Evolving Web

Knowing It Will, Waiting for When

Last month while in Beijing I had the good fortune to have a nice plate of Wikipedia.  Of course, I blogged about it.  There was some initial attention but, honestly, I'd fallen off (still haven't fully climbed back on) the blogging wagon and my pageviews showed it.

But I figured that one day, someone would notice the Wikipedia post and it would go crazy.  It was just too good and the pictures Pockey took were excellent.

So today, a cascade of sites picked up the Wikipedia post and my pageviews, which were seriously depressed, did this:

Now I feel like Thomas Dolby Robertson - I have this huge back catalog of really great work and all people are going to remember are my novelty posts.

Of course, this is largely my own fault.  When I was posting regularly my daily traffic would hover at better levels.

What's also interesting about this though is that the instigating site was, apparently, a food site, then spread to kottke, geek press, and Waxy (Nov 28th).  And from there to a host of other sites, like this much appreciated summarization by Dan Bruno.

So this further confirms a few things I've long expected:

(1) Geeks are actually migrating away from Jolt and Chips to fully embracing food culture.  In many instances, my food posts have raised as many comments as my better tech posts

(2) Write it and they will come.  In England they are warning kids that Blogging is Forever.  Two edged sword obviously.  But, if you leave nice nuggets up, people come back to them.  I've been watching this fairly closely as I've been writing less.  When I was getting around 200 or 300 pageviews a day, much of that was coming to new content.  When there was no new content, my pageviews fell to half that.

(3) Network effects extend naturally outside of predictable network paths.  They are not linear.  LinkedIn and other social networking sites currently do not recognize this.  Facebook allows you to be a member of a variety of Networks, but only one of them can be geographic.  What is up with that?  I belong to three geographic networks:  Seattle, The Bay Area, and Beijing.  Who is Facebook to cordon me off to merely one?

Two final interesting things about (2) above:

(A) New subscribers kept coming even when I wasn't posting (I suspect because going directly to the site was no longer rewarding)

(B) Certain articles started gaining in stature as I was dealing more and more with natural search traffic.  The clear winner in those?  Aggregation pages. 

I'll blog more about my natural search observations later.  But, now that I've firmly profited from my own "Blinded Me with Science", I need to quickly go write up my "Hyperactive!"  

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, kottke, seriouseats, dan bruno, geek press, waxy, natural search, blogging, thomas dolby

The Significance of Music in Second Life

co-written with Johnvon

Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their communities together.

Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago, technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more popular alternative to attending performances. This has led to our current iPod era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social concert or club audiences of earlier periods.

More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music. Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the dogged resistance of the 'mainstream' music industry, technologies for sharing music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.

Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large simultaneous user base.

We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.

Sharing the Experience of Music

People want to share music. This doesn't only mean passing mp3 files back and forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of the main ways we identified with our friends.

While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one's own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or through their own websites.

Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy.

However, although Last.fm bills itself as the 'social music revolution' and tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own...

...yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The 2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of other listeners.

Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.

While the user's avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more easily than they could in a real life club.

Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life -- distance is never a barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to leaving would be social.

But, regardless of where the user ends up, she'll be there with other people. They will experience the music at the same time, they will "share" the experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.

Are We Not (walk)Men?   No!

Until the advent of Second Life and similar virtual world technologies, the Internet had really only extended pre-existing trends towards music listening as an asocial private activity. As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette -- action without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone.

However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift -- with Second Life broadcast media and experiential media coalesce.

In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from unknowns and mega-stars -- all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.

Impact

Stay Tuned

In upcoming days Johnvon and I will examine Second Life and Music more closely. Articles will include:

• Culture, Networking and Music
• Monetization and Sales of Music heard in Second Life
• The flow of music from real life to second life and back again
• Music Production in Second Life
• Leveraging of External Networks in Second Life

Technorati Tags: second life, music, lastfm, social networking, social media, monetization, broadcast media, experiential media

A Return to Music

In 2000 through 2003 I recorded and released a series of CDs and participated in music projects with bands around the globe.  I played live in Hong Kong, Atlanta, Olympia, and Portland.  But in 2004, I moved into a new house, recorded a few tracks and promptly turned my full attention to making my company successful.

Now I think my company has finally reached a point where I feel I can actually concentrate on music again.  So last night I started to arrange my new setup.

Things are so powerful now, I am just amazed.

Here is my new kit ... built from the crumbling architecture of my old kit.

M-Audio Axiom 49

This keyboard controller has 49 keys, 8 trigger pads, 8 "rotary encoders", 9 sliders, and 15 assignable buttons.  It also has internal memory so that I can save settings while playing, move on to something else, and regain that setting. 

M-Audio Firewire 410

This is an outboard audio interface for the laptop.  It's what brings the other gear all together.  I've had this for several years and love it to death. 

Ableton Live

Live is sort of an audio canvas that allows you to assemble a wide array of sounds and instruments and manipulate them in real time.  Its biggest strength is as an instrument and it's wonderful to play live.

Propellerheads Reason

There is nothing like Reason for both flexibility and ease of use.  Like Live, Reason can be an audio canvas, but it comes with some very well designed digital instruments.  Reason is easiest to play from an external keyboard like the Axiom 49.  Reason isn't too easy to play live, but is great for developing sounds and patterns to drop into Ableton Live.

Native Instruments Reaktor

Reaktor is a synthesizer construction package that is so powerful that not even Native Instruments knows what it is capable of.  It is ungodly complex and can generate the clearest sounds (pretty or ugly) imaginable ... and likely several ones not imaginable.  It will take me a very long time to get through ... or even just get into this.

Native Instruments Massive

Not for the timid.  Massive is one single synthesizer with phenomenal sound.  It comes with an inhumane 420 presets.  And once you start going through presets, you can't stop.  It's like 420 of the finest chocolates.  As you can see, there are knobs for days in there and behind the big display, there's about 50,000 other things you can tweak.  When you first get it, it doesn't look special.  But five minutes with you will surely make you a convert.

AudioMulch

The labor of love of Ross Bencina, AudioMulch is what got me started in laptop music.  I still use it, I still love it.  It is also an audio canvas and yes, many of the above products perform similar functions, but just like a guitarist will have several guitars because they sound or play differently - so it is with music software.  The music I create in Mulch is qualitatively different than the music I create in the other packages. 

Tuareg

Bram Bos is the maker of Tuareg, and even though he's moved on to his Tunafish project, I still love using this thing.  Tuareg is basically a wave mangler / beat generator that is what I think of as a Happy Accident Machine.  You put several wave forms into Tuareg, adjust some knobs, and you get beat patterns made out of raw sound.  I will never tire of it.

AKG Perception 200

I needed to get away from my old microphone collection.  Shure SM57s, battered after years and years of use.

The AKG was a mere $150 and is reviewed well on many web sites.  It was also highly recommended by the guys at the music shop.

So I've got one now and will report on how well it works.

I am looking forward to being back into music again.

 

Technorati tags: music, creativity, soul, tuareg, audiomulch, bram bos, ross bencina, massive, native instruments, propellerheads, reason, reaktor

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Marching to a Different DRMmer

The BBC reports today that a buncha record executives are less than enthusiastic about DRM. 

The report says:

Among all record labels 48% of all executives thought ending DRM would boost download sales - though this was 58% at the larger labels. Outside the record labels 73% of those questioned thought dropping DRM would be a boost for the whole market.

Among all those questioned, 70% believed that the future of downloadable music lay in making tracks play on as many different players as possible. But 40% believed it would take concerted government or consumer action to bring this about

Two simple paragraphs that speak volumes.

First off, it's apparent that smaller labels aren't enthusiastic about DRM.  Many larger label executives don't care much for DRM either.  So ... why DRM then?

IT'S THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

The very large labels who make a majority of their money off acts of temporal popularity are terrified that downloading will drain their sales.  They are likely right.  People's buying patterns for music will likely gravitate to music that the specifically want to add to their own archives.  Very similar to how we'll buy and recycle a newspaper, but we'll keep a book for a long time.

DRM is the only effective measure of dealing with this problem the record companies can envision - because ideally it creates a pay-per-use model for music.

WHY EVERYONE HATES DRM

Large labels have managed to utterly vilify themselves with DRM.  It has made them look even more money grubbing than they already appeared.  One can look back to Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar" to see this stereotype has been around for a long time.  Dig a little further and you find the roots of the record company traveling through the south and stealing recordings of blues artists.

But things are bigger here in the future.  DRM is a nasty drug for the record industry.  When they get wired on it, they sue old women, people without computers, anyone the computer tells them to.  And they won't ... back ... down.

DRM is also hard to administer.  It sounds easy, but from start to finish it is a nightmare for record companies.  They have to negotiate with technology companies, lobby government officials, withstand interviews about it with the press, hire huge legal teams to sue people, and then deal with the fallout of suing 12 year old kids.

They fought hard to get the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed, which gave them the rope to hang themselves with.  With the DCMA, the notion of fair use was expertly restricted.  This let entertainment industry legal teams to get punch drunk with potential lawsuits.

Again, that had delicious negative PR attached to it.

WHY THE INDUSTRY CAN'T JUST CHUCK DRM

Everyone, even those that won't admit it, in the entertainment industry knows that DRM is ultimately harmful to their business.  But they've invested a tremendous amount of political and fiscal capital into making DRM and the DCMA happen.  The DRM-heroin that seemed like a good idea a few years ago has proven to be a monkey firmly attached to their backs.

For a different, but complimentary systemic view of DRM, check out Joscha Bach's DRM discussion on Teleread.

 

Technorati tags: DRM, DCMA, addiction

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Interfaces Form a Contract

Last week I sat at the IDEA 2006 conference and, for the most part, allowed myself a peculiar luxury.  I let myself think of things other than my company for prolonged periods. 

IDEA was put on by the Information Architecture Institute and was interested in discussing the intersections of physical, expressive, emotive and raw-information worlds.  Speakers talked about building architecture, user interface design, emotional impact, communication, vision, and so on.

I work with all these concepts every day.  I make operations management software for government, usually in the transportation arena.  Yet, being able to go and just focus on those elements alone made me appreciate them all the more.

While I've done these things before in both my psychological and architectural training, I started to look for the elements of interface design in other areas of my life. 

So this morning, I started to look into the word interface.  I know it's been done, but I needed to do it.  This long Saturday post is that investigation.

We start with a snippet from an unlikely source for insight - the Java User Interface Design Tutorial.  The good folks at Sun say:

Interfaces form a contract between the class and the outside world

Now, if you go to wikipedia, wiktionary, or Webster's, you get a very different, often self-referential definition of (noun) an interface or (verb) to interface:

At the end of all of this, we are left with many definitions of the word interface.  The more I searched, the more definitions I found.  The more the word was appropriated or misappropriated, the more the term was obfuscated.

A quick distillation will yield that an interface is at its weakest a simple point of contact.  But the deeper meaning is that it is a purposeful point of contact.  It is the object or the moment that conveys meaning.

Unless you are Derrida, one generally does not wish to be obtuse.  We would like the elements of our creation to be effective.  In order to do that, they need to convey meaning to the visitor.

Sometimes you want to convey clear and immediate meaning.  Your message is appropriately controlled and simplistic.

Some messages are more complex and open to interpretation.  Emotional, political, thoughtful information can impact different people in different ways.  Thus, the point of communication requires more complex and subtle elements of design.

I am a member of an online community that uses the interesting musical creations of Bram Bos, himself an interaction designer in the Netherlands.  We have had a long standing inside joke about 'The Button" which would be a UI Bram could design and all we would have to do is press "The Button" and exactly the music in our heads would just pop out the speakers.

The thing is, no one really wants "the button".  In our daily lives we all sometimes wish for the button.  When I was growing up in the 70s, when everything wanted to sound toxic, there was an allegedly soothing water softener for grown ups to bathe in called "Calgon" on the ad, the woman would shout "Calgon take me away!" and suddenly she'd be in this bubble bath and all of life's troubles would vanish.  Calgon was her button.

While we all may yearn for a button or water with less calcium in it to yield unending bliss, it seems unlikely at the moment.  There is no ultimate single-point guide to a universal happiness.  So we have:

... a contract between the class and the outside world

We have that layer defining the article for interpretation and the interpreter.  With simplistic messages like the stop sign, there is a near universal acceptance of the meaning of the message and if you do not accept that meaning you will be punished by society.  With complex messages, like the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, reactions are as varied as there are people on the earth.

There are still those out there in computer land that prefer a command line interface to a graphical user interface.  Their brains and temperament are geared towards memorizing commands and scanning man pages than using visual cues.  This is their contract of interaction with their computer.

Others use graphical user interfaces.  Some people can use maps, some can not.  Some people have long calm conversations with their spouse, others bicker.  Some politicians visit their constituents and have conversations, others give speeches.  Some people use the self-checkout while others go through the line.

Some people interpret George Bush's speeches as plain talk while others interpret them as simplistic.  Some people see Earth First as providing a first line of defense against environmental degradation while others see them as ecoterrorists.  And so on...

When we bring all this back to interface design - whether we be programmers or architects or chefs - it is clear that our product is a manifestation of a contract with the person who experiences our product.  Music, art, an emotional moment, even our own words are all interfaces to be interpreted.

They are the point where one person touches another.  Where information, emotion, or something is exchanged.  They are the instant where we recognize that we are separate, individual and unique - but we have limitless ways of communicating with the outside world.

And that's the challenge.  We've done a lot of innovation to increase the amount of information we can receive, the amount of work we can do in a day, the complexity of information we can squirrel away for later use -- what can we do next to increase our emotive communication?  The Quilt is a massive piece of emotive communication.  Story Corps is a massive piece of emotive communication.  In a way, I suppose, in the right hands, MySpace and blogging can be very emotive.

In the building of on line communities we talk a lot about the interface, and we're usually thinking of its technology or its hooks to keep you interested.  But what if you can build an emotional UI?  ... what then?

And when are you an interface?  How have you designed you?

Technorati tags: java, sun, idea 2006, idea2006, interface design, interfaces, MySpace, Story Corps, NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, George Bush, bicker, architecture, all human thought and actions

Written with Windows Live Writer at The Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, WA

Call for a Food and Social WOW

Ross Mayfield is a virtual success.  His paladin in World of Warcraft has reached level 60.  He's one bad Silicone and Pixel dude.

In this post, he talks about the cooperative elements of WOW, like many posts have before.  It's still an intereting phenomenon.

The real information comes below the raves...

I still have issues with WoW's disconnection with real life, failure to augment it, let alone provide incentives to live it better.  I believe it provides good simulation-based training, have made connections there as happens with all social software, but it still comes at a cost great enough that I am unsure of it's return.

This is why I never played World of Warcraft.  I am a gamer, with a studio crammed with old video games.  I have been known to blow an evening or two on game each week.  But World of Warcraft seemed like an addiction waiting to happen.  The need for full-immersion in order to acheive success scared me.  It felt like digital meth.

My diving into WOW to see what it's cooperative elements were like would be like joining a freebasing community to see how I could share my works.

I would much rather cooperate with people by going to dinner and having a conversation.

I invite Ross and everyone else to start a World of Socialcraft, where we rediscover the art of conversation and the love of food.

Technorati Tags: WOW, world of warcraft, food, social software, cooperation

Busy weekend

(If you came here from tech.memeorandum, you might be more interested in this post.)

I feel like I haven't blogged for a week, but it's really only been a few days.  So here is a rare life post.

On Friday night my wife and I went to Barbacoa, prior to its opening, my wife refused to step near TexMex.  But this place is something special, has always had high quality, and always has some surprises.  Plus, it's just down the street from our place (well, one neighborhood away).

On Saturday I woke up and tried to write a post on Agile blogging - using last week (and now this week)'s Microsoft Windows Vista release and Scoble's subsequent blogging cat fight.  It ended up being 33% inspired writing and I ended up roundfiling it.

Then I went and test drove some cars and bought some hardware for the closet that will never be f***g finished.  Went home, found out it was the wrong stuff and cleaned the house.

Then David Anderson swung by to continue his slow, patient and inexorable quest to make me Scottish. So we went and ate sushi and then stood stage-side to watch Belle and Sabastian, an interesting Scottish group that manages rather successfully to combine britpop, country, 80s disco, new wave and a few other influences into a coherent sound.   The only unsettling thing was their bass player looked like David Spade.

After the evening, I was 1.7% more Scottish than when I started.

While I was doing this, my friend John in LA was hanging out with an outlaw billionaire and Kato Kailin - which he called and told me at 1 in the morning.

Sunday was (not) clothes shopping with my wife at Nordstrom.  As per usual, we went and bought nothing ... well, she did.  I also stopped off and picked up the right hardware for the closet.

We arrived home in the early evening where I tried to blog a longer book review of the most recent Banana Yoshimoto book.  Again, inspiration was not a majority player.  Sigh.

Technorati:  Closet Hardware

I Remember Music

I've been so busy over the last year, I've totally neglected my music.  Fortunately, Ross Bencina has not.  He has released - after many years of love labour - the 1.0 Release Candidate of Audiomulch. I've mirrored the actual Application on Soundbag.

I will post a review soon.

Music via tiny feet

Farmer Glitch reports this new device which lets your worthless gerbils finally earn their keep by joining into the entertainment industry.

The Cooperation of Casting

At heart people want to communicate and they want to share.  Despite the fact that long lasting collaboration may often experience major pitfalls, people want to work together.

File sharing and peer-to-peer systems have come under much fire since Napster first gave legitimacy to the file sharing world.  Below you can see my discussion of the Grokster Case.

But running in parallel with these law suits is innovation.  We started with trading mix tapes on cassettes in the 80s, then trading CDs, then file sharing, and now ... casting.  Podcasting is quickly replacing file sharing as we've known it over the last few years and even more recent is Skypecasting.  And it is fascinating.

Skype is a free peer to peer voice over IP system.  Short form: phone on your computer.  You can use it to call and chat with anyone over their normal land line or cell phone.  Or you can talk to them directly through your computer to theirs.  Computer to Computer calls are completely free.

Skypecasting uses this infrastructure to do podcasting-like music or audio broadcasts.   And it sheds light on the Grokster case.  MGM is suing Grokster (Universal couldn't because they are owned by Sony who fought the entertainment industry over the VCR ... tangled webs, eh?) because they claim Grokster's primary use is to steal music.  The Betamax was shown to have lots of other uses besides stealing movies, so it was okay.

The great thing about Skypecasting is that there is no doubt that Skype's primary use is for telephone calls.  Users created a secondary casting system completely independent of the Skype company.

Why this is so interesting is that it shows that when people want to cooperate (for whatever purpose) they will find a way to do so.  Cooperation, at its source, is a human good.  The entertainment industry should recognize that there is good will at the heart of this movement and harness it ... rather than fighting it and alienating their audience.