Headed down to the Middle East tonight for the Telefon Tel Aviv show… The band was great, but one of their openers, T. Raumschmiere, blew my mind… It was great… I might go see Wire tomorrow night as well…
I decided to rent a car for my trip home for my mom’s birthday this weekend.. It’s expensive, but it will be more flexible…
has asked me to try and collate my thoughts on weblogs and why I don’t find them exciting or important.. I guess he values my opinion, or likes to hear me wank on like my opinion is important. Regardless, who am I to pass up an opportunity to pretend I am a pundit.
For those that are interested, here are some of my opinions on the whole weblog phenomenon. I have entitled this “Part One” as I am uncertain if I will revisit this topic in the future; yet I am certain that this will not represent the entirety of my views on the topic.
I joined LJ real early, I am user #6045, and my motivations were simple: A friend, Kate, out ``there’’ (in the bay area) had created one earlier that week and I wanted to comment in her journal. Then I made the decision to replace my written journal with this online one as an experiment. I was in college and it was a way that my folks and friends back in NJ could keep up with what was going on.. This was back in the day when I was working with , , and , and the day I started mine I showed it to jerry who signed up soon afterwards.. Soon after many of my friends at CSH and elsewhere started using LJ to simply comment in others’ journals or to start their own. Some of the used it as real journals, others used it for more weblog type purposes (posting links, etc), and most fell somewhere in between. But to me the important thing was the connection I was able to keep with my friends (both RL and not).
Now I started this journal over two years ago now, and at some point between then and now this whole weblog thing started gaining momentum.. Everyone talked about it as some sea-change; “putting journalism back in the hands of the people” or similar phrases were often used to describe the phenom. It seems to me that the term weblog breaks down into 3 different (non-exclusive) categories:
Each weblog out there blends these 3 styles together in some manner, and I have probably missed some other styles. Anyway, I started seeing more and more hype surrounding the phenom, and began thinking about it. And here I am, one year later, still uncertain of why people are so excited. My confusion and dismissal are really founded on two major gripes, one foundation gripe and the other an implementation gripe. LiveJournal addreses both my gripes with the larger weblog set.
My problem with the foundation of weblogs is that I simply don’t understand what makes them different from any other media. When I began using the Internet back in 1992, I found so many documents, reports, and opinions about how the Internet was turning the tables on media creation and publishing. All of these opinions were that the Internet was going to let the common people take control of the airwaves, per se. And as the web grew into a pop-culture phenomenon this was proven to be insightful and completely wrong at the same time. Because while it is true that more people were given the power to publish work, the media congolmerates also obtained that power, and used their already extensive influence to replace the noise of the common with the signal of the few.
I have no doubt that while it is obviously possible for a weblogger to become an important information distribution source, they will continue to hit the same roadblock that has plagued the Internet since it’s popularity has risen: Seperating the wheat from the chaff. As more people start weblogging it will become harder to identify weblogs, articles, people, etc. which are worth reading. Weblogs are in their infancy today, yet even a tool like Google (who’s index algorithm heavily favors weblogs) has seriously difficulty narrowing the scope for you at all. What is going to happen is that there will be aggregation services, which will syndicate stories from weblogs around the web to make it easier for the common person to find. Sound familiar? Good, because this is exactly what we have today: Whether you are talking online or off, every form of news media is simply an aggregator of stories. While some new renowned journalists might rise out of the noise, it is still going to be a handful of people. While the stories that these aggregators syndicate may change, the song remains the same.
I just don’t see how this is different from what we have had for years. I have thought about this real hard and I have listened to the arguments of others, and I still fail to see this simple thing. While I don’t argue that this simple evolution doesn’t expand the scope of journalism a bit, I don’t see the big deal.
My implementation argument has to do with the implementation of almost every weblog I have seen to date. What attracted me to LiveJournal was the little link under each one of my posts: “Post a Comment”. These three words attracted me to LJ and are what has kept me going with my journal this whole time.. I wouldn’t have written a lengthy review of the SliMP3 or iPod had it not been for the discussion forums, as I would have had no idea if any one was reading my words. I am not talking about hits, I am talking about feedback… LiveJournal provides such a rich, threaded, discussion forum, and my journal addiction comes from hearing peoples reaction to what I write (as well as my reacting to others). LJ also notifies me when someone responds to me, allowing me to continue discussion while it is topical (as opposed to when I remember to check the forum).
All of the weblog packages I have looked at have had piss-poor discussion systems. To me, if there was to be one thing interesting about weblogs, it would be the tighter binding between the journalist and their readers, yet “blogs” seem to toss this by the wayside. Services like Blogger and MovableType focus too much on the publication of stories/entries, and not enough on the interaction between writer and reader. And this is why they fail to interest me. The one thing I would have given this steamroller of a phenomenon and it is cast away like a stepchild.
Take one of the threads in ’s new MoveableType based weblog as an example. MT’s token effort towards supporting non-threaded commenting obviously falls short once some serious discussion starts taking place.. Imagine trying to wade through 30 comments, and keeping track of who is replying to who and what discussions you are interested in becomes a nightmare.
So those are some of my thoughts regarding weblogging. And who knows, perhaps I am just a curmudgeon. It wouldn’t be the first time I completely missed the technology mark
I named my iPod “Abe Froman”.
I haven’t ran an rc5 client in a long time, but it is interesting that they have exhausted over 85% of the keyspace without hitting paydirt.. I would be really amused if they somehow made an error in their search algorithm and missed the solution.. But assuming the search is going well, it surprised me how long it has taken to brute-force a 64 bit key… The project has been searching for almost 5 years…
Today we are all headed over to Boston Billiards for my major award… We get to get out of work a little early and get free food (served by typically hot waitresses). Can’t complain about that.. :)
Afterwards engineering is reconvening at my house for some Super Monkey Ball 2 play… Should be fun..
I picked up Moonbase Commander today, which is a fun, cheap little game that more people should try…
The Commodore Elvis
I can already feel the 9-11 cheese eating away at my soul…
I got my iPod today, and figured I would give it a bit of a write up for those of you who may be interested. While I am not as “beamingly excited” about this device as I was about the SliMP3, but it is a damn fine piece of kit.
I got it around 2pm at work today, and hit a wall in the test case I was working on, so I decided to drop it and open everything up… First thing I did was find the charger and plug the thing in. I was amused that printed on the static plastic scratchguard covering the LCD were the words “Don’t Steal Music” in 4 languages… The charger is quite nice, it has a firewire port on it which only has the power pins connected, and the actual 2-prong outlet connector is removable, so you could presumably replace it with a foreign module… But that’s probably something I will never use..
While it was charging I decided to install the firewire card I bought for my home machine in my work machine so I could play… :) This was the most painless installation I have ever had, just popped the card in and XP knew what to do… It didn’t even prompt me for drivers… I wish computers could always be like this.. Anyway, once the card was installed I disconnected the iPod from the charger and hooked it up to the card (since it will charge off the firewire port).
The unit comes with MusicMatch Jukebox but I decided early on that I had no interest in this software… I decided to use the free EphPod project instead since it seemed to be more what I was looking for (a simple way to copy music to the iPod). After a lengthy download (not large, just slow) I installed it and fired it up… It did some initialization of the iPod and it was ready to go… I picked a few folders of MP3’s and copied them over in no time flat. Firewire is the way to go when dealing with this kind of data, my Archos Jukebox had USB1 which made transferring music to it very painful. By the end of the day I had filled up the unit and never really noticed the copying time.. The largest chunk of data I copied was 6GB and it took less than 30 minutes (I have no idea how long it took).
EphPod seems like good software, but it is a bit shaky still… I had it give me a few application errors (which it seemed to recover from) now and again but it did the job. It was supposed to let me use my Audible audiobooks but that didn’t work… The people on the mailing list says that better Audible support is to come, so I will be waiting for that big time… I was disappointed that it didn’t work right away though… (The official iPod software only supports Audible on OSX… I think our Mac dev box at work has 10.1 on it, so I might use that instead to copy over the audiobooks)
The ui of the unit itself is nearly flawless… The rotary touchpanel is something you simply have to play with to fully understand… The difference between the iPod and the Archos is night and day.. The Archos made a good MP3 player, but the iPod is clearly an evolution beyond… It is more than easy to use, it is blindly intuitive… There are a few things I miss from the Archos though… Queue mode, where you can select what the next song after the current one is on the fly, seems to be missing… I would have thought I would have been able to build a playlist on the fly with something as nice as the iPod, but if you can I can’t figure it out.. There also needs to be a quick one-button way to get back to the “now playing” screen once you leave it. But those are all minor quibbles, and they will hopefully be addressed in future firmware updates (or someong giving me a clue).
The sound quality of the iPod is certainly better than the Archos (not that the Archos is particularly bad). The iPod gets louder, if you have a loud MP3 it is simply uncomfortable at full volume. The range is good because some MP3’s were simply too quiet on the Archos. The equalizer is much better on the iPod, even if it is just a bunch of presets (Rock, Jazz, etc.). While the Archos had a “freeform” EQ, it was a simple Bass/Treble one, and the upper ranges of either just overdrove the DAC, making things sound like shit.
That’s all I can think of right now, but feel free to ask questions… The unit is certainly the Rolls Royce of MP3 players, but it is worth the money in this reviewer’s opinion…
I think Oysterhead would be a better band if they fired that god-awful lead guitarist… It is like 2/3rds a good band… Stuart is an amazing drummer, and Les is an amazing bassist, but that Trey douchebag is just way too wanky…
That is all