Wired Minds

Kristin Windbigler

Big Doin's in Blocksburg

A lot of exciting things have happened since we last chatted. Over the weekend, Frew and my new fast friend Tim drove up to attend the Fortuna Rodeo with me. Besides baking in the grandstands, we ate an inordinate amount of meat, drank beer, and bullshitted with a bunch of smelly cowboys (yay!). Tim also brought his photography equipment and snapped some great portraits of my friends and neighbors.

In other news, the concrete trucks came streaming in yesterday and dumped more than 40 yards of the stuff within the forms Brandon, Josh, and Cliff built last week. Brandon tells me they’ll start in with the hammers and nails next week. So exciting!

Jeff Burchell

And the music (writers) never stopped?

(We know you've been waiting, and we promise, sometime soon, we'll tell you dear readers about the two weeks we spent driving all over the north island (and a few days on the north end of the south island) with Jen and Jim. Days were spent sampling wine in several regions, hiking nearly 18km across volcanoes, kayaking 15+km along shorelines, floating on innertubes through caves, jumping off of waterfalls, and enjoying all the things that New Zealand has to offer outside of Auckland. Denise has been updating the photos over on flickr, so you can see some of what we did.)

But this post is about two musical resources that you probably don't already know about. 

First is an absolutely awesome station out of Spindale, NC (near Asheville -- where I spent several summers): WNCW.  They've got a great-sounding 128kb/sec stream (which is rare for a station of their size, and speaks volumes about them). I put Local Color, their local music show, on underheard.org a few months ago, but have recently been spending more and more time listening to their live stream (especially in their overnight hours) -- usually with a smile on my face. If you're looking for an alternative to KCRW, that's a little more eclectic and somewhat less urban, check them out.

Second is that I recently discovered that Bob Lefsetz is posting The Lefsetz Letter as a blog now (actually, he has been for some time, it's just that I recently rediscovered him). Bob's been a music industry insider since before I purchased my first LP (for the record: Blondie's Autoamerican -- which easily dates me as being from the Atari half of Generation X), and he's been publishing The Letter for more than 20 years. We used to get a copy of it (on paper) at KZSC, but it's been nearly 15 years since I last read Bob's writing. It's still as good as I remember it (he pulls no punches, and he stays current; check out what he has to say about DRM and why the music industry doesn't get it.) But Bob... go back to the black T-shirt or fold your collar. You're old enough to remember how stupid that looked in the 80s, and you're only embarrassing yourself by repeating that fashion tragedy.

via http://innerslacker.com/p/b

Jeff Burchell

Why there is no toxic's law

Posted by toxic — Nov 23, 14:04 NZST

Bob Metcalfe has one that's been in the news again lately.  So does Mike Godwin.  Voidmstr's is one of my favorites.  There's an unattributed one about arguing on the internet that became an instant classic.  And Gordon Moore's has held true for longer than the ARPAnet has existed. The commercial Internet has been vital to my livelihood for nearly 15 years, and somehow, I've escaped the burden of having a law attributed to me.

This is a good thing. If there were a toxic's law, it would be about what happens when you use a small portion of someone's blatantly obvious statement to justify your own belief in your own hype, while summarily ignoring the context of their statement, the external facts that surround it, and the obvious dangers posed by believing your own hype.

And inevitably, it would get reflexively used out of context to help justify someone's hype.

But I digress...

Someone who will remain nameless is in the process of building yet another social networking service. It will allow you to stalk your friends' friends, post pictures of ceiling cat, and leave messages that say little more than "OMFG, U l00k sooooo hot in your pix. LOL! Can I b ur friend". It will neither make, nor save users any money. It may get some of them laid, and the visionary behind the product once told me that he'd like to see it read email (OMG! JWZ's Laws!).

This morning, he sent me a link to this article from the Economist, penned by Eric Schmidt (formerly of Sun, now of Google). Go ahead and read or skim it (it'll open in a new window). I'll wait.

OK, so now you know that it's telling you not to bet against the Internet, because there's lots of new technology that's yet to be developed, and virtually everything that is on the cutting edge today is disruptive to traditional business. VoIP is a serious threat to telecommunication monopolies, and lots of people have their targets set on the Cable TV industry. Why? Because the Internet is based on simple, open standards, and that fosters competition that forces products to improve faster and get cheaper, or get left behind when a competitor steps in and builds something better, taking your users. Attempting to control your consumers or create what used to be known as "Vendor Lock-In" will always backfire on you (are you listening, Apple?). The telephone and cable companies success is due to the inherent vendor lock in provided by their business models -- your choice of traditional cable and telephone companies are dictated by what zip code you live in.

So... what did this visionary of the next generation of social network take away from this article? The last two paragraphs. Go ahead and read them. The lesson is compelling: put simple, intuitive technology in the hands of users and they will create content and share it. The fastest-growing parts of the internet all involve direct human interaction.

Imagine that! The fastest growing portion on the world's global communications network is the portion that involves communication. And this is why the Internet needs another social networking site.

So.  What are we ignoring here:

1. Google's primary foray into allowing users to create content is Blogger.com (which is also blogspot). Depending on whose numbers you trust, between 10,000 and 70,000 new blogger pages get created every day. Unfortunately, most of these pages are what's known as a splog, or spam-blog. Give the users easy tools to create content, and people will use them to game the search engines, and try to sell you blue pills. Google, of course, is responsible for AdWords, the largest advertising network on the Internet. Many of these splogs are used to create and raise the ranks of ad farms. Ad Farms are useless to the Internet community, but they generate revenue for both the owner of the farm, and for the provider of the ads (usually -- you guessed it -- Google). Google has no financial incentive to keep the splogs off of Blogger (they make Google more money than your pictures of James Traficant's implausible toupee). If you've been on MySpace lately, you'll notice the same thing happening there. While it once was "a place for friends" or "a place where good friends and girls meet", it is now just "another place for spam". Do you really want to be Burger King's friend? 

This is the future of the Internet?

2. What's the current #1 generator of traffic on the Internet? This may be a surprise to some readers who insist that Alexa is a reliable measure of popularity, but it's BitTorrent. Numbers vary (Mary Meeker claims it to be as high as 60%, companies selling appliances designed to help ISPs throttle it are claiming closer to 30%), but virtually everyone who actually runs a network seems to agree that it's overtaken email as being responsible for the most bits flying around on the wires today.

(As an aside -- ISPs are purchasing infrastructure to throttle torrent traffic (while still marketing "unlimited" connections), but they can't seem to stop the russian botnets from drowning your email box in millions of stock market related spams?  WTF?)

OK. What is BitTorrent good for? Right... mass distribution of content. Taking one thing, and putting it into the hands of as many people as possible. This is something of the opposite of "Tools that allow average people to create and share content". It's really a tool that allows many people to consume the same slick media that is produced by someone else (usually, this content is made up of movies and TV shows, which are produced professionally (and which Hollywood fights tooth-and-nail to try to keep consumers from distributing)). Sure, there is legal content on BT, like Linux DVDs and freely distributable, but still professional, shows like PBS's NerdTV.  But that's the exception.

3. But what about YouTube?  Yeah... what about it?  For every person who watches an amateur vlogger, or the guy from the Monkey Chow Diaries, one thousand watch the professional actress who portrays lonelygirl15, and twenty thousand watch clips that CBS repurposes from The Late Show. YouTube's success is not about the ease of content creation (though to justify the rampant copyright violation going on there, YouTube has to claim that it is). It's about the ease and inexpense of content distribution. Most of the content that's distributed is still professionally produced. YouTube and JumpCut didn't equalize video creation any more than Podcasts obsoleted radio. it just made it easier for viewers to find stuff that they want to watch. But that's not what people are using YouTube's success to justify. There's a big difference here.

Smart investors aren't going to bet against the Internet, because it's still disruptive, and it's still evolving. Savvy BitTorrent users have already created their own video-on-demand services, despite the cable companies' many attempts to build such a beast. VoIP allows me to have a US phone number here, completely bypassing the truly awful Telecom monopoly in New Zealand (not to mention, I can call just about anywhere in the world for a few cents per minute). We're just starting to see forays into realtime IPTV, which might someday beat out your Cable company (even the NFL is hip to this, partnering with Yahoo to offer people outside of the US the ability to pay to watch the TV broadcasts of all the games via Internet).

Various pieces of hardware are appearing that connect streaming and stored media of all types to your existing home theater/stereo. I'm listening to WNYC on my stereo right now, from halfway around the world, and later (if I wanted to violate US law and receive it via BitTorrent) I could watch The Daily Show on my TV, even though it's not shown in this hemisphere. And that's a lot more compelling content than someone mumbling into a webcam or stoned talentless teenagers lip-syncing poorly to songs from Avenue Q (without paying royalties). It is the consumption of content that is driving the Internet, not the creation of it.

When we were in Venezuela, NPR simulcasts were our connection to the news of the world -- in stereo sound that's better than most of the overly compressed stuff on the FM broadcast spectrum today. This level of communication, even to underserved parts of the globe, was unthinkable just a few years ago. It's a hell of a lot easier to upgrade the software that distributes audio and video across fiber optic lines than it is to upgrade the television satellite once it's been in space for 10 years, or to fix your shortwave transmitter. The internet companies know this. The media companies are trying to pretend that it's false (and issuing lawsuits to people who prove them wrong). Knowing that better/faster/cheaper technology tends to win in the 21st century, it's no wonder that Google closed above $500 a share today.

But are smart investors still betting on Social Networks? Or is giving people the tools to create content for their friends just a way to become the next Geocities.

Only time will tell.

[Full Disclosure:  This year, I will be receiving a 1099 from both BitTorrent and the company building the new social network]

via http://innerslacker.com/

Kristin Windbigler

My Brush with Project Lameway

I’ve learned over the years to be leery when Frew asks for a favor, despite his innate ability to appeal to my sense of friendship and all its obligations. It’s not like he asks all that often, but when he does it is almost guaranteed that his “favor” will involve me embarrassing myself in some new and improved way. That’s why when he called last week to ask me to be his “model” for something called Project Lameway, I knew to ask for a little time to mull it over before I gave him my answer, which of course in the end was NO WAY! To lessen the blow, I offered to let him use my sewing machine. Then I heaped on the story about how I’d been emotionally scarred at age 11 during the Humboldt County 4-H Fashion Review when I was marked down for my slumpy shoulders and general lack of grace. No one told me I’d also entered a beauty contest. The year before I had won a medal for my snappy gabardine plaid slacks and accompanying belted terry cloth top (all the other 10-year-olds made Gunny Sax knock-offs with quilted jackets). I hadn’t sprouted boobs yet, though, so I guess no one expected me to carry myself in any particular way then. Everything changed once puberty set in. Neither my posture nor my ability to float like a lady was improved by having these problems with my appearance pointed out to me in a public forum by these well-meaning (or mean-spirited?) adults. In fact, for quite a while, things got much, much worse after that...OK, so I’m still a little bitter. Let’s move on…

Frew’s Project Lameway mission was to concoct an outfit from a paper sack filled with thrift store clothes and some other scraps. It was supposed to embody a made-up children’s book character (he figured I’d be the perfect Little Betsey Frankenstein). Relying on his own junior high sewing experience (denim apron), he got right to work hand stitching half of a red t-shirt to half of another red t-shirt, which turned out pretty cute (I even secretly kind of wanted it). He paired this with a white satin skirt over the top of a black velvet skirt. A white 1970s polyester blazer with one silky arm completed the look (Frew felt a little uneasy about a certain Michael Jackson quality brought on by the latter, but it was too late to turn back). Using my sewing machine, he threw in some random seams to make the thing ride cock-eyed and voila! Fashion happened. Sort of.

I had no idea that when I turned Frew down and joked he should ask Luke to be his model that Luke would actually agree to it. And boy, look how tough he looks in that skirt! He would have had those 4-H ladies quaking in their barn boots.

via http://www.mountaingirl.com/

Kristin Windbigler

They Call Me DJ Old-Timey

Just a few days after my last post I was able to get the PhonOcord to play those records, although for the most part pretty faintly. It is tempting to leave you thinking that this accomplishment might have involved some tools or arcane knowledge of vintage electronic components, but the truth is I figured it out while talking to my mom on my cellphone one night while coming home from San Francisco. It turns out that these are special records that play from the inside out! Problem solved!

Well, not really because they still need to be digitized. I decided that since there are so many of them, it would be unfair to burden Mattmarg with this task. So I ordered a USB turntable (you heard me right) that I thought was special because it would allow me to capture sound at 78 RPMs. I felt kind of dumb when I realized that you actually just digitize the sound at 33 or 45 RPMs and adjust the speed of the file with a pulldown menu in the accompanying software. Nevertheless, I’m extremely happy with it and excited about getting this project started. After a couple of test runs yesterday, though, it’s become apparent that I have a lot to learn about cleaning up audio files. Since a lot of the records are made from cardboard, they sound pretty dirty. I sure hope there is something that can be done for them.

Webmonkeys Continue To Rule

I've discovered that ex-Webmonkey producer and top-notch cliff diver Kristin made a movie. With music from Webmonkey Mattmarg! - Ed.

Boot Camp / 7:30
A portrait of storyteller, philosopher and bootmaker Jack Rowin by an admiring apprentice. By Kristin Windbigler.

• high speed connection (DSL. cable modem)
• dial-up