Matthew Good made a guest contribution to the Tyee today and mentioned Rebecca as being one of his top five, favorite blogs that he reads. As cool as that is, I also got mentioned and linked in the post, riding on the coattails that is Miss604. Of course, I say that sarcastically, but if you read both of our respective blogs, I’m just as much of a fan of hers as you are. 😉
Very cool stuff and many thanks to Mr. Good for the link love.
Awhile back, I made a post about how I couldn’t believe that students at a small college in the U.K. protested against a rock show by the band Clinic so they could focus on their studies instead. You can read my post and get more background information here.
The beauty of the internet is that someone who was actually there found my post and left a comment on it, four months after the whole ordeal. Additionally, “Sue” was one of those students who opposed the show and gave her account of what happened and why. I find this incredibly fascinating that I’m posting her comment here to make an update to my previous post in this topic.
This is such an old story if feels odd posting a comment, but I only came across all the internet ranting on the issue today. I was one of the students that protested about the gig, to be honest we were told it had moved venue and thought nothing more of the matter. However now I feel that I should set the record straight(although probably no-one will even read this).
The gig that was to “last a couple of hours” demanded that we destroy our sculptures in order to move out of the performance space; our studios. We were given one weeks notice. A couple of weeks after the scheduled gig we had a very important assessment that lead directly into our degree show. After three years of studying our result is determined by the degree show. This assesment was CRUCIAL. However we were told to remove everything from the studio(which demanded destroying many of the works). We would have less than 1 week to build new work before our 3 year degree began to be assessed on the basis on what was being presented.
Also in response to the endless record company lies, It wasn’t the first gig to be played there since the sex pistol. A year prior to the clinic scheduled gig a big promotional gig with the paddingtons had happened to mark the 30th anniversary of the sex pistol’s first gig. Central Saint Martins has used this fact to establish itself as a venue to whore band, making false connection with rock’s history, to create artifical connections between the music industry and art students, when infact its just the old money making men pushing promotional bullshit. It was a disguting act of record label PR/branding. Yuk!!!
And finally, not to be rude but St Martins is not a “small” school, it is internationally reknowned for its on going contribution to our creative environment. Its just a shame that the reality of this reputation (you see really the sex pistols played for 5 minutes before college heads unplugged them and chucked them out)is perpetuated by vulgar marketing, where the dean ignores his students in order to contrive PR stunts with money hungry record companies.
Thanks for the clarification, and I certainly stand corrected on the details. I am very much against having anything destroyed when it comes to art, so you officially have my support, Sue. This shows a real beauty in the reach that blogging has, and your comment certainly reached me.
I’ve heard this term being tossed around in light of the Kathy Sierra situation. For those not in the know, trackback to what Scoble wrote about taking the week off because of the personal attacks towards his wife and the effects of threats on Sierra has had on him. That saves me time explaining it, but the basic lowdown is that bloggers are finding themselves in the line of fire. Thus, a “blogging code of conduct” has been mentioned to help the situation.
To me, this already exist, but on a very unspoken level. There are some things that you do and don’t do if you want your online presence to be respectable. For some, having that level of respect is the last thing they want, and this is not about respect in terms of popularity. It’s about not being an ass, plain and simple.
Death threats, defamation, slander, and everything else negative that is going on in relation to the already mentioned situation is simple human behavior. It’s an elementary school playground.
Continue reading “Blogging code of conduct”
Running into David Drucker at the Massive Tech Show on Wednesday, he clued me into the March Vancouver Blogger Meetup that was taking place that night. I gathered Rebecca kind of last minute and we made our way out to The Whip for our first venture with this group, but this isn’t the first time that we’ve heard of these meetups. It was about time that we crashed the party though.
There were a number of familiar faces, and this will completely sound like a Wizard of Oz moment. There was David and MJ, who we met at our first meetup ever in Vancouver, but that was for podcasting. And Pete was there, Tanya from NetChick.ca, Nancy, Jonathon, and Jan was there, too!
It’s always fun to bridge that gap between people you know through their postings, and this meetup allowed me to do that a little bit more. Rebecca has a nice follow-up on this, and Jan did the same in as well as posting a review of The Whip itself. I’ll echo his thoughts and say that it was a pretty swanky place, being my first time there. I hear it has changed, and they might see me there again if I’m ever in the area. Yam fries are tasty, and the beer selection is… Well, it’s good, but I just hadn’t heard of nearly all the things they had on tap. Don’t think anyone complained though.
All in all, a really good time with lots of great conversation. I think it’s natural when people of the like mind get together like that, it’s hard to not talk, especially at great lengths, about the things you are passionate about. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be there, right? It’s those reasons that encourages me to go to meetups like this.
Instead of tacking on an update to my original posts here and here about Bum Rush The Charts, I thought I would throw a few more thoughts into the aftermath that was. After all, I helped promote this event/movement, and you probably assume thoughts that I have on it. Yes, I liked the concept, but the discussion in the spheres of blogging and podcasting urges me to think out loud a little bit more.
GZExpat is a long time, non-supporter of all things iTunes, and The Reverend Don Deeley has presented me with numerous theories of everything that is wrong with DRM[wiki], which is what every single thing you can buy from the iTunes Music Store is laced with. It’s that thing that prevents you from duplicating, copying, or moving the file in which you purchased within certain parameters.
Some people are unaffected by this, but that’s like saying you can drive the car that you bought here and here, but you can’t drive it here, park it there, or you have to give up your car after you drove it for six months. So let me be in agreement, I am all for opening up DRM across the board, just like what Steve Jobs proposed in his little white paper that he lofted at the music industry nearly two months ago.
In a slight manner of speaking, that is what BRTC was about, except it goes a little further than this. The ultimate goal was to push an independent artist to the top of the iTunes charts. It fell short, but the results still showed an effect. Will major music executives care? Probably not, but it shows that independent media can push independent music in a user driven capacity.
Don’t think for a minute that Billboard Music Charts[wiki] work this way. The only reason someone sits on top of that chart is because of the millions of dollars that is spent on marketing that artist. It’s a funneling of big music pushing their focused, narrowed down product to big radio networks who only play a certain amount of artists in their regular rotation on the hot hits stations. It’s what they want to sell and make the maximum amount of profit, not necessarily what you should or want to hear. And if you find that hard to believe, remember when ska was hot? Don’t hear that much on the radio these days because some marketing trend guru says the most amount of profit potential lies in some other genre.
Dave Slusher made a post as to why he was abstaining from BRTC, and I completely respect the idea he presented. However, the aspect of getting respect from traditional or mainstream media is not the reason I bought into this. If anything, I saw this as a really great experiment of what is possible through the combination of blogging, podcasting, and combining that with independent music.
In the end, it proved that it has the potential of being very effective. You can argue all you want about the over all method, but science works the same way. You run an experiment, test the results, and then look another way to test the hypothesis in order to validate your data. That’s not to say that this will happen again anytime soon, but no one can say with complete sincerity that this trial produced some results that are worth raising an eyebrow at.
Isn’t this always the case? I remember those early days of the Interweb when it was a rush to be the first, and I’m not talking about making geeky websites and whatnot. No, it’s way more stupid than that, and you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Those various sites with message boards where someone has to be the first person to post a reply for the soul purpose of being the first one to do it. It said very little and pertained just as much to the initial topic of the post. It would just say, “First!” That’s it. One word, and it’s a mind numbing mentality that still goes on today.
This is what I think about when I read this:
Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It’s just not quite clear who.
It may not be one of the Internet’s grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”? [cnet]
Bragging rights, to me, means who really cares? Even if you were the first, then good for you. That doesn’t change a whole lot for me.
Benefits of being able to declare bragging rights? Wikipedia will smote those who attempt to pull your name off their pages, your name will go into traditional history books, and I’ll give you a cookie.
I’ve been resisting the MyBlogLog for some time. Rebecca is more about these social networking things than me sometimes, but this is a situation where is makes more sense when it comes to the world of new media and social media. In other words, she was right.
MyBlogLog enables you to take advantage of your existing presence on the Web and ties it into communities of like-minded readers and authors to add context to the conversations in which you take part. [mybloglog]
So there it sits on my sidebar for now. I’m not a huge fan of people seeing that I’ve been snooping around their site, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t log out and clear the cookies from your browser. The added benefits of networking with other bloggers, however, is a very nice element of their service.
Mmmm… this kool-aid tastes great!
After some careful planning and budgeting, Rebecca and I have both signed ourselves up for NorthernVoice 2007. It should be a whirlwind of a weekend since the following Sunday is our one year anniversary. If that seems to be a geeky way to spend the first part of the weekend after being married for a year, then you’re probably right, and we like it that way.
Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging conference that’s being held at the UBC main campus on February 23-24, 2007.This is the 3rd annual incarnation of this event, see the 2006 and 2005 websites for previous information.
Blogging, podcasting, social media, new media, web 2.0, and so on. Yes, there will be lots of ideas about all those things being tossed around, not to mention plenty of laptops on laps action.
We had a snafu in our planning, not realizing that Friday held quite the goings-on with the whole Moose Camp deal. In our heads, we thought that was taking place in the evening on Friday, so we opted to have Rebecca take the following Monday off in anticipation of our celebratory weekend. Looks like I’ll be checking things out for that Friday on my own, but she’ll make her way down for any activities later on that night. We’ll both be sneaking around on Saturday.
Looking forward to meeting more new people in the sphere of all things new media, plus catch a few neat sessions(view the schedule). Even Dave is leading a session on podcasting, so I’ve got to go heckle him check that out.
I’ll probably check in here during the event, and the recording gear always travels with me. It’s just a matter of not getting too into soaking up information to remember to grab some audio cuts. Have to see how things go. For me this is really good timing because the wonderful (I’m throwing that in there in case anyone at CIC is watching) Canadian government recently approved my PR application. I’ll be able to work in a matter of weeks now. 🙂
I don’t do this often, but the RSS feeds picked up this post today regarding a Channel 4 news introspective about the media coverage going on in Iraq. I found it rather interesting to watch, albeit nearly 50 minutes long. A lot of what it speaks about is nothing that I hadn’t already assumed, but they put it into much better words than I ever could.
If you have the time, check out Iraq: The Hidden Story. It really makes me wonder what the generations to come will say about this conflict, especially looking at the lifetime process I have given to understanding past conflicts. Even more so, there is mention of how bloggers are vital at getting information from inside the country that major news agencies have no way of gaining access to.
There’s a very interesting discussion going on right now in the realm of hockey blogging. I’m a bit of an outsider when it comes to the “mucking and grinding”, but it’s no secret that I’m a hockey fan.
What’s going on right now is a discussion about Eklund, the main guy behind HockeyBuzz.com. I don’t know enough about the guy to say much about him as a blogger, but to know him is to understand that “Eklund” is a pseudonym, he never posts under his real name, and you never see his face. Anonymity is his “thing”.
In the blogosphere, there is an unspoken system of checks and balances that fellow bloggers go to work on in order to verify the integrity of what one person claims through their posts. Now that Eklund is to partner with Sportsnet (a Canadian variation of what FoxSportsnet or ComcastSportsNet is to the U.S.) for the hoopla of the approaching trading deadline for the NHL, various folks are coming forward to address this issue of his method and content.
The discussion seems to be expanding, but you can read what Kukla, Alanah, J.J., Zanstorm, and Eric are saying about this. You can say what you want about blogging, but there is something to be said about journalistic integrity. To me, this is what all this discussion stems down to.
