brian tong and molly wood - image by CNET

Anchored by two very smart and funny tech-observers, Molly Wood and Brian Tong, the once daily podcast seems to have fallen victim to the talk-show radio syndrome where news stories have become launching points for venom and hyperbole. Back when Tom Merritt was part of the crew the balance between news reporting, analysis and rants was well managed, entertaining and worth listening to/watching. The revolving third seat, since Merritt’s departure, has been manned by good people, but all seem to be either too quick to go into rant mode or no one can be found who is strong enough a personality to maintain the news/analysis/rant balance. I’m sure that there are probably constructive reasons for the change, but the reduction of the podcast from daily to weekly isn’t a good sign. And for me, with the rant-a-thon, I can hardly make it through even the weekly sessions.

Case in point, news item: Apple’s Siri voice-service is under scrutiny over it’s apparent aversion to giving info when asked for assistance looking for birth-control. Siri doesn’t seem to have any problem giving assistance when asked for where one can score pot or how to dispose of a body. The latter example, obviously meant to be humorous while the former… well, have you read the Steve Jobs biography? Molly Wood goes into rant mode about Apple’s obvious nanny-mode control issues. Apple had previously responded that it wasn’t a political statement and that, after all, the service is still in Beta. One of Wood’s co-hosts offered that it could have also been a CYA thing, with Apple not wanting to be sued in the future when someone under-age uses Siri to get info and then gets an abortion. Wood wouldn’t have it and called Apple “Beta” explanation bull[shit], and continued the rant. I shut off the podcast and deleted the episode.

What it comes down to is that there’s no one there to pull back on the rants and maintain even the illusion of journalistic balance. It was a little understandable when they were under the pressure of doing a daily tech-news show that they would riff on the headlines and not spend too much time to dig deeper into the stories. And given the ongoing nature of most of the stories and the incomplete record of the events, one does need the analysis. Problem was and is, especially when dealing with anything Apple or Steve Jobs, Wood and Brian Tong always assumed the worst, most controlling, evil motives. To their credit they’ve earned their skepticism over Apple’s motives. Wood has seen how Apple marketing has been savage in their pandering and mistreatment of the press and Tong worked for Apple in the early years of the Apple Stores (which I guess qualifies one for … wounds). Alas, having been poorly treated by individuals or organizations… well, if one is going to be a journalist one needs to rise above it. Where’s the objectivity when one automatically goes for the “evil” reason. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t be skeptical and just buy the marketing fluff, but there is a middle ground that C/NET and Buzz Out Loud seem to have lost a long time ago.

Sources:

• Buzz Out Loud 1568: That’s just the Google Maps guy, ignore him. http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-57334959-10/buzz-out-loud-1568-thats-just-the-google-maps-guy-ignore-him-podcast/ retrieved 12-30-2011.
• Petition To Correct Siri’s Apparent Anti-Abortion Bias Collects Nearly 30,000 Signatures by Laura Bassett/Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/siri-abortion-petition_n_1124281.html retrieved 12/30/2011.

With the demise of one of my two discontinued Griffin Evolve wireless speakers I’m left to again ponder how I want to share my media in my house. Be prepared for lots of first-world technology nonsense in the following paragraphs. I’m sure that most people solve their need for moving their media around their house by picking up their ipods/iphones and jamming their earbuds in their ears. It’s a pretty good solution.

My pre-evolve-demise set up was to have one main media server (mac mini) in my upstairs office with music, DVDs, stored movies and podcasts. My main source for news and entertainment has been the podcasts that I subscribe to. So when I wanted to listen to podcasts in the upstairs bathrooms or anywhere in the house I would pick up one evolve wireless speaker and carry it with me to the room (most podcasts are monophonic so i only needed either of the two speakers). In the downstairs living room I was using my PS3 to watch DVDs, Blurays, media streaming from the upstairs server and some Internet streaming. In the bedroom I have an iHome clock/radio where I dock my iPhone to play podcasts and I read ebooks or watch video podcasts on my iPad. There’s no TV in the bedroom.

Like I said it was a pretty functional set-up but there was plenty of room for improvement and the loss of the evolve wireless speakers encouraged me to look into some kind of upgrade. Let’s start downstairs. After the last system update of my PS3, it won’t display the video stream from TWiT.tv and never was very good streaming any Internet video. And any sort of hick-up between the upstairs server and the PS3 and I couldn’t view/listen to my podcast subscriptions. So, the PS3 has been good for watching Blurays but pretty much a C- when it came to anything else. The other thing about the living room set up is that my couch is a little over 16-feet from my TV so even at 42-inches the TV seems too small and too far away. So, I’d like to upgrade the TV to 60-inches and am marginally hopeful that some of these Internet-ready ones will “solve” the problem of not being able to access either my media or podcasts stored on my media server. But after looking at the Vizio “internet widgets,” these “internet-ready” TVs feel a lot like the PS3′s kind-a works set-up. I could just get another mac mini, but I’d rather not throw down $800 on a box until I see whether the much cheaper long promised Boxee Box does the job for $500 less. And then there’s Google TV appearing on Sony TVs in the undetermined future. Ack. I think I’m holding off on anything TV until November/holiday/SuperBowl time frame.

Then there’s the problem of not only having a TV screen too far away, but having my speakers 16-feet away also. Probably compensating for not having a giant wall size display I’d love to crank up the volume but I’ve already had the dreaded wall-knocking from my townhouse neighbors when the volume was nowhere near “11″ so that’s not going to work. Add to that I’ve had the same receiver/amp so long that the VCR that made the 5.1 really cool died over five years ago. It’s a dinosaur and with the little satellite speakers 16-feet there’s almost nothing immersive about my home-theater experience.

I’d like to have something with an A/B switch so that if I’m working from my dining room table over 19-feet away across the room I could switch on bookshelf speakers right next to me and not have to blast the whole room (and adjoining rooms). I might also just move the main speakers half-way across the room so they’re closer to the couch. I used to have these giant 4-foot speakers that I left in CA that would do nicely in the living room. Damn. Then there’d be wires running all around the room. I hate wires. Further study is required.

I have the mac mini media server connected to a TV in the upstairs office but I’m not happy with only having the TV speakers for music and movies. I’d also like to get a bluray player so that I can watch my newer discs upstairs and not just downstairs. There are a few home-theater-in-a-box solutions, but it does seem weird to possibly have a better sound system in the office than what I have in the living room. I really wish that I could just add an inexpensive bluray drive to my mac mini. Grrh.

As far as getting my podcasts in the bathrooms and other bedroom, I’ve looked at the Sonos systems and it does seem like overkill, even for me. I mean, I could just buy an inexpensive dock-with-speakers and use my iPhone in the bathrooms. Crap, after re-reviewing the Sonos site I’m hard pressed to find another solution that’s quite elegant. Here I thought I at least had one easy solution. Problem is that half the time I’m watching video podcasts and the Sonos is audio only. Damn.

My previous look into my media setup: http://joebustillos.com/2010/01/23/moving-media-around-the-house/

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

Of course I need to get the paperwork through the over-loaded CA teacher-pension system before spending said moneys. Ack. Fingers tapping.

According to Coulton, Kutiman is an Israel musician who takes bits and pieces of unrelated musical instruction and amateur performance videos from YouTube and creates something really amazing. Here’s Kutiman explaining how he does it, followed by one of my favorites from his collection:

One of my favorites – Wait for Me:

Coulton concludes, “So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?” I agree, copyright is so broken and it’s up to us, those who create and those who enjoy these creative works, to leave the old models and make a new future where the Creatives are compensated and all of us can freely enjoy the works of their labor.

UPDATE:

So, since posting this blog entry, Kutiman pulled his videos from YouTube. Damn. The videos are still available at his site:

Go there and enjoy. jbb

One thing I was really looking forward to when I moved here was setting up my Mac Mini in my living room as a Media Center connected to a big ass* HD LCD/TV. Because of the limited HD space on the Mac Mini I have a horde of external USB hard disks lashed to it where the music, podcasts and movies are stored. It didn’t take me too long to realize that the heat of a typical Florida afternoon…

*NOTE: “big ass” for me means 42″… I don’t really make enough dough to justify a 60″ plasma rig.

… was forcing the army of external hard drives to spin up their little internal fans like no ones business, especially the noisy fan on the big black Drobo which houses 4 burning hard drives. Then I got that month’s electricity bill. Yeah, I love the lovely blue glow of all of those LEDs on the front of the external HDs as much as the next geek, but it seems that I can extend their lifespan and maybe afford a few more LED-laden-devices if I just turn the damn things off when I’m not there. Problem is that I like having my podcasts ready to view or listen to when I get home after work and that requires that I leave the Mac Mini on. Hmmm.

So, the first thing that I thought was to beef up the Mac Mini’s HD** and then be able to turn off everything except the Mac Mini, Time Capsule router and cable modem. Cool. Then the printer started acting all flaky and started getting all kinds of hiss and noisy from the speakers when playing anything from the Mac Mini through the stereo. Argh. That got me thinking that maybe I need to move all of the gear further away from the TV and stereo, making me thing contemplate moving the router, modem, printer and NAS hard disk to the bedroom work area. Then it got bad enough that I started thinking that I should replace the whole Mac Mini media center thing with a Playstation3. I mean, when it comes time to upgrade my video playing from DVD to Blu-ray a Playstation3 is still the best player/media center. Then when I looked into it further the Playstation 3 as media center was usually dependent on being connected to some media server where all the media would be stored (like my mac mini…). So what would be the point?

So, it’s clear to me that I need to climb behind the “entertainment unit” and straighten out all of the cabling that’s contributing to the noisiness and eliminate as many unneeded devices as possible. I also looked up how difficult it might be to upgrade the HD in the mac book pro to something like 320GBs so that I could untether it from the external HD where I have all of my music. We’ll see. Of course all of this is going to have to wait until I have a chunk of time to be crawling into the guts of things and disassembling things. Ack. And don’t even ask me about the cool Harmony universal remote that keeps turning on the wrong setting on the stereo when I go to listen to my podcasts. Sigh… jbb

Music: “De-Evolving” by Jonathan Coulton on the “Smoking Monkey” CD

**NOTE: 320GB 7200rpm drives from OWC for less than $200

Music/Podcast: WebbAlert – June 30, 2008 from the album “WebbAlert” by MorganWebb

p.s., my new friendfeed handle is jbb

Technorati Tags: blogs, community, friends, internet, podcasts, twitter, video, videopodcast

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, musicvideo, podcasts, twit, video, youtube

Several weeks before, after one of his weekend radio shows Laporte was speaking to his assistant and his chat-room audience and he criticized Revision3 for not going far enough in their shows and for just duplicating the TV-esque formula that they had all worked on when they all worked together at Tech-TV.

Check out my next article when I’ll share more on why Laporte thinks Revision3 is blowing it and his plan to be the Internet (TWIT) King. jbb

Music: Divine Intervention from the album “Girlfriend” by Matthew Sweet

Click here for more on Geoff Smith, also check out his other videos at http://youtube.com/user/ringtonefeeder

Technorati Tags: Internet, leolaporte, media, podcasts, twit, video, videopodcast, youtube

Music/Podcast: MacBreak Weekly 88: Drobotized from the album “MacBreak Weekly” by Leo Laporte, Scott Bourne, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, and Alex Lindsay

Technorati Tags: apple, applehardware, hardware, leolaporte, macworld, media, podcasts, youtube

Leo Laporte is creating an around-the-clock video studio and I’m all jazzed about the new blog theme, called Revolution by Brian Gardiner. One of the things that I started to think about as I was working with the theme was that because of the theme’s “magazine” type layout, I am thinking of moving all my blogs to the one. Yeah, I’m dreaming big. Funny thing is, after writing all about ads on the blog, I seem to have lost all of them on the main page. But I have to remember that no matter how pretty i make the site or how much time I spend on it, none of this matters if no one reads it. So, while Greg is sometimes jealous of my site’s designs, I need to be much more like him and spend time developing relationships with other bloggers and be much more net-social. Amen. jbb

Click here to view more details on Revolution WP themes

Technorati Tags: blogs, friends, leolaporte, podcasts, techtoys, videopodcast

To that end, I just saw this video on Cali Lewis‘ Geek Brief podcasts and she said that when she showed it to some family members they suddenly understood it and started to Twitter. If only …. The following is from the folks at the CommonCraft show at www.commoncraft.com.

BTW, I’m jbb on twitter and you can catch my little 140 character witticisms at http://twitter.com/jbb

Music: If It Makes You Happy (Featuring Chrissie Hynde) from the album “Live From Central Park” by Sheryl Crow

Technorati Tags: calilewis, family, kids, media, podcasts, twit, twitter, videopodcast, work

I loved the part with the homeless guy leaning on a computer with the sign, “Will work for computer parts.” I pray that’s not a future vision of moi. Yikes. jbb

Fortunately not long after Tech-TV’s demise, my pepperdine pals introduced me to Podcasts and I’ve been addicted to this tech resource ever since. There’s rumblings that podcasting, being the latest technology fad, has reached it’s peak. Who knows. I just know that the convenience of getting daily or weekly tech updates delivered to my computer and iPod makes it possible for me to stay informed why driving to and from work and not having to be planted in front of my TV to benefit from this resource. Nothing related to technology or Internet distribution tends to have much longevity, but for now Podcasts are a valuable resource to me.

The list of podcasts I’m subscribed to continues to evolve. I’m curious how you get your tech information and which podcasts you may regularly listen to. Please share what podcasts you listen to…

Following is a list of podcasts I’m currently subscribed to (Note these links are the rss URLs):
* Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code
* Bluer (Minneapolis Vineyard Christian Fellowship)
* Diggnation (video podcast subscribed to via iTunes)
* Inside Mac Radio
* iPodlounge
* IT Conversations
* Leo Laporte KFI Weekend shows
* NetMusic Countdown
* One Big Head (Ed/Tech podcast)
* Security Now (Steve Gibson/Leo Laporte’s podcast)
* Teach42
* The Chris Pirillo Show
* The Evil Genius Chronicles
* The Laporte Report (do you see a trend here?)
* The Living Word
* The Wizards of Technology
* TWIT
* WGBH Morning Stories
* Your Mac Life/Trash Talk
* Thru the Bible Radio (also subscribed through iTunes)
* Your Mac Life (only available as an online stream, with a live-video cast Wednesday evenings 5:30 PST)