Heard John Schaffer talk about some new mixtape site, and thought it would be muxtape but it was this site called CassetteFromMyEx - which, I think it’s appropriate to call it Muxtape’s uncle. Instead of new mixtapes, this is a site to which you can upload your OLD mixtapes, yeah, the ones that were made for you by an ex romantic collaborator.

From an interface perspective, it doesn’t have much on Muxtape; it’s in semi-blog format. It’s interesting because each mixtape has a whole story (if you’re interested in that kind of thing), but the especial reason I like it, is because NONE of the music is from today. It’s all from “yesterday”, some of them are labelled as some guy’s name we went to college with. This is like a big old dusty attic. Interesting walk down someone else’s memory lane.

                 

Ok. MuxTape kicks ass. It’s a dead-simple interface, nothing to figure out. You upload 12 songs, and that’s your “mix tape”. Songs are listed in big blocky format. Click and listen. So simple that it was harder for me to describe than for you to go listen.

So I won’t describe its functions, but rather why it’s so damn great.

1) “Gimme a cheeze wit nuthin” .. “Nuthin??” - In such a simple interface, he (Justin, the guy behind muxtape) has managed to irrevocably separate love & sharing of music, from selling & promoting. There’s no way of contacting the person (author? mixtaper?) who created a certain mixtape. The closest to being “marketed to” on the site is when I was listening to one guy’s 12 mashups…well, I have to assume he made them… I googled his long, odd account name, and found some other stuff online about him. But pretty subdued.

I don’t mean to knock “the music industry” - in fact, I think this guy justin could have each song link to Itunes to let people buy songs if they want to - and I’m not knocking the commerce side of music. It’s just that I’ve grown so so so used to love of music and sales/promotion of music to be joined at the hip, that there’s something…relieving to not be able to buy anything on this site.

2) Blind Taste Test - Ok, what else. I like that there’s no voting. No comments. No friends. No networking. Just click on a random colored box, and listen. Your opinion of the music can be influenced by nothing except the music itself. What else do you have to go on? nada.

3) Only The Best - I like that you’re limited to 12 songs. In the same way that the entire interface is elegantly simple, so is the musical philosophy a sparse one (please upload 12 songs) rather than “please upload your ENTIRE 200 GB” - Of course an assumed benefit of only 12 songs is that you’ll choose them very carefully, making the quality of the site’s music OVERALL being extremely high. I’m hearing lots of good stuff here yo.

4) You Can’t Categorize Me! - I like that there’s no genre, category, vertical, horizontal, sounds like, etc, etc, etc. This is similar to what I wrote in #2, but I think it’s worth its own item in this list. Here’s my approach to music: I like good music. Across all “genres” and “categories” - Any genre has its great, and it’s crap. Yes, there are people who only like trance, or heavy metal, etc. But most people I know, when asked “what kind of music do you like?” can’t answer, because their collection spans the gamut. (gamet? gamit?).

Categories help people to more efficiently purchase music. When my friend says “hey you gotta listen to this song” I don’t first ask him what genre it is. It’s not a prerequisite. What I care about is that he chose this song, of all other songs, to claim as “good”. So that’s worth my time.

Same goes for muxtape. If you took the time to upload 12 songs, for absolutely no potential benefit to yourself in any way, then I believe you really think these 12 songs are worth listening to. Damn, every single muxtape I listen to is great. And spanning “genres”

5) Runs On Amazon Elastic Cloud - This last bit of fascination has nothing to do with music. It’s all about hosting. Apparently, he’s using Amazon’s Web Services which means that he only pays for the amount of disk space (and bandwidth) that he uses. Now, I have no idea what his costs are, but the point is, muxtape will literally never run out of server space, beacuse Amazon’s EC2 gives you ever-expanding hosting space (cost per usage, of course).

Ok, that’s it. Go make a muxtape. Oh, and go listen to My Muxtape. Or Hal’s Muxtape

Update 4/16/08: Since I wrote this, muxtape has added a couple of improvements.

1) When you’re logged in, if you like a certain muxtape, you can add it to your favorites. But, in keeping with ‘muxtape tradition’ you can only have 12 favorites

2) Every song now has a “buy from Amazon” which, incidentally, I’ve never used.  Amazon MP3 Downloader is pretty cool… can move your mp3’s directly to Itunes.

                 

Listen and Sing Along: .

I’m watching you from afar
You’re emptying my honey jar
I’m with you now but not for long
So long ‘til we meet again

Remember when you lost your clothes?
I stuffed you into my pillows
I’ll hold your smile and sing this song
Until we meet again

I don’t want you to cry
Oh please, please don’t cry
I love the way
We are today
I won’t think about our goodbye

I’m watching you on that day
From my window you walked away
I’m with you then, when time stood still
My vision from the window sill

                 

Listen and Sing Along: .
I remember long ago
When I was but a lad
I used to live a thousand lives
Through yarn spun by my dad
The ladies I did marry
And the beasts that I did slay
All would find it odd to find me
In the present day

Living in a box
500 feet for my two eyes
I used to gaze a 1,000 miles
At every crisp sunrise
It seems that people now
Gaze at their gold for sense of pride
A lazy man is more honest
Than hard work full of lies

The more I gaze upon one thing
The less of it I see
The less time I want to work
The more I need coffee
I juggle my addictions with a
Lion’s sense of pride
The monkeys on my back
Are only along for the ride

I love the way you wash your hands
I love the way you sneeze
I hate it when you tie my boots
Cuz I hate dirty knees
I wish I could remember you
The way you used to be
You have changed at least
As much as mine own memory

Everything that we can prove
Is all that we can lose
We have made our final choice
But still we have to choose
This bucket is my handkerchief
This saw it is my trade
I’m going back to bed please wake me
When the house is made

                 

Let’s say you’re at a dinner with 20 people, and there’s one piece of cake left. Who gets it? Normal social graces usually result in that last cake being split between the few who begrudgingly admit they would like it..as long as no one else really wants it more…

But this kind of “who can be more selfless” behavior gets under my skin. Sometimes, I wish everyone could feel comfortable enough about saying “Yes, I want that last piece of cake, and if you all got up right now and I was the last one at this table, I wouldn’t think twice about eating this cake. But since you’re all here, and you all feel the same exact way as I do, we need to find a fair and equitable way of dividing this cake.”

Because that’s the real truth of the situation. But instead, this becomes a subtle jousting match, where you’re never quite sure who is being how honest. All these little personality calculations start going on, most without us really being conscious of them. Yet they are going on. For each person who says they don’t really want it, we take into account that person’s past history of “politeness”, that person’s history of eating like a pig :), or of watching his/her weight, etc, etc.

Without going into every one of those little calculations (because that’s not what I’m here for today), the end result is that no one wants to stick their hand out too far beyond anyone else’s, for fear of breaking some rule of inconsideration, of dispoliteness, and because there is ’something to be said’ for making a small ’sacrifice’ now (i.e. i do want the cake, but I’d be happy to let you have it) because it can have a more meaningful, more symbolic, positive effect on your relationship with that person/those people.

But end of the day, the result is that the person with more smoothness forgoes his/her share of the cake, and the person who might not be as aware of subtle cues - or simply doesn’t have the chops to ease his way towards a nonchalant avowing of the sacred cake - gets the cake. And the person who actually does get what he wants - i.e. the cake - feels like he has lost something else, something not entirely tangible, but somewhat more important.

Ok so I think I’ve described this situation enough for you to a) recognize it and b) realize I think it sucks donkey butt. The initial gut reaction could be “c’mon it’s a frikkin piece of cake. NOT a big deal. If you want it, just take it. Plain n simple” But the truth is that the subtly intricate social dynamic DOES exist, and just ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. It needs to be addressed head on, ‘attacked’ so to speak, in order to get PAST it, rather than pretended into non-existence.

So here’s my proposed solution, the essence of which is for the unspoken, fear-based dynamic, to be transformed into a simple-yet-strategic game. Here’s one game option. You could have another idea, and if so, please share it in the comments area below.

RULES: Everyone picks a number between 0 and 100. In silence. And writes it on a piece of paper, or just types it on their cell phone. Then everyone reveals their numbers. The person with the lowest number is the one who gets the cake.

BUT it’s not that simple.

If you have the lowest number, and the next highest number is 10 or more than your number, THAT person “wins”, or, at least, you are disqualified. For example, let’s say you chose #4, and the next highest number is #15… you’re out. And if the third highest person is, say #23, then the person who chose #15 wins gets the cake.

Here’s a ‘real world’ sample of how this first rule plays. 5 people playing the game. Here are the numbers they chose:

4, 13, 15, 30, 32

In this case, the person who chose “15″ wins, because the “ten” rule knocks out the “4″ and the “13″

VARIATION #1: So let’s add another dynamic. In addition to the “distance of 10″ knockout rule, lets say that any two numbers which are consecutive get knocked out.
So if the five chosen numbers are
4,5,7,9,10
The #7 wins, because the other four all get knocked out.

Similarly, if the five chosen numbers are
3,5,6,9,11
The #3 wins because it’s the lowest number ’still standing’

And to show both knockout rules at the same time, here are another five chosen numbers:
3,14,15,18,38

In this case, #3 gets knocked out because of the “Distance 10″ knockout rule. #14 and #15 get knocked out because of the “Consecutive” rule. #18 gets knocked out by the “Distance 10″ rule. So #38 wins, even though it’s the highest number. Yum. Death by chocolate.

Oh, there’s a third knockout rule, which is another “Distance of 10″ rule, except that if you’re the highest number and you’re more than 10 above the next person, you’re knocked out. This is to put a leash on cherry pickers who, in a more crowded game, might just opt to choose #100 and hope that tough vying for the top spot results in mass carnage. With the usage of this third knockout rule, the previous example would have resulted in #38 losing as well.
What If…
This then leads to the question: “What if everyone gets knocked out?”

I was toying with a rule to govern who wins when everyone is knocked out, but then realized that the real POINT of this is to transform the aforementioned social knot into a fun game. So if everyone gets knocked out, you play another round. The more rounds you have, the more fun it becomes, because, eventually, people start exhibiting patterns, faking, bluffing, strategies, reading subtle cues, etc… essentially all the social detection skills people used in the unspoken awkward game, now people can freely and openly “compete” with each other, and whoever actually gets the cake can be celebrated as the winner.

I think that’s all for now. Play and see how it goes. I’ll do the same.

                 

I have nothing to say on this topic, except that lionbridge.com uses it in their meta tags, and there are ZERO results for this in all engines.  I wanna see if I can be the first.  Oh, and by the way, what’s up with SEODisplayName?

                 

I received a forwarded email today, whose main purpose was to react to a new turn of events in Britain:

“This week in England every memorial of the holocaust has been removed from the schools study programs, arguing that it hurts the Muslim population that denies the holocaust. That is a sign of an upcoming worldwide disaster, terrifying evidence of how easily countries can give in to anti-Semitism.”

The rest of the email is about how we all must band together, forward this on to everyone else you know to stop this horrible turn of events.

Now, were this an entirely accurate statement, then I would be concerned about it. However, the email I received cited no official source or explanation of this new “sweeping change” so I did a bit of searching. First checked snopes, but nothing there (update 3/31/08: Snopes has since included details on this, as have many other sites). So I’ve turned up a few links Here’s one link, here’s a second link, and here’s a third.

To roughly summarize these articles (although I recommend reading them yourself) this change was not brought about specific to the holocaust, but as an overall change to the way Britain approaches its teaching of history.

Instead of teaching history by time periods, they will be teaching it through concepts. According to these articles, it is untrue that they will STOP teaching about the holocaust; what they WILL be doing is incorporating different beliefs about history, including people who deny the holocaust. Here is an explanation from the guardian:

“Historical controversies will be a key topic. For the first time, OCR, the exam board launching the A-level, will also study Holocaust denial, teaching pupils how to defend against the claims.” (source:the guardian)

Yes, while it is understandable to be concerned about this, especially for all of us who know all too well that the holocaust was very, very real, it is very important to not mischaracterize the change.

Anyway, if you’ve been a party to this particular email forward, I recommend you forward this new, more accurate data on to your lists, because no one is helped by getting overly upset and reactionary without having a clear picture of the truth. In fact, isn’t “an accurate view of the truth” the reason you forwarded this email on the first place?

Additionally, if you turn up any more data on this topic, I would appreciate it (as would the others who are reading this post) if you could post your findings in the “Comments” section of this post. The more data the better.

                 

Tonic, my hands-down favorite music venue in New York City, is closing. My first reaction was shock, but it subsided quickly because, well, it’s really no surprise, not like this hasn’t been happening (CBGB, Continental, etc). I found out about three hours ago, and now I’ve simply become sad. I’m really going to miss Tonic. There isn’t one other place - music venue or otherwise - that I’ve been able to rely on so consistently for inspiration like I have with Tonic.

Tonic is the only club that I could decide on a whim to walk over, pay admission, and be guaranteed to see great music. Today I’ve been thinking about why this is, what was it that made Tonic so great? It’s not just that I like the whole “avante garde” scene. It’s that the people making music in this space are all pioneers of sorts, innovators, people chasing a sound they hear, chasing a sound that doesn’t exist elsewhere. And the musicians who play at Tonic range from highly skilled to virtuoso.

The reason I have given up just walking into any other venue ‘on a whim’ is because too often the musicians playing there emanated “please buy our cd’s and if you’re a record exec, please sign me” rather than at Tonic where, overwhelmingly, the musicians are (were) just playing great stuff, and loving what they play(ed). Fuck, I hate having to use the past tense about Tonic.

Before I moved to NYC, while still living in Ithaca, our band played a show at the Baggott Inn. At that show, I met a girl, we dated a few times. Point of telling you this is not the girl, but that she lived across the street from the recently-opened Tonic (they hadn’t gotten their liquor license yet). I think Tonic kept me dating that girl longer than I otherwise would have

Not really so long ago. Tonic never made it to Legend status in the way CBGB did, but, wow what a place.

There’s a letter on the site, and I’ve been thinking about this one line:

It is, however, unfortunate that it is so difficult for small businesses to operate in this city and that a chain store that can afford a high rent is more desirable than a place like Tonic that has a different kind of value.

It’s a topic that’s been getting talked about a lot lately. Patti Smith, when asked about CBGB closing, commented that our society - and more importantly our city - is prospering too well for artists to flourish. She wasn’t really bemoaning it, kinda more just stating it. And on the whole, as I walked around today and every store is a major chain store, yes, there is something… sad… to see NYC getting chain-stored. That’s really the extent to which I’m willing to go right now. It makes me sad.

Without being overly optimistic, I’m..well, not hopeful, but expectant. Of what’s to come. Of what will replace this vacuum. New York City is filled with incredibly interesting, unique, purposeful people, artists, musicians, and the inner need to express, create and “make” does not go away just because the rent got raised. The short-term answer is Brooklyn? But if this trend continues, we’ll see Brooklyn getting converted as well, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Where will this trend lead us….? How will we respond….?

I don’t know, but I’m sad about this. I’ve really depended on Tonic. I wish they had made this known with more lead time, reached out to the community for some kind of support. This is such a short notice, seems like the decision has been made, and only two weeks until closing time.

                 

I attended the NY Chapter of the Social Media Club two nights ago, and the discussion launched off of Jay Rosen’s http://www.assignmentzero.com which is an experiment on the idea that you can cover the new as good or better by using a widely dispersed group, acting in unison, than one single professional journalist.  It’s based on the idea of “Crowd Sourcing” where many people each do a small amount, and yield powerful results.

For a lot of this topic I was simply enjoying certain ideas popping out.  I like the idea of harnessing the spare moments of many people.  Some interesting benefits to this:

• reduce the amount of inference, assumption and speculation on the part of any one individual, because that individual’s task is so restricted in scope, that there’s no reason for him/her to stretch beyond what he’s absolutely sure of
• increase the focus on single points of strength; the other side of the restriction coin is that because each person focuses only and wholly on what s/he is good at, each single point’s strength is raised, which therefore raises the strength of the whole piece
• As part of this process, the biggest hurdle, or problem to solve, is organizing the participants/contributors.  How to keep 700+ journalists working in tandem?  Another question to ask is, how to easily and quickly identify - or help participants to identify - their single most effective way to contribute.  Because in this type of organization, it’s always best for the overall if each individual were to focus on what s/he does best.
• What could this do to celebrity?  I love this idea, that in harnessing the efforts and strengths of many people’s small contributions, you naturally do away with the need - or possibility - of the “I” to shine, of the “Me” to be fed.  “I” and “Me” become sublimated to the “Us” and “We” - Can this tradeoff be carried out in a way that my own “Me” is fed directly by being part of the “We”

The conversation soon moved to asking question about credibility and trust in journalism and the media.  We started off by asking how do we, as content receivers, get our news and determine who is trustworthy, etc.  And since most of us in the room are also content producers, the discussion quickly turned to that side of the topic:  How can “I” as a content producer, make it clear that I am credible, trustworthy, believable, etc?

Although it really is an important topic with a wealth of tips, techniques and strategies for both explicit and implicit communication of “my credibility” I believe that the desire of the content producer to be viewed as credible can be considered at odd with the desire of the content receiver to receive trustworthy, solid “content” or news.

So going back to having one news piece be covered by 700 people instead of just one, I want to make two analogies.

First is the car insurance industry.  If you are male, 21 years 3 months old, 6′, brown hair (plus a whole lot of other information) they can predict, with a certain amount of reliability, what your liklihood of getting into a car accident is.   It’s not bias.  It’s not belief.  It’s just statistics.  With mass amounts of data, no one person needs to be an individual.  He is just a liklihood.  And while it’s degrading to the individual, it’s an incredibly efficient way of assessing risk factors across millions of people, something that in no way could be accomplished by assigning a personalized, rigorous interview process for each car insurance applicant.

Second example:  On this blog, I get 25-to-45 visitors a day for the search term “Myspace Music Player” and 110-140 visitors a day for the search term “VIP Movie Tickets.”  I’m not sure which engines they come from, but I know what my logs tell me.  But look at what I just wrote.  How is that possible?  Are there 45 people in the world who, each day, type in the search “Myspace Music Player” and then click on my site?  I mean, is it the same 45 people?  Impossible.  Every day, a DIFFERENT 25-to-45 people type that search phrase into the engines and end up clicking into my site.

And this is just a small example (because both these topics are only a few months old on my site).  I have pages here and on other sites where these types of trends continue for months, and years.

It’s the same concept as with the car insurance companies.  While there’s no way to predict what any one individual in the world will type into the search engines, it IS possible to predict, after a while, how many random individuals in the world will search and find my site.

So how this relates to establishing credibility?  It means that you or I, desiring to be an informed world citizen of the world, can be better serves by DECREASING our need to find one or a few highly credible sources, and instead putting our time and efforts towards drastically increasing the sheer number of sources.  While any one of those sources may or may not be trustworthy, or may or may not be biased, by making the choice to take in a wide range of bias and human flaws, the average result will be that I have a clear view of the situation.

In reality, this means that if I’m pro-bush, I increase my informed-ness by reading both pro-bush, anti-bush, and all the variations in between.  The belief that any one group, and one person does NOT have bias is flat out false.  So if I, the reader, want as broad and true a picture of reality as possible, I can only hurt myself by preferring one bias over another.  I may at the end of the day decide to SIDE with one view.  But which side I TAKE should not influence HOW MUCH I KNOW.

Ok, that’s all for now…