David Emery OnlineReflection: 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 ➔Expression Engine vs Textpattern
Mr Hicks is pretty much on the money here, I think – Expression Engine is definitely more powerful then Textpattern, especially when it comes to things like users, but it’s just not as ‘nice’ to use.
Visit ➔An Essential Dozen: 2008's best albums so far
I was considering posting a ‘albums of the year so far’ type post, but this pretty much covers it (bar a few exceptions, which I’m sure they’ll have in tomorrows follow up best). Not often you come across a music related list you wholly agree with…
Visit ➔Firefox developers accelerate CSS implementation
Looks promising – the more browsers that implement CSS3 selectors and CSS Animations/Transforms the better.
Visit ➔A New Day
A lovely redesign by Jason Santa Maria – makes me want to do yet another redesign (of course!). I’m very interested in this whole concept of per-article styling – bringing art direction into web design is very important I think; I’m itching to find a site that I can have a go at really mixing things up on and making all the content ‘unique’ from a design perspective.
Down with page templates!
Visit ➔Introducing MagCloud and the Future of Magazine Publishing
I really like the idea of being able to self-publish a magazine – it’s a much more interesting concept to me then book self-publishing. Hopefully MagCloud will expand to the UK sooner rather then later as it looks like a very easy way of doing it.
Visit ➔New BuddyPress Theme
I’m not generally a WordPress fan (it gets far too much hype), but this is looking very, very interesting – I’ve long been searching for a decent mini-social network platform and this could well be it.
Visit ➔OK Computer, Scanner, Dot Matrix Printer…
I assume that everyone reading this has probably seen the ‘Radiohead’s Nude played by old computer bits’ video already (although I’ve embedded it below just in case), but the ever-interesting Creative Review blog have just posted a nice little interview with its creator, James Houston.
Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.
Wi-Fi on the iPhone. Frequently asked questions.
“O2 has partnered with The Cloud to provide you with unlimited access to over 7500 public Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK on your iPhone. Excessive usage policy applies.
From 11 July, you will also get access to 2000 Wi-Fi hotspots from BT Openzone.“
Very nice – I’ve only managed to use ‘The Cloud’ once in the last 6 months of iPhone ownership, so having free BT Openzone access is a nice bonus.
Visit ➔iPhone is now free on selected Pay Monthly tariffs
…and a free/£99 upgrade to existing O2 iPhone customers, which is a pretty great deal all round. Didn’t really expect to get a free new 3G iPhone out of this keynote…
Visit ➔The Big Picture - Boston.com
Simple but perfect – a blog showcasing exceptional news photography, with nice and large photos.
Visit ➔Versions - Mac Subversion Client
Finally a decent Mac Subversion client – I’ve been using it for the past couple of days and it seems to be really nice.
Visit ➔Future Photoshop UI changes
I find it very frustrating that Adobe think they know best when it comes to creating interfaces, when they quite obviously don’t. Is it too much to ask to have native window controls?
Visit ➔Design Rants
“I don’t really have a good fix for this one. I ran out of ideas, so no text expandability. But I feel really bad about that, so the guilt makes up for it, right? Right?”
Exactly my thinking when it comes to html/css – have a good go at making it work in the ideal, totally-semantic-markup + no javascript requirement + text-expandable way but sometimes it’s just not pragmatic. Of course, if your html is well written you can always turn off css to get at the content, but that’s hardly a good solution… oh the guilt.
Visit ➔Play Magnatune music on your blog
I’m not sure why more labels and shops don’t let you embed streaming players of their music – it’s great promotion.
Visit ➔Dean Kamen Outdoes Himself (Again)
This is amazing – Dean Kamen (of Segway infamy) has created a prosthetic arm aimed at amputees. It’s not called the ‘Luke arm’ for nothing (fast forward to the arm demos):
Yes, we are living in the future.
Visit ➔