11.06.07
Lessig on Copyright, Business, and Culture
From the 2007 Ted Conference:
06.17.07
mutednoise: on hiatus
I feel like this is something akin to the show that could have been good but never really hit its stride having its series finale. As I mentioned on the organizational parent blog, BloomBurst, recent events have had me take a long, hard look at where I was spending my time. A result has been some difficult choices.
The point of the painful exercise was deciding what I could really put all my passion into and make great and that which needed to stop slowly burning resources. An archive dating back to 2002 (and an online presence of one sort or another since 1999) is hard to walk away from. During that time mutednoise has been an electronic music act (at the forefront of the failed glitchcore movement, I delude myself to think), a geek forum, a repository for gears, games, and music news, and finally an online culture blog. At each reinvention I continued to contribute but never really enough to make this place a destination. I suppose the information super highway needs the odd curio shop here and there but manning the counter in that type of joint - and not having the passion or resources to make it something more - means it gets kind of lonely.
If time were limitless it would be fun to continue posting assumptions at what the geek hath wrought. However, what the glaring revelations of the last few weeks have cast in sharp relief is that I’m trying to do too much. I was well on my way to launching a number of new blogs around an ever increasing list of interest points. I want my own ‘new culture niche’ media network (Next New Networks be damned). But while technology has made it so incredibly easy and cheap to start those ventures making them powerful successes is a whole different matter.
So now my effort is narrowly channeled into carefully chosen pursuits which have the best chance - given devotion, time, and intellectual sweat - to do more than exist; the goal is to make an impact.
The archive will stay up till March of next year (2008) at which point the hosting will not be renewed. The domain name is paid up for the next several years. I will return to mutednoise if (1) I come up with a new angle that is powerful enough to get behind and/or (2) operations across the other sites are humming along nicely and I’m ready to apply what I’ve learned under the hood here.
However, barring those things it is time to close the book on mutednoise. Thank you for reading, for making comments, and (for those of you that have been here long enough) downloading tracks.
06.04.07
Death Star Crisis Management Video
So what happens when you combine the 30th anniversary of Star Wars being released in theaters, cheap stop motion technology, and a great script? Why, the Death Star Crisis Management Video! It’s something perfect for a Monday and finally answers my question - just how exactly did Darth Vader got picked up after the explosion.
05.25.07
ZeFrank on Creativity/Cultural Change
An excerpt with ZeFrank from CecilVortex:
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we’re entering into. You’ve got so many people that are making things now, whether it’s emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What’s really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who’s gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that’s being produced right now. And I think it’s the wrong thing to look at. It’s actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that’s the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.
05.24.07
Reznor on Changing Music Culture/Consumption
Yes, I’ve referred to Trent Reznor as an intellectual ‘Captain Dreamy’. And I’ve mentioned the alternate reality game (arg) that he deployed for his latest album, ‘Year Zero’. However, a recent interview with him ‘down-under’ has surfaced on the Lefsetz Letter (the email counterpart to the Lefsetz blog) and their are just too many great details not to share. It details a clash of cultural norms brought on by shifts in technology pitting corporations against their customers - with the artist caught in the middle.
It must be an odd time then to have a new album, Year Zero, out?
It’s a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there’s so much resentment towards the record industry that it’s hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don’t look like a greedy asshole. But at the same time, when our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago
I would think “Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I’m not relevant”. But on this record, I know people have it and I know it’s on everybody’s iPods, but the climate is such that people don’t buy it because it’s easier to steal it.
You’re a bit of a computer geek. You must have been there, too?
Oh, I understand that — I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off. I created a little issue down here because the first thing I did when I got to Sydney is I walk into HMV, the week the record’s out, and I see it on the rack with a bunch of other releases. And every release I see: $21.99, $22.99, $24.99. And ours doesn’t have a sticker on it. I look close and ‘Oh, it’s $34.99′. So I walk over to see our live DVD Beside You in Time, and I see that it’s also priced six, seven, eight dollars more than every other disc on there. And I can’t figure out why that would be.
Did you have a word to anyone?
Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say “Why is this the case?” He goes “Because your packaging is a lot more expensive”. I know how much the packaging costs — it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I’m taking the hit on that, not them. So I said “Well, it doesn’t cost $10 more”. “Ah, well, you’re right, it doesn’t. Basically it’s because we know you’ve got a core audience that’s gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever”. And I just said “That’s the most insulting thing I’ve heard. I’ve garnered a core audience that you feel it’s OK to rip off? F— you’. That’s also why you don’t see any label people here, ‘cos I said ‘F— you people. Stay out of my f—ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F— you guys”. They’re thieves. I don’t blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s— that they pull off.
Where does that extra $10 on your album go?
That money’s not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It’s just these guys who have f—ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I’ve got a battle where I’m trying to put out quality material that matters and I’ve got fans that feel it’s their right to steal it and I’ve got a company that’s so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don’t know what to do, so they rip the people off.
Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months” bulls—.
When your US label, Interscope, discovered the web-based alternate reality game (ARG) you’d built around Year Zero, were they happy for the free marketing or angry you hadn’t let them in on it?
I chose to do this on my own, at great financial expense to myself, because I knew they wouldn’t understand what it is, for one. And secondly, I didn’t want it coming from a place of marketing, I wanted it coming from a place that was pure to the project. It’s a way to present the story and the backdrop, something I would be excited to find as a fan. I knew the minute I talked to someone at the record label about it, they would be looking at it in terms of “How can we tie this in with a mobile provider?” That’s what they do. If something lent itself to that, OK, I’m not opposed to the idea of not losing a lot of money (laughs). But it would only be if it made sense. I’ve had to position myself as the irrational, stubborn, crazy artist. At the end of the day, I’m not out to sabotage my career, but quality matters, and integrity matters. Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.
Is the Year Zero ARG something labels will copy now?
Well, their response, when they saw that it did catch on like wildfire, was “Look how smart we are the way we marketed this record”. That’s the feedback I’ve gotten — other artists who’ve met with that label ask ‘em about it: “Yeah, you like what we did for Trent? Look what we did for Trent”. They’ve then gone on to try to buy the company that did it to apply it to all their other acts. So, glad I could help them out. I’m sure they still don’t understand what it is that we did or why it worked. But I will look forward to the Black Eyed Peas ARG, that should be amazing.
05.22.07
A Fair(y) Use Tale
When copyright critics need an example of everything that’s wrong with the current system Disney is nearly always mentioned. The company has been a leading advocate of extending the length of creative works despite having a foundation in open source fairy tales (Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). That’s why an enterprising person has put together this movie about appropriate fair use situations. Oh, and they used nothing but Disney clips to do so. Educational and oh so clever.
05.21.07
Mnt Dew Highlights Design Innovation
Mountain Dew has long been the drink of choice for the geek set. In college we lovingly referred to it as ‘Engineering Green’. It certainly had come a long way from its ‘zero-proof moonshine‘ days.
But rather than slavishly stick with the brand image that has worked since 1973 the handlers behind the yellowish drink are again mixing it up. As described on the Innovative Ecosystems blog:
Pepsico has launched the Green Label Art project for Mountain Dew, marrying the introduction of the first aluminum bottle in the U.S. CSD category with gorgeous, breathtaking, visually arresting designs by an eclectic group of non-traditional designers, including skateboarders, tattoo artists, vinyl toy developers, etc. These designers know their audience and Mountain Dew is leveraging their edgy appeal to create breakthrough, on-brand creative. It’s brilliant and beautiful.
Just having snazzy bottles would be one thing. But Mountain Dew is also backing up the project with a dedicated website. It features short videos of the designers, wallpapers of custom artwork, and a design contest for people to participate in.
It’s this kind of stuff that I love to see major companies doing with their products. Sure, Pepsico probably didn’t have to do any of this and they would have continued to sell truckloads of product. However, by being willing to embrace other interpretations of the brand they make it cool.
05.17.07
Twitter and How to Kill Community
As you may remember I was pretty bullish about Twitter. It seemed like a fantastic way of staying in touch with like minded people and staying motivated throughout the day. I even won business for Vox Pop Design because Twitter made me available, helped me network, and become fast friends with others. A quick scan of Twitter’s traffic the last couple months shows that I’m not alone.
Lately, however, Twitter users are much more likely to see the dreaded ‘network kitties’ than they are their social chums. The site has not been able to successfully scale to the demand of users (as one peer pointed out, ironically enough on Twitter, that when one update could potentially kick off hundreds of SMS messages the technical curve to support it becomes very steep).
As Duncan Riley, speaking on TechCrunch, says (my emphasis added)
It’s not just down time on Twitter lately that has made the service sit somewhere between frustrating and useless. Even when Twitter is up, updates/ refreshes fail, pages don’t load and third party tools can’t connect. There has been a lot of downtime.
I’m already noticing that there are decidedly fewer posts among my inner circle since the outages became worse. The disruptions cause a breakdown in what made Twitter so good at - spontaneous, geography free discussions. For many, one to many views of the kitty at work and they’ll be off to something that works. It would have been much better for Twitter to have capped their users (ala GMail when it was starting out). Limits not only allow the technology to scale gracefully on its own measure. It also provides a sense of exclusivity that can create additional demand.
Unfortunately, its too late to implement something like that for Twitter. The best we can hope for is that Twitter fixes their problems before any more people leave for functional pastures.
05.15.07
Open Post: What Tech Do You Hate?
Following quickly on the heels of their excellent ‘5 Enemies of the Future‘ Valleywag has just posted their list of ‘8 Companies We All Hate (and why we use them anyway)‘.
Rather than recapping their thoughts I thought I’d open things up. What websites/browser tech/etc. do you use despite hating the experience? Why do you continue to do so?
I’ll start and throw Hotmail out there. It doesn’t have the largest amount of free storage, is decidedly anti-geek cred, and pales in comparison with GMail. So why do I continue to use it? Because there are some people for whom that is the only address they know me by. Sure I could send out a mass mailing letting everybody know what my new(er) email address is but who honestly updates their address book after getting one of those? And, frankly, logging on once a month is easier.
Another technology I hate using but am forced to are Adobe PDFs. It’s bulky, its slow, and up until Firefox 2 leaving a reader document open in a tab would eventually crash a browser. It makes sense to put long, context sensitive information that can’t be devoured in one sitting in a PDF. However, taking a menu and linking to the pdf from your restaurant website rather than just having the contents on the website is extremely dumb.
What other web tech do you hate but can’t live without?