David Emery OnlineDays with My Father
Photographer Phillip Toledano documents a series of photographs of his elderly father; beautiful and heartbreaking.
Visit ➔Living Life Online: pitfalls and perks
I’m really quite interested in the potential side effects of all this internet openness, especially with things like Twitter and Facebook where people seem to reveal a lot more then the would have previously.
It’s a temporary phenomenon, though – the kids growing up don’t live (and have never lived) in a world where this doesn’t happen.
Visit ➔Psychedelic Horseshit vs Half Machine Records
“to: half machine records
subject: new wave hippies ep
dude, got the ep’s today, what the fuck is with the spaces in between the tracks. they were strung together with care. THERE ARE GUITAR AND DRUM PARTS CHOPPED IN HALF. i am beyond pissed off. this is why bands are supposed to get test pressings. this thing is a piece of junk now, completely worthless, and all copies must be burned or otherwise destroyed. i am deadly serious about this. if this gets out i will personally make it my job to see to it that every copy is retreived and destroyed. starting at yr offices.
-matt horseshit”
They’re going to burn all the copies; I love music industry stories like this…
Visit ➔Concrete and Glass
I would encourage everyone to go to this – looks like it’s going to be good fun.
Visit ➔Monkey: Journey to the West
One of the many, many things I’ve been working on recently. The album is amazing, by the way, and the BBC are going to use some of the music and animations as part of their Beijing Olympics coverage so you’re bound to come across some of it soon.
Visit ➔Last.fm: The Next Generation
I think the new version of Last.fm looks and feels a lot better then the outdated, slightly haphazard old one. The comments on this post are massively revealing, however – people really (really) don’t like change.
Visit ➔Cheapeasyglobal
No, of course blogging is not dead. It’s almost like saying writing is dead. No, what might be seeing something of a decline is this concept of ‘rockstar’ blogging – your Scoble’s; your Kottke’s; your Denton’s.
Blogging has gone mainstream, and the rockstars just aren’t relevant anymore.
Visit ➔Regarding Me.com
For a mass-market orientated web service such as MobileMe, not fully supporting any form of the most popular web browser is pretty poor form, isn’t it? Sure, I think you can just about get away with it if you’re a niche start-up aiming at early adopters, but not when you’re selling your product in cardboard boxes in retail stores.
Lazy arrogance, pure and simple.
(Oh and Ben, would you please finish your site? It. Hurts. My. Eyes.)
Visit ➔Total chaos mars UK iPhone launch
Very much mirrors my experience – I got to my local O2 store at about 7:50 to be greeted by a queue of people about 70 strong, with a couple of O2 employees looking like they’d expected 2 or 3. I gave up empty handed after about half an hour when it became clear that they both didn’t have enough iPhones and their systems had crashed – in the half an hour I was their they managed to process 5 people.
The queue:
TechDouche
I couldn’t agree more. I am sick and tired of the continual ridiculous posts about music appearing on TechCrunch; I appreciate that Michael Arrington has a certain point of view on the topic, but he obviously has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
Visit ➔Top five musical crimes perpetrated by record store customers in the 90s and 2000s
Pretty nicely sums up why I don’t like going in indie record stores. They should be some form of capitalist urban mecca to me, full of interest and discovery, but instead they’re intimidating and impenetrable.
The Greatest Bug of All
A great insight into the world of coding and bug hunting – well worth a read if you’re not a coder and want a glimpse behind the curtain.
Visit ➔Nonesuch Records
Nonesuch Records have just launched a new site, and very good it is too – really love the clarity of information (that is so often missed on record label sites). While I’m at it, take a look at the new Domino Records site – the design is maybe not quite as nice, but the use of colour is lovely and I particularly like the user controlled ‘status’ at the top.
Visit ➔Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web
Well worth a read – I particularly like the automatically generated life stream stuff.
Visit ➔Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008
Good to see some movement in this direction, although I think it may be a little premature; obviously it depends on your audience (and 37signals is going to have a more early-adopter heavy audience then most) but on the sites I look after IE 6 makes up 35% of IE users (which has about 40% market share in total).
It would really have to drop below 5% for me to consider dropping support I think, but it has got to the stage where it seems fairly reasonable to serve a less flashy version to IE 6 users – so we can start using things like transparent pngs and serve IE 6 a simplified version still keeping the fundamental content readable and the site useable.
Visit ➔National Assn. of Recording Merchandisers Urges Release Date Parity
“Err, hi guys. You seem to be screwing up our business model (even though consumers obviously like it) – could you stop please? Pretty please?”
I also particularly like the phrase “…we are opening the door for chaos in the marketplace”.
Visit ➔Reflection: the national on the big stage
While we’re on the topic of long-form music writing, have a read of this great piece charting the (eventual) rise of The National. It’s an interesting read, and brings up some interesting thoughts about the consumption of digital music and the subsequent consequences in the comments.
Incidentally, The National for me are the very definition of a ‘grower’ band; every album they’ve done so far on first listen has sounded slightly dull – it’s only a month (or two or three) later that I realise just how brilliant it is. For reference, that is very fucking brilliant.
Visit ➔Is The BBC The Enemy Of Hip Hop?
A very worthwhile read on the state of racial segregation on UK public radio today. The concept of 1xtra and things like the Mobo Awards has always sat uncomfortably with me (their very being is basically based on racist thinking), and it’s good to see I’m not alone in that.
Also, it’s also well worth checking out www.thequietus.com in more depth – it’s fast becoming my favourite music blog as it has a very refreshing focus on actual writing and journalism, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute news slant that most music sites take.
Visit ➔MySpace opens its garden, allows third-party data sharing
A very promising start, although it seems to be limited to ‘people’ at the moment – I’d really like to hack away at getting data from artist profiles. It’s good to see MySpace finally getting their shit together, what with this and the recent redesign – they just need to redesign profile pages next…
Visit ➔