Archive for March, 2006
I haven’t written much about music here and I think I might in the coming future. What I really should be writing about is design and yet here I go with my music plug.
Bishop Allen (wikipedia) is a small band out of New York City that has decided to go without a record label and just do the work themselves. So far it seems to be working great as they have not starved to death after almost 3 years as a band. They only have one album out called Charm School but every song on it is amazing.
A lot of bands put out good albums though and there seems to be a difference between a band that puts out a good album and a band who can continue to produce good music. With only one album I was afraid Bishop Allen might not be up to the challenge.
This year though they are planning on releasing an EP every month of 2006. That about 4 songs for 12 months or 48 songs in a year. I was skeptical if they could hold up their quality in such a small time frame. 2 EPs and 8 songs in to the year and they have yet to hit a bad note. I’m actually amazed that they have kept up the quality of the songs they are putting out.
These songs are fully finished. They don’t feel like demos or rough stuff they are working on for an album. Each song is a gem that I listen to in wonder.
If Bishop Allen keeps up this quality they are quickly going to jump to my number 2 band of all time right behind Cake, another band that has stood the test of time.
Each EP is only 5 bucks and they have even offered up a several free songs on their site so you know what you getting. You need to buy these EPs.
January – Corazon.mp3
February – Vain.mp3
bishopallen, indie,indierock, indiepop, music, download
As hard as I might try I really can’t get in to Rocketboom. I can’t figure out why it’s as popular as it is. It’s not that I don’t like Amanda Congdon It’s just that I don’t find her sense of humor very endearing. Her enthusiasm seems fake and no matter what the news story is it always has some sort of cheese spin to it. I don’t wish bad things upon them, I just don’t get it.
On the other hand I love MoBuzzTV. Karina Stenquist has the perfect personality for the online world. Smart, sarcastic and just a little snarky everyday the news is delivered with just the right amount of dark humor. In general I can’t say enough great things about it besides I wish it was longer.
It makes me kind of annoyed that Rocketboom gets so much attention and yet MoBuzzTv seems so over looked. I can only hope they are doing well and will continue to produce shows for a lone time.
rocketboom, mobuzztv, vlog, AmandaCongdon, KarinaStenquist
The dream dies today as Arrested Development will stop pursuing a new network to air on. I’m not exactly sure how many Showtime subscriptions it takes to pay for a show but something tells me they would have made their money back if they had actually picked up the show.
ArrestedDevelopment, showtime
Joan of Arcadia was an awesome show that was plagued by a fatal flaw. That flaw is in fact what the entire show was based on though you might not even know it. On the surface the show was about Joan and how god talked to her. Yet if you watched Barbara Hall talk about the show on the DVD you quickly learned something slightly different.
Barbara explains that the show is about Joan, the metaphysical warrior, as well as her father the cop, as the physical warrior. Barbara really wanted to play the two side off each other and form a balance of the world of god that you can’t fully grasp and the world of being a cop.
This view of the show puts more focus on the contrast of Joan and her father then on the fact that Joan talks to God. This is not necessarily bad but this was not what any publicity or even the opening credits focused on.
When ever a show gets canceled there is usually a fairly clear reason why. Shows get pulled because they are not getting the viewership they wanted. Who was Joan of Arcadia target audience? 50% of the shows focus was Joan and her friends. The other 50% was a about the Father who was a cop and his trials at work.
This 50/50 split seems to have been the problem. If you liked the kids the best then you did not care about the parents and if you liked the parents you most likely did not want to watch a teen drama.
Barbara was so focused on the contrast between the two that she did not see the fact that she was spreading her audience too thin. Not to mention that advertisers like to know who they are advertising too. An audience that was 50% adults and 50% teens is not an effective way to market to either. At the end of the day if a show can’t bring home the bread it’s going to get canceled.
I might sound a bit hard on Barbara but that’s only because I love the show so much. While it was flawed on such a basic level it did everything else right. The writing was snappy and very emotional. While I did not enjoy the parent story lines they were still well written and I would have enjoyed them more as a separate show instead on woven in to the same show.
The amount of character development she managed to pack in to thirty minutes (With the other half taken by the parents) for about 8 different characters was amazing. Yet there was still so much that could have been done. Friedman was neglected and kept as a flat character until the second season where he only started to shine. Even Joan’s brothers were left fairly flat until later in the first season.
A couple years back in college I ripped Memento, a move sequenced in reverse, and re-sequenced it in chronological order. I keep talking about trying the same thing with Joan of Arcadia and cutting out most of the parent scenes. I’m sure it would be extremely rough but it would be closer to a show that would have actually grabbed their target audience and kept them for season after season.
joanofarcadia, cbs, dvd
I’ve written this email to enough people now that I really should just post it for every one else:
I say if you want an mp3 player to go head to head with the ipod the Creative Zen Micro is great.
One of the decisions that should go in to buying any mp3 player is how much music you’re actually going to want to put on it. With most mp3 coming in around 3mb and a cd coming in between 40 – 70 mbs you should be able to figure how much music you want to have with you at all times. the more music you are willing to swap on and off the device the smaller hard drive you can get.
The Creative Zen Micro has 5gb of space which is roughly 1666 songs or about 83 hours of music.
Cnet has a great list of best of the best mp3 players and also navigation to change what type of mp3 players you are looking at. The most important categories are:
Flash memory MP3 players | Hard drive MP3 players | Micro hard drive MP3 players
Flash memory is the hardest to break since it has no moving parts but has the smallest space. typical about 1gb.
hard drive and micro hard drive are easier to break (both the ipod and Creative Zen Micro micro hard drives) but have much larger storage. micro hard drives are smaller and have less storage then regular hard drives but stay about the same price as regular hard drives. regular hard drives have more space but can become annoying to carry around since they are so big.
mp3, mp3player, creative, ipod, cnet, review, guide
This week at Inside the Net Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte talked about SXSW. Amber actually made it down though I didn’t bump in to her at SXSW. What surprised me is that Amber was really surprised at how many designers were there.
Maybe it’s just me but SXSW has always been design first and technology second. Even when the panels are about standards the focus is design. Why Amer thinks this is just a Tech Web 2.0 conference baffles me.
Does any one agree with me? Designers own SXSW and though it’s fun to talk about business and technology the focus will always come back to design even if I have to get on stage and drag it there myself.
insidethenet, sxsw2006, sxsw, ambermacarthur, leolaporte
Just to stir up some trouble I thought I’d point out some of the more amusing points of SXSW.
Jason Santa Maria really has a love hate relationship with Stan. Holistic Web Design used some illustrations of stan as users point of view and you could almost see Jason cringe.
Sean Inman is a tiny tiny man. He’s extremely slight and most likely wears his facial hair proudly as to not be mistaken for a high schooler or perhaps a small child.
Jason Kottke is always hard to spot at conferences but that’s only because no one’s looking in the right places. If you are in a panel look to the far back corner to find the man who hides so well.
This year Jason offers other advice like “Never Get Married”. Something he should say as much as he can if he really wants his wedding to go well in the next 2 weeks. All I can say is if I donated to Kottke.org do I get a wedding invitation? I think so.
Eris Stassi must be web designs little secrete. Her occasional posts on her blog were very reflective and deep though very far between. Clearly she has a lot of clout as she really directed the Holistic Web Design panel in there decisions and really seemed to be a diving force in how amazing the redesign of Plazes seemed to be. Not to mention that she is truly beautiful.
I’m surprised that with so few big named women in web design Eris does not get more attention. Perhaps it’s good that the web design bolgosphere only cares about content and could care less if your pretty or not. Though it seems most big named designers are not ugly at all. I mean look how pretty Jason Santa Maria is. Talk about one sexy beast.
(thanks to Laughing Squid for the pic of JSM)
sxsw, sxsw2006, jasonsantamaria, erisstassi, seaninman, kottke
Sunday was very low key. Only a couple of sessions really stood out. Meet Judy Jetson was interesting but not overly so. We still seemed to be so frighted of teens using technology that we can’t get past it. Of the 3 one did mention sconex which was pretty cool even though it was just in passing.
The Keynote with Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong was good. I never got in to Dooce but I do like Kottke. I think it’s funny that so many designers can agree on something like web standards but still can’t accept pro blogging as something respectable. I meet Jason briefly at AIGA and he’s a really nice guy.
In fact he’s the opposite of what anyone might think. If you ever want to find Jason at a conference you just need to look for some one with a power book in the corner who is trying to disappear. I’ve never seen anyone who wanted to blend in to the background as much as Jason does. I could tell he was best on stage when he was talking to Heather and forgot about the audience.
Running Your New Media Business and Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Start up Decisions was good but nothing revolutionary. If anything I like hearing over and over again the same thing at similar panels. I hope that when I start my own mew media company I might even do the right thing the first time around.
Holistic Web Design was by far the best presentation of the day. All of the members of the panel help completely redesign Plazes.com and the results were amazing. I loved to hear each one talk about the project, what they changed, why and how it effects the end user. Eris Stassi (who abandoned her blog several months ago) really did an amazing job of directing the redesign and I have even more respect for her then I had in past years.
sxsw, sxsw2006
Traditional Design and New Technology was slow panel.
Liz Danzico (who might be angry at me) was a great moderator and continues to ask great questions every time I see her. The panel bright up many problems but didn’t really offer anything close to an answer.
JSM seemed the closest to bring actual conversation to what seemed mostly like a doom and gloom panel about how design sucks on the internet. They kept saying the technology wasn’t at a point where we can just forget about it. I don’t know if they are waiting for technology to stop but I think a large part of web design will be new technologies and functionality that can be added to websites. If they are waiting for technology to get to a point where it gets out of the way of making a website I think they have a long wait. Technology will continue to change and challenge how websites are made. Design needs to learn how to exist in that or die trying.
How to be a web design superhero was mostly fluff and I’m not really sure who that was supposed to help. Perhaps people who want to design but have no idea how to start. Not the people who really seem to come to SXSW. They did have the prettiest presentation I’ve ever seen with a really engaging panning and sliding around. I not sure if it was Keynote or not but it sure looked cool. I wonder if they had the rights to use those super hero images. They looked like Alex Ross painting but it’s been so long sine I’ve followed comics that I can’t really be sure.
Fried and Coudal did a great job of summarising the entire conference and were great over all. Couldal is greatly suited to be a moderator and I wish he had even more involvement in the conference. AIGA’s presenter in Boston, John Hockenberry, was not amazing and I think Coudal could have easily stepped in and taken over. He’s just so personable. Fried pointed out to a yahoo employee that yahoo wastes a lot of money. Basically saying they suck and it got a big reaction from the crowd. ‘m sure that will come up again and again around the web with funny headline everywhere.
Making money with your blog design skills was mostly rehashing old information. I was hoping to hear some information about blog design that was different then regular websites beyond that you had to know how to use the blog technology. Though the panel was lacking in new information they were all great. The moderator was interesting, knowable and great at controlling the time flow. The panelist were extremely personable and I want to go to subscribe to all of there blogs right now.
Kathy Sierra‘s Creating Passionate Users has to be up for best presentation in the conference. I think she blew about 200 minds in the most informative presentation I’ve ever seen. I’ll definitely be looking for the notes in the near future to bring back to Sconex.
Photos: Andy Budd and kitseeborg
SXSW, SXSW2006
in case you haven’t found it here is a list of all the events going on after hours at SXSW.
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