list of a all of the relevant sources cited in the footnotes and bibliographies of the theses that mentioned Wagner in order of their popularity and their most cited passages (giving the student a very concrete place to start their reading). The search could also provide a list of current Reed faculty who have advised theses that touched on Wagner and therefore might be sources of additional information. It wouldn't be difficult for these and other kinds of results to add up to the point where they constituted a pretty thorough overview of any topic searched for in the archive. Also and secondarily, having all Reed theses in a database would be a pretty useful tool for finding out what subjects Reedies are interested in, what books they're reading and citing, and just generally what kind of academic output they're producing.

What about the process of writing a thesis? Downstairs in our basement office right this minute, under my printer and scanner, I've got a stack of scratch paper about a foot-and-a-half high. Most of it is printouts leftover from the process of printing my thesis three years ago. It is different for everyone, but in my experience, the thesis process, especially in it's second semester was a constant back and forth between me and my advisor. Passing pages of chapters to her, getting feedback, putting in the changes, printing more pages, reading her scrawled comments in the margin, scrawling my own notes for revisions during our meetings. At the end, during the proofreading and last looks period many pages just got big X's through them to indicate that they were fine (no edit marks) and yet were not part of a finished print out.

Microsoft Word already offers the option of saving a file as html. It would not be difficult to offer students a central place they could upload html files of their theses where they could then make them public, or only available to their advisors (or any other faculty or students they asked to take a look) via a password protected login. The system could log reader comments and associate them with parts of the text, allowing the student to easily look at the most recent comments made by all of his various editors and to tell whether or not he'd already incorporated the changes (this would be especially helpful around the ends of the semesters when many departments conduct 'mini-orals' in the fall and then full oral defenses in the spring and students are often overwhelmed when receiving edited copies of their completed chapters from four or five readers all at once and finding themselves facing the prospect of rectifying those changes with each other as well as their existing text). The software could act as a node to collect citations and resources as the student came across them or as the advisor thought of them and do any manner of other things students and advisors might find helpful to the collaborative thesis project. Further, at the end of the school year, the system could provide a comprehensive log of the process, showing when major progress was made in writing new pages, what types of comments were the most helpful in creating big writing breakthroughs, what sources provided the most insight. This report would aid both self-evaluation on the advisor's part since it would provide concrete feedback on how their advice helped, and the thesis grading process which is meant to take into account the process the student underwent in completing the project as much as the project's inherent qualities themselves.

Obviously both of these projects have potentially valuable applications outside of Reed if they were well-developed there. Universities are going to be putting a lot of energy into digitizing their vast holdings of information in the coming years and beyond whatever value lies in the simple process of scanning the texts themselves, most of what's to be won or lost in this will come in the design of the interface for this information: what it makes accessible and how easily. Also, since the inception of the modern university, the best teaching tools professors have had available have been unoccupied offices and chalk fragments that somehow retained a useable size. Isn't it time we gave them something better?

Greenspun's two books are almost textbooks for completing projects like this one and they do a good job emphasizing their value. His vision of the web populated by sites that let people work together to share information and solve each other's problems is a compelling one and worth working towards. And the clarity with which he approaches the engineering problems involved makes them seem nearly trivial. If a twelve year old can write Amazon.com, surely all these college students, graduates and professors can find a way to work better together through the web.

Tagged: Philip Greenspun, Reed, College, University, library, undergraduate, thesis, catalogue, web publishing

Posted by Greg at 5:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 8, 2005

Stovepiping

Back in 2003, after the end of the war part of the Iraq war (don't worry, this is a post about music, not politics), Seymour Hersh wrote an article in the New Yorker titled, The Stovepipe. Hersh defines "stovepiping" as taking a request for action arising from intelligence "directly to higher authorities without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny." In other words, stovepiping results in intelligence failures when conclusions are allowed to pass rapidly from the lowest levels of the intelligence gathering apparatus, the ones with their hands directly on new information as it comes in at ground level, up to the decision making authorities many levels above without passing through the normal many-layered time-intensive vetting and checking processes inbetween.

In the case of military intelligence and decision making stovepiping can cause failures of caution and diligence resulting, as in the Iraq war weapons of mass destruction problem, in calamitous mistakes in judgement on globally important matters. But what about in fields where the stakes are much lower?

Sometimes, being a band in the music industry can feel a whole lot like being a piece of intelligence in the intelligence apparatus. There are endless and endlessly picky levels of gatekeepers through which you have to pass before the real decision makers -- the audience -- can even hear you in the first place: club bookers, music label reps, radio station programmers, and music journalists of many stripes and levels of influence just to name a few. And each of these gatekeepers has different, and often contradictory, criteria for what music they'll put their weight behind. Whereas the process for vetting intelligence is, at least theoretically, based on objective methods for verifying facts, the process for deciding which bands get attention from all of the musical gatekeepers is random and corrupt: tastes differ, favoritism is rampant. I don't think it would be too controversial to say that if the music industry was in charge of our intelligence gathering and vetting they'd do an even worse job than the actual military and intelligence communities.

The thing is they do an equally bad job with identifying and promoting good music. Mediocre artists filter up because of coincidences of the social network and their location, great bands that could be widely loved are inexplicably ignored. Just look at the parade of small overlooked bands from the eighties and nineties that are currently having their day in a much brighter sun: Mission of Burma, Slint, The Pixies, etc. So, where stovepiping is a disaster when it comes to military intelligence, it could just be the savior of the music industry, or at least its audience. In musical terms stovepiping would be any opportunity for an individual or a small group to choose one or more bands that are not widely known but that the group feels are excellent and expose them to a much wider audience without having to go through all of the normal industry filters.

With the PDXPOP Now compilation selection process, I've been lucky enough to be involved with exactly such a process. In addition to seeking out tracks from some of the best of Portland's many successful bands, we also openly solicited CDs from anyone who wanted to send them to us. We listened to music from something between 300 and 400 different bands, most of which none of us had ever heard. All of us were amazed at the high level of quality amongst these entries. Each of us found five or ten bands that we really liked that we didn't know before. And the best part of it is that now we get to put songs by these bands on a CD that thousands of people will buy and listen to. I'm sure that some of the bands that will end up making onto the comp (the process is not quite one hundred percent finished) will end up having success far beyond what would otherwise have been possible for them. It's been exciting to see bands that were in this exact situation before last year's festival and compilation, like Wet Confetti and talkdemonic, have so much success in the wake of the CD and festival.

One last, hopefully larger, point here. With the intervention of the computer and the internet into the creation and distribution of music the barriers to making music and puttting it where anyone can get it are falling away. However, this does not necessarily mean that the cream will necessarily rise to the top and the best music will suddenly be freed from the constraints of the music industry's gatekeepers. If anything, these gatekeepers, albeit in a new form, will become even more powerful as listeners fight not to drown in the rising tide of available music. The more music is available to listeners the more they will rely on filters to limit the pool of what they're exposed to, and while some of these filters may end up being electronic or social (Music For Dozens, for example, is going to offer both), there will still be individual people and entities with a tight hold on what people listen to. In this environment the kind of musical stovepiping that PDXPOP offers will become even more important than it is now since the potential for really great music going unknown will be so high. And that is something that neither listeners nor artists want.

Tagged: stovepiping, music, PDXPOP, Wet Confetti, talkdemonic, Portland, MFDZ, Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, compilation

Posted by Greg at 3:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2005

FOAF, del.icio.us, and "The Net" (the Real One, the One We All Grew Up Reading About)

This post is a little different from others I've made. It is still an overly long and maybe less than precisely clear exposition on a technical issue of limited interest on which I have minimal expertise, so there's no reason to really worry, but the different thing about it is that it's not new. It comes from an email I wrote a while back to Brain Kuhn in the wake of the discussion that arose from my first post on Rory's blog. Chris and I were talking about some of this stuff last night so I forwarded the email to him. He recommended that I post it, so here it is, slightly edited to add in some necessary context. Enjoy!

One of the things that needs to happen for the web to become more a part of "real life" is that online communities need to have some of the advantages of real communities. I remember, as an early- and pre-teen, reading sci-fi books like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game where the public sphere of the world would take place on "the net". Characters would have online personas that would, in turn, have political rights, be able to make speeches in public forums, that would become more or less famous, that would, in short, have complete public identities. Right now it can be said of certain internet "celebrities" that they have an identity on the web (Rory is an example of this within a limited community, Cory, within a larger one). They have a homepage, when they comment elsewhere, people know it's them, they have jobs in the physical world that are related to their online identities, etc. The system for online identity that I'm trying to imagine would enable this for everyone and, hopefully, in a way that is not based on celebrity as the cost of entry (as if we didn't place enough importance on that already).

Before moving forward, let me give you a miniature example of what I'm talking about. I'm sure there are all kinds of technical problems with what I'm going to say, but I'm not interested in those, I'm just trying to illustrate a concept by reference to an existing technology (that I happen to only understand in its barest outlines). The example is: FOAF (Friend Of A Friend).

Here is a quick link with a good description and some technical examples that I didn't completely understand: it's from the IBM developers' network.

The point of FOAF is to create something like an open Friendster. The way it works is that individuals create their own XML files in which they describe themselves via fixed unique reference points (their email addresses) and, more importantly, their relationships to other people. Then concatenating these various XML files allows a service to describe a social network (if Billy is friends with Sally and Sally is Friends with Joey, then maybe Billy is friends with Joey). The idea is that you could create your own self-describing XML file and then just point a service like Friendster to it so you could withdraw it if you felt it was necessary. You wouldn't be uploading a batch of your personal data to them that they would then own (and be free to do whatever they want with including charge you for, sell to the Nazis, or accidentally lose). Also if you didn't like a Friendster policy (like firing an employee for blogging) you could withdraw your file in protest.

Taking it one step further, it seems to me that if a trustworthy third party could verify a relationship (or, better, that there could be some kind of open protocol for this), by checking the XML files of both parties in a claimed relationship (Joey claims to be Sally's friend and Sally claims to be Joey's friend) then, we could start to embed public web identities in a network of trust that would establish identities beyond a reasonable doubt without reference to anything like credit card numbers or social security ids. (I think there are significant social benefits to reducing the dependence of digital identity security on these types of government and corporate-issued markers, but I won't outline those because I want to try to keep my focus here).

While the Friendster example of this has somewhat limited scope imagine the same thing applied to Google. Steven Mallett wrote a mobilizing rant on this subject. And then founded a group to do something about it: Data Libre. These areas are where data-decentralization of this type really becomes radical.

Now, here I want to do a little bit of a jump cut to talk about folksonomies before coming back around, hopefully, to link the two areas together.

All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere in the last couple of months, del.icio.us appeared with the concept of tagging (or at least that's how it looks from my a-historical seat as a recent arrival to these kinds of issues). Before we get too far, we need a definition of tagging. Here's mine:

Define: tagging. noun. the act whereby users mark certain websites with various words for a variety of purposes including their own future reference and public consumption. The idea being that the convenience to the user drives the action of tagging and then great social utility is derived from combining all the results. See also: folksonomy.

(A great discussion of the comparative merits of folksonomy v. taxonomy (the traditional library way) is taking place on Many-2-Many)

So, the juice for us here is that, just maybe, this solves the problem of credibility. On a web filled with, say, a thousand times the data, Google becomes less useful. Especially because the more "amateurs" are empowered to create data, the more the results for the most popular search terms become useless (I had a link to a more authoritative source on this, but I can't find it right now -- why didn't I tag it!?): when you search for Iraq, do you want to get the NYT or some Portlander sitting in the Red and Black cafe blogging a latte-drink-in? Now, if your search was based on tags created by actual people, and organized by what results were tagged with your term by the most people then this problem would be at least reduced (ironically, del.icio.us doesn't anywhere allow for sorting of results by most popular; I think they've got some kind of ideology about causing churn, with most recent results always at the top and their deep commitment to RSS-ing everywhere they can, rather than re-enforcing popular links by letting them rise to the top). Del.icio.us places their emphasis on another way of dealing with this problem, which is through filtering. You have an inbox there where you can subscribe to other people's tags, essentially indicating them as trusted filters of the web. You can also, through RSS, subscribe to any at all on del.icio.us. So you can get a feed of del.icio.us/atduskgreg/useful+web (all of the things I tag with "useful" and "web", which, since I mentioned it, is a tag combination I use to mark sites I find that relate to the kind of issues we're talking about here. That page has links to all/most of my online reading on the subject so far).

Now, I'd finally like to try and link my two areas (FOAF and tagging) together. I don't exactly know how to do this yet, but I feel like they could be related very powerfully to try to solve the issue of trusted content. Some kind of method for having the trustworthiness of a tagger (determined via their FOAF xml file) weight their tags in search results. So, if you have verified links with a lot of people as being a trustworthy tagger then your tags will play a greater role in determining tag-based search results. This is basically a way of enacting the importance of experts in giving authority to information without creating barriers to entry for becoming an expert (no degrees, no learning complicated taxonomies). This would also deter spammers, etc., since their FOAF would reflect their extremely untrustworthy status and so their tags wouldn't effect search results (you could, potentially, even set up something like a do-not-call list, where you could choose to specifically eliminate all sites tagged by a particular user from your results, or set some kind of floor where only people with a certain level of trustworthiness could contribute to your results; you could range this level anywhere from only your direct friends to just high enough to try to keep out bots).

Tagged: FOAF, del.icio.us, tagging, Ender's Game, semantic web, Orson Scott Card, social networking

Posted by Greg at 5:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 6, 2005

My Old Boss Makes Good

My overseer when I worked at the Willamette Week a couple of years back, Nigel Jacquiss won a Pulizer Prize this week. The prize, awarded for investigative journalism, went to Jaquiss for breaking the story of former Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt's sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl while he was in office and his following use of the power of his office to cover up that relationship. Goldschmidt's secret held for 30 years before Nigel came along. And I can't remember the last time a Pulizter for investigative reporting went to a reporter at an alternative weekly, so this is more than a little bit of a coup for both Nigel and the WWeek.

I remember Nigel as a serious and helpful boss who always sought out the most serious public interest stories without regard to their flashiness. He deserves the recognition. As does the WWeek news room, which is scary good for any alternative weekly, let alone one in a city Portland's size.

Posted by Greg at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

LicenseMusic.com

Thanks to IT Conversations, I just found a website that may fulfill all of the criteria from my last post on the need for an easy online music licensing system. Right now, I'm listening to a conversation on the Future of Music with Gerd Leonhard and David Kusek, the authors of a new book called, coincidentally, The Future of Music.

Leonhard runs LicenseMusic.com. According to their about page:

LicenseMusic.com was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and quickly became the default destination for the online licensing of pre-cleared library and production music.

Now, "pre-cleared library and production music" are not exactly the popular sample sources that makers of mashups and remixes want to access. However, again according to their about page, they are about to release a new version of the site which will include the following services:

• * An online marketplace for music of all genres for any licensing application.
• * Instant licensing of pre-cleared tracks via a licensing matrix incorporating tens of thousands of deal variations.
• * A sophisticated music search engine providing almost limitless search options and automatic prompts to assist users in locating, hearing and storing tracks.
• * A Subscription Service, providing unlimited flat-fee access to over 20,000 tracks of pre-cleared music.
• * Over 100,000 major artist recordings and 10,000 chart hits, negotiable online using a unique automated negotiating tool.
• * A virtual music licensing "office" providing filing, project planning, track search, streaming, downloading, negotiating, transactional and email functionalities.

I especially like the sound of the "unique automated negotiating tool" for determining prices for licensing from the "major artists" and "chart hits". This could be exactly what's need to open up the Long Tail of licensing. I'll keep an eye on it when it comes online and report back on how well it works.

Tagged: licensing, royalties, LicenseMusic.com, sampling, Remix Culture

Posted by Greg at 4:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 29, 2005

Business Idea: Digitized Rights Management

Summary: We need a unified web-based system for clearing samples and paying royalties on cover versions. Such a system, if it was highly user friendly, both for the licensor and the licensee, would result in the legitimization of a greater portion of the growing "Remix Culture" and, therefore, more money for rights holders, more freedom for creative artists, and more open availability of so-called 'derivative works'.

I recently posted about the new "digital parlour music" being made both by emerging stars such as Keren Ann and Benjamin Biolay and by friends of mine (for example, Amy Sue and Chris Anderson) and other real people. Along with the tide of home recording technology, the aesthetics of sampling -- what is more and more being called "Remix Culture" -- has risen as well.

From Mashups to the popularity of the Creative Commons, Remix Culture (applied to everything from music and the visual arts to software to architecture) seems to be the cultural and, specifically, musical word of the minute. It was the theme of this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in all but name; Wired recently ran a cover story called "Sample the Future" which included a copy of a CD with a collection of songs made under a Creative Commons license. It is simply everywhere.

The rise of the digital home music studio brought Remix Culture to the masses. As Richard Koman put it in an introduction to a recent interview with the father of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig:

What do you get when you mix P2P, inexpensive digital input devices, open source software, easy editing tools, and reasonably affordable bandwidth? Potentially, you get what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture: a rich, diverse outpouring of creativity based on creativity.

One of the things that my friends discovered in making and releasing songs of theirs that include samples (Chris's "RU Alone") or are covers (Amy's version of "I'm On Fire") is that going the legal route of clearing the samples or getting permission for the cover version is extremely onerous. Even though the Harry Fox Agency (along with BMI the main entity in charge of licensing) recently added an online system for purchasing a mechanical license there are still a large number of obstacles for the license-seeker and lost opportunities for economic efficiencies.

The difficulties facing a person trying to clear a sample (rather than record a cover version) include the need to obtain both a "mechanical license" (via Harry Fox or BMI) as well as permission from the owner of the recording's master, the lack of a unified search between Harry Fox and BMI and the difference between the two companies' policies and pricing, and, most importantly, the prohibitive cost involved in actually purchasing all the appropriate licenses, especially for small independent artists who will likely never see a dime from their work. Creative Commons was developed to deal with these issues, but it does so only on the copyright holder's side. CC allows artists to make their work available for participation in Remix Culture, but it does nothing to make it easier for remixers to legitimately use the enormous library of music licensed under the existing regime or for license holders in this regime to monetize any of the illegal Long Tail use of their music by independent artists who can't afford the steep fees.

In these difficulties lies the seed of a profitable, maybe even transformative, business. This busines would construct a web front end for both BMI and Harry Fox's libraries. The website would need to be highly user friendly. It should feel as much like the iTunes Music Store as possible and as little like a complex legal transaction. Next, the business would have to convince Harry Fox and BMI to put in place a much more fine grained pricing structure than their outmoded current division into manufacturing more or less than 2500 units. This structure could resemble the variety of available Creative Commons licenses in that it would depend on the specific use to which the licensor was going to put the sample. Further, in order to be available for samples (rather than simply cover versions), the business would need to co-ordinate with record labels to unify "master licenses" with "mechanical licenses" (if not legally then at least practically so that it would be invisible to the consumer) in order to provide one-stop shopping for musicians looking to use samples in their work. Again, there should be variable pricing for the master licenses portion of the price based on the demand for the specific sample (if a piece of music was popular amongst remixers, it could demand a higher fee, but music that has never brought in any royalties might be made to do so if it was easily available and cheap enough).

The payoff for accomplishing all of these difficult things (both for the business and the copyright holders and record labels) would be that some portion of the illegal sampling ecosystem would come into the light and be monetized. Just as the iTunes Music Store brought part of the illegal file sharing market into legitimacy, creating an entirely new revenue stream for labels and bands in the process, this new business would would attract the ethical remixers for whom the only obstacles preventing them from paying for their samples are price and difficulty. We may be headed for a utopia where all culture is easily and freely available to all for creative use, but until we get there, there is a great deal of money to be made making the current badly broken system work better.

Tagged: royalties, licensing, music, Harry Fox, BMI, Creative Commons, business idea, Long Tail

Posted by Greg at 3:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 25, 2005

Is Clear Channel A Monopoly?

There was an interesting post a couple of days ago over at The Technology Liberation Front on The Radio "Monopoly" Myth. You hear so much discussion of the dangers of media consolidation, much of it with a Chicken Little-ish tone, that it's refreshing to see any argument on the other side, even if that argument happens to be tragically misguided.

Here's his argument: the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) (the sum of the square of the market shares of each individual firm in the market) rates the consolidation of any market on a scale from zero to 10,000. It is a major benchmark that the FCC and the DOJ use to gauge antitrust violations and to approve mergers. Because of the very large total number of radio stations in this country, the HHI for radio is very low: either 462 based on revenue or 92 based on the raw number of firms. This is on a scale where the normal range is 1000 (normal market concentration) to 2000 (high concentration verging on antitrust). Therefore, despite their large number of stations, Clear Channel can't possibly be a monopoly since they control such a small fraction of the total industry's revenue or stations.

So my question is: What happens when you limit the pool to large urban markets? I bet these market percentages go way up and even push the numbers necessary for monopoly status. For example, according to Journalism.org, Clear Channel's 1194 stations (which is more than the next seven competitors combined, by the way, including both Viacom subsidiaries, Infinity and Citadel) are spread throughout about 180 markets making for more than six stations in each market. What do you want to bet that these 180 markets include at least the 100 largest media markets in America? Can you even name six radio stations in your market? What about if you don't include public radio? When you look at it this way, even though Clear Channel doesn't literally own a monopoly share of all radio stations, it starts to look very much like they have a monopoly share of the actual market, of ears if not frequencies. But isn't that the metric that really matters?

In regards to the HHI based on revenue, I don't think that it's to Clear Channel's credit that they've managed to put such dreadful and unpopular programming on their stations that, despite their monopoly shares of most urban markets, they still can't manage to make any money. It's interestinng that, when looked at this way, the HHI, which at first glance seemed to clear Clear Channel of the cloud of monopolist accusations, now starts to look like a snapshot of exactly the way the company has destroyed the radio industry: they own all the big stations but they somehow have managed to drive away the audience and therefore eliminate all the revnues. This seems like a somewhat strange fact to bring up on their behalf.

Tagged: Clear Channel, radio, consolidation, HHI, Technology Liberation Front

Posted by Greg at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Chris's del.icio.us Script for Net News Wire

I've mentioned Net News Wire 2.0, my RSS reader of choice, here a number of times before (most recently here, and in my original review). In that original review, I discussed the possibility of NNW replacing Safari as my browser of choice. One of the things standing in the way of this happening was NNW's lack of bookmarks, and, more pertinently, bookmarklets, such as one allowing you to post a page to del.icio.us.

Well, my Music For Dozens cohort, Chris Anderson, recently posted his Apple Script for posting the current displayed web page to del.icio.us to both his blog and NNW's script section of their site. I've found that using the Script, especially in combination with Tinker Tool to assign a hotkey to the script (I'm using cmd+0), I now only go over in to Safari about a third of the time to follow links I find in NNW (Flash and general media conent still work better there). One more step closer to living in an RSS reader/browser hybrid. Now, all we need is bookmarks and we'll be too close to call. . .

Tagged: Net News Wirte, RSS, reader, syndication, Apple, Script

Posted by Greg at 3:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

The New Digital Parlour Music

As part of what seems to be "March is Keren Ann Month" in the national music media (NPR, NYT Fashion, the Boston Globe, and even Pitchfork), the NY Times ran a story by Jon Pareles this Sunday on the rise of Home Studios (Home Sweet Studio). In addition to Keren Ann, the piece mentioned artists ranging from Moby to Mice Parade, Bruce Springsteen to Aesop Rock and what virtues recording at home had brought to their work. The theory seems to be that "working in solitude can nurture more eccentric, more private songs," the studio becoming "a sanctuary: part sandbox, part confessional."

I found two aspects of this piece striking. First of all, isn't this old news? Moby's Play came out in 1999, was made at home, and was the biggest record in the world for a long time. By this point, just about everyone I know has a home studio. Granted, I live in Portland where there's more than one musician for every six people, but still it seems like the ever-falling price of home recording equipment and the ever-easier integration of that equipment with the computer has made home studios mandatory for anyone with even the slightest interest in making music themselves. The reality of the artists they talked about in the piece, going off to do multi-thousand dollar days in the studio to give songs a final polish, sill seems far removed from both the limitations and the immediacy of the home studio work I see around me.

The thing Pareles got right, though, is the musical aesthetic. Rock bands, hip-hop and 'R and B' groups, country, just about every other type of popular music is communal and social in its prouction. Music is rarely the sentiment of one person confessed to no one in particular. Even when it seems to be, as in the work of certain song writers whose work gets described as 'confessional' (Bright Eyes, whose star is burning even brighter than Keren Ann's and in the same firmament, comes to mind) there is always either a narrative distance as in the novelist's art, or an emotive distance as in the ironist's.

The domestic privacy that swaddles this new home studio environment, on the other hand, allows for a truly confessional music, music not intended to be heard by anyone in particular and, often, not actually heard by anyone at all. The tools of the trade tend to be drum machines, samplers, and sequencers along with acoustic guitars and quiet, often whispered, vocals. Rather than sampling vintage or contemporary popular music (the unit of meaning in the communal music venues where sampling-based music was born, like dance and hip-hop clubs), this new private music tends to sample sounds found in the home: pets' purrs, dishes' clanks, doors' slams, etc. The vocals, and other sounds that "move air", are only as loud as is natural in a small bedroom.

Current recording-based pop (Beyonce's Crazy in Love is a paradigmatic example) is almost pefectly public. It is all extroversion, from the sample of soul horns to the dance beats and the shout-outs and the shout-alongs. But before the era of recording, music was played in the home. People performed actual works of musical "literature" on the piano for their own enjoyment and on occasions when communal listening was called for. This new Private Music, while made with technological tools derived from the suite of systems created to make song's like Crazy In Love, is a return to the spirit of parlor music, music made for a small group of intimate acquaintances or, more simply, just for the music's maker herself to pass the time.

Note: It is one of the great ironies of this post-whatever age that technologies and social systems are rapidly falling into place to make this Private Music public in a big way. The explosion of the popularity of blogs have illustrated the interest we posses in the intimate details of other peoples lives and, potentially, in their thoughts and creations.

Tagged: music, home, recording, digital, Keren, Ann

Posted by Greg at 4:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2005

The Tiniest of Hacks

The scale of this idea really couldn't be a whole lot smaller, but since I know there's a couple of you out there who have recently started using (or recently bought: good for you) Net News Wire 2.0b, I thought I'd go ahead with it anyway:

Hitting 'tab' cycles your focus between the three panes of the main NNW window: the subscription list pane, the items and tabs pane, and the content pane. Here's what's useful about it: When you click on a link from a post in the content pane of a News Item, NNW will open the link as your rightmost tab and jump the content pane to it if you've got that preference selected. I don't keep that preference selected because I like to use open tabs as a kind of standing "to read" list that I return when I have some free time. Usually, after clicking, I want to keep my News Items in the content pane so I can just hit the 'up arrow' when I'm ready to read the next Item. Anyway, even though I've got my preferences set to just open the link in the background, NNW still shifts my focus to the new page (without displaying it), the result being that the 'up arrow' no longer moves me to the next News Item. For awhile, I was having to mouse over to click on the next Item, until I found that if I just hit 'tab' twice in quick succession, the focus would be back where it belonged and I could 'up arrow' again happily.

As I say, this 'hack' couldn't be smaller in scale, but it's made me happier since, in reading upwards of 100 items a day, I probably click through 20 or 30 times, so it makes for just that many fewer times I have to take my hands off the keyboard. Also, like any good hack that undoes a user interface bug (of whatever scale) it goes just that little bit further to syncing my brain with the program, so my 'flow' with it is never interupted, and the amount of time I have to spend on the task at hand goes down a bit -- here it's by just enough that I can notice it with satisfaction.

Tagged: NetNewsWire, hack, rss, reader, syndication

Posted by Greg at 5:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

Ganson's Dancing Machines

Sometime in January, I saw an excellent episode of PBS's Nova: Science Now. It had a story about Mirror Neurons (which we use to respond to other people's facial expressions), a profile of an MIT AI guy who obsessively -- and hopelessly, according to his girlfriend -- tries to schedule his own life down to the second, a piece about sand dunes that sing in the wind, and a tiny little clip about an artist that makes moving sculptures.

The clip started on a closeup of a wishbone walking across a white ground. It had a teetering sauntering gait and was attached to a metal armature. After a series of close ups of rotating flywheels and oscillating springs, the camera pulled back to reveal the entire contraption. At first glance it looked like the wishbone was pulling a gigantic Rube Goldberg device more than five times its height made up of spindly bicycle wheels. After watching it for a moment I realized, that the machine was, in fact, generating the motion, pushing the little bone along and causing its teeter and saunter.

The film and sculpture both turned out to be by an artist named Arthur Ganson; the particular piece on display was called Machine With Wishbone. Ganson is both a brilliant machinist and an eloquent poet of motion, especially walking. He tends to use large and complex mechanisms to produce naturalistic, often human-like motion in small organic or mundane objects. The baroquely intricate workings of his handmade contraptions are as beautiful in their absurd and artificial complexity as the resultant organic motions are in their simplicity and familiarity. This combination makes for a compelling result every time, avoiding the common trap of art that uses the organic/machinic juxtaposition to take sides.

Ganson neither laments the dominance of the thoughtless machine over the living soul nor celebrates the augmentation of the mortal body by omnipotent technology. Instead he sets the two to dancing together, as partners.

Tagged: Arthur, Ganson, mechanic, kinetic, sculpture, art

Posted by Greg at 12:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2005

The Launch of Podshow.com and Why Social Networking Sites are the Wall Marts of the Long Tail

On today's Daily Source Code, Adam Curry announced a new venture, Podshow.com that he is undertaking with Ron Bloom to "bring together the elements to create a marketplace" for Podcasting. He listed these: making it easier to find Podcasts through search and directories, enabling monetization through convincing big Madison Avenue types of the value of narrowcast advertising, and lowering barriers to entry for content creation by anyone.

I think these are all the right ideas, hip to the best current thinking in these areas like the Long Tail, etc. Something occurred to me in looking at the crappy temporary pre-launch page they put up (crufty with advertising-speak: buzzwords and catchphrases, and confusing non-compliant design): The big movers of the folksonomic/tagging/new whatever, Flickr and del.icio.us, have raised the bar for useability of site design. Both of those sites do complicated things that are hard to explain to people who haven't used the sites. It is a virtue of their implementation that "you really have to use it to get it" is both so often said of these sites and so true. What they do can't be reduced to buzzwords or a satisfying one sentence marketing statement. With podshow.com, and so many other sites, on the other hand, I think that if you didn't already know what they were about when you got there, you would have no way of figuring it out from the site and no chance of figuring out how to use the site itself.

Right now, this is not such a big deal because we're talking about a parking page. But soon, when they launch their service, they better have a design of equivalent quality to del.icio.us and Flickr, one that is both self-explanatory and a pleasure to use. I guess what I'm realizing is that the excellence of these sites' designs may not just be a happy coincidence, but a necessity of operating in the Long Tail. Since, in Long Tail territory, people are following whims and whisps of their own taste, wandering around laterally to find new things that they might like and new people whose taste they trust, rather than searching for a specific pre-known thing, the "stores" have to be much more responsive to their desires, making it simple and obvious for them to navigate in whatever direction occurs to them at any moment.

Take the totally dominant sell-your-own-music site CD Baby as a example. Try to find At Dusk on CD Baby. It's easy. You just type the name into their search field and you get good results. But then try to navigate from there to any other semi-similar band, Menomena for example. It is next to impossible to do just by clicking on links even though we're in the same scene in the same city and, in fact, know each other a little bit.

The key to this kind of navigation is social networking. You don't want to browse other bands in the same genre or in the same region, you want to see what bands other people who like At Dusk also like. It's just like the real world: the best way to find out about music is to talk to people who you already have something in common with musically (say that you run into at a show or in a record store) and then explore what else they like that you might not know about yet. On the other end, everyone has a friend or two who they trust for music refrences, who is always listening to new things and has taste similar enough to your own that their recommendations will have a pretty high hit rate. The more people you find like this the more good music you'll find.

Sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr do a lot to encourage these kinds of interations. They're always pushing you down the Long Tail towards things you don't know about yet but might like rather than up to the most popular items that you already have an opinion on but that get bought the most.

I can't think of a medium that is more ripe for this kind of treatment than podcasting. It has the social networking element already built in by its relation to blogging and there really isn't anything narrower than the Tap Dancing News on openpodcast.org or any of the 6 items in the ipodder.org subdirectory for "wine".

I don't know if it's going to be podshow.com, but sometime soon, someone is going to build a great social networking site for podcasting and that's going to be the ballgame.

Tagged: podcasting, social, networking, del.icio.us, flickr, tagging, folksonomy, adam, curry, podshow.com

Posted by Greg at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2005

Art or Not?

In a recent post, I mentioned the popular series of Rate-my-X sites that followed the popularity of Hot-or-Not. A fun new one is Art-or-Not? on which you can grade people's art on a scale from one to ten and submit your own work to be graded. It's like the artistic communities that have arisen on Flickr, but with more negativity.

Tagged: art-or-not, art, rating, sites, Hot-or-Not

Posted by Greg at 2:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2005

Making URLs Smaller

My house and bandmate has a problem. Oftentimes, when I send him interesting links that happen to have long URLs, for some reason his Hotmail account splits up the link, ending the part it sends to the browser at some arbitrary point (I think the point has to do with where Mail.app was displaying a line break when I sent the email).

Recently I found a solution to this problem: TinyUrl.com. They take your long, crappy URLs and parse them into something simple, like "http://tinturl.com/6". That kind of thing won't cause a line break. Hotmail won't freak out. They've got a bunch of other smart uses for the thing on their homepage, but I liked this one because it solved a problem I'd encountered that I never thought would be solved.

Tagged: tiny, url, Hotmail, useful, web

Posted by Greg at 2:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 9, 2005

Flickr Fixr

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned an interesting use of Flickr photosets that I'd seen. Having seen how cool that was, I went over to Flickr to try to set up some photosets of my own, only to discover that their slick JavaScript interface didn't work for me. It didn't even load. Instead it gave me some kind of strange error message that I had the wrong version of Safari.

Yesterday, their tech support got back to me to ask if I used any "special plugins or extensions" with Safari. I told them that I use PithHelmet, but not much else. Almost immediately they told me:

PithHelmet could be the problem. i've added a fix to our code here to try and work around your version number and ignore it. this code will be deployed later today.

And by the end of last night it was working perfectly. I just wanted to post this here because I always appreciate good tech support and I thought it was cool that, because of my whining, all of Flickr now works with PithHelmet.

Also, with the technical problems sorted out and with my new digital camera, I've started using Flickr again more heavily. I'd used it in the past to setup my (semi-defunct) Portland art moblog, but now I set up a profile and am running the RSS feed of my uploaded photos on the sidebar here and am going to see what else interesting I can find to do with it. I'll keep you posted.

Tagged: Flickr, photography, tech, support, RSS, PithHelmet

Posted by Greg at 3:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Adarwal My Long-Lost Kin

It's both disturbing and heartening to come across someone who's independently come up with an idea that you thought was your own. There's reassurance. You're not crazy; it's not just you. But there's also disappointment. This thing that'd come into your head is not something wholly new in the world; it's been done before.

Neil Adarwal makes paintings of shirts. They're compelling in the way they give frumpy personality and solid form to such easily un-noticed everyday objects. There's a magic to the drawing of folds of cloth that permeates art history, from Fra Angelico all the way through Dutch still life and Matisse, and Adarwal here masters it with a matter-of-fact flatness that retains some of the graphic power of the modern masters while injecting a playful sense of individuality and personal biography (especially with titles such as "To fieldtrips" and "If we're meeting in the square" for the bright stiped-orange one).

About a year ago, I started a still life of a pile of shirts that were sitting on the back of my chair. The shirts sat there for about four months while I worked(drastically limitting my wardrobe). It started on one sheet of paper and grew from there. When I reached the edge of the first sheet, I just grabbed another (each sheet is about 12 by 24 inches, making the whole thing around four by eight feet). Four months later I had twelve sheets and I wasn't quite done. One thing lead to another and I stopped, putting the thing up on my wall, without filling in all of the details, without actually finishing it.

The point is, having spent four months looking at shirts draped over things, I can tell you that I see them much the same way Adarwal does. I've lived in the little folds whose identity he captures with such simplicity and clarity. I've experienced the stretching of space into which the long cascading of sleeves pulls you, and which makes Adarwal's chair backs, or whatever the armatures are holding up his shirts, so long and stilt-like.

Anyway, it's a strange experience to realize that you share your eyes with someone you've never met and that they beat you to something you never thought you'd even get anyone else to really understand.

Tagged: art, drawing, shirt, still, life, Adarwal

Posted by Greg at 2:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 7, 2005

Invisibilia

A World of Invisibilia seems to be an ongoing series of drawings/photos by Greg from The Man Who Fell Asleep, a strange site featuring "animations. pictures. words. sentences. banal observations. clumsy satire. fictional interviews. poetic license."

What he does is take various photgraphs of people from different sources (snapshots, portraits, the web) and then draw out one of the figures, replacing them with a simplified, somewhat charicatured line drawings. He explains himself thusly,

Maybe the pictures illustrate the idea that we all want to remove ourselves from life, and replace ourselves with fictional, self-created versions of ourself. We want to fictionalise our own existence, and impose order and narrative where there is none.

What I like about them is the way the flatness of the drawings seem to stand out from the photographic background, vibrating with an almost three dimensional depth. They remind me of stereographs in which the depth always looks like a series of planes stacked in front of each other (like painted theatrical flats), rather than a continuous recession.

(via Robot Wisdom)

Tagged: drawing, photogrpahy, Invisibilia, rotoscope, art

Posted by Greg at 4:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Painter Working From Hot-or-Not Photos

Most likely, you've used Hot-or-Not, the strangely hypnotizing site that lets you rate the attractiveness of strangers and, if you choose, be rated in turn. A couple of years back it spawned a whole universe of copycats from Rate-my-Kitten to Rate-my-Poo and thus spent its flame in a brief flash of being the thing-of-the-moment.

Unlike the silliness of some of the copycat sites, Hot-or-Not remains compelling. The painter John Angelbeck captures some of what makes it so in his watercolors based on uploaded Hot-or-Not images, about which he says,

Each photograph submitted to the site was transformed from a household photo to a digital mating call, available to the world. I am intrigued by how each of these self-conscious images was chosen specifically for this purpose and how that purpose dictated what is found in each of them.

As always with artist statements, Angelbeck does not seem to get, or at least is not willing to say, what makes his work successful. What makes these images effective "digital mating calls" is also exactly what makes them pointed and often touching portraits: the way they capture the subject's world, a common one, which we also inhabit, while also picking out particular details that make the person specific and their humanity poignant. The velcro Addidas sandals or the 3.5 inch diskette on an otherwise bare carpet. The Insane Clown Posse flyer and google-eyed alien drawings on a background wall. While the commonalities of pose and mood of facial expressions may tell us something about the sociological fact of how people (or at least teen girls) try to best-represent themselves, it is these details that prick at our feelings bringing life to these distant and digitally-mediated self-portraits.

Anglebeck has no presence on the web that I can find. I discovered his work through New American Paintings, a jurried publication of contemporary painting by region.

Tagged: Hot-or-Not, art, watercolor, contemporary, Angelbeck, painting, rate

Posted by Greg at 3:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 5, 2005

Demand's Photgraphy

Thomas Demand is a mid-career German artist who re-creates scenes from real-life and from photographs using cut colored construction paper. MoMA is currently putting on a retrospective of his work (NY Times article). Demand's work, the above picture of a Florida vote-counting station, one of an airport security checkpoint and another of a hotel bathroom where a German politician was found dead, reproduces and deepens the chilly distance found in newspaper photos of passion-filled events, removing not only their humanity (there are no human figures in any of Demand's images that I've seen), but their actual physicality as well, rendering them, literally, into objects instead of people or places on which emotional meaning could adhere.

Although Demand's reconstructions are apparently accomplished at full-scale, they have some of the pleasures of miniaturization, of reducing the real with all its detail and incomprehensibility into a schematic which feels both easily understood and an agent of potential further understanding (think of the uses to which models are usually put in architectual planning, et al, as well as the resonance of the word "reconstruction" in the Unsolved Mysteries sense).

More about Demand here, more about the retrospective on MoMA's site, and the MeFi post that lead me there.

Tagged: art, sculpture, photography, contemporary, Thomas Demand, MoMA, German

Posted by Greg at 1:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Review: Accident Hash Podcast

As I promised in a previous post, I've been listening to a number of podcasts from the Association of Music Podcasting. AMP is an alliance of various music podcasters who are working together to make a library of "pod safe" songs bands have given them permission to play. It's a nice effort to both provide legal music for people looking to make their own music podcasts and a great outlet for independent bands trying to promote themselves however they can. Once I've gotten a feel for each podcast, I'll post reviews here. The first one follows.

Podcast: Accident Hash
Genre: various types of alternative rock-based pop
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/accidenthash
Host: C.C. Chapman
Most Recent Episode: Hash #8: Quick Like A Bunny

C.C. Chapman hails from Boston and focuses on "New England Independent music". Chapman has a frank and friendly tone and his descriptions of the music he plays are apt and honest. Describing music in words without recourse to technical terms or overly specific and obscure genre names is challenging and Chapman does a good job of it: S.G. Ladd's song "Smiles" does sound exactly like "Counting Crows meets John Mayer meets Third Eye Blind" and "coffee shop pop" tells you pretty much everything you need to know about John Hoskinson's "Uncharacteristic".

As you might guess from these descriptions, however, Accident Hash's greatest failing is the somewhat vanilla choice of music. One of the most potentially exciting things about music podcasting is that since the selection is limited to independent bands and since there are really no commercial forces of any kind, it could be an outlet for some truly experimental and exciting music that wouldn't find advocates in other formats. Granted, a lot of people like pop music as a style and I'm one of them, but there has to be music out there that is "pop" in sound without coming quite so close to specific styles (and at time, even specific songs) as the bands on Accident Hash have a tendency to do. The Benjamins' "Again," for example, is pretty close to the Pixies' "Gigantic," maybe even litigate-ably so. Buttonhead's "Easy: The Girlfriend Song" could be a 311 song, but without quite reaching the level of vocal quality and melodic sophistication that band so habitually achieves.

Not to be entirely negative here on the music, there are a couple of standout tracks, as well. Lonesome Jack, which Chapman describes as "Irish bar pop", play a kind of chaotic and exciting too-many-things-happening-at-once mix of ska, pop punk, and Irish music that has a giddy and infectious energy. Utenzil provides a refreshing change from the generally very slickly produced tracks on this podcast with a simple bit of "basement electronica" that has a catchy one line melody and goes on exactly not too long. Even John Hoskinson's "Uncharacteristic," which I mentioned above as being comfortably "coffee shop" reaches, in its best moments, for the heights of Nick Drake or, in a different direction, Dan Bern.

With the simplicity and clarity of his presentation, Chapman has the potential to make a really compelling show out of Accident Hash if only he'd be more willing to stray somewhat further from the stylistic territory of mainstream radio. I'll stay subscribed for a couple more episodes at least, but if the musical selection starts sounding a little less like what I can already get on my FM dial (even if, here, it is coming from local independent bands), then Accident Hash would have, in me, a new permanent listener.

Tagged: music, podcast, review, New England, Accident Hash

Posted by Greg at 5:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 2, 2005

Brickfilms

Brickfilms are stop-motion animated movies made with LEGOs, especially LEGO figures. They're also called "LEGO Movies". I hadn't heard of them until about an hour ago and though I'm totally not surprised that they exist, I am pretty entertained. So, here are some links to get you started:

brickfilms.com

a homepage of sorts

All of the Dead

an hysterical silent-era style zombie movie featuring "some vague semblance of a plot in which explorers discover an ancient thingy which makes the dead rise from their graves, followed by random violence and intertextual references."

Sven Central

one of the more serious directors, with a kind of Tarantino-Kill-Bill-esque style and high production values. Check out especially his Bloody Snow. It is (not) surprising how many Brick Films feature extreme violence. He also has a strong link section (but I can't link to it properly because of his frame-based site) to other Brick Films; it's under Filmtips.

A Peculiar Event

A contest run by the people at Brickfilm.com. A good place to see a broad cross-section of the movies.

iStop Motion

from Boinx Software, a program for making stop motion animation using your iSight or other digital video or still camera. It lets you superimpose the live camera image with the previous frame and records directly to Quicktime.

Anyone else got any good ones?

Tagged: Brickfilm, stop motion, animation, LEGO, LEGO movies

Posted by Greg at 2:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 27, 2005

Review: Net News Wire 2.0 Beta

As part of my New Year's resolution to pay for more of the software that I use all the time, I recently purchased a license for NetNewsWire 2.0. Even though it's still in beta, over the month long trial I found myself growing ever more dependant on the program and, therefore, amazed on the trial's expiration to learn I'd only had the thing a month. If that's not a reason to buy software, I don't know of one.

I'd first tried NNWlite (their free version) sometime in late 2003 when I first heard of RSS, but couldn't really grasp the utility. A lot of the feeds I subscribed to contained only headlines and not the full articles; they hadn't implemented the in-app tabbed browser; etc. Basically, NNWlite, at that point, was constantly throwing you back into Safari, rather than just letting you get at the content you subsrcibe to within itself, which is, I've found, what makes using an aggregator so useful, saving you time browsing around the web.

Now, not only do more feeds provide full stories (and there just simply are more interesting feeds around), but also, now NNW has great support for enclosures (podcasting was actually what made me look again at using an RSS Reader) along with their rocking browser system (the first time I accidentally hit cmd+q instead of cmd+w, and then re-launched the program, I was thrilled to find that it remembered all the tabs I had open and just reloaded those pages. If only Safari would do something like this, I'd lose great links a lot less often).

Having sung its praises for three paragraphs now, there is something I really wish that NNW would do that it doesn't: support bookmarks and therefore, and more importantly, bookmarklets. Being able to tag pages to del.icio.us is the main reason for my desire, though there are other neat things to do with bookmarklets as well (see my previous post on bookmarklets) this is the big one. Right now, when I find a page I want to tag, I've got to copy the URL into Safari, wait for it to load, and then trigger the bookmarklet to tag it. Though the kind folks at Ranchero were nice enough to point me towards an apple script for del.icio.us posting, it only works on individual News Items themselves, not web pages you've opened, which, in my experience, is really what you want to tag.

This small complaint aside, Net News Wire, has really changed the way I use the web. I use it nearly as much as Safari; I'm reading a lot more things (blogs and otherwise) on a consistent basis in not too much more time than before. This plus the great podcasting functionality (the one problem there is the lack of the ability to tell NNW only to download the enclosure in the most recent item in a new feed which can result in undesirable mass downloading on new subscriptions) has really made it indespensable.

What I really wonder and where the rubber's going to meet the road is when Safari RSS comes out with the release of Tiger, if NNW will turn out to be obselete. My experience with NNW has made me feel like browser-integration is inevitable for RSS readers (if their browser's behaviour was 15% more Safari-like, they supported standard browser plug-ins like Shockwave, and they supported bookmarks, I would drop Safari right now). The question now is just whether Net News Wire or Safari RSS will integrate the other's functionality first.

Tagged: NetNewsWire, Safari, RSS, Reader, browser, internet, syndication

Posted by Greg at 3:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 24, 2005

Anticipated and Unanticipated Packet Loss

I've been away for a couple of days. It's been a combination of spotty internet access (Speakeasy, my service provider, was having some kind of problem with "unanticipated packet loss in Seattle, Portland, and surrounding areas", that first made service intermittent and then wiped it out all together) and life busy-ness. Anyway, I've got a couple of posts in the works here, but I thought that, for now, I'd just give a quick update on a running issue here at IDFDZ: my problems with Hotmail.

They seem not only to continue, but to become ever stranger. Tonight, I received an email from Microsoft thusly:

In order to improve customer experience and reduce spam and junk e-mail abuse on MSN services, Hotmail will no longer allow new e-mail accounts to be accessed via Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express.

We are pleased to inform you that because you are an existing and valued customer, at this time your current Hotmail and MSN account(s) are exempt from this restriction and you will be able to continue enjoying access to those accounts from Outlook or Outlook Express. However, any new Hotmail or MSN accounts you create will not be accessible via Outlook or Outlook Express.

I don't understand how abandoning remote access, even by their own products, will improve the "customer experience" (I also don't know how much these restrictions would even affect me if they applied since I use httpmail to access my account from Mail, which they never supported in the first place). Are they trying to prevent spam from being sent from within Hotmail? How does not accessing your mail through a client help prevent you from getting spammed? What's the point?

In the meantime, the other friend that I'd mentioned in the last post has also dropped his use of his Hotmail account with Outlook and, therefore, his account altogether. I don't know why anyone who uses a mail client would do otherwise. Since they paired this email with a pitch for something called Microsoft Outlook Live ("Because you actively use Outlook or Outlook Express to access one or more of your MSN Hotmail or MSN e-mail accounts [ed.: I don't], this could be the ideal time to consider subscribing to our powerful new e-mail service - Microsoft Office Outlook Live [ed.: or to cease using our service in any way whatsoever and reluctantly join the vast chorus of outrage that follows our every move]."), it feels to me like Microsoft is trying to use the spam issue as an excuse to try to monetize their email service. Which, besides being a morally grey area, seems like a pretty tough sell with a bunch of strong and openly accessible free service in the running all of which have, in my experience, much more effective spam filtering (Fastmail and Gmail, for example). Anyway, I'm surprised I haven't seen any comment about this rather shocking change in policy elsewhere. Are there really no geeks with Hotmail accounts? Including the ones who work for Microsoft?

Tagged: Microsoft, Hotmail, Outlook, email, MSN, problem, user, practices, POP, IMAP

Posted by Greg at 3:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 19, 2005

Bookmarklets and the Moment

Last night, Chris and I stayed up through the night talking about various issues arising from my recent post on tagging relationships. We covered a bunch of topics relating to the growing folksonomic zeitgeist, including ways of tagging music, how to leverage existing taxonomies to ring greater utility out of emerging folksonomies, and whether my idea of tagging the relationship between two links is (1) possible, (2) useful, (3) actually in anyway different from tagging individual pages.

Chris captured the excitement of the moment well in his post today:

i feel like i'm witnessing the front edge of the envelope of a phase change in thought and communication. almost like a revolution, in the way that the intellectual forbearers of the Declaration of Independence must have felt, sitting in thier salons, thinking of the way things could, or should, be.

While tagging itself is a big part of this feeling of zeitgeist, I think it's important not to overlook the other new technologies that are integrating the tag-web fluidly into our user experience. Specifically, I'm thinking of one recent deleopment without which, I think, tagging would not be fully possible: bookmarklets.

If you've never used one, bookmarklets are basically tiny applications that run from within a web browser. They often do things with or to the content of the current web page. The first example I came across was del.icio.us's, which lets you tag your current page and then return to it. But they can do other things as well, starting with just user input from JavaScript-generated popup menus. For example the Technorati Tags bookmarklet simply takes my keywords and generates the html I use to include the Technorati Tags at the bottom of each post here.

Both of these are examples where, without the bookmarklet, I don't think I would use the services, that's how much more convient they make things. Del.icio.us especially is almost inconceivable without using bookmarklets for posting. The del.icio.us bookmarklets (they offer several options) are what make me feel like del.icio.us is "always on"; it's what makes tagging interesting pages occur to me so easily when I find them (especailly with the fact that, in Safari, you can trigger bookmarks with numerical hotkeys -- using del.icio.us has become akin to hitting cmd+s to save).

I thought I'd start a list of cool bookmarklets (and bookmarkleting resources) here that could then be added to in the comments and the trackbacks:

M Feeds

generates podcast-friendly RSS feeds from any page that posts media files

Technorati Tags

generates html for including Technorati Tags in blog posts from your keywords

Library Lookup

looks up a book in your local library's catalog

Jesse's Bookmarlets Site

is a useful refence of bookmarlets with utility for web developers and others who are sticklers for web standards

NYT Link Generator

generates permalinks to NYT stories

Make bookmarklets from any search

is a bookmarklet that will run your specified web search on any highlighted text

Image Drag

lets you drag images around to rearrange webpages. Super cool, but doesn't work in Safari or IE (works great in Firefox)

Bookmarklets.com

is a compendium of different bookmarklets

Favelets.com

is another compendium. This one has some interesting bookmarklets for translating webpages with Babelfish

Javascript Builder

is a tool for generating the javascript to make your own bookmarklets

Tagged: bookmarklet, del.icio.us, useful, web, tags, folksonomy, javascript

Posted by Greg at 3:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 18, 2005

Olympus C-7000

Today, I received, in the mail, my new digital camera. I had picked it out around the time my dad came into town for my birthday.

I was waiting all day to play with it and after a busy and productive day (finishing a grant, a studio tour and recording some drum samples with Chris and Will, etc.) I finally got around to it in the last couple of hours. After finally wrapping my head around its various controls, I think its pretty neat. The way the manual focus works with a picture-in-picture display (it insets a blown up version of the area at the center of your view finder so you can tell whether it's getting closer to being in focus or farther away, just like my dad's old Canon A1 I used to play with) is pretty slick and, for some reason, none of the reviews mentioned it. Also with the pop up flash (making it easier to turn off and to remember if you've got it on or off) and the retracting lens (without the sliding lens cover which was such an inconvenience on the similar camera I looked at in the store -- the Olympus C-60) it is pretty intuitive to use. Already after only a couple of hours I feel like I understand how to navigate the functions pretty smoothly. Now I've just got to learn how to take good pictures.

For your amusement/disturbance, I've included some of my first attempts here:

Tagged: digital, camera, Olympus, picutres

Posted by Greg at 5:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2005

The Art of Tagging Relationships

I have a friend who is currently a senior art major at Reed College, my alma mater. She is a photographer and her thesis project involves collecting photographs from various sources (including her own practice) and assembling them into an ever growing installation on the wall. She arranges the photos into combinations derriving from many different properties they posses: commonalities of appearance (visual rhymes), of subject matter, of source, etc. In the couple of times I have seen the project over the course of its development it has been quite fluid with many, if not most, of the images moving around, changing their relationships with the others.

As soon she started telling me about her ideas for this project, I started trying to convince Lindsay -- that's my friend's name -- that she should learn some web design. I immediately thought that the kind of ideas that were driving her project and the kind of attributes she wanted it to posses would be most easily and best present through the kind of inter-connections that a website would allow.

At the time I was thinking of all of the ways she could attach additional information to the photographs and the way she could link them to each other and to various other material on the web (including, for many of the photos which were drawn from online sources, their original sources). Basically, I was thinking of the web's power for annotation. What hadn't occurred to me was its power for dynamic and multiplicitous organization.

Maybe it's just the fact that I had a long session today with Chris working on the last stages of nudging m4dz into beta, but tonight I've been having all kinds of interesting ideas for ways of presenting Lindsay's project on the web using a dynamic database driven structure and, especially, the power of tagging.

Let me explain what I mean. If Lindsay were to organize her images into a database that would include various categories of meta-data (size, quality, source, etc.) along with a capability for tags, she could then create a website that would allow her to dynamically re-arrange her images at whim in order to visualize new groupings of photographs along many different informational lines (anything contained in the meta-data or her descriptive tags) that would be very hard to imagine just looking at the photographs in piles in her studio. For example, she could immediately group together all the photos captured from web dating services that she'd tagged with the terms "leftward" and "gaze". This would give her a group from a common source that would have a strong possibility of having compositional attributes in common, or rhyming visually. At the very least this could act as a powerful tool for composing the actual installation itself, in visualizing different potential combinations of photographs and generally managing the collection. At best it could be a way to create a dynamic interactive version of the project on the web that would allow users to participate in visually re-arranging the collection in order to explore the connections Lindsay made between the images along with, potentially, making their own.

All of this is great, but it's not what is really exciting me in thinking about the potential here (this is maybe where it gets more interesting for web-heads and slightly less interesting for Lindsay): what about the idea of tagging the relationships between these images rather than attributes of the images themselves. Here's the point. Say, in laying out the installation, Lindsay knows that she wants two photographs to go next to each other in a particular way (say that Photo A should be directly above Photo B). Instead of having to fabricate a tag like "aboveCorner" to apply to both photos in order to -- poorly -- describe the relationship between the two, the database could treat the relationship between the two as a single entry and then use tags to describe that entry. So the entry would look something like: Photo A <--> Photo B (tagged: rhyme).

Now we're beginning to have a system that would be really powerful in terms of allowing a unique arrangement (or at least a finite number of options) arise organically from Lindsay's process of looking at and thinking about her images. As she went through and linked up images in relationships and described those relationships, the database could be forming an image of the work as a whole by building the units she defines into ever larger structures. Of course, the relationships should be nestable so that units like (Photo A <--> Photo B) <--> (Photo C <--> Photo D) could receive tags as well.

Tagging networks individually has the promise of allowing simple human readible and producible systems of knowledge (i.e. folksonomies) to extend over vast terrains of data wihtout becoming alienating or unmanageable. They do this because they are so easily and painless extensible, ever changing with the whims of rapid tagging to fit whatever new items are discovered and then totally flexible in recalling these items. The system I am trying to describe of tagging a network via its relationships has a very different benefit. Instead of rendering the web of items easily accessible along any unkown future lines of search or methods of discovering new relationships (a great example of this would be the way del.icio.us gets individuals bookmarks kept for their own reference to transform into powerful indexing and churning engines) it facilitates the process of mapping observed existing current connections and knitting them tightly together into an object which uniquely represents the network of objects as you experience it while tagging it.

I can't, tonight, think of any applications where tagging relationships would make social bookmarking systems more useful, but if they facilitate the combining of loosely joined webs of diverse information from the outside world into a coherent and individual product, they might just make for better art.

Tagged: art, photography, folksonomy, tagging, del.icio.us, Reed

Posted by Greg at 3:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2005

Association of Music Podcasting

Digging ever deeper into this whole podcasting thing, I was interested in a recent link mentioned on the Daily Source Code: the Association of Music Podcasting. They are a new service that acts as an intermediary between podcasters and independent musicians. They accept submissions from bands in the form of links to mp3s along with other associated info and an agreement text. That way their members can play music on their shows completely legally and independent bands have access to an outlet to get their music to new listeners.

I submitted At Dusk's music so we'll see if anyone ends up playing it. We had some good luck with a bunch of mp3 blogs (Ian Mathers, *6eyes, 3Hive, Tofu Hut, and adoorajar, for example), so I'm excited about this.

It would be great if they had a way for podcasters to sign up to join their music directory or a way to browse the directory's content online, but this is a great start. I'm subscribed to some of their shows now so I'll let you know what I think once I've heard some episodes.

Tagged: podcasting, At, Dusk, music, mp3

Posted by Greg at 11:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 14, 2005

Amy Sue Sings A Song

My friend, co-worker, and fellow M4DZ artist Amy Subach recently started a podcast on my urging. As soon as I heard of the format I thought of her; she has that rare and quirky ability that is necessary for successful blogging, solo musicianship, and vaious other acts of public personal exposure of being able to make a listener feel like they know her, like she's present, even through highly impersonal media.

The idea of her podcast is that she'll sit down, write a song, and then podcast it with some explanation of its context, all in a just a couple of hours. She'll do this regularly, a couple of times a week. The song in her first post, though, is one she'd already written. It's one of my favorites, Stolen Shoe (that link will take you to the song's M4DZ page where you can hear the album version). I recently rediscovered it listening to her record at work. It makes my heart swell. I think it's a fitting start.

Tagged: podcasting, music, Amy Subach, M4DZ

Posted by Greg at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hotmail is killing me (with kindness)

An update on my Hotmail problem. About 36 hours after fighting my way through their torturous help system in order to send an email asking for aid, I got a reply from an actual human.

She was profusively nice. Almost too touchy feel-y, with constant talk about my "frustration" and "feelings". Anyway, here's her explanation of when they request validation:

Now, I'd like to let you know when you will be requested to validate your usage of your Hotmail account, they are:
1. When you access your account or send a message through the web interface
2. When you access your account through your e-mail client
3. When you lose the ability to display your messages in your e-mail client

Is it just me or does this translate into being constantly asked for validation at every turn, i.e. 50 times a day, as was my problem? She goes on to say that this policy is part of a process aimed at creating a "really Spam-free Hotmail" and that "after a certain period, this challenge will diminish significantly and will only happen periodically because the system will recognize you as a legitimate customer."

I don't know about the ethics (or effectiveness as a business practice) of forcing your users to prove that they are "legitimate customers" rather than simply treating them that way in the first place, but there has been one upshot. Even though she didn't say anything about it in the email, the spam from them has mysteriously stopped. I guess begging to be left alone was a human enough trait it proved to them definitively that I'm not a spam bot. At least for now.

Tagged: Hotmail, webmail, bug, Microsoft, update

Posted by Greg at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gus

Tonight, after my shift at work, I had a couple of Dupont Saisons with Gus from Portland Radio Authority. He's a good friend and ex-roommate and bandmate of one of my co-workers.

We had a great conversation about PRA. They broadcast live from last year's PDXPOP Now! Music Festival and they do a bunch of great things with some of Portland's best musicians (inculding Modernstate and Talk Demonic, two of the station's founders). Right now they're working on creating an internet radio version of the station and so I promptly volunteered my services to simultaneously implement podcast versions of each the shows. It would be pretty exciting to see 49 podcasts of Portland-centric music come online simultaneously.

I also pitched Gus on being an early beta tester for the new Music For Dozens. In addition to everything else, he's a solo musician and I can't wait to get his music and his input for the site. I'm psyched! Drunk, but psyched.

Tagged: music, PDXPOP Now, Portland, podcasting

Posted by Greg at 2:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 13, 2005

Hotmail is killing me

A week or so ago, I started getting clumps of emails from staff@hotmail.com to my Hotmail account. The emails said something to the effect that as a part of a new anti-spam crusade, they would periodically be asking users to sign in and verify their humanity by typing in some letters and numbers shown in a semi-scrambled image. I use Mail.app close to exclusively and so I have been employing httpmail to use my Hotmail account as if it was a normal IMAP account for some time. I have a friend, a PC user, who uses some flavor of Outlook to check his Hotmail account and he's having the same problem.

Well, in the last couple of days, the frequency of these emails has increased following the power law. It has gotten to the point where I get dozens of these emails each time I open Mail, and if there is not a repsonse from Hotmail staff to the help request I put in that totally solves the problem, I am going to have to cancel my Hotmail account (or at least remove it from use in Mail, which means never using it).

This is very frustrating for a number of reasons. First, the only reason I had to use a hack like httpmail to make Hotmail work with Mail is that Hotmail does not itself provide support for the IMAP or POP standards. Also, the hypocracy of suddenly flooding my inbox with spam in an attempt to prevent an obvious and useful use of their service in a so-called attempt to prevent spam is shockingly irrating. Just the pure disregard for customer practices takes my breath away.

I am not normally a Microsoft basher, but this experience puts me in mind of this recent article about the company's imminent demise.

If any of you out there in blogland know how to fix this problem, via a more legitimate way of checking Hotmail from Mail or anthing else, please let me know. I would love to avoid the hassle involved with canceling my account, but at this point, I don't know how many other choices I really have.

Tagged: Hotmail, webmail, bug, Microsoft

Posted by Greg at 5:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 12, 2005

RSS parsing for the rest of us

One of the things that made me want to start this blog was the experience I recently had writing a guest post on Rory's blog. I got great feedback from a number of smart and interesting people and I can't wait to keep posting there.

The seed of my first post for him, about the need for an easier all-encompassing and idiot-proof system for putting content up on the web, was the difficulties I had trying to parse an RSS feed for use on my band's website. I had discovered this problem to be unsolvable without knowledge of php or above, i.e. only by pros or semi-pros.

Well, I recently found a solution to this problem that is exactly my speed: RSS Digest. In about two minutes, I got it set up to parse a feed of my pertinent del.icio.us posts for inclusion on the sidebar. All you've got to do is enter the RSS feed, enter some info about your website, edit the HTML that will style the feed, and then copy a one line Java Script into your site's HTML, and you're ready to go.

The particularly intriguing thing is the potential to run an entire website just using this to power the dynamic content. If I wanted, I could transfer this blog back over to blogger, design a static page with space for the posts and then use RSS Digest to parse the ATOM feed and poof, I've got a blog that I can style however I want. I'm liberated from Blogger's templates and I can take full advantage of whatever CSS and HTML skills I might have. Neat.

Tagged: useful web, RSS, parsing

Posted by Greg at 6:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Del.icio.us pushes us down The Long Tail

First, a term:

def. The Long Tail. n. The great mass of products in any market which, though selling few units individually, as a whole make up the majority of activity in that market. The extent to which each product in a market is equally available will determine the market share of this mass.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, coined the phrase in a Wired story. He likes to present this graph:

where the red part is "hits" and the yellow part is "niches" and "the vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products". The point is that in a market where customers have full access to all of the products and it is easy for them to obtain information about all products, the area of the yellow part will equal or surpass the area of red part.

The Long Tail does a really good job explaining the diverse advantages accruing to audiences and artists through the digital distribution of media (and, conversely, what's scary about it for big Labels and Movie Studios): namely that any artist can find an audience for their work, even if a small one, and audiences are exposed to a vastly wider range of media choices to explore.

It occurs to me that something similar is happening on the internet right now with websites themselves. At first glance, the web would seem like a place where all the barriers to the Long Tail (all the things that keep us on the red part of the graph -- physical barriers to distribution, limited bandwidth for promotion, etc.) disappear. But, in the mid 90s as the amount of content on the web exploded beyond the point where any individual could keep track of it (I'm a little too young, but I know people who remember when Yahoo listed all the new websites that went up everyday and it was a short enough list that you could browse the whole thing and click through on all the links that interested you), the problem of information overload started keeping people in the red part of the curve. This was the era of portals like Yahoo and Google and, especially, the super-hyped startups that were trying to be "the online home for" whatever. The idea was that no individual could make sense out of all the exploding content on the web, so we'd want to go to safe, universal sounding, sites to do our shopping (i.e. shoestore.com) and we'd want portals like Google and Yahoo to sort the rest for us.

This problem of information overload created what are essentially scarcity problems. If the information that you want lives in a sea of noise then the limiting resource is your own time and attention and you live in a world of "hits", the small number of sites you can find that are interesting enough that they are worth going to. This era was in full swing when I started using the web for real for the first time in college with my first broadband connection. I was completely unenthused. I felt like I could count the useful/interesting things I could find on one hand. I didn't see what the big deal was about.

Recently, in the last year or two, I've caught the bug. I've gotten so excited about the web that it takes up too much of my time and leaks into my conversations often enough to get me made fun of by my friends. The thing that did it was a set of new technologies and practices that made it easier for me to get at the good content further down the Long Tail, to begin exploring the "niches". The two main things I'm thinking of are RSS and del.icio.us. While there's plenty to say about RSS, I want to concentrate here on how del.icio.us solves the problem of scarcity of attention.

Del.icio.us distributes the task of browsing the web. I don't mean the kind of browsing that you do when looking for the answer to a question. Want to know which "Nathaniel Hawthorne novel tells the story of the Pyncheon family and the curse that was visited upon it in their opulent New England family estate?", (a question from the online trivia league I participate in) for example. Ask Google (though, on Learned League, that would count as cheating). What del.icio.us helps with is lateral thinking, looking when you don't know what you're looking for.

This is the kind of browsing that is important when looking for new cultural products, music for example. If you live in the red part of the curve you only get exposed to new music that can pass through the narrow filters that keep you afloat in the information sea: radio, record labels, and wide circulation publications. It is very difficult to actively search for new music that you might like using web filters. Try Googling to find music that you haven't heard before that you might like, it is not easy.

Del.icio.us uses two strategies to overcome this problem: social networking and churn. First, by becoming a useful tool for keeping track of the interesting things that you find (by helping you recall them), del.icio.us lures each person's good finds into the public sphere. Immediately this makes del.icio.us an effective human filter, greatly shallowing the sea of info-noise. But this is not enough. What really makes the site worthwhile is the way it facilitates navigation through the resulting links. Every page on del.icio.us is organized with the most recent links at the top. I've switched to their main page as my home page. Everytime I open a new browser window there's ten new links I've never seen before about a wide variety of subjects that other people have looked at and found interesting or useful. Now, not everyone of these links will be about a topic I'm interested in (not every one will even be in a language I speak), but the hit rate will be much higher than that of an arbitrary Google search I might try to find something new. And there might be something of interest in an area I would never have thought of exploring.

You can also narrow things down a bit. Want to find new podcasts to subscribe to? Go to del.icio.us/tag/podcast and you'll immediately see the most recent things all users have tagged with the term "podcast". Some of these will be actual podcasts and they'll be different everytime you look. Subscribe to the page's RSS and they'll come right to you.

The real power here comes from the fact that they're not giving you the most popular sites tagged with your term, but the most recent. That means that everytime you look at the results there'll be something new (i.e. it takes no labor to find new sites, aside from the social contract-demanded labor of tagging the links you find interesting) and no particularly popular sites can dominate the top of the list (i.e. every site has an equal chance of making it into your attention). As we saw above, these are the main criteria for starting off on the road down the Long Tail. All of a sudden without actually doing anything, I'm finidng a bunch of new interesting things on the web everyday. It's not that there is suddenly a wealth of great new sites, just that the barriers for finding them are starting to vanish, and, at least right now, that feels like the same thing.

Tagged: del.icio.us, useful, web, tagging, folksonomy, long tail

Posted by Greg at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 11, 2005

A New Home

I just finished the process of transfering over from Blogger. I'm digging this whole Blosxom thing. No PHP. No SQL. Nothing fancy. Just a CGI and three style-able .html files. That suits me. Also, I registered my own URL, all official like.

While it feels good to be out of the playpen and on my own, there's still a couple of bugs here (I haven't figured out how to back date the old entries properly, for example, and the whole thing could be somewhat speedier) and I'm still sorting things out stylistically. Let me know what you think, if you've got any advice.

Posted by Greg at 2:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spam on del.icio.us

Looks like del.icio.us has started to get hit with spam. Will be interesting to see how they respond. I have a sense that much rides on their response for the future of tagsonomies/folksonomies/theNewWhatever.

Posted by Greg at 5:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MEME: More purple fingers at the State of the Union

Many freshman congressmen, along with Katherine Harris, and a visiting Iraqi woman showed their purple fingers as marks of pride at tonight's State of the Union. (NYT)

Posted by Greg at 4:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MEME: Iraqis' purple fingers on election day

As markers of

• resistance to tyranny(David Brooks in NYT)
• national pride(St. Petersburg Times)
• Israeli interference(alJazeera)

Posted by Greg at 4:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My First Post On Neopoleon.com

My frst post on Neopoleon.com. I'll be writing over there on various IDEAS for the web.

Posted by Greg at 4:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 9, 2005

Video games for the blind

Last night I heard this story on the bbc about "video" games for the blind. Apparently they involve having to locate enemies in the stereo spectrum and attack them in the proper direction using the arrow keys (for example). I thought that this would be a great tool for engineers and recording musicians to do some rigorous ear training for stereo field locating and close listening. Also, they could be good for getting to know a new set of speakers or headphones. It seems this is the main page for finding these games. Here is a free one. I haven't found one yet for Mac, but would like to.

Posted by Greg at 11:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Coinage: "Clipcasting"

A podcast that, like Metafilter, consists entirely of links to other podcasts and other audio content. Since "links" obviously won't work directly (you can't click through on your iPod to a referenced media file -- not yet anyway), instead, the clipcast consists of clips of good bits of audio from various sources (podcasts, public radio shows, the internet archive, etc.) surrounded by brief introductory remarks as in a normal linkblog.

Posted by Greg at 5:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

• At Dusk
• Music For Dozens
• PDX Pop Now!

(link | rss)

• Hyperlinks for iTunes
• Why Learning Art Leads to Bad Art
• Borenstein's Law
• Batman Begins, Again: The State of the Blockbuster
• Widget You Like to Know Where I Find the Time
• Disjecta In Progress
• Some Self-News
• PDXPop Now! Votin' and Promotin'
• PDXPOP Now! 2005 Compilaiton Tracklist Announced!
• The Films of PES

• The Struggle To Right Oneself: On Artists' Statements
• Flickr's Interestingness and Images of Katrina
• Lindsay's Satellite Map Mural
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