I’ve Moved To My Own Website: AndrewAPeterson.com

Please continue corresponding with me through my new site.  

HERE

It’s seriously so hard to move.  So many little things that I can’t move.   For instance I can’t make it so my comments take you to my new blog.  Ughh!  So frustrating.

Can Anyone Explain The Open Rights Group to me?

The Open Rights Group is out there. I have no idea what they aim to do.  There are a bunch of new projects that have sprouted up online for various goals having to do with Intellectual Property in the digital realm, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and more recently, the Featured Artist’s Coalition…  

My question is, is the O.R.G. a friend or a foe?  

I’m a child of digital media, and I’m also an artist.  I’m also a creator of other forms of content like this blog. 

The Open Rights Group’s site is so confusing and not-clear in its mission at first glance.  For all I can tell it’s a front for a major publisher effort.  

Really, the site is terribly unclear.  Maybe I was supposed to spend a bunch of time digging for the agenda there.  

Please, you guys, make it clear!

I can help if you want, but damn.  I can’t even tell what you stand for.

It needs to be completely clear to anyone visiting the site, as soon as they get there, me thinks.

Dream-Team is Back! GDGT Weekly(Peter Rojas & Ryan Block)

(I’m linking to pages in the Wikipedia that don’t necessarily exist yet.  These guys are surely famous enough, so I assume the pages will come soon)

The geniuses behind the Engadget Podcast, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are podcasting again!!!!!  

gdgt.com has arrived! (iTunes Link HERE)

When I first started to get into Social Media, Podcasting/RSS, The Blogosphere and Technology (in-general, as a broad area of interest), back in 2005, the Engadget podcast quickly became a key part of my media intake.  

Staying on top of what’s going on in the realm of consumer-facing hardware really helps you to see the bigger picture of what’s going on in Tech. Actually, if you’re not looking broadly at Technology, you’re really not seeing Tech at all.  

There are so many aspects of technology that bridge across market sectors.  Handsets, GPS Devices, Media Players, NetBooks, Laptops, Gaming Consoles…  You get the idea.  It’s all just computing, but seeing how innovations are coming to market, how they compare with what already exists, and what technologies are relevent in multiple areas of the market is absolutely crucial if you want to be able to see what’s coming next.  And having total gadgetphiles analyse it all for you is so helpful. 

When it comes to a consumer technology product reviews, I really believe there’s no other source on Earth as valuable as what’s created when these two guys record themselves in conversation.

I don’t know what happened with Engadget or WeblogsInc, but I don’t really care.  I stopped making it a point to read Engadget around the same time I stopped trying to stay on top of Digg.com’s technology feed (too much clutter/BS)

More importantly, if you think you’re staying in the loop of what’s going on in the “Tech Space” by merely reading Wired Magazine or by subscribing to TechCrunch and ArsTechnica, you are so, so, so wrong.  I urge you, listen to Peter Rojas and Ryan Block talk about every last fucking device that comes to market for a week or two.  I bet you’ll never stop. I hope they never stop again.

I’m so glad they’re back.  It was traumatic for me when they put the Engadget Podcast on “Hiatus…”

For all practical purposes, it’s back.  THANK YOU, Ryan and Peter!  You guys are such super heroes of tech!

This is pure gold!

WordPress Blog Deleted/Archived for TOS Violation

If your blog has been deleted suddenly by WordPress.com, DON’T PANIC!  …that is, unless you use your blog for phishing scams or spam-commenting or anything else that brings down the experience of other people on the Web and/or makes it harder for people to find the information they need.  In that case, panic.  Scream and cry.  I hope your blog is permanently deleted, and everything you eat for the rest of you life tastes horrible. The Web is our garden!  

Assuming you are an ethical participant of The Cloud, pretty soon you should get an email from WordPress.com explaining the nature of the take-down.

[Anyway, my blog is back, obviously.  I guess I need to start backing up my blog? Jeeez.  What a hassle.]

[begin story]

I regularly blog about scams/spam on the Web.  It’s a way for me be discovered by, and to provide guidance to, people who happen to be googling around about some questionable content they find or are emailed.

One example of this is this search result for “paypal-cgi.com,” a site that mimics PayPal in order to trick people into handing over their paypal login info.  I come up number one for the search, and the title of the result makes it clear that you shouln’t trust PayPal-CGI.com… If you click thru to my post, I explain why these things exist and how to detect this kind of crap.

You see, I’m actually doing something good here.  And it’s good for me too.

Anyway, recently I encountered some scam crap on craigslist and blogged about it. And since my blog post contained a link to the spam/scam site I was exposing, WordPress.com’s evil-detectors went ape shit and my blog got automatically removed by wordpress.com.  

I was in the middle editing a post and suddenly my category selection buttons stopped working.  And there was a thing saying somethin like “you do not have permission to edit this..” or something like that.  When I refreshed the page, I got “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available”

…and my blog had been completely removed leaving only this scary screen saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”

Ironic. I got banned for merely exposing something malicious.

Current Spam-Filter technology isn’t context-aware. This is a slippery slope: Using words or links alone, without regard to context, to define what is untrustworthy content.

See the post in question for yourself HERE: 

Fortunately, about an hour later, I got a message from WordPress.com: 

from: Anthony – WordPress.com:

Hi,

Your blog was automatically flagged, as links to overnightcashexplosion.com were detected (and these are certainly not permitted). The blog is back – please remove all such links.

Best,

Anthony

Automattic | WordPress.com

I responded with:

if it’s a url in text, is that different in the eyes of your spam defenses from an actual link?  I’d like to leave the url if possible so I can still come up in searches for that url. 

WHat’s your take on that?

Thanks for communicating with me. :)

-A

Anthony from WordPress replied:

Hi,
Sure, you can leave it – I understand the context.

Best,
Anthony
Automattic | WordPress.com

So, there is a layer of discretion here?  That’s good I guess.

BitTorrent Tracker Specifically for Independent Artists

(just an idea I had in the middle of the night… maybe it’s a good one?)

It just occurred to me that what artists like me, who are non-label, totally independent, need is a tracker/directory site for us to upload out torrents to.  A tracker that’s 100% legal music.  

I’m thinking since when you launch a .torrent file, depending on the client, you can select what files you want to download, artists can include in one torrent, a few different versions of their releases.  For instance, I could include a flac version, and two different mp3 bitrates, all album artwork bundled with each compression scheme  separately, and each version in it’s own folder.  

The user selects the one torrent, launches it, selects the folder for the version they want, and they get what they want.  

*Artist is distributing without needing a central server…

*Fans of indie/niche music are getting what they want the way they want it. And there’s a central place  for hard-to-find and/or totally legally-distributed-via-P2P music. 

 

There may also be advantages to creating a recommendation engine that excludes major-label music:  Maybe major label music obscures the analysis of music taste in some cases?  Just a thought.

I wrote a letter to the peeps at The Pirate Bay.  Maybe they’ll read it and write me back.

Green-Washing, Water-Hoarding, Guilt-Mongering, Pickens & ZapRoot

Comment I left on zaproot’s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…

Here’s the Video I’m responding to:

I love me a good conspiracy theory.

I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).

Are there other sources?

I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.

I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.

Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228

Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…

I just want my skepticism to be smart.

Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.

The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.

Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?

You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.

Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?

This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!

If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew

Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Internet-TED, 2007:

Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007.  It’s worth watching.  

He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil’s “Sigularity.“ 

He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand.  This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation.  Thought I’d share.

How Will I Organize My Tags? An App? MOAT? A Feature in Delicious?

Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account.  I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.  

What we need are tools for analyzing and perfecting the organizing of bookmarks.  Every one of these systems like Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon etc, have the same problem: user-submitted tags are bug-y!!! The engine of the platform needs to guide the users toward better tagging!  Basically, we need built-in systems for finding the types of redundancies and other tag-errors that we all have. We need debugging software, so our bookmarks can become good, clean representations of how web-users feel about various web resources.  ”Suggested Tags” and “Popular Tags” are great time-saving features but I’d like to also have a tool for correcting tag-cancer.  

These software offerings, if/when they finally exist, are going to make it increasingly more easy to harmonize user-submitted value from folksonomies with the ‘Semantic Web,’ which is right around the corner.

 

Some examples of areas where I think a robot could help users to clean up tags are:

• Redundant Tags. Usually just alternate tenses of the same word (like the plural and singular form) but also synonyms. Example: Image, Images, Picture, Pictures, Pix
• Arbitrary Capitalization. HTML vs html etc.
• Vagueness. Like los or awesome (wouldn’t it be safe to assume that all the things you bookmark are ‘awesome’ to you?’). 

This is a screen-shot of my tagging screen from Delicious.  I added the red scribbling to point out just a few of the problems my tags have.

Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild

On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far.  It’s just too much work.

Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.

I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it.  At some point down te road,  maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.

T. Boone Pickens’ Grassroots Campaign for U.S. Energy Plan

I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head.  Get it together, people!)

MP3 of interview HERE

Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man.  Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.”  In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines.  The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.

Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement.  He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”  

He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.   

Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around.  What do you think?  I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).

Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.

This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)

Blank Screen of Death WordPress Nefarious Invisible Plugin

Recently while troubleshooting an old WordPress 2.1.3 blog, I found that when trying publish a new post, the next page would fail to load and only get to a blank screen.  Also, while looking around in the dashboard, I noticed that the default upload directory (for uploading images etc), was set to:

/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../tmp/ 

from  CyberInsecure.com :

Wordress blogs are mass scanned and attacked, and a new directory in wp-content folder is created in vulnerable ones. The directory is usually called /1/ and its full of html files containing Javascript redirects in them (doorways). There was also an infected blog with phishing pages for Google logins. Google cache already shows thousands of results with such hacked WordPress blogs. They can be seen best by committing a search inurl:wp-content/1/ (do not visit those results, your PC might get infected). Google has already tagged some of these spam pages as harmful.

The blogs are most likely attacked by some kind of automated tool since the amounts of spam are too big to work manually on all those spam pages creation. It seems there are also spam comments in posts as well. Spam comments are pointing to internal infected blog pages in folder “1? to get them spidered and to get people to visit them.

This issue was reported to WordPress.org, and there is an unofficial fix for this issue. The fix is based around renaming the cookies used by WordPress by default. If the exploit is hacking the cookies by mass scanning blogs, and it looks for a specific cookie name, that would stop what is out there now but it would not fix the issue.

Recommendations: Upgrade to 2.3.3 along with immediately changing any administrator passwords. Currently older WordPress versions, especially Wordress 2.1.3, attacked using “admin-ajax.php” sql injection exploit to retrieve the administrator account’s password.
Change default cookie names in your blog.

Things like this are a reason to keep your WordPress, and all other software up to date!

Reading:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/154278

http://cyberinsecure.com/wordpress-doorway-spam-attacks/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/154571#post-721909

http://iboughtamac.com/2008/03/28/protecting-wordpress-from-magic-include-shell/

Emailinglist Spam A Sad Example

I just glanced at my DataPortability email digest and apparently they got some sexy girls hot sexy pictures and nude videos going on in there.   WTF?

Uh… 

Is that Portable Data?

We are constantly trying to come up with new ways to battle those entities whom have absolutely nothing to contribute.  

In the coming age of more intelligent computing, within the cloud of service providers and throughout the Web Of Data or Semantic Web, will the penetration of irrelevant solicitors be the same?  

Surely there will always be Spam, but will structured data and the services that utilize it help to make barriers, at least of relevance? Or at all?  

Just some shit to think about.

Four Eyed Monsters Cable TV National Premiere Tonight @ 9 Eastern

Four Eyed Monsters, the feature film, will have its national cable TV debut tonight at 9pm Eastern time on IFC. The film has received tons of awards and critical acclaim since it first hit the film festival circuit. It was even nominated for two Independent Spirit awards, Best Cinematography and Best Feature made for under a half million dollars (or something like that).

The film has made a big splash in the realms of Social Media Marketing and Digital Distribution. So this is news on a few different levels. It was the first feature film to screen in Second Life; the first full-length film shown on YouTube; probably the first MiniDV film to get a “best cinematography” nomination from a major film award organization (pretty sure about that one); one of the first films to be advertised via additional content via podcasting (probably the first film to video podcast at all); and all this from a film initially thought to be un-marketable by Hollywood distributors. This film has clawed it’s way up the back of our mainstream culture using totally innovative methods and now, after proving itself online, having been watched around a million times on YouTube, Four Eyed Monsters has been acquired by IFC. Smart pick, IFC!

Tune in! (isn’t that what they used to say back in the TV days?)

For the sake of being fair, full disclosure and all that, I worked on the film and composed the score. It’s still good though, I promise.

CraigsList is a Hot Little Traffic-Driver! Damn.

Lately I get about 100 organic hits to my blog per day, which isn’t bad considering…

Yesterday I posted an ad on craigslist (Free Stuff in the North Bay/Marin Area) in response to an item being offered for free and I included a link in the ad linking to the rant I posted here about it (the painting I wanted). In the first half hour or so I got around 100 hits from craigslist! And it keeps coming…

If I was a spammer, which I’m not, I’d seriously consider trying to leverage craigslist’s community and traffic.

(video)DataPortability and Me (Get Your Data Out!) Danny Ayers Rockin Out

Great job, Danny. That’s funny.

“wrote an interesting post today” SEO, Evil Robots and One Sad Outcome of Non-Semantics in Spam-Control/Search

I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you want to call this thing) is being infiltrated by Robot Blogs. What they appear to be doing is crawling the web and scraping excerpts of blog posts and reposting the excerpts, linking back to where it came from. They usually say:

“[KeyWord] wrote an interesting post today”

Since they link back to the blog post they scraped, they show up as a trackback in the comments area of the original post. This way, the unsuspecting blogger is linking to the fake blog. The fake blogs seem to be set up in an attempt at monetizing traffic via adsense ads.

I googled the phrase “wrote an interesting post today” and the top hit was (I probably am the top hit now) some blogger talking about filtering any comment that contains the phrase “wrote an interesting post today.”

I had decided to change my little tagline thingy to this exact phrase as a sort of inside joke for bloggers, but found myself wondering if being associated with that phrase will adversely effect my findability. Perhaps Search Engines or Spam Filters will begin to look out for that phrase?

Already, I bet there are tons of bloggers who filter out comments containing words like “viagra” or “casino,” assuming that there is absolutely no context in which these words could be used in a legitimate discussion. The fact that I am using those words here is proof that there is such a thing as a legitimate discussion which contains them.

Filtering for a word or phrase seems to me to be a slippery slope, especially if we’re talking about Search Engines, since they act as our main interface to the Web.

Google: Please don’t hate me because I said Viagra. I’m not a spammer.

PHP Application Turns MySpace Friends Into CSV – View/Mine in Excel Spreadsheet Etc

My friend threw together an app that scrapes your MySpace contacts and puts useful info into a reusable format.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE. (ZIP FILE)

UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.

Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:

“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel

There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.

If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.

Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.

MySpace iPhone App Coming Soon

This looks cool. Thanks, Arin for the heads up.

I wish it wasn’t necessary for developer to build their own APIs for these social sites like myspace. I wish there was just a comprehensive API to begin with.

GarageBand-Quickie Enhancement For Skype/Speach/Call Recordings, Podcasting Etc

After some experimentation, I found this is a good, quick, cheap way to get your audio levels for spoken word material up to snuff in a jiffy, without needing to understand much of anything about the technical aspect. Only requirement: a Mac.

Of course, all sources should be processed this way individually if possible.

If you’re recording Skype calls with CallRecorder, you should use Ecamm’s free tool (zip file download) for extracting the individual tracks from the saved Quicktime movie and import each side of the conversation into GarageBand on its own track.

Volume should be optimized for -0.5 db. Personally, I wouldn’t rely on an automatic process like Levelator for this. Maybe I’m old-school. I think it’s best to process each instrument/track with the following, in this order:
A. EQ (mainly to reduce rumble, plosives (‘P’ sound blasts), if there are any)
B. Compressor (Lessens the dynamic range of the material, allowing you to increase the volume with less clipping (overloading))
C. Limiter (takes care of the occasional clipping that occurs once you compress and boost the volume)
Then, put an additional Limiter on a Master Track, just in case.

Here’s how you could approach this using GarageBand:

Since GarageBand only has two open-ended plugin slots per instrument/track, you can take care of the EQ and Compression in one step (more or less), by using Apple’s built-in “AUMultibandCompressor” plugin (comes standard with every Mac). Assign the first plugin slot to “AUMultibandCompressor,” and the second slot to “AUPeakLimiter.” (pic)

A good place to start for setting up the Compression is the “Gentle” preset. Then, to get to the settings so you can fine-tune, click the little pencil button. First turn up the pre-gain volume until you have plenty of compression happening. You’ll know because all four of the meters on the bottom will be active almost all the time there is sound coming from that track (pic below).

Then, turn up the post-gain volume until the track’s meter (pic below) in the main GarageBand window is hitting the top on all the louder syllables, like the ones that start with P’s or K’s.

Do all this with the Tracks’ volume settings at their default positions. Only use the compression’s post-gain setting to increase the volume of the tracks, that way the Peak Limiter’s default settings will be in the right place. If the Limiter was set to stop the volume from going over -0.5db and you increased the tracks volume to +3db, the result would be that the audio could reach +2.5db, which is too loud. So leave the track volumes alone and only work with the gain controls in the settings for the Compressor plugin so that the Limiter’s -0.5 is the same as the Track Volume’s -0.5… (sorry if that’s confusing)

The goal is for the track volumes to get as high as possible without ever triggering the little virtual clip indicator lights (pic). If they do get set off, they reset by clicking on them.

If a track’s audio is hitting the red in the meter, but never tripping the clip indicators (pic), you’ve achieved the sweet spot of plenty loud, but not too loud).

Your podcast will seem as loud as everything else out there. Hurray!

NOTE:
If there is a lot of rumble from breath or microphone handling, or ‘Pops’ from P sounds (plosives), you can cut the Low-EQ of the track by reducing the “EQ 1″ setting of the compression plugin.
ANOTHER NOTE: If the sound starts to seem too artificial-sounding (squashed), back off on the pre-gain a little and compensate with the post-gain to get it back up to an adequate level (hitting the orange and red fairly frequently while never setting off the clip indicators)

I guess I’m actually ramping down (blog stats and possible 9-5 job)

I have a job interview for a job I actually want to get tomorrow. I need to bite the bullet and work like a normal person for a while. There’s too many things I need to buy in order to remain productive in the long run, a new machine for instance. If I get this job, I will surely have practically no time to participate in the Web like I have been. I’ll be back though, some day. Don’t you cry.

In related news, look what happens when I stop blogging every day:

That’s my traffic. And the interesting thing is that this isn’t because of subscriptions as in more people subscribed so fewer posts equals fewer hits… It’s because of

• the Live-Web search engines like Technorati and WordPress’ back-end,
• traffic from TrackBacks when I blog about other people’s blog posts,
• and how Google seems to give higher status to sites that update more regularly.

There are a good deal of searches that I used to come up on the first page for that I’m already falling off of, just because I went on a road trip and wasn’t really blogging for about a week.

Social Currency on the Web requires participation.

Voluntary Payment for Music vs. Music-Like-Water Approach Part 1

Part One – Some Background. Long Tail, Net Neutrality & Free Culture

First, let me apologize for how long this damn thing is. Unfortunately, I need to make sure I get everyone on the same page more or less as far as what I see as the important ideas/themes to consider when looking at the current condition of Music (and all other Media). If the set-up is old news to you, bare with me while I school everyone else for a second.

Second, if you’re interested in what is going on with all this stuff, you really ought to check out the book: The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution by Dave Kusek. The first six chapters are available as a podcast in the iTunes Store HERE (iTunes URL Link). And a variety of links to where you can purchase the entire Audiobook can be found HERE.

This is where I got the idea of “Music Like Water.” In the first chapter of the book, Kusek talks about how in the future, music will flow like water without the constant interruptions we experience now when we have to buy or download it or move it from one drive to another. Music will just be there waiting. Like water through a faucet, it will pour. It will be as abundant and as varied as we like. I believe, as long as the Net remains neutral, this is inevitable.

Right now of course, that’s not at all how it works. But if you’ve got your ear to the tracks you can hear it coming. Digital Media, The Web, Search, Recommendation Systems, Social Software, RSS/Atom feeds, P2P technology, increasing connection speeds, accelerating processing power, the cheapening of storage – We are clearly on the threshold of a paradigm change. This is a particular moment in time when some very exciting things are happening with regard to how media is curated, discovered and distributed, not to mention how it’s created.

This stuff is much bigger than just music too. Of course all of these concepts carry over into Film, News, Literature, instructional products, the list goes on, but even beyond all that, this is a profound moment in history because the very process by which Human Culture grows, changes and spreads is changing because of the Internet and the invention of digital product. Anyone with access to blue-collar amounts of money can create media. Since increasingly anyone can participate in the cultural dialog, people are. This phenomenon is causing the few companies and institutions that have had most of the control over Culture in its many forms for all of living memory to lose market share as they increasingly find themselves in competition with Everyone and Everything else.

The “Everything Else” is also called the Long Tail and is examined by Chris Anderson in his book, “The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This is a good book to read or listen to because it brings to light an important fact: There is more value in the sum of all the less-popular and niche products than there is in just the “Top Hits” we’ve grown up with.

The “Everyone Else” is me and you. What we are participating in here is what Lawrence Lessig calls the Read/Write Web. Rather than a one-way, or Read-Only form of media, digital media and the Web are very conducive to dialog. One example of this dialog is sampling in music. Another is the blogosphere. And there are many, many more. The Hands-On, Read/Write, Two-Way “remix-culture” that we are finding ourselves in suddenly makes you and me part of the “Everything Else” I mentioned a moment ago.

In this way, we are taking market share from corporate media and so corporate media is losing influence over our Culture and losing Money as the value they can offer advertisers is falling. And guess what. They want to stop it. That’s exactly what the Net Neutrality debate is about. If the Net becomes un-neutral, it will be like handing the freedom to participate that we now enjoy over to companies that stand to gain from preventing our participation in Media, and our access to a variety of media products.

If you want to learn more about Two-Way Media and how Corporate Media is trying to control it, go read or listen to Lawrence Lessig’s book: “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture.” It’s free!

Almost everyone I know uses illegal means to access media products at leas some of the time. Often it’s just too inconvenient to get media the legal way. Actually it’s often not even an option.

The traditional purveyers of Culture are losing money because of this. Media have been selling eyes and ears to the advertisers that fund them since before your parents were born. It’s not paranoid conspiracy-theory-speak when I say that the corporate media want to maintain control over the Culture Markets.

MORE ON THIS TO COME.  In the meantime, check these out:

Trent Reznor Talks to CNET About Saul Williams Release

NIN Releases Ghosts Volume I for FREE 

Recent Post of Mine Comparing Press About the Radiohead “In Rainbows” Release to the Release of The Saul Williams’ Record

DIGG THIS: Video About Net Neutrality

I was pleased to wake up the other day after sleeping over at a friend’s house and find that this was playing on the TV Set via the podcast “The Digg Reel…”
Apparently it’s gotten some love out there. My friend Arin put this video together and he used an early incarnation of the song Starting Over in it.

read more | digg story

Chris Anderson and Michael Arrington on Charlie Rose

Two really cool interviews to check out via Charlie Rose.

Chris Anderson of WIRED and “The Long Tail” and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

Charlie Rose apparently has an awesome archive of a ton of his interviews available on his site.  Woah.  I’m probably going to spend next weekend there.

Semantic Standards are Sustainable SEO for You, Your Business & Website

Big Rant.

Using HTML was once a smart move for findability online.   Seems obvious to us now, but in case you don’t realize how stupid people were during the initial growth of the Web back in the late nineties, imagine this: People used to send cease and desist or take-down letters to owners of other sites because the other sites were linking to them.

“How dare you link to my site!  You have no right to mention my existence and if you do not remove the link, I will sue you!”

In other words, we have a hard time looking beyond the current paradigm.  Right now that paradigm is something like, in order to be findable, spend a lot of time working with the wording of your site’s copy, and make sure your metadata and you document structure are written to reflect what search results you want to win.

It’s funny though: Still, one of the best things you can do SEO wise is to have an RSS feed.  And in case you didn’t realize this, RSS is a Semantic Standard.  Apparently RSS 2.0 is a little convoluted (the adjustments made to the standard since it’s creation are not entirely in line with the Semantic Web school), but the original RSS stood for RDF Site Summary.  Blah blah blah.  Go look it up.
A little bit of Semantics is potentially way better for your site’s visibility than a whole lot Keyword tweaking.

FOAF, SIOC and the countless other Semantic Markups are a way for you to get your foot in the door now!  A bit like the people that realized early on that they needed to have a website at all in the first place.

A little bit of early adoption of Semantics for your information could really pay off as we start moving toward a smarter Web.  And we are moving toward a smarter Web.  Who will be part of it when it reaches it’s tipping point for large scale adoption?  Will you or your business?  Or will you wait until some news report announces that the rest of the world has already gone semantic? I know I’ll be there.  I already am.

Because what Search Engines are trying to do is provide users with access to what users are looking for, the process of SEO, when it consists of tweaking Keywords and/or document structure around, according to whatever the latest rumors are on what silly and temporary way Google seems to  be currently making decisions about relevance,  is always going to be flawed and as long as these SEO rumors are floating around, people will be trying to game the engines and in turn, people are collectively increasing the need for the engines to change their parameters, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Search engines do not try to index sites based on the sites’ application of SEO techniques, engines index sites based on an attempt at creating an Information Architecture… This is hard to do because most website aren’t presented in a architecture-y way.  So we’ve come full circle.  Feeds are an architecture-y way to present your content, so it’s no wonder they help with SEO.

You might ask “So what’s next beyond RSS?  How can I make Google love me even more?”

My answer is: “Stop lying to them with your SEO, and start helping them with Semantics”

And just remember what happened when a little bit of semantics got put into effect?  Remember RSS?  Well the blogosphere basically happened and in turn the “Live Web,” Podcasting and all that.  Powerful stuff, and Web 2 is just the tip of the iceburg.

A letter To Lawrence Lessig: Government Websites

This post is aimed at one of my personal heroes, Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Mr Lessig,

First, I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done already to spread awareness about ‘Net Neutrality,’ the need for Intellectual Property reform, ‘Free Culture’ and so on. Your name comes up often as I do my part to help to change the way people think about the ownership of ideas and/or culture, no doubt because many of my thoughts on these matters are derivatives of yours. And finally, as an artist, thank you for helping me to see past my own possessive instincts, and to understand that my creative efforts are best honored if I aim for my work to become part of the Public Domain, because it is there that I can really contribute to the shape of our culture in the future. So thank you. Please keep up the good work.

It occurred to me that you may be the perfect person to spearhead the solving of a problem our government has -a small problem with major consequences. Before I go on though, I just want to urge you not to take this letter the wrong way. I don’t mean to imply that you need people like me to help you to choose your battles. But I know of no one else in the public eye that is such an advocate for the people, and who also seems to understand the implications of digital communication via the Web. You are the only public figure I can think of that generally seems to take the people’s side in all the domains where this issue manifests itself: The need for transparency in government; The need for people to be able to navigate the law to some degree without the aid of lawyers; The importance and potential of the [Read/Write] Web, especially with regard to how it can and does make our Democracy more democratic; etc… You actually seem to understand what the Web is and why it is important, and I fear that many or most of our legislators, judges and executives do not. This is why I’m writing to you.

The problem is that government websites generally lack consistency, search-ability, interactivity and general user-friendliness. On the surface, this may seem to many people like a minor problem. But from my point of view, it is one of the most important manifestations of how our government doesn’t work for the average person. This is a huge opportunity to improve how our democracy works for us.

Here are some of my thoughts on this.

1. Government websites generally have no interoperability between them. It seems to me that government websites should share a common information infrastructure as well as a common basic user interface and query system. If I am looking for information on something like a law on one government site, like say a county, I should be able to expand my search to include less local results, like say the state I am in, or narrow my search to only include more local results, like the City I am in. I think that government sites should be hierachically connected wherever possible to say the very least.

In general, I think it is time for all official government agency websites to become integrated.

2. Government websites do not routinely take advantage of technologies that make it easy for us to get new information from them. With technologies like RSS and iCal, it seems that citizens should be able to access regular updates from all the government agencies that concern them. We should be able to anonymously subscribe to feeds of governmental news, events, changes in policy, Etc. Example: “Effective today: All automobiles must have headlights turned on when it is raining regardless of the time of day. See Vehicle Code XYZ Section abc.”

3. By allowing existing laws to be un-findable, our government excludes us from even being able to understand what we have supposedly agreed upon through a democratic process.

For instance, on many occasions, I have tried to find out the specifics of one law or another. I have gone to my City, County and State government websites hoping for my question to be answered by a quick search, but instead, I’ve found myself hours later with a ton of windows open still trying to figure out the answer to a specific question like “Is [somehting] against the law?”

Again, to some people this may seem like a trivial complaint, but how in the world are we supposed to be law-abiding citizens if we cannot even be sure what the laws are? I believe that most people, in most communities in the USA have a very vague understanding of what is and isn’t legal. To many of us, The Law acts like some sort of urban mythology. We have no idea what the law actually says, and we cannot find the law if we want to learn what it actually says.

I have even had conversations with law enforcement officers in which the officers assured me that I “Can’t do” something, but were unable to tell me what the law says, where it says it, whether it is a local, state or federal law that is in question, or where I could even begin to look to find out for myself. This is scary to me.

I understand that Laws themselves are often confusing to lay persons. But I don’t understand why it is so hard to even find Laws in the first place. We have the technology to vastly improve this situation. It must be improved.

4 . Government websites generally have no place for public discussion or comment. There is also generally no universal protocol for asking the government(s) questions through the Web. Really, there is practically no way to reliably get facts about policy from government agencies in general. Since we clearly have the technology to make it possible for citizens to interact with and get information from government agencies, while keeping the expense to taxpayers very low, shouldn’t this be imperative?

So those are some of my main ideas about the digital government interface. Perhaps it is time for it to become written into law that certain standards and improvements are implemented on all government websites. Indeed, if there are already legally binding standards in place for government websites, they need to be vastly improved.

If technologies like RSS along with Semantic Web technologies were taken advantage of by government agencies, they could lead to vast improvements in our ability to understand and take part in our democracy.

Mr. Lessig, I wanted to write this to you because I don’t know where else to turn with these ideas. I hope you get this, and if you do, I hope you understand why I wrote this to you, rather than, say, The President or Santa Clause.

Of course, I am more than willing to help with this cause in any way that I can.

Sincerely,

Andrew A. Peterson

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