David Emery OnlineLike your hair is on fire
In the US, the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays… you get the idea.
What if you and your team went against type? What if you spend the two weeks while your competition (and the forces for the status quo) are snoozing—and turn it into a completed project?
Or, how about you don’t do that and take some time off, which is far more important then yet another project and exactly what I’m doing right now.
Visit ➔Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.
Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…
Visit ➔Designer Peter Saville: 'The Album Cover Is Dead'
Peter Saville, who was responsible for the cover art on albums by New Order and Roxy Music, has declared the artistic medium dead.
Saville blamed technological advances, such as iPods, for the decline in popularity of cover art.
I noticed the other day that with the way I have iTunes configured – using coverflow view – I actually get album artwork larger then a CD, so I hardly think the medium is dying. Also, I think the possibilities of things like individual artwork for each track and websites-as-album-booklets (like minotaurshock.com) mean there’s scope for a lot more innovation now in this medium.
Visit ➔Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Really interesting stuff – I particularly like the object removal demo (fast forward to 5:58 to see it):
Visit ➔Changes for Some SMS Users - Good and Bad News
Let’s start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.
Twitter needs a business model, stat.
In fact, I’m surprised they didn’t take this opportunity to roll out a similar ‘pro’ scheme to Flickr, where you can get SMS updates and maybe no API rate limits for $29.99/year. I think for twitter it could really work, especially considering that – due to the high API usage amongst the userbase – traditional banner/adwords based advertising models may well not work that well. It still mystifies me that they haven’t tried that yet though – surely it wouldn’t hurt?
Visit ➔Minotaur Shock - Amateur Dramatics
We’ve just launched a new site for Minotaur Shock which has a bit of a different twist – he’s rated and priced each track differently, based on criteria like ‘Musical Difficulty’ and ‘Computer Crash rating’:
The record company that releases my music, whilst steeped in history and home to a lot of my favourite records, spunks a lot of money on lavish felt-lined gilded box-sets made by nimble-fingered faerie folk who live in the woods. This means that artistes such as Minotaur Shock who will only ever sell a limited amount of records (because discerning listeners like yourselves are few and far between), do not command the same kind of influence over the Powers That Be and their kingdom of jewel-case goblins.
Consequently, this release, the third album proper I have created as Minotaur Shock, is no longer an album in the physical sense, it is content. Not content as in satisfied, but content as in digital bits and binary bobs. Now, you may think that I am less than enthusiastic about this, but you’d be mistaken. After initially being a bit miffed (I’m being honest; we’re all friends here), I started to think about the nature of an album, and how the way people listen and use it is changing.
The site also features some beautiful illustrations for each track, and utterly gratuitous slidey javascript stuff – well worth a look.
Visit ➔The Twitting Point. Or An Ode to Saturdays.
We sit dehydrating in front of the computer screen after hours in the gym trying to reduce years of beer gut cultivation. The sitting got boring and geeking out became our last bastion of escapism, to have all the knowledge and therefore, all the power. Some thing has happened to me and a whole generation of the tech-related fads: I don’t need nor want the power/knowledge, it seems like i just wanna digest it and get it away from me.
Knowledge digestion is my favourite hobby. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.
Visit ➔Becky by Be Your Own Pet
Great video for the best song off their last (and sadly final) album:
Visit ➔