Of blogs and catching flies
Posted: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 3:22 PM by Will Femia
I'm listening to
M.I.A. this afternoon. She played an outdoor concert venue near my house a couple weeks ago and nearly leveled the neighborhood with the volume on the bass. The day before they were playing her in the coffee store where I buy my beans, and I read a friend's blog recently and learned he's flatly in love with her. And then last night I read
this item about her rocking Bonaroo and then announcing it was her last show. I feel like I missed something important so now I'm catching up. (Ah yes,
I think it was this one that rattled the dishes out of our cabinets.)
It still hasn't managed to take
that Led Zep song out of my head, however. I reckon I'll be humming that for at least the rest of the week. And on the subject of the floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
has some maps and other info that's
interesting to flip through if floating rooftops and sandbag-filling
footage isn't doing it for you anymore.
But speaking of listening to music online,
Moodstream is a pretty amazing effort from the folks at Getty Images. It pairs a giant slide show of their photos and videos with music clips. What plays depends on a mood dial you set. While you watch/listen you can click to purchase either the music track or the visual media. It looks like you can hear the whole song when you click through to the audio player (from which you can also purchase the track). It looks like you can also build playlists from the things you like in the live stream. I'm a little overwhelmed by it all. I can't see myself using it on a regular basis but it's certainly a novel way to shop for music.
Speaking of browsing media, "
MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more." The part you're wondering: "MagCloud will pay you the markup for each copy that is purchased. Production cost is currently $0.20 per page, and during Beta the shipping and handling is a fixed $1.40 per copy (USPS first class mail)." Hmm... I'm not sure there's much money to be made with costs like that.
Photojojo just did a feature on making your own magazine and I think I like their other suggestion,
Issuu, better. (It helps if you have a nice big monitor but poking through Issuu is kind of like hanging around in the magazine section of Barnes & Noble.)
Speaking of listening to music online, "Advertisers and record labels are t
urning to MP3 websites to reach a much-desired demographic." The idea here is that mp3 blogs are getting together to form a network. With their combined, concentrated niche audience they can more easily sell higher earning ads.
Speaking of making the bloggers work for you, I don't know what to make of this
AP vs "teh bloggerz" business.
Just about none of it makes sense to me. What does the AP think bloggers are doing that damages their business more than helping it? How did they think sending take-down notices to some random site would fix it? What do they think the "Media Bloggers Association" is going to do for them? How do they think bloggers are going to do anything differently once "guidelines" are established? Without question there's some thinking to be done about the value of the excerpt. I thought the pornographer had a point in
suing search engines for showing peeks of naked pictures in image search results. I'm also sympathetic to news organizations that complain that aggregators like Google News show too much information so that skimming news junkies don't have to click through to the source. But until we develop some kind of telepathy so that we can make recommendations to each other without using any actual words or images, badgering relatively small individual bloggers is not going to solve more problems than it ends up creating.
Speaking of taking back the content, remember my remark about Hulu as YouTube-killer? Mark Cuban says
Hulu is kicking Youtube's Ass. He's speaking in the business sense but I have to wonder if there are lessons the AP can take from Hulu.
A new swimsuit is shattering records and unleashing debate - This thing sounds so cool I want to wear one just sitting here at my desk. "Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded by ultrasonic welding." Oh yes, I definitely need to get some clothes that have been welded ultrasonically.
"Two necessary molecular ingredients of DNA and RNA have been confirmed to have
originated from outer space." Engage imagination.
Did you see the
Google recipe search? Random bizarre recipe I found while testing the search:
Coke salad.
A reader left a comment on the post with the office freak out video pointing out that
the hoax has been revealed. The whole thing is apparently a way of promoting
that Angelina Jolie movie, Wanted, which looks awesome, if not terribly original, so I'm inclined to forgive the deception.
I had an odd experience this morning. Flipping through link I saw this item about
a new anti-war MoveOn ad. What's odd about it is that I went to college and was pretty good friends with the actress in the ad. I haven't talked to her in years so I don't know if that's really her baby but it sure takes the authenticity out of the ad when you know it's an actress. (But don't I know that it's always an actress? Why would this be any different? And couldn't she be an actress and still mean what she says?)
Commuter Click:
Is the Universe Actually Made of Math? This is one of those things I barely understand but feel smarter for trying.
Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape - A little preachy in the way self-help stuff always is, but it's different from the usual set of advice.
