Category: General

Nancy White just reminded me of Magnatune and I’m glad she did. Here’s what she had to say (and I couldn’t agree with her more).

They let you listen to any and all of their music for free. If and when you want to buy, you can download or download and get a physical CD. You can burn your downloads. You can GIVE COPIES TO THREE OF YOUR FRIENDS. You can podcast their music. And the split with musicians is 50/50.

Imagine if all music was sold this way? Amazing indeed.

As noted in her post comments, my favorite musician right now on Magnatune is pianist Rob Costlow, specifically his song Bliss (M3U audio) from his album Sophomore Jinx.

I definitely need to do some more exploring though, as I haven’t browsed through their selection in a while.

Oh, I almost forgot. This approach that Magnatune is taking is something I talked about a few of years back. I call it the “give model” (versus the normal business “take” model) and it touches upon my notes of In Giving You Make Yourself Stronger. You want to reward the artists for all of the great music that they are giving you as an investment in them. In doing so, you’re giving them the ability to sustain themselves, so that they can continue doing what they love and you can continue enjoying their music.

I woke up this morning feeling more “whole” than I have been in a very long time. I think the reason for this is that on Friday when Sandra and I went out for a walk, I popped into my favorite fantasy and sci-fi book store in town, called White Dwarf Books, that I hadn’t been into in a very, very long time. I decided I wanted to indulge myself in getting another book to read, as I haven’t read anything in while (with my last book being Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which I had read out loud with Sandra). Anyways I decide to grab a book with a myriad of titles to it called Scion of the Serpent, the first volume of Anok, Heretic of Stygia, part of the Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures series (which will also be a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game next year), which is set within Robert E. Howard’s mythical world of Conan of Cimmeria. Anyways, obviously I enjoyed it because I finished it Saturday night, only a little more than 24 hours after I bought it.

The interesting thing that I noticed though after finishing this book is all of the other memories and interests from my past that swelled up into my mind. It was as though this book became a beacon that illuminated many of the thoughts and interests that lay hidden and forgotten in the dark recesses of my mind. It also illuminated the fact that I have been way too focused on my research and work related to the Web. There is nothing wrong with being passionate and focused about something but there is a lot wrong with being so focused that you become blinded to all of the other things that make your life enjoyable and interesting. In a sense, I had become very monolithic in my outlook which is the very thing that I’ve been communicating to avoid by emphasizing diversity. Thus I, myself, haven’t been practicing what I’ve been preaching.

Therefore, with all of these thoughts and feelings within me this morning, and feeling more whole than I have been in a very long time, I sat down and scribbled out my diverse interests that I believed made up me. What I found very interesting in doing so was that my interests themselves almost formed an ecosystem in themselves as many interests interconnected with other interests and were interdependent of each other. Of course when I started seeing this, I laughed because my life itself and everything within it almost seems like one large ecosystem with many different sublayered ecosystems all interlinking within it. It was kind of like looking at the universe as a whole with all of the galaxies within it then zooming in to our galaxy to our solar system to our planet to my country to my province to my city to my neighborhood to my house to my body to the organs that make up my body and then to the very molecules that make up my body parts. In the end, all you see is everything interconnecting and interdependent upon everything else around it which makes you realize that everything is connected, be it physically, mentally, or even spiritually.

So now I have these scribbled notes in front of me showing my diverse interests. Again, interestingly enough, while initially drawing my interests down I noted that certain interests bordered others. With this in mind, instead of writing out a vertical list of interests, I instead created a diagram more like a sun with a circle in the center being me and my interests radiating out from it. As I drew in my interests, I placed them strategically so that the interests radiating out were almost like a circular prism of varying colors flowing from one another. Yet in drawing this sun-like diagram, I realized it couldn’t be just two dimensional but needed to be three dimensional as well. No matter how well I placed my interests, certain interests still wanted to border upon others. Then I realized what I was looking at and how it related to a common expression I had been using in the past.

That common expression is “this interest is a facet of my life”. And therefore, what I was looking at was a gem that represented me with each facet being a different aspect or interest of my life. Even more interesting with this approach is other strange comparisons you can make from it. For example, research in data storage is pushing the boundaries of two dimensional storage mediums to three dimensional ones through the use of holographic data storage. And therefore, when you look at you yourself (or your life) as a gem, it allows for immense complexities and depth as you aren’t just looking at the surface of the gem but through it at many different angles. In effect, each corresponding angle or reflection of angles makes up a different aspect of your life.

And yet even in realizing all of this, one major problem still remains. How the hell can you easily represent all that I am, all of the diversity of who I am, on a single website which is what I would like to achieve? For some reason Seth Godin’s idea of a lense somehow seems to relate, as each lense that Seth describes is in actual fact just a facet of me or my life as this gem. By turning the gem in my hand, I can look through each different facet of it and see something totally different each time. And yet at the same time, all of these different views all comprise me as a single person. Oh to be able to design like nature with such simplicity and yet such infinite complexity at the same time! 🙂

I just reread Douglas Rushkoff’s latest excerpt from his book that I had posted earlier about and I was stunned when I realized I had missed the following in my initial read.

So let’s be clear: this is not a business book. Or at least it’s not just a business book. For your career is not your job and your company is not its balance sheet. Your most personal choices are, in fact, your business choices. And your business choices may as well be your civic choices. Whether you realize it or not, your product purchases and brand loyalties express your politics, and your relationship to money says a lot about your understanding of time, of power, and of belief. It’s all one dynamic picture.

That’s why I’m going to ask you to look at commerce, communications, civics, and community as if they are all part of the same system – an ecology, really, of interdependent activities and needs. There is just one thing going on, here. Pretending that each aspect of your existence or your enterprise can be compartmentalized is, itself, a product of the Industrial Age thinking I’ll be asking you to abandon, and the surest path toward forgetting what it is you might have once, originally, hoped to accomplish.

Why am I stunned by this? Because it relates to my discoveries about permaculture. Nothing exists on its own, as everything is connected. Just as the world is an ecosystem, so to is the Web. The sooner that businesses start realizing this, the sooner that they can change and evolve.

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada. Do you remember what it is for?

I’m getting tired of my simple blue with green design and I’m looking for an even simpler design. I’m looking at using minimal amounts of color as possible in my design, so that the images I include with my content stand out even more. Enjoy the messy sandbox.

There’s a great post on Boing Boing talking about Douglas Rushkoff relating to his new book entitled Get Back In The Box: Innovation From The Inside Out. Here’s a quote that leaped out at me when I saw it because I’ve felt exactly just like Douglas in dealing with companies in the past who just don’t seem to get it.

That’s when it hit me: What this fellow needed was not to hire companies who could market like craigslist but to be more like craigslist, himself. That is, simply understand what specific product or service he’s really offering, and then do it as well and expertly as possible. That’s not what he wanted to hear. No, he wanted a new marketing campaign to define his business for him, from the outside in.

Exactly! A fancy ad campaign can’t hide what your customers can see about your business. If you want to be different, you have to start acting different. Changing your company’s culture from the inside out is just one way of doing this. Yes, it’s means taking risks but do you really think you can innovate without it?

Doh, I’ve been so busy lately I forgot to announce to everyone who my benefactor was that came out of the blue and offered me a job! It was none other than Anthony Casalena of Squarespace. We actually had been collaborating on some ideas in the past and so when he noticed I was looking for a job on my site, he let me know he was looking for someone to help him with his company. As I mentioned at the time, it sounded way too good of an opportunity to pass up and I’m glad I took it because the simplicity of Squarespace is definitely keeping me focused on ensuring my ideas follow the same level of simplicity as well.

No I’m not talking about some new autotagging feature that scans your content and automatically assigns tags to it. I’m talking about modifying existing blogging software so that it assumes the tags you want to assign to the post based upon where you are located within your site. For example, right now in Squarespace, I can click on a category view (i.e. blog, book, contact, etc) to filter my view by that specific category. At the top of that view though, I still have a button to “create a new journal entry”. Well imagine if in pressing that button, the post that I created automatically got assigned the same category tag of my current view. So if I was looking at my book entries and I created a new journal entry, that entry would be tagged “book” because the system assumed I wanted this tag because I was viewing my journal filtered by books. In effect, the association is automatically created based upon the view or location of where you are on your site.

Here’s another example for those who have created Flickr Photo Set’s in the past. Imagine if you could select the default tags for a specific Photo Set that you created. Also imagine if you could select a Set when adding pictures to Flickr. So if I had all my cat pictures in one Flickr Set entitled My Cats and I selected that set when adding more cat pictures to Flickr then the system would automatically tag those photos with my default tag settings for me without needing me to enter those tags. So not only would those photos be added to my primary photo stream but they would also be added to my Photo Set entitled My Cats.

Now some people may say, what’s the big deal?! It is only a few tags to add. What’s wrong with the way we do it now in selecting them? Well here’s my point, I’m not looking at just a few tags but many tags as well as other journal properties. And once you have to start dealing with that many journal post properties, you’ll definitely want an easy way to automatically tag your content instead of having to tediously enter these properties or tags every single time. I’ll give some more examples of how to do this automatic application of many tags and properities to your content using, strangely enough, some new dynamic views I’ve thought up. More later.

I just imagined what my life would be like if I constantly thought as much about content structure offline as I do online. I’d be walking around in my house and on every single object in my house would be a big sticker indicating the properties of that item. So if I had a painting, a big sheet of paper would be stuck over the painting and on it would be the following.

Artist: Yadda Yadda
Date Created: 21 Sept 1993
Materials: Oil Based Paints
Colors Used: Yellow Green
And so on…

Then even more so, between all of the pictures of art in my house I would tie strings connecting each piece of art to each other, so that I would know that they are associated with each other.

Do you see the absurdity of what I’m talking about here? We are so focused on tagging the content that we lose focus of the content itself by almost covering it up when we categorize it. It is like writing a small post but then adding tags to categorize the post and your tag count exceeds the number of words in your post. It’s ludicrous.

When we buy a book in a store that we are going to read later, do you adhere labels to that book such as “book” to know it is a book or “bookshelf” to know to put it on the your bookshelf at home. No, you just do it. The action itself of putting that book on the shelf defines that it is tagged “bookshelf” and grouped with other books there.

Therefore, when we are working with our content online we need ways in which we can just as easily tag our content automatically based upon our actions and where we place this content. In doing so, it will allow us to remove the tagging interface so that only the content remains standing simply and uncluttered like a beautiful piece of art.

This is a mind dump. Therefore most of this probably won’t make sense.

Types (Text, Photo, Music, Movie, Bookmark, etc)
Properties (Source, Author, Date, etc)
Time Frame (Day, Week, Month, Year, Decade)

Property -> Date: Start Date: Jan 1, 2004 / End Date: Year (shows full year) (can even group by month)

Select post type when adding it. Journal, Book, Photo, Music, Movie, Bookmark, etc.

Select Journal Archive view with “Grouped by Type” enabled so that posts are shown grouped by typed. AS WELL as a side box that allows you select the view order (i.e. use up/down arrows to arrange order or select alphabetically, date?, etc)

Select types from drop down list (like you select categories) to filter Journal Archive view by those types only.

Select start and end time frames (with Ongoing Present and Full Past available) so that you can filter your Journal Archive view by a specific time frame.

Select a single or multiple categories (from drop down list) to filter Journal Archive view by specific categories.

Select filter by bookmarks and “Grouped by Source” or by specific Source (i.e. Boing Boing) with time frame set to the last week to find all bookmarks that were found off of Boing Boing.

Select time frame or number of posts to filter by but with option to have view more button on side (i.e. More >>).

EXAMPLE: Travels in Asia 2005

Select Journal Archive and enable filters for specific 2005 timeframe,  categories of “asia, vacation”, types set to all, group by types which would give you a nowblog / lense that focuses on exciting things to do in Asia in 2005.

PER POST PRIVACY SETTINGS (even to point of Follow-up being private and post being public)

CREATE A NEW JOURNAL ENTRY: Available on Journal Archive, if clicked, defaults to same categories filter settings