So around Wednesday, the last week of the break, Tricia asked me what did I want to do with my Christmas break. Was I thinking of going anywhere or doing anything special? Number one, I wouldn’t think about going anywhere without including her and number two, there was only half a week left of my break. So, after a brief pause I told her that I was already doing it. She looked at me, puzzled. I’d spent my days mostly on the computer, laboriously updating hundreds of feature images in my blog after the move to my new blog host and chasing down other bloggy stuff. Hmmm. That was the short, mostly painless version. I really did enjoy having the time to do all of this silly bloggy stuff. But the real story goes back to Thanksgiving week when I began to investigate upgrading my Godaddy hosted blog(s)… Here’s the long painful rendition…

Tuesday, November 29th
Still waiting for last Godaddy website hosting update. Ack. Tech warned that it could be up to 72 hours… Has it already been 72 hours? Damn. I was just in the process of trying to develop the habit of doing at least three posts a week, but I had a post disappear between issuing the last update and when the site was updated. So, as always, I plan something and then have to adjust said plan to wait for other things first. Damn.

So, I had been trying to decide whether to re-up my Godaddy hosting plan or go with something else. Of late I had been depending less and less on my FTP access to my go daddy site. I’d been wanting to move everything away from my expiring MobileMe iDisk hosting, but was getting discouraged because I’d been running into server errors, etc. I purchased a year’s worth of SquareSpace, but I wasn’t impressed with what I could do with the site that didn’t look like a blog (and couldn’t get a “magazine” theme with rotating gallery up top). Damn.

I very briefly experimented with the Onswipe theme to make the main blog more iPad fun. Alas, because I had far more Twitter posts than full-feature posts, Onswipe didn’t really work. Then last week it dawned of me that I could create twitter-specific WordPress blogs and remove them from my main blog so that themes like Onswipe would work. Doh! Now I just have to wait for my hosting plan to return from the “upgrade.”

Friday, December 2nd: Friday Sick of Hosting Problems
Friday on a week that didn’t quite equal a full week doesn’t quite feel like a proper Friday. I’ve been sick most of the week and slept all of yesterday, so my poor sense of direction/focus isn’t all that unexpected. Add to that I’m still waiting for Godaddy to pull their heads out of their asses.

Two weeks ago I talked to a tech about upgrading my old hosting service to their new shiny “4GH” and he suggested that I enable a service that would automatically require that they move me to a newer server and then after that the upgrade would just be a check-box. Or so he said. I enabled the first part and it took a bit over 48-hours before I had access to the backend again, signaling that that step was completed. So I contacted Godaddy on the 25th to renew my hosting plan, indicating that I wanted to be moved to the 4GH plan. The tech said no problem, it should take between one to 72-hours for the update and that I should get an email indicating that the change was made. Seven-days later I’m still seeing the “pending account change” status. I contacted their tech on Wednesday and got a trouble ticket and they told me that the connection had timed-out and that’s why the upgrade hadn’t completed. So I waited until today to re-check the status. No change. The tech escalated the trouble ticket and suggested that I might sign up for a one-month hosting plan, move my blogs to the new server then after the month move it back to the “fixed” hosting plan. I told her that I can’t see putting more work into something when they haven’t delivered on the original upgrade. Why should I spend more money, buying a month’s worth of hosting? I ended the call thinking that if I’m not back with backend access in another 24-hours that I should take my business elsewhere.

I don’t know where I’d switch to. I’m thinking that if the problem isn’t resolved then I will cancel my renewal and create a new service and move to the new service. Time to research the alternative hosting services. Ack.

Sunday, December 4th: Web Hosting
I think I know the Godaddy.com hold music by heart now. Sad. They resolved my upgrade issue after seven-days, so that I’m not getting the “pending” message anymore, but, the upgrade to their 4GH plan, the one that I requested didn’t go through. Ah, right. And now I can’t Dreamweaver or Transmit to log into the site so that I can back things up. So…. brain-dead decision, I thought maybe it was a password problem and because I had access to the hosting dashboard, I decided to change the password to something less cryptic. Now the password setting is twirling the “pending change” icon of death. FUCK.

Just called tech support… yeah, something is happening… it’s been escalated to the next level tech support and I should expect another email with another ticket number. Damn. I was actually thinking that I’d like to avoid the hassle, cancel my previous “upgrade” (the one that didn’t happen), and then open another hosting account with the vaunted 4GH service. But now, well, I haven’t posted to my blog in over a week and I’m tired of having to work with tech support just to access my own damn content. Time to move my Internet tent. Damn.

Tuesday, December 6th: Loyalty
It’s completely illogical for me to feel anything or to feel bad about canceling my godaddy hosting account. Sorry if you were expecting something more personal or something along that line. I guess it comes down to caring about things that one spends a lot of time doing and I spend a lot of time in this space, writing, researching, reading, connecting, and so anything that gets in the way of me feeling connected or threatens my continued connection causes an emotional reaction. So, I was looking through my records and I’ve been registering domain names with godaddy since the end of 2006 and started hosting my sites with them since January 2007 and in Internet time almost five years is forever. Yeah, I’m a bit depressed about having to cancel the hosting and hassle of looking for a new provider and then having to build everything back up. And even though these words are not reaching out to the Net (yet), thank god that I found this program (DayOne) that prompts me to do my daily writing. What a godsend. Okay. Back to the business of getting back online.

Wednesday, December 7th: Moving
There’s generally an assumption that anything “Internet” is less than “In Real Life,” that it takes less time, less energy, less meaning. I don’t think that is so. I’ve been working on getting my website/blogs reset/set-up since the 25th and it there hasn’t been anything about this process that’s been “less” anything. So, today i’m now in the process of moving my blogs/websites to a new host. I’ve got the skeleton of the new blog setup on the new host and the right domain name pointed to the right host. All I need to do with wait 24-hours for the information to filter across the Internet so that it works with my browser… More waiting. Damn. I’m going to be glad when this process is over and I can get back to creating good content. Ack.

Thursday, December 8th: Living Online
I started this post yesterday, but got interrupted when I accidentally over-wrote my new wordpress blog with another that I was setting up for Tricia. Live online/die online. Damn.

Friday, December 9th: Living Online, continued
Still struggling with getting a different domain name to work with my old hosting account, so that I can move the main domain name to my new hosting account. This is turning into the proverbial removing the table cloth without losing the table settings trick. Ack. So, besides accidentally 86-ing all the work I’d done yesterday last night when I was creating a separate blog for Tricia (ARGHHH!), I’m now reconciling myself with the idea that I’m going to have to manually reset the main image (feature image) for every single blog post… currently there are 957 posts on this blog. [fail trombone]. Well, back to work.

Saturday, December 10th: Silent Blog
Since my godaddy hosting troubles around Thanksgiving I haven’t posted another blog post. Thank god for Day One, the app that I’m using to record my thoughts (and the fact that the app bugs me every day to write something…). So, I have posts to upload… I’ve just been frustrated at not having a reliable … host. Well, the blog is up on the new host, but I need to transfer my main domain name to the new host and that requires that I get another domain name take over that spot and … well, I’m going to have to call godaddy to get it up and running. Damn. Moving one’s blog is a royal pain in the ass. Oh yeah, I’m having to manually set up the “feature image” on all of my posts and edit the categories to make it run with all the different devices (web, iPhone and iPad). Yay. Be back after the Godaddy encounter.

Sunday, December 11th: Manually Moving Blog Content
Last few days have been spent manually moving my blog media, resetting categories and resetting feature images on the new blog host. Yeah, really exciting. I decided that I’ll go back as far as 2008 to make changes (I have posts that go back to 2003).

Last step was to replace the primary domain on the expiring godaddy account so that the majority of hosted images would point to the new host. Looks like the transfer worked and the temp primary domain seems to work, but I can’t access the admin functions. I can probably do a WordPress reinstall if necessary, but I’m keeping the temp godaddy going just as an image/content backup reference/resource. Time to move my Internet flag to the new place. Onward and upward.

Wednesday, December 14th: blogs and webmail
I’ve been spending the past four days working on bringing my blog back up, mostly resetting, copying and posting images, resetting categories and today trying to get my hosted email account to work. No luck with the email. But they warn that it can 24-hours for the changes to take effect. Where have I heard this before and why does it bother me. So, around 2:30 pm (ET) on Thursday it should all work perfectly. Ack.

Tuesday, December 20th
Going back to add “feature” images to old blog posts and ran into “video pulled for copyright claim”… damn. The internet is not reliable. Surprise.

Tuesday, December 27th: Sometimes Whining Works
That’s right, sometimes whining works, especially on Twitter. A couple days ago I was taking some time to clean up my inbox and working on a bunch of things that hadn’t been working on my blog and ran headlong into a conflict between my flickr widget and my dynamic feature image function and then once I got that working I couldn’t get a plugin called Onswipe that creates a special iPad theme to work. So I did the most constructive thing that I could imagine, I whined on Twitter:

“Frustrated w/ blog,fixed dynamic content display (java script), now onswipe won’t work.If I wanted this much troubleshooting I’d run windows” @jbb

Then within less than a day I got the following message:

@JasonLBaptiste
@jbb hey joe, what’s up? How can we help? j@onswipe.com

So another day later I wrote Jason an email explaining my problem and what I’d been using with my wordpress blog and a bit later got a response with a zip file of an updated version of the plug-in. I’ve been working on the blog today and it’s been mostly good. Onswipe works, but there are some things that don’t quite work.

So, it’s not enough to just complain, but to complain to the anonymous internet! Who knew?

Tuesday, January 3rd: Bloggy Status
So after all of this, what’s the scoop? Godaddy was sacked as my hosting service because they couldn’t deliver on their promised vaunted 4GH service at the beginning of December. I moved to FatCow and they’ve been decent. Moving everything over has been a hassle and took over a month to reset all of the broken links and images. When I dug deep to get conflicting plug-ins to work together I decide to sack my previous expensive theme and go with one simplistic theme that should work across computers and iPads (making getting Onswipe to work with my blog moot). I love StudioPress and might use them for my separate photography and video specific blogs, but it turns out that simpler can be better, hence the move to the MINIMATICA theme by One Designs.

So, the move had nothing to do with SOPA, but I’ve been slowing moving my domains to hover.com for quite a while and the SOPA bullshit has made the decision all the better. My hosting account with godaddy expires in seven days on January 10th. Thus will end five-years of service. Weird that I’d feel funny about that. Thus are the reflections of one who lives so much online.

In 2007 I found a perfect theme called Revolution that did all the “magazinie-things” and have purchased several of it’s successors since then (most recently themes based on the Genesis framework. During this past Winter break I was trying to get several features working on my blog and came up with the idea that maybe the reason things haven’t been working is because maybe the framework I’m using is too complex and works well, but only if you stay within their limitations. So, I thought that I might need to look around. Yeah, I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on my themes and I was thinking that maybe there might be a free solution.

Looking through the ”newspaper” and “magazine” themes, they all had something to offer, but also a number of compromises. One theme had a great slider option but required that you upload/reset a new “feature” image… What? Why require a new “feature” image when the “feature image” function has been standardized for some time. That was a non-starter. Then I remembered that the big change from the earlier themes was the huge sliding image that new themes presented to the reader/visitor. So I looked up “slider” themes and one popped up called Minimatica and caught my eye because the main screen was a single pane of four half-images in a semi-slider fashion, with no sidebars, multi-panes or any other distractions, just the one window. Brilliant. And it would work perfectly on iPads.

Four posts, that’s it. That forces me to have four posts up front that are worth the reader’s time and effort. And even if one clicks on the links to the categories in the menu, one is then presented with four posts from those categories. It forces me to be much more focused and make categories like featured media and past featured media meaningless. If it’s worth posting it’s worth being on the front page. Archives are listed in a more traditional blog/list view and selected stories get all the full-screen graphic support. I’m really liking this choice. Now I have to just come up with the content worthy of anyone’s time. Back to writing.

Sources:

• Minimatica Free WordPress Theme, http://www.onedesigns.com/wordpress-themes/minimatica-free-wordpress-theme, retrieved 1-2-2012.
• Revolution WordPress Theme, http://www.wordpress-themes.co/revolution-wordpress-themes, retrieved 1-2-2012.
• Genesis WordPress Framework by StudioPress, http://www.studiopress.com/themes/genesis, retrieved 1-2-2012.

image by MacRumors.com

So for those up us with current accounts or those who want to keep their previously created iWeb site on the Internet, we have about a year to figure out how to replace mobileme hosting. This applies to all current emdt students and graduates from the past three years. Those who did not activate their mobileme accounts are out of luck and will need to find alternatives right now. I’ve been looking through numerous articles ranging from speculation to top ten lists on the iCloud transition and possible solutions. I will list them in the Sources section below.

iWeb on Dropbox

I found an excellent step-by-step instruction on how to host any website using Dropbox’s Public folder here: http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites. I’m going to adapt their instructions for our purposes.

Basically the idea is that we are going to save our iWeb site to a folder and that folder will be in the Dropbox Public folder. The dropbox folks note that “You are limited to client side scripts and HTML since Dropbox cannot run any server side stuff.” With that limitation in mind lets begin.

1. Create a folder in your Public folder in your Dropbox folder (in my example I created a folder called month11 - remember to avoid using spaces or punctuation in your folder title)
2. In iWeb, from the Site Publishing Settings page, in the Publish to: menu select Local Folder
3. Still in the Site Publishing Settings page, in the Folder Location section, chose the folder you created in step one. Leave the Website URL blank for the moment.
4. If you are working or updating an iWeb site save your work (file menu > save).
5. After you’ve saved your work (or if you are just moving your website to the new location), select the Publish Site button.

Because of how iWeb creates it’s folder structure you might have to search around a little bit before you find the correct folder and html file that will act like your index.html or home.html file that you want to put in the Website URL section of the iWeb Site Publishing Settings page and to bookmark and share.

In my example website (above) I created a folder in my Public folder named month11 and called the website edm613 (which iWeb name as a folder inside of my month11 folder). When I drilled down I found a folder named Home and the Home.html file that I needed to point to get the functional website URL: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/[DropboxID]/month11/edm613/Home/Home.html. Remember that after the domain name, such as dropbox.com, upper case letters make a difference, so be aware of this in your URL. Also the designation [DropboxID] will be your special dropbox ID number. Finally, because iWeb wants complete control of the folder where your website is saved to please do NOT remove or rename any file in the folder you’ve chosen to save your iWeb website to. If you are successful you should have a fully function website now. enjoy.

test iWeb site on dropbox

Domain Names: The dropbox wiki ends with the following information:

If you own a domain, you can create a CNAME record that points to dl.dropbox.com. From this, you can create links such as download.yourdomain.com/u/[DropboxID]/interestingpicture.png. For more information, see here: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=7897&replies=17.

Alternatively, you can use TinyUrl or bit.ly to create a shorter, custom link to your page or setup a redirect from a domain name you already own.

Sources:

• Ten ways to replace iWeb and MobileMe hosting By Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/13/ten-ways-to-replace-iweb-and-mobileme-hosting/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• From iCloud to Dropbox: 5 Cloud Services Compared By Brian X. Chen, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/cloud-services-compared/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• What to do with your MobileMe-hosted site post-iCloud By Geoffrey Goetz, http://gigaom.com/apple/what-to-do-with-your-mobileme-hosted-site-post-icloud/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• MobileMe: Some speculation about the transition to iCloud By Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Apple reviving expired MobileMe logins for iCloud transition By ipodnn staff, http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/11/06/16/requires.ios.5.os.x.lion/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Opinion: Why Apple scrapped MobileMe for iCloud: What went wrong with MobileMe By Jackie Dove, http://www.macvideo.tv/distribution/news/index.cfm?newsId=3286864&pagType=allchandate retrieved 6/22/2011.
• MobileMe Support By Apple, http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Make Your Own Website By by SebastianH/DropBox, http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites retrieved 6/22/2011.
• Steve Jobs Confirms Discontinuation of iWeb in iCloud Transition By Eric Slivka, http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/12/steve-jobs-confirms-discontinuation-of-iweb-in-icloud-transition/ retrieved 6/22/2011.
• image: Clouds by karindalziel, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirak/644335254/ retrieved 6/22/2011.

In typical Apple-style with it’s lightning-focus on delivering the perfect user-experience across three different platforms (desktop/laptops, handhelds and tablets) Jobs proposed the next step in the online evolution. I was there, at a Steve keynote in 2000 when iTools was introduced as an easy way to make websites and send email iCards. Contrast that to today’s announced iCloud services, where we’re not posting websites but making our media seamlessly accessible across multiple devices. Alas, there are still some of us who are just looking for online disk space where we can host our webpages and associated media. Apparently, and not too surprisingly, “we’re” in the minority.

A cursory survey of friends and family pretty much confirms that almost no one really is into creating websites or having an online presence beyond a Facebook account. There are a few, very few, among my geek friends who created slideshow galleries back in the day, mostly of their kids, and there were a few who did blogs back in the LiveJournal days. But as the tools have become more and more powerful, I see virtually no draw amongst my friends and co-workers. A couple years ago I gave pro-flickr accounts to my four siblings. One is being used by my niece to share photos of her first born and another account was taken over by a brother-in-law for his business. The others went unused. None of my immediate co-workers have a personal blog, though they all have personal and professional facebook accounts. A few coworkers use Twitter but I don’t know if any use it personally or just have a “work” account. So, what an online presence means for most is mostly about micro-posting/social networking a la facebook and having this connection available on one’s handheld device(s). And, except for our current dependence on using MobileMe to host student capstone project websites (which could easily be hosted anywhere else), I do not know that anyone would care at all if iDisk or the web-hosting part of MobileMe disappears. Does this, my concern about creating and hosting my own sites and blogs… does this put me ahead of the curve or terribly behind it? I love what Apple has done over the years and plan to continue to explore new ways to use my iPad2, Apple TV, etc., etc. But somehow I do feel like I’m getting lapped and left behind. Adios, mm, we hardly knew ye.

Addendum:

The same day I wrote this post Steven Sande at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) speculated about the transition from MobileMe to iCloud, with the delightful subtitle: “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.” Sande listed the following four speculations about what this transition will mean:

• Speculation #1: Web-based versions of Mail, Contacts, and Calendar will be de-emphasized
• Speculation #2: iDisk disappears
• Speculation #3: Gallery is toast
• Speculation #4: So long, iWeb hosting

Though completely based on speculation, Sande seems to agree with my fears that those of us needing web-hosting are going to be EOL’ed. Awesome. I guess I need to look into how/whether one can post iWeb sites using DropBox hosting (next post…). Check out Sande’s article here: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud/.

Resources:
CNET News: Steve Jobs introduces iCloud, http://youtu.be/O_C1TZIT-qQ retrieved 6/7/2011
Apple – Introducing iOS 5, http://youtu.be/LLJIef-e-7g retrieved 6/7/2011
MobileMe: Some speculation about the transition to iCloud by Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud/ retrieved 6/9/2011.

"May I axe you a question?" Astro's Got an Axe! by tohoscope

Bob is still looking for his A

Grades in middle school are controversial, especially now that students earn credits to be promoted to the next grade level. Ask a teacher at my school to “give an ‘A’” and their response is likely to be one of confusion, disbelief, laughter, or even anger. Administrators will tell you that grades should be used to measure student success and communicate progress. Unfortunately, many teachers use grades to communicate a very bad message and focus on “principle.” “Its the principle of the matter,” exclaims a colleague. “If you give an ‘A’ to a student who does nothing in your class, what kind of message are you sending the kid who works their butt off?”

So it goes back to measure and comparison (see chapter 2). Giving an A is not about allowing students a free ride and telling hard working students that it is all for nothing. Rather, it is eliminating the “anticipation of failure” and allowing the class to focus on what is more important; learning. It’s all about placing everyone on a level playing field (pardon the competitive sports analogy) and saying, “you already have the grade, what’s next?” It’s likely that the response will involve a feeling of relief and willingness to explore.

Ashley’s always reaching for an ‘A.’

However, I think the next step of giving an ‘A’ is just as important as giving the ‘A’ itself. Teachers who feel that giving an ‘A’ would eliminate student accountability will like this step the most. Requiring that students predict how they have earned the A before they have actually received it, helps them develop goals and builds intrinsic motivation. It also helps them see the possibility of being successful, something many have given up on.

Interested in seeing how I felt about this in October, click here. – Noel Nehrig

And my erudite response:

Grades are a bit like religion. There may have been a point at some time but it’s gotten lost in all of the noise and people are very scared to consider what to do if grades/religion had never existed. In the classroom, has the point of all the effort gotten lost to pursuing a grade? I mean, just like religion, isn’t all of this effort suppose to amount to something intrinsic, some good that goes beyond measure?

Grades are institution solution to communicating student progress and/or position in the A-to-F continuum within the classroom. There the measure, not the point. But i’ve seen instructors at all level quibble looking to seal up any possible loophole that a student might use to game the grading system. At best a grade is an approximation that may or may not be related to student progress fulfilling course requirements. In the end, it’s what we carry in our heads and hearts that matters more than this imperfect approximation. Funny how only those who excel and those who feel besmirched care so much about grades. What’s up with that?

Sources:
Wk 1 Reading- “A” is for Ax Murderer by Noel Nehrig. http://web.me.com/noelnehrig/The_Blog_Prince_for_EMDTMS_MAC/2010_MAC_OCD_Wk1/Entries/2010/2/6_Wk_1_Reading-_%E2%80%9CA%E2%80%9D_is_for_Ax_Murderer.html retrieved on 2/9/2010

Astro’s Got an Axe! by tohoscope. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tohoscope/182444838/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Stone mason by sk8geek. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/3917647300/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Pretty Princess Picking Her Nose by Pink Sherbet Photography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3295969599/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

It is a bit strange to feel a connection with an Internet personality (who was a Cable-TV personality from a small network before that) and then discover that there’s a whole community of weirdos like me who work in tech. Following is a short documentary featuring Leo talking about the moment we’re at right now where it’s possible for a small media company can compete with giant corporations and get their message out without all the filters imposed in the past. It’s about the individual and the community and the message. It’s not about 140-characters.

Bonus video: Here’s a video circa 1996 during which Leo Laporte predicts the future. Given next week’s Apple announcement, Leo’s talk about the power of the Newton in 1996 might be all the more interesting:

Sources:
* YouTube video: TWiT 228: The TWiT Of The Decade posted by TWiT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaq_FoA8jmo retrieved on 1/19/2010
* The Spark Series, Part 3: OPEN by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick. http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-3-open retrieved on 1/19/2010
* Of Mouse and Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIV8BxlaQs retrieved on 1/19/2010

What is it that you most love in life,
and how do you express it in your
day to day routine?

Thinking about the aunts and uncles who’ll be at this year’s Christmas gathering, and realizing that the list is getting shorter. My dear sister-in-law, Connie, passed last Spring. And a life-long friend whom I haven’t had the best communication with, has had incredible health difficulties since taking a fall a few months ago. For my part, I’ve been so busy, with an almost around-the-clock sense of urgency tending to my job. Because of the freedom I’ve been given I feel the need to work all the harder to deliver the best possible learning experience for my students. That’s a blessing, but I still need to pause a moment and consider bringing the bigger vision into the daily routine.

I shouldn’t let a day go by without picking up my guitar. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t write in this blog. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t call up a friend just to say, “hi.” I’ve done these important things too infrequently this past year and that needs to change. After my uncle Joe passed, whenever I found myself relaxing for a moment, especially if the moment included a good IPA, I raised my glass in his honor. I didn’t do this because I thought that he might be haunting me or aware of my gesture, but because I wanted to honor the memory of his work ethic, what he contributed to in the life of his six daughters and dozens of grandchildren and just the man’s man who he was.

So, there needs to be more room for the meditation that I find in my guitar. Thus, last night when I should have been trying to get some sleep because I had an early morning video shoot (I was doing the behind the scene stills), I found myself listening to some Sarah McLachlan and then strumming along, then looking up the lyrics and chords for the song on the Internet, then learning the song and playing until my finger, that have long lost their callouses, forced me to quit. I’ve long felt a strong emotional connection to McLachlan, but when I listened to the lyric last night, something in the careful twist of words really connected it to the journey I’ve been on. I decided that this would be a good place to start getting back to the things/people I love in my life.

“Fallen“
Heaven bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past can be undone
But we carry on our back, the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It’s the bitter taste of losing everything
that I’ve held so dear…

I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Heaven bend to take my hand
I’ve nowhere left to turn
I’m lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know
Oh they turn their heads embarrassed
Pretend that they don’t see
But it’s one missed step you’ll slip before you know it
And there doesn’t seem a way to be redeemed

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Sources:
* “Fallen” by Sarah McLachlan from her Afterglow CD

* youtube video: Sarah McLachlan Fallen Live – Macworld 2003 Keynote posted by cryotekk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKqFw9x_IM retrieved 12/11/2009

p.s., I used to catch hell for my affinity and attraction to artist’s like McLachlan. This person would tease me, saying that I needed to quit listening to the “lesbians” because the music was making me too moody. I’m glad that I didn’t stop listening. The music didn’t make me moody, it spoke to the shitty situation and my frustration with it. Making this song a part of my emotional vocabulary is a far better way to move past those trouble times than to pretend that they didn’t happen or wall off whole sections of ones life. There, I said it.

:: Description
You will read the Art of Possibility chapters 10 -12 and post one entry (or more) into your blog.

:: Rationale

pacbell by joe bustillos

Sometimes the road we take in the Universe of Possibility leads us in unexpected directions and to unimagined destinations. I took a summer job with Pacific Bell in California. That the company was called Pacific Bell might tell you how long ago that was. I met an energetic manager who shared with me that the secret to avoiding job boredom was to never stay in one job position for too long. He estimated that 18-months was usually more than enough time to get to know all one needs to know and then move on. He was an unusual entrepreneurial sprirt in a company that was much more well known for it’s “lifers” not making any waves and just putting in the time needed to get to retirement. I wasn’t as entrepreneurial as the manager but I knew, much to my family’s frustration, that there was something more for me to do. After finishing a second bachelor’s degree and nearing the end of my teacher credential program, Pacific Bell decided that it was time to let some people go. Normally that would have been a horrible thing, but for me the timing was perfect and I started my career as a public school teacher a few months after letting go of my 15-year “summer job” with the phone company.
Ah, but the story continues from there. Truth be told, being a teacher was somewhat akin to being a phone company drone in that the highest form of praise tended to be that one always showed up for work on time and never did anything that made work for others. Yeah, I somehow ended up in another world of “lifers.” Of course, I didn’t know any better so I kept doing things like teaching my students video journalism to help with their literacy and brought computers from home into my classroom. I guess I became a bit more entrepreneurial because I’d get involved in creating some new tech/ed/media program on campus, we’d have great success and then after a couple of years the funding would go away and I’d find myself working for another school/district, bringing tech/media to the natives. While getting a master’s degree and time spent working on a doctorate I continued the “create a tech program/find success/lose funding/change jobs” cycle three times. Alas, the doctorate program ran aground (twice), but I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Ludgate and somehow found a home on the opposite end of the country working for Full Sail. I am not the poster child for the Art of Possibility. But I am kind of stubborn as far as expecting a lot from myself because I’ve already been given so much. And if I can influence someone to not settle for the status quo, to push the technology, to enable their students, well then, that’s a damn good day.

The following video features someone who found amazing success, in many ways, through equally amazing failures. Having witnessed three of his incredible keynote speeches, this is not one of his better speeches. But the message is all the more real given the speech’s lack of polish. Enjoy.

:: Resources

The Practices
This books is less of a “study” book, where you try to analyze every sentence and paragraph and more a book that you want to move through and try to focus on the over-arching concepts presented. At the end of each chapter are some questions that form the “practices” part of the book. Use the questions to prompt your book notes that you will post in your blog. Feel free to answer the following study questions, or comment on the practices at the end of each chapter, or write about whatever moves you most (that’s directly related to the reading). Your choice.

Chapter 10. Being the Board: It’s not them. It’s not the circumstances. It’s me. It’s my choices. Now what do I do?

Chapter 11. Creating Frameworks for Possibility: How do I take this flash of insight and make it into daily thing? And how do I share this with others?

Chapter 12. Telling the WE Story: I told you it wasn’t about you. Have you been able to tap into the power of combining your expertise and passions with someone equally gifted? Have you had the pleasure of lifting a teammate, student, stranger up enabling them to realize their dreams and exceed anything that you could have imagined?

Coda: Now what do we do?

Sources:
Image: Pop!Tech 2008 – Benjamin Zander by Pop!Tech, http://www.flickr.com/photos/poptech2006/2968249798/ retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/pacbell01.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: jbb & zander by Joe Bustillos, http://web.me.com/edm613/media/jbbnbzander.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
YouTube: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 posted by peestandingup, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA, retrieved on 11/12/2009.

Then a couple of weeks ago I got a comment on my old blog, Jacob’s Ladder (which is why the writer makes the understandable mistake that my name is Jacob. oops):

Jacob, I’m not really skilled at computer codes, etc.,so I’ll try to get on the site using anonymous. I’m Don Kimrey My blog is Scripturestudent.wordpress.com. I came upon your site thru the “Ooze” posting and your comment there. Sounds like we have some things in common. I read right many of your posts and found them interesting and, more importantly perhaps, honest. Sounds like we traveled some of the same roads, and I discovered that a disappointed idealist makes the worst kind of cynic. But I also have come to believe God’s love is constant, even when ours falters and we’re not sure which way is up. Hang in there. You seem to be quite intelligent, and I sense that you’re on an honest quest. Let’s pray for each other. Don Kimrey

Thanks Don. The best I can promise is good thoughts about you and your journey. I’d forgotten all about the Ooze article. I wish I could find the article and my comment. Damn. Oh yeah, and today I got a letter from a local Baptist church inviting me to participate. Sounds interesting, but I think I’m better off finding misfits who appreciate Faith… just from a reasonable distance.

It’s a weird world we live in, it’s funny every day,
half the world prays like the preacher, other half don’t even pray.
So no one understands you if you pray in your own way.

Now I’m stuck here in the middle, everything is in a jam,
stuck right in the middle, doors on both sides seem to slam,
no one seem to want me, only God would take me like I am.

Well my brothers criticize me, say I’m just too strange to believe,
and the others just avoid me, say my faith is so naive,
I’m too sacred for the sinners and the saints wish I would leave – Mark Heard

Sources:
* Image: free child walking on white round spheres by D Sharon Pruitt, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/233228813/ retrieved on 11/04/2009.

* Stuck in the Middle by Mark Heard from the Stop The Dominoes CD

High Speed Aerodynamics by o b s k u r a

One of the books that I use for my course is the inspirational The Art of Possibility and in one of the opening chapters the authors, Ben & Roz Zander, propose getting rid of grades. This usually invokes strong pros and cons reactions from my students. For example…

“The author of the book, “The Art of Possibility” made a statement that “not just in this case, but in most cases, grades say little about the work done.” This statement could not be more true. The first thing I thought about when reading this chapter is the meetings that I have sat in with administrators that have implied students should earn nothing less than a 50% and that is if they even fail. Today, we are educators, which work in a data driven education system where the author’s statement of this book could not be more applicable. Grades today do not reflect the work or worth of a student for the simple fact that, like Southern California, there are so many other places that are driven by political, or administrative, holds to influence their “data” and/or “funding.” by Melissa C.

Two of Melissa’s classmates responded:

“I feel the exact same way!!! My school wanted us to also not give students anything less than a 50% a couple of years ago and last year the 50% was raised to 60%. When we were told this many of us were livid! I felt like what was the point of grading work if we were just going to GIVE grades. Where is the “Truth in Grading”? Our system depends on data for funding and political purposes. Since our high school graduation rate was so low I believe this was a strategies used to improve it. I don’t understand how passing the children when they clearly have not mastered the material. Giving students a passing grade is being done on all levels and it is so frustrating when students come into my classroom and you are thinking they are on level and find out they are very far behind.” by Nicole

The second classmate said…

“I recently shared this chapter with some of my colleagues at school and you should’ve heard the gasps of horror when I proposed that grades mean a lot less than we think. Of course, they all seem to agree that the way schools are “graded” according to NCLB is unfair. Talk about a double standard. In all actuality, grades can be a good way to provide feedback to students as long as what we are really assessing is mastery. Then again, there are a lot of better ways than grades to do that. I feel lucky that my administrator feels the same way I do (he has also read this book). Unfortunately, we have a steep hill to climb to get everyone on the same page.” by Noel

Being the class professor I had to add my two-cents:

So, part of the problem is that grades are meant to be a way to communicate progress, but rather than track the progress of the learner, they tend to be a crude measure kind of like the height requirement before a little kid could get on a rollercoaster, “rider must be this tall to ride this ride.” It doesn’t tell us anything except for that one data point. So in many ways it fails in it’s primary task. Worse than that is that this crude measure becomes the goal, when what the student is capable might be far beyond “the goal.”

Now your concern is a bit different because administrators are trying to keep students from digging themselves into a hole that they cannot get out of, because if they fail to turn in the first of three assignments, for example, they cannot make up the points needed to pass if they get a zero out of one-hundred the first time out. Now the grade is being used as an accounting tool that needs to be tweaked, which should be a sure sign that something’s amiss. There are some fundamental issues being lost in the need to show a number, forgetting that there might be dozens of reasons for the student not turning in an assignment, beginning with a basic cultural conflict between the needs of the school and the pressures at home and that the student probably can’t read. This is where data is the enemy because it provides excuses and allows decision-makers to hide from the truth that this section of the community/school wall is completely broken and needs more than meetings and studies to repair it.

Sources:
image: High Speed Aerodynamics by o b s k u r a, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mixedmedia/2650461196/ retrieved on 10/31/2009

Week 3 – Giving an A by Melissa Clark (with comments by Nicole and Noel), http://constantclarke.blogspot.com/2009/10/week-3-giving-a.html retrieved on 10/31/2009

image: Cover of “The Art of Possibility” from Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=qLz0SmPL-qgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false retrieved on 10/31/2009

CNN.com

Beck continued, “We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.” So, in all Beck felt like it was a great success in that it sparked conversations about climate change.

Sources:

Image & article “Bloggers unite on climate change” By Matthew Knight/CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/14/blog.action.day.climate/ retrieved on 10/16/2009

So, let’s be entirely clear about what might contribute to this person’s state of doubt. We in the “Developed West” believe that the most important entity is the individual and we darn near worship the independent individual. Government, community, family, culture, they have some importance, but the most important thing in all of the universe is the individual. I before thee or we. Period. Somewhere in there is a twisted interpretation of the commission in the book of Genesis that man should go forth and conquer the world and do with it what he pleases. Man, individual, conquer, seems pretty clear.

Of course, up until this last century very very few individuals could even hope to survive a single year without the intervention or assistance of others. Forget that part. What we have here is the result of decades of individual-worship and the inability to recognize that we are, in fact, inter-connected and that everything we do has some ripple-effect across the world. The fact that we don’t “see” this, like watching dominoes knocking one another over on a table, only reveals the gross limitations to our powers of perception. Add to this that our lifespans are so pathetically short, too short for an individual to experience the changes wrought by ones actions. So, because we don’t see the changes very easily we assume that we can do whatever we please with no concern for the results of our behaviors. To me this shows how little we understand of this world we would presume to conquer. The scariest part is that those who have the need to lead and grasp at the reins of power may be most susceptible to the delusion that they as individual leaders are more important than those they represent or lead, and take no responsibility for their actions. So whether you are a five-year-old secretly coloring on the walls in your bedroom or a governor of a bankrupt state, or the former president of a religious denomination, every choice, no matter how small will effect us all on some level. We are all connected.

“Wherefore whatsoever ye have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light; and what ye have spoken in the ear in the inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Luke 12: 3 (ASV)

How about we do something good with all of this power.

Sources:

image: “the heat is on” by jenny downing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny-pics/3800586843/ retrieved on 10/14/2009.

An open letter to my emdt co-workers, co-conspirators & creativity enablers,

On one level or another I’ve been teaching communication and writing since I took my first teaching assignment 15-years ago. One thing that I learned right away was that it seemed to be a big function of the education system to take the eagerness of our little learners to share their every creation and over time crush it down to nothing, such that every fourth grader knows that no one wants hear what they have to say and even less what they think. The smart ones, in this system, are the ones who learn to speak and write in the language of their teachers, and that it’s critically important to not make any mistakes in spelling or grammar. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the ones who might suffer the most from this fear of writing are the ones who are part of the system that enforces this approach to writing, our masters students. But what they may not know, which I learned from my second-language 6th graders, is that they’ll never get any better at writing without working at it on an ongoing basis and that requires that I release them from the system that says that they can only write about things that the teacher cares about and only in the style set by the teacher. You have to work against a lifetime of “correction” and just get them to write before you can help them to write “better.”

As we begin to make blogging a bigger part of our process, please consider the learning process and that putting thoughts down in writing for others to read takes something more than can be expressed in a check-list (though a check-list can be very helpful in the beginning). What prompted this concern is the following exchange between two of my current students about having to do a blog in my course:

edm613 student blog entry:
“I must admit, I disliked blogging in the last class in which it was a requirement. I am really not sure why- I like to write- but it just never gelled for me. I did, however, revisit the idea of blogging after losing my job at the end of the last school year. I thought I would chronicle the ups and downs of my lack of job, talk about the new and exciting things I would encounter and boast about my new accomplishments. I would fill the pages with salsa lessons, daily musings and funny anecdotes. I think I actually managed to write a paragraph once or twice and it consisted of me complaining and moaning about emotional drudgery. I have a difficult enough time sounding interesting in one line on Twitter- I couldn’t possibly blog about my life- or lack there of.

“So here we go again.

“I decided not to re-purpose my last blog but start a new one. It will be chock full of fresh and new ideas, brilliant insight and astute observations. Words will flow from my mind, through my fingers and dance onto the page. I will be clever and captivating. What does this have to do with anything in class? Nothing, but every blog has to start somewhere. Welcome.”

Second students comment:
“I agree with you about blogging in our last class. The requirements were very limiting and seemed to hold me back. The blog became a chore and I dreaded each and every post for fear that I wouldn’t get a good grade or I would make some simple mistake and have to redo everything. I am very excited to get to share with everyone and express my thoughts more freely again. I like that you have brought a great sense of positivity into your new blog. I like your new point of view…you think you can assist me in bringing back my light?”

Standards of excellence and creativity will never be found where one doesn’t have the freedom to make a thousand mistakes first. I should know. jbb

Sources:
image: keyboard – clipart.com/jupiter graphics
thanks to jolene t. & joann s. for your thoughts and comments on blogging and giving it “one more try.”

One of the problems with Web 2.0 stuff is that its use often defies the structures previously understood. What is twitter? In a linear world of meetings and memos, Twitter makes no sense. In a world of direct emails and broadcast media Twitter makes no sense.

Some time ago I had the most intense relationship, at a time when I was extraordinarily busy, and the relationship was greatly assisted by both of us having an open IM window where we could drop little thoughts over the course of our work day. We weren’t having long conversations, but there was a strong sense of presence (and unpressurized access). Twitter is like that, a sense of presence. It’s rarely direct conversation or communication. And unlike the video, it’s not a desperate plea for attention. For those with large followings it’s a means of crowd sourcing things. More than a few podcasts who stream their recording sessions live, will often ask the audience questions and get responses through Twitter. For those of us with smaller followings it’s more a way to keep informed on people or institutions of interest. Right now I have 320 followers and I’m following 311 and an increasing number of those I’m following are connected to NASA or science.

I’m a blogger, I spend hours and hours writing articles and creating videos for my blog. I’m used to the idea of sharing my thoughts and ideas with a relatively undefined public. I see Twitter as a way to do the same thing in much smaller chunks. When something isn’t quite worth spending hours on with a full blog entry then I twitter. That’s another thing, I don’t spend hours on Twitter and Twitter comes to me, I don’t go to it.

Like my former IM relationship, I’m doing other things when the Twitter happens. I have a Twitter app running in the background (like Tweetdeck or Tweetie) and I’ll occasionally glance over to see who is saying what. Or if I’m standing in a line I’ll check the Twitter on my phone. So for me it’s maintaining a sense of presence and keeping tabs on what’s going on without really having to work at it.

How this works for Education? I can tell you that it won’t work as long as we maintain this sense that education only happens between a set number of hours on a set number of days. It also won’t work as long as we maintain this fiction that teachers aren’t people, that teachers need to maintain a lifestyle unlike the norm we are willing to allow the phone company employee, software engineer and desperate housewife to have. Twitter as an educational tool makes sense when education isn’t something locked in a box, but becomes something where all experiences can be learning experiences and those of us who are called to be teachers find the balance to “Be” and not just “Do.” Anything less is a band aid on a broken system that needs to die and join the buggy-whip and the slate chalk board from whence it came.

Sources:
Are Your Tweets Censoring Free Speech? by Cristina Saileanu-Tuckness, http://notesofnamaste.blogspot.com/2009/08/are-your-tweets-censoring-free-speech.html, retrieved on 08/21/2009

Party On, but No Tweets By ALLEN SALKIN/The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/fashion/09blogfree.html?_r=1, retrieved on 08/21/2009

YouTube video: Twouble with Twitters: SuperNews! by Current, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w, retrieved on 08/21/2009

Long Beach studio circa 1999 - image by joe bustillos

So I packed books and everything in the bedroom and started taking apart my home office, disconnecting all the monitors (three) and gadgets. I decide to set up a temporary office on the dining table in the front room with one external monitor, keyboard and mouse. When I went to bed that first night in the office-less bedroom I was really surprised at how dark that room was. I had to turn on a nightstand light to safely navigate the room. Next surprise was how soundly I seemed to sleep that night. Duh.

This isn’t rocket science, I’d been sleeping in rooms bathed in the continual glow of blue, red and green LEDs, and four monitors showing an earth in space screen saver for as long as I could remember. Of course once I took my glasses off it was all an undefinable glow, but I guess the glow was enough for my brain to not fully “shut off” when I slept. The difference in my sleep before and after removing the office was remarkable. It was remarkable enough that I decided that I was going to forego the bedroom TV or other technology when I move to the townhouse.

I know for many this a “duh” thing, but for me this really is a change in thinking. For years I’ve maintained no difference between my working life writing on the computer while watching some TV and pushing up to and past the point of exhaustion and then just staggering to bed my head still very full of the things I’d been working on. Now I am going to have to be much more deliberate and intentional as I get up from my office chair and walk down the hall to go to sleep. Hell, maybe I’ll develop the habit of doing some reading or talking to late night friends before drifting off to slumberland. A technology-free zone was not something I would have guessed would have come out of this move. Wow.

image by Ballistik Coffee Boy (cc)(by:) 2008

I was listening to an excellent interview of one of the creators of Scrivener, a word processing app, by Your Mac Life’s Shawn King and became very enthusiastic about using a word processing app that’s specifically designed for longer text like a thesis, dissertation or novel. I’ve been looking for the word processing promised land since I first started working with micro computers in the early 80s. Most, if not all, early word processing apps were designed for office memos and have pretty much struck to that model, at least that was my experience beginning with Word Star to Word Perfect to MS Word. When I switched to the mac full-time I was delighted to find that there were some creative outline/notetaking apps that really addressed my need to design and compose longer threads of creativity. I eventually settled on Notebook from Circus Ponies. I used it to design my media course for Full Sail and couldn’t imagine managing the continuous flow of course changes and updates without it. I laugh when I think that I used to use sticky-notes for information that didn’t fit into full blown documents. Yikes. Notebook is so much better than using just a file and folder cluttered desktop system and I’ve made at least one convert of the EMDT staff. Anyway, after listening to Keith Blount from Scrivener I became curious if anyone else has gone on a similar journey, looking for the perfect WP app. Shawn King’s interview follows immediate. After listening to the interview please take the poll listed below and share your thoughts on alternative WP apps.

Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009

Sources:
Image: Apple III Keyboard Refinements by Ballistik Coffee Boy, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceageboy/3131550267/ retrieved 8/01/2009 – (cc)(by:) 2008

mp3: Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009, http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/archives/2009/07/22/apple-earnings-pan-mass-challenge-and-scrivener retrieved 8/01/2009

APP Highlight:
Scrivener by Literature & Latte

Notebook by Circus Ponies

image by neva

Over a year ago I wrote about my friend Neva:

I wasn’t living in Long Beach when Melissa Etheridge made her breakthrough playing locally at a club called Que Sera on 7th Street (funny that her wikipedia article doesn’t mention Que Sera), but every time I come out and watch Neva I think I’m seeing the beginning of the same thing. – neva rocks taco beach! *video* – May 4, 2008

I don’t remember how long I’d been going to my favorite watering hole, Taco Beach, when I happened to be there on a night when Neva was performing. Nothing formal or flashy, just an acoustic guitar and amazing voice playing over the bar PA, taking the passing attention of the audience between their conversations and drinking. Doing a solo acoustic set in that setting was not for the faint of heart. The audience wasn’t overly obnoxious or disruptive, but I’ve seen pretty talented musicians stare down at the floor, reduced to mumbling through their songs because they couldn’t break through the conversational sound-barrier. Sometimes it seemed to take a whole band to grab the audience’s attention, or at least something electric and loud. Neva had a backing-band a couple of times, but most of the time it was just her and her guitar and she was able to get the whole place rockin’ in her direction.

Wanting to be a supportive fan I checked out her MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/nevamusic and was met by the typical unappealing sprawl of a page where she’d post a poster for an upcoming gig that broke the pages frame and left one scrolling in all directions because one couldn’t see the whole poster at once (NOTE: I’ve shrunk the example page so that the viewer can see the whole poster at once. Notice that the list of gig dates along the right column are entirely illegible and the multi-spacing added to the confusion). Of course almost all MySpace pages are noted for their amateur quality. Regardless of the visual quality of her MySpace, between her MySpace and Facebook accounts she’s been able to muster up an online following of more than 800 folks. It’s difficult to figure out how many fans she has who are not online, but I’d guess that the online number is only a third of the folks who come out to see her shows (this guess is entirely based on the wide variety of folks who attend the shows I’ve seen, from college kids to retirees). Anyway, over the years I started taking pictures of her gigs and posted the results on my Flickr account. Then I started to shoot some video. I’ve only managed to edit and post one “performance” video and one “slide show” video (the latter video being mostly about my moving away from So Cal, Taco Beach & neva concerts). We talked on occasion about her website, but nothing came of it. Then she moved from Southern California to Lake Tahoe and I moved to Florida.

Just before I left So Cal I heard that she was working on a studio recording and eagerly bought the six-song set when it came out last February.We talked a couple times and she was doing pretty good with the CD but wanted to sell a lot more and joked that she’d sold a copy to all of her friends and family and still had a lot to sell before she would get to the point of having paid for the studio time and CD manufacturing. One of my first thoughts was that she’s not exactly living in a music mecca, living near Lake Tahoe. But then over the past few years I’d been following the careers of a few successful independent artists and part of the key to their successes was generating Internet buzz and gathering a much bigger following than they ever could with just public performances.

Lessons Learned From Those Who Went Before

The first on the list is a former software writer who decided to celebrate the birth of his first child by quitting his job and going fulltime with his music career. Jonathan Coulton built a strong following with the technorati in part because he spoke their language and found a way to be quirky, funny and touching usually all at the same time. Coulton produced and released two CDs, Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow and Smoking Monkey by 2004. Podcasting was just then taking off and Coulton offered to help his friends who were experimenting with the medium. But what really seemed to help Coulton was that he offered every song from the two CDs as a free download on his website. He understood that the free music would help generate a lot of interest and buzz and that at the same time those who became real fans would willingly buy his CDs (which were just one click away on the CD Baby website). The combination of speaking fluent geek and free-to-buy worked perfectly. But that alone does not a successful career make. Coulton kept interest up by deciding that the following year he would record and release one song a week for the whole year, and following the success of the last releases, he offered the recordings on his website for free, with the understanding that there would be CD collections made following the end of the year. Thus, the incredibly successful “Thing a Week” project was born, which resulted in a four-part Thing-a-Week CD collection. This past month Coulton released a follow-up CD/DVD project, BEST. CONCERT. EVER., recorded from concerts performed over the previous year, which includes fan-video, internet personalities and various interviews.

Looking at Coulton’s website one would not assume that this is the work of a genius, or wunderkind self-promoter. It’s basically an old-school unglitzy blog, low on graphics, big on text, with a tiny header and row of tiny buttons/links along the right column. It’s definitely the kind of thing that a former software writer turned successful musician might produce. But if one digs a bit below the text, one will discover that Coulton does two things right. One: everything a fan might want to know about him and his music, including the lyric, guitar song-sheets and the download-able songs are all just a click away. Two: he welcomes fan music videos, fan concert videos and fan involvement with his wiki and forums. And maybe this is the biggest key to his success, he came from and is still part of the community that now supports him. There’s no cult of personality or detached stardom. There a genuineness that bands and artists from major labels can’t hope to pull off. There’s no promotion machine trying to convince us that we want to listen to him. Just the craziness of his songs and simplicity of his performances are enough to general real interest and fun.

The next role model, Geoff Smith, is a Nashville musician who splits his time performing in a piano bar that partly owns, running a successful musical ringtone business (using a free/plus-premium model), writing jingles and doing live-video-streaming concerts with and for his friends, most notibly Cali Lewis from Geek Brief TV. The first time I saw Smith was one night during the holiday season a couple years ago. He’d turned on his web-cam and was streaming live-video from his living room, sitting at the piano taking requests from the chatroom that was attached to the live stream. He spent the whole evening playing Christmas songs mixed in with a little Beatles and other pop-tunes, bouncing between his piano to acoustic guitar. His talent was obvious and his enthusiasm and playfulness made for a very fun night watching this stranger from across the country while I worked on whatever project I was working on at the time. Not too surprisingly, Smith’s website conveys a lot more personality right away, but it’s also very user-friendly and transparent for the fans. In an email correspondence I asked Smith a bit about the blogging platform he was using, because I recognized the WordPress theme as being related to the one that I’ve been using for the past few years (Revolution, which became StudioPress by Brian Gardener). Smith confessed that he didn’t know too much about the inner workings of the blog because he has a friend doing that part of the business.

Like Coulton before him, Smith connected himself to many of the A-List podcasters, offering his services as a jingle writer and performer. He also offered his fans something a little different from Coulton’s free-to-buy method. Smith recorded a CD, Ones and 0s, and if you bought it directly from his website you’d get a bonus track subscription which entitles you to download new songs/videos that he updates on an ongoing basis. He recently released the 21st upgrade track from the CD. Buzz, community, relationship and using online/new technology to connect with the community/fans.

neva-music.com version one

neva-music.com version 1 by joe bustillos

The website is important, but as we learned from the two examples cited above, it’s completely meaningless without the willingness of the artist to be available to the community and fans in a way that was never realized (or really possible) in the pre-Internet world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream, Stickam, these are all tools to connect artist with community/audience. Getting past the fad-ish attention these technologies are getting from the general media, these tools can revolutionize relationships for those willing to let them into their lives. Transparency, genuineness, vulnerability, real-ness.

A couple things were paramount in my mind as I was putting the website together: 1) promote the brand, 2) make the  CD easy to get, 3) make the calendar/gig schedule easy to find, 4) make the website very visual. As I noted above, Neva’s MySpace and Facebook pages were none of these things. The best part of the MySpace page was that her music started to play as soon as you landed on the site, there was usually a giant poster about her next gig or schedule of gigs for the month dominating the page and way below everything else fans could make comments. But visually it was chaotic and her name didn’t stand out all that much. It looked like everyone else’s page.

1. So I put her name and image way up front (more in #4).
2. More could be done to promote the CD and make purchasing it more obvious. I found a “discography” widget that was made to list the CD and  the singles with links built in to sell the CD and singles. She just has the link to sell the whole CD, It’s a work in progress. I love how Geoff Smith has icons on the footer of his page connected to all of his products/projects, and these icons are persistent across all of the pages of his blog.
3. I wanted to put some kind of calendar on the front page that was click-able to info about where and when she’d be doing her next gig. I found a widget that did the gig thing in a list form. It’s a lot more clear than the MySpace version, with click-able links to venue information and maps. But having a calendar would have been visually more involving. I created a calendar using Google Calendar that I could embed in her website, but didn’t get it working the way I wanted.
4. Besides being a talented writer and performer Neva is very easy on the eyes and WordPress template(s) I’ve been using have become more and more visual. Color, image, feeling, I prefer this version of a promotional website to what she previously had on MySpace and Facebook.

So, this is still version one. Supporting community/fan communication is essential and this model only allows for comments to individual posts. The other thing is that i don’t know how much or if Neva is going to want to do individual update (e.g., blog entries). Additionally, I’m considering an experiment using the SquareSpace online publishing/blogging platform because it takes the layout/visual webpage/website design up a whole level. It has the design sense of iWeb without the irritating template limitations.

Big Picture: Facilitating Community

As the technology/Internet coach, I see my part of this as the one to find a way for Neva to comfortably interact with her community using the these tools. She knows her audience. She knows the people she wants to work with, on the music end of things. My part is to help her get started using these tools to communicate her beautiful voice to an Internet audience. jbb

Sources:

Image: Neva in an Alley, http://www.myspace.com/nevamusic

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, Neva’s MySpace, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, JonathanCoulton.com, retrieved on 7/27/2009

YouTube Video: When You Go by Jonathan Coulton, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPBsSlYYezc&feature=player_embedded, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, theGeoffSmith.com, retrieved on 7/27/2009

YouTube: I’m a Twit by Geoff Smith, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3biEam1_GgY&feature=player_embedded, retrieved on 7/27/2009

Image: screen-grab by Joe Bustillos, neva-music.com, retrieved on 7/28/2009

Image/slideshow: nevamusic @ Taco Beach by Joe Bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/sets/72157603250930056/, retrieved on 7/28/2009