Not sure what the best title for this post is… I’ve been playing music most of my life, and for a good portion of it have had a strong aversion to pop music..almost a bias against anything that “popular.”  More lately, I have been letting go of the knee-jerk reaction to pop music, and have heard a lot that I do like.  However, often a song or a musician/band that I like turns out to have been written by someone else.

It’s no mystery that many famous ‘musicians’ don’t actually write their music, in fact their ‘art’ or ’skill’ is some combination of performance, appearance, attitude and musical proficiency.  But when I like a song that seems like an honet confession, or an interesting viewpoint, and then find out that it was actually written by someone else entirely, it deflates all my interest in that song or musician.

So my criticism of pop music has boiled down to an objective acceptance of this phenomenon in music, but a personal dislike of music that is, essentially, dishonest.  Hmm.. it’s hard to make this not come off as an attack, because it’s not.  I believe in music a perfect medium for personal expression, for communication of something uniquely-from that particular musician or band.  I guess it just means more (to me) when the music comes from the musician.  Otherwise, I feel like I’m being manipulated.  The performance, the vocal quality is perfected, and then coupled with someone else’s ability to write a good piece of music.

Not that there’s a shortage of musicians in this world making music that is wholly their own.  Just that this pop music thing gives me this little filter through which I feel forced to pass my judgement, otherwise I risk having my love for music manipulated by factors otherwise unknown.

                 

Isn’t it about time that NYC movie theaters offered a VIP option?  For an extra fee (could be yearly/monthly membership fee or just a higher price per ticket), movie goers can reserve seats in a movie theater.  There’s nothing earth-shattering about this idea; we’ve all seen it done in many other businesses.  But seeing a movie in NYC (and I’m sure other places as well) has become a pain.  You have to get to the theater BEFORE the previews in order to get a good seat, so you have to sit through the PRE-previews, then sit through the actual previews.  I would gladly pay more money, if i knew I could stroll into a movie theater 1 minute before the actual film starts.  I could save about 30 minutes per movie.  Since I see a lot of films - and often like seeing them in the opening weekends (crowds=fun) - this would flat out save me both time and aggravation.

I’m sure there are ways to implement this which would be ineffective, inefficient, and annoying, but other ways could be perfect.  Maybe just redesign the whole movie-going experience and make it completely a reserved-seat method, like in concerts and theater.  The theater could have a two-tier system, where x-amount of seats are allowed to be reserved, and the rest are general admission.  Why not?  Seriously.  Just as long as you leave the option for people to not HAVE to pay extra for the reserved seats, no one will be hurt, and people can pay more for the added convenience.  In certain situations, I sure would.

                 

Currently MySpace is ranked #6 by Alexa.  This one idea could increase their reach by a significant %.  A huge portion of myspace users (I dont know how many) browse in order to find new music to listen to.  Each artist on MySpace can upload 4 songs into their MySpace Player, and visitors can listen to a person’s music.

Here is the idea:  MySpace should create a downloadable player.  Each time I arrive at a musician’s MySpace page and I like their music, I can “add this song to my playlist.”  In this way, I could build up a library of music specifically from MySpace.  It would be like a MySpace radio of sorts.

From a user perspective, this is super, because it would allow users to listen to their “new-found favorites” even when not directly engaged with MySpace.com.  I could, for example, be listening to my MySpace Library right now while writing this blog entry.

From a musician perspective, this is duper, because it would allow them to become ‘regulars’ in people’s ears, instead of just being sampled while on the actual MySpace.com.

From MySpace’s perspective, this is both super and duper, because they would immediately increase their reach and their potential influence.  First of all, by having thousands upon thousands of MySpace Players downloaded onto people’s computers, they have a hugely increased reach for advertising, while the associated hosting/server costs would be a small percentage increase (i.e. the MySpace Player can download encrypted music files so the songs are not streamed from MySpace’s servers).

Second, by having exact statistical data on which musicians users like, they can build up a recommendation system, by which users who opt-in to ‘new recommendations’ can be given offerings of new musicians who match the user’s implicit musical preferences.  Ok, I think that was wordy.  I’ll say it again:  “I can tell what you like by what you’ve chosen to listen to, so I can give you more music based on what I can tell you like.”  (You get my point, I’m sure).

Well, that’s it.

If I was in charge of MySpace, I would implement this immediately, I would make it my primary objective, and if all current programmers were busy with other stuff, I’d hire new ones tomorrow.  So if you work for MySpace, get this idea done.  If you know someone who works for MySpace, show em this link, and tell him/her to get this idea done.

                 

There’s this whole thing going on in the NYC School system, where parents want their kids to have cell phones in case of emergencies, and say it’s a security threat that the school wants to ban cell phones from school.  The schools argue that cell phones increase distraction and cheating.  Here’s one article on the subject.  Here’s an article from last month describing a lawsuit that parents are bringing against the school, and this is an excerpt from that article:

“[The lead lawyer said that] the cell-phone policy, in effect since 1988, is illegal and unconstitutional because it interferes with parents’ rights to oversee their children’s safety.”

Here’s my position:  I don’t care which side is “RIGHT” or “WRONG” - My take on it, is that there is a solution which can equally and directly solve both parties complaints.  I have called the school board to try and offer this advice, but never got a reply back from anyone.

Here it is:  There are cell phones which are designed specifically for parents to give to their children.  It has roughly four programmable speed dial buttons, and NO DIAL PAD.  The point?  The phone can ONLY call the four numbers which mom and dad have programmed into it.

Why is this solution so simple?  It absolutely, 100% addresses the parents’ concern over security and ability to communicate with their children, while at the same time absolutely, 100% prevents students from sending text messages back and forth to each other.

Here is one such example:  The Verizon Migo - I’m sure other carriers have similar solutions.

Folks:  Just agree to make these phones the only ones allowed in school, and we can all get on with our lives, stop clogging up our airwaves with the complaints, stop wasting tax dollars defending this lawsuit, we have a solution at our fingertips, lets use it.

                 

Checking your email every minute is like
Checking the front door for visitors every minute

                 

“The government is holding me down” … “Bush stole the election” … “Corporations are evil and must be stopped” … “Gun companies cause deaths”… etc etc etc…

It has recently been unearthed that all these theories are, in fact, caused by the very people they’re about. The corporations and governments plants conspiracy theories, and also plant evidence about those conspiracies. For example, that whole 2000 election thing in Florida, Bush won easily, but made it look as if there might have been tampering. Corporations untraceably fund lawyers to bring lawsuits against them. The list goes on and on. But the question remains: Why are they doing this?

It’s simple, really. The people in power - across any industry or position - know that to get there, they had to take responsibility for themselves. To achieve any type of “success” a person has to stop blaming others for his/her failure, and start focusing on how to get better results in whatever activity he or she is involved with.

These people in power know that the more they get blamed for all the world’s problems, the more safe they are from competition. Placing blame outside of oneself is the root cause of depression, and non-progress. If you don’t like where you are in life, and you have a suspicion that it’s not entirely your fault, well, my friend, it’s THAT VERY SUSPICION which is the root of all your problems. Refuse to believe it, force your self to take responsibility for yourself, etc, etc, etc… I can go on and on with this self-help rhetoric, but, no need.

This isn’t about some do-goody pump yourself up. It’s about the bait you take, given so casually by people in positions of influence and power. This phenomenon is in no way lessened by the various “organizations” that seek to root out any and all intolerance to their specific way of life. An interesting question to ask yourself, next time you’re listening to a spokesperson of one of these organizations, is “Does this person really want to stop the injustice he so prominently rails against?”

Our first reaction is, of course “Yes” - but why would someone who has risen to such a ‘high position’ in the ranks of this particular organization want to be needed no more? The more injustice, the more ‘his people’ need to struggle against a large and unknowable oppressor, the more he can retain control of his organization by continually rooting out these growing oppressions.

So that’s that. More on this to come. Stop believing in conspiracies. They are not what they seem.

View a Southpark Episode on this:

                 

In yesterday’s NY Times the article Cyberface: New Technology That Captures the Soul discusses the current most cutting edge approach to digital film-making. Up until now, motion capture was the cream of the crop, but this new company called Image Metrics has developed a method for directly translating a human actor into digital animation.

What is supposedly so groundbreaking about this is the level of human-ness it is able to convey through the digital animation (as implied by the title’s ‘capturing of the soul’). But what I find interesting is the concept the creators built this new approach on. Here is the quote, I’ll discuss after:

Many surveillance devices rely on facial recognition software, but it produces a lot of false positives. Mr. Edwards and his colleagues took a different approach, one that starts with the generic model of a human head and layers onto that a mathematical distillation of an individual’s expressions. He compared his approach to describing a new bicycle. The person who’s listening is likely to picture the new bicycle based on other bicycles she has already seen.

“It’s model-based computer vision,” Mr. Edwards said. “The idea is, if you know an object, you can picture it. The key for animation was that realization: that we needed to build a computer system with the prior concept. The mathematical structure describes the basic concept of the face and maps the subtle variations.”

I find this interesting because, essentially, they looked into the human mind for clues on how to improve this technology. After analyzing the way our minds work when, say, picturing a bicycle that is being described to us, they culled out a ‘truth’ about the way our minds work, and applied this to their software.

This doesn’t give me any answers at the moment… but it does give me a question to ask: What methods do human beings use in order to determine the level of relevance of a particular document? Can an in-depth analysis of how humans perform this function, re-inform the path to higher accuracy in the search engine world? Can any new starting points be discovered or uncovered that have yet to be?

                 

i was thinking about social software recently..

i realized something interesting about it; something like myspace, for example, has its own subculture. people talk about myspace, using myspace lingo, referring to myspace things, and portraying myspace behavior.

the whole idea about social software is that it is the digital version of communities, right?

i think i disagree on the 100% transferability from offline to online.

social software is not for ‘online communities’, but ‘online subcultures’. the reason this is different, is because people act in the specificsubculture-way only while on the subculture’s website.

this is an important difference when compared with real-world subcultures.

for example, take ‘hippies’ or ‘punks’. each has a certain characteristic way of living, way of dressing, way of talking. these behaviors are more prominent when surrounded by others of the same subculture, even if only due to shared knowledge and experience in that subculture’s ways.

but when one member of a group (hippie or punk), walks into a deli in the center of town, even if that person tones down the amount of his/her subculture’s traits s/he displays, there are still aspects of it which s/he cannot hide, such as dress or hair.

it’s that one point in which online subcultures differ. you can be part of an online subculture, without ever having to experience ’standing out’ in front of people who are NOT part of that subculture.

there’s something very big in this point, when it comes to thinking about social software, and where it’s going in the future. this one difference, i believe, is a key to further developments and innovations in the social software genre.

                 

I’m reading this book now called The American Soul by Jacob Needleman… great book, I won’t go into detail about it, except to bring this one quote, which I think is great to think about it in relation to thinking about social software:

If government is the art form of America, if the Constitution is the masterpiece of this art, then there must lie within the process of its formation lessons that we shall need to learn as the modern era spills into the new millienium. The art of the future is the group. The intelligence and benevolence we need can only come from the group, from associations of men and women seeking to struggle against the impulses of illusion, egoism and fear.

Really, I don’t want to get into the whole “where is America going” bit.. I’m mostly focusing on how this author is claiming that what is most unique about America’s form of government, is that it’s based on the group. I find this a very interesting point to overlay on my thinking about social software, where it’s going, what does it point to for future development, etc.