David Emery OnlineWhy You Must Code
First, let me state my opinion up front: if you are making a living using computers, and in your area consider yourself an “expert,” you should know how to program.
Simple. If you are a “social media” expert, a “product person,” and especially anything tied to the Internet, you should be able to program. It doesn’t mean that you will do it for a living, but you should know how, and do so regularly, if only to keep skills up.
I agree wholeheartedly with this – you don’t need to be able to do anything properly complicated, but you should have a grounding in how it all works underneath.
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Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook.
Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.
This seems like a big loss to the digital publishing world; there’s no doubt that Push Pop Press had the best eBook tech out there, and it seems a shame that this won’t get further use.
On the other hand, it’s very interesting that Facebook are aggressively hiring amazing designers at the moment – with their resources, they could come up with something really interesting. It would be very easy for them to rest on their laurels and simply keep iterating Facebook.com, but it feels like they’re aiming much higher then that.
Visit ➔How Social Media Is Hurting Your Ability To Obtain New Fans
Using Google+ as a marketing tool is EXACTLY THE SAME as using Facebook or Twitter; while they’re might be small differences with the interface or how to specifically do something, the actual value in using them only comes from exactly how you use it. Do you post interesting an engaging content? Do you thank fans and respond to them? Do you make being a fan or follower a rewarding experience? Awesome, your doing the right things.
The problem is, most musicians are not doing this. Nope, they sign up for each and every new thing thinking that JUST BECAUSE it’s the new thing, thinking it’s going to help them. So they post songs, spam friends with events, do the whole “wave my hands in the air look at me” typical bullshit, and then sit on the porch and pout because they don’t have any new “fans”.
I do love a good rant, although he does lose the point a bit when he starts talking about Digg and Reddit – those places are great for getting lots of traffic, but it’s not necessarily the kind of traffic you want.
Visit ➔Beirut Pushes Up Digital Release Date
Beirut's new album, The Rip Tide, is out August 30 physically via bandleader Zach Condon's own Pompeii Records. If your music collection largely consists of ones and zeroes, though, you can hear it a lot sooner: the album's digital release date has been moved up to next Tuesday, August 2.
This sort of thing really frustrates me; there’s no doubt this is just a reaction to the record leaking, and actually it does far more damage then a leak could ever do. Firstly, it’s a pretty good advertisement that the record has leaked but more importantly rushing the digital release just screws up any change of the release making a big impact when it properly comes out. Beirut – I would have said – is in a prime place to establish themselves as a serious band, and a good chart entry would have done a lot to aid that; by doing this, the album will look a lot less impressive when it does finally come out properly.
And sadly, chart positions do matter; I don’t think – unless you’re in the top 5 – they make a huge amount of difference to fans, casual or not, but they make a massive difference to the rest of the industry; a good chart position opens doors, a bad (or lower then expected) chart position closes them.
A leak only really impacts people that probably weren’t going to buy the record anyway – rushing forward a digital release can – in some cases, not all – destroy your campaign.
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Web Typography for the Lonely aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.
All of this is awesome.
Visit ➔Ninja Tune on Leaks
It was with considerable disappointment that we learnt in the last week that two records we have been working on have been leaked, despite the use of watermarked CDs. Toddla T's Watch Me Dance (Ninja Tune) and another upcoming release were both leaked from copies sent to the journalist Benjamin Jager at the offices of Backspin magazine in Germany.
For my non-music industry readers, most releases these days are distributed to journalists, radio DJs and other folks that need the music before an album release either via watermarked CDs or digitally via watermarked downloads or streams.
Watermarking does actually work – it’s a pretty advanced technology, and you really can trace things back as shown by this Ninja Tune post. The thing is, though, is that it actually doesn’t do anything at all – technically speaking, at least – to prevent an album leaking; it’s not like the days of copy-protected CDs that would only play in certain CD players if you looked at them in the right way (on a Tuesday. When it’s sunny.). You can take a watermarked CD, rip it to MP3 and upload it anywhere you like unrestricted.
Watermarking is protection by fear.
Fear that if you did leak it the person who sent it to you would find out and there would be repercussions.
Figuring out what those repercussions actually are is pretty difficult, however. Obviously you stop sending them music, which is you’re a freelance journalist could be an issue I guess, but it’s hardly the end of the world. I have heard of people suing, but most of the time that’s going to be a bit of an extreme measure. So, naming and shaming as Ninja Tune have done seems like an effective solution – if they didn’t do anything, their social copy protection goes out the window.
Although as Darren from PIAS mentions on Twitter, they better be really sure they know who leaked it…
Visit ➔The Liberated Camera
About a year ago a young photographer came to me with a question I'd never heard before. What did I think about "face detect" autofocus?
Probably I sighed. Then said something about how modern cameras left us with so little to do that any half-competent photographer just might want to decide where to focus on his own.
There was one problem with this expert advice—I'd never used the feature, not for a single frame. Every photographic instinct told me I was right. But then ignorance is a splendid way of maintaining our pet prejudices. So I resolved to give face detection a fair shake.
You know those articles you read where it feels like a lightbulb has gone off above your head? This is one of those articles for me as a photographer.
Like most ‘photographers’ I’ve been pretty snooty about things like Face Detect autofocus, but that’s pretty ridiculous really considering I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure faces are in focus. In practice it may well not work well enough for what I want, but it’s just the fact that I haven’t even tried that’s the kicker.
In short: don’t forget what the goal is (taking good photos); it doesn’t matter what tools you use to get there.
Visit ➔Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen
Coolest thing ever, right? The world needs an iPad version of this, stat.
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