Social Media as Ice Cream

Amazing explainers Common Craft have helped us understand every new web development, from RSS, to Social Bookmarks, to Wikis. Today they debut their latest piece on Hobnox specialty: social media.

The ice cream metaphor is great for sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and MetaCafe, but does it work for us here at Hobnox?

I’d say yes, perhaps even moreso. Hobnox is a community made by artists for artists. We have a suite of tools at your disposal on top of the standard upload-and-share interface. If you come along with the videos-as-ice-cream metaphor, Hobnox is the joint where the food critics and semi-pro dessert chefs come to hang out. Sure, that’s a cheeky description, but we are talking about ice cream after all.

If you’d like to join us, comment here, and I’ll hook you up with a beta invite. We have some big news coming up with a contest as well, so stay tuned… and if anyone would like to learn more about Hobnox, come meet me at JP Licks tonight. For some reason I have a hankerin’…

2nd Year Anniversary

Two years ago this week I started this blog as an effort to chronicle my travels quite literally on the road, touring as an assistant tour manager and percussion technician across the country. These days the “road” is a lot like what my anonymous friend from Yale told me a little under a year ago, when I dusted off the blog to start writing again.

Here on my cotton anniversary, I’d like to simply say thanks for reading, and hope I can keep this a good space as travels take me elsewhere.

Thanks again,
-Andy

Used MP3s

As a followup to yesterday’s ponderings over Tuesday new releases, very heady website Music Think Tank posted the following question a couple days ago: How much is a digital download worth when you resell it? We have yet to see the secondary market develop around digital music, as we see with used CDs and Records. What would that look like? What would that feel like?

This is a long and complex illustration, so reader beware.

‘Til Tuesdays

(image of the joint for my Tuesday fix, Newbies, care of Flickr user spi516)

For all my Boston readers – yikes! Have you looked outside recently? I haven’t seen this much rain since my trip to Honduras. Stay dry.

I owe many props to Largehearted Boy’s consistently great coverage of what’s coming out each Tuesday both with the CD and DVD previews, and the “try before you buy” series.

Something was bugging me earlier today while I was pondering the glory days in Cyndi Lauper: why do we release albums on Tuesdays in the US? I know each country is different – UK usually does it Monday, but that follows the day after the charts, so to some degree that makes sense. Japan I’m pretty sure does this on Wednesdays, but that’s only based on my quick spot assessment. What brought us to do it on Tuesdays?

A Study in Nu-Metal

Premise: nu metal was a bad time in America’s music history.

Hypothesis: original, quality hip-hop songs remixed with nu-metal sounding background underneath do a better job at nu metal than all nu metal, substandard a title as that may be.

Evidence: Care of So Much Silence, DJ Z-Trip’s heavy-handed remix of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out“

Thank you, and enjoy the holiday. I’m off to play some wiffleball.

(side note – did you know that “Wiffle Ball” is a registered trademark? Talk about a dilution case. I’m putting that up there with Kleenex, Xerox, and Band-Aid as brands that will probably be gone in my lifetime)

Music To Pull Over Speeders By

For the past couple days I’ve been enjoying the long weekend by working on some experimental composition. For a while I had a variety of pedals, pads, knobs, and computer programs all laid out in a circle and started creating some rather strange loops and effects.

Being in my living room for good stretches also helps me observe the happenings on Beacon street, which runs right by my window. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that the Brookline Police have rekindled the old speed trap right outside, and have been consistently nailing people who recklessly zip by (and a note to Beacon St. drivers: slow down! It’s that speed limit for a reason. People live up here).

The police have been very clever about the trap; sometimes it’s set up at night with a car parked amidst all of the residents, sometimes it’s two cops working in tandem from both sides of the lanes, sometimes it’s just one bold cop walking out in front of a speeding car and pointing to the side. They seem to have all the latest radar gadgetry as well, making for very efficient ticketing, I’m sure.

They’re doing us neighbors a pretty nice service by keeping the traffic outside our window moving a reasonable pace, so I’d like to help them any way I can. One thing I’ve noticed is that, while the police do seem to have a great system and quality equipment at their disposal, I have yet to hear the gritty Brookline police traffic stop theme music for when they’re nailing bad guys. And so, I humbly submit this rather goofy track that I’ve tossed together over the past few days:

Brookline Speedtrap Getaway

Deconstructed below the fold

Muxtape Update

Good afternoon, and happy Towel Day. I’m thinking of re-reading the first story in the series today in tribute.

I’ve had a bit of time now to catch up on my RSS feeds, and noticed two pieces on Wired’s Listening Post that for some reason didn’t make their way onto the national TV news I was periodically checking while out and about. Muxtape, genius little mixtape website, had some trouble on Wednesday that was later resolved. Due to some sort of glitch almost every track on muxtape turned into “Good Disease” by Aim. While trip-hop may be the bee’s knees for a handful of folks out there, and no disrespect to the British DJ, it cost Muxtape a day’s worth of headache and the loss of the past week’s worth of uploads.

Perhaps I have grown too bitter observing twisted marketing campaigns in the online space, but the thought came to mind almost immediately that this would be quite the publicity stunt for an artist looking for some massive exposure. Naturally, this probably would never happen in the real world, but what a great plot twist for a movie. I can picture a sort of major-label “Office Space” trick: the young, desperate A&R rep with the myriad of personal problems is desperately trying to boost sales for his slacker friend’s indie rock band, so he hacks Muxtape and all the billboards in Times Square to play the “hit song.” Taylor? Oscar? Ryan? Any of my writer friends want to run with this one?

This incident hit me directly, as I had recently posted a tape of travel songs just before heading up to Maine. Well, I took upon myself to fix it, and here’s the Muxtape, back in action. I might mix it up a little later today. On the ride home I listened to Rhino’s amazing garage compilation Nuggets in its full, 120-song glory. I might make a little “best of” in anticipation of some songs I’ll be releasing here a little later.

Reel Good Cinema

I’m back. Thanks for sticking around in my absence. I often wonder how long I could go silent before
people all stopped reading. The trip inspired a few ideas for posts from me, but I want to start with one of the coolest cinemas I’ve ever seen, and a picture of a giant rust lobster (as a side, “Rust Lobster,” should be a followup B-52s song).

Let’s begin, shall we?

Weekly Wrapup / Back On The Road

Most popular posts this week:

Shooting up to number one pretty fast, considering I posted it today: Berkman@10: Conclusion
2. Berkman@10: Day One: Afternoon
3. Berkman@10: Day Two: Conclusion

The two days at Berkman were so resource consuming, it’s almost hard to remember that earlier this week I was boasting a front-page-in-Digg.

“Strong and content I travel the open road,” as Whitman would say. I leave tomorrow morning for Rockland, Maine and onward to Bar Harbor on Tuesday, before making the trip back to Brookline via central Mass Wednesday. Don’t expect much from here for a couple days, save maybe a few little anecdotes (you probably will see a giant metal sculpture of a lobster, as I know a killer one along the way).

And all good travels need good soundtracks, so I’ve updated the Muxtape accordingly. Click on the tape icon at right or right here.

Best of luck, travelers. I leave you with the most peculiar web error message I’ve seen in a while, taken from a hotel website along the route:

I guess I needed the middle-child of web browsers to use the site. Again, I may not know better, but why would you write an error message saying “your browser is too new?” I feel like the onus would be on the developer to keep things current.

So it goes.

Berkman@10: Conclusion

I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, with good reason. Thursday and Friday’s conference saw me wired in a way I usually reserve for the web prowling I’ll do in some of the more heady market research projects at Hobnox. In addition to the lectures held in Harvard Law’s beautifully equipped facilities (all rooms had outlets at each seat, and many had microphones wired into a room PA, so discussions in a room fit for 100 people were conducted comfortably), we were conversing on IRC, posting questions for discussion on a dynamic question tool, twittering with an agreed set of tags which were aggregated through sites like twemes, and editing the details of the conference, Wiki-style, on a conference wiki. For a center dedicated to understanding the web in a powerful way, they certainly practice what they preach. As my roommate Oscar noted, “it sounded like you were put in the Matrix.”

I met some amazing people, had a chance to put faces to names I’ve been reading about (and reading the works of) for my entire college career. I met amazing people my age and younger working on fantastic projects at MIT, Harvard, and BU (see my YouTomb post from last night), and was left wanting much more. One small piece of that: I really wish I could have heard more from Wendy Seltzer of The Berkman Center, NU Law, Tor, and creator of Chilling Effects, a site working along many of the same lines as YouTomb for years now.

The substance of my reactions can be found on the various liveblogs and reactions I’ve written (and probably will continue to write) tagged with “Berkman@10.” My overall conclusion is as follows:

I don’t know enough yet.