It was less than 48 hours before I broke my Macbook and then lost my wallet, containing about £130.
Woo!
Hardly surprising — the rest, about another 200 apparently, just have whatever genre tag they came with. All my music is excellently tagged with as much information as possible. Except for the genre field. I don’t see the point; it seems too vague. Nonetheless, I would be interested to hear how people do it; how do you decide between Rock and Indie Rock (or Alternative Rock, or just Alternative, or Alternative Indie Post-Steampunk Rock)? Is it IDM or just Dance? What’s the difference between Europop, Synthpop, Power Pop, Dream Pop (my Chairlift album is tagged that, for some reason), and just plain Pop? I’ve noticed that even Wikipedia doesn’t have much consistency, and frequently lists multiple genres, a compulsion I often feel when attempting to define a genre. So please, do tell. Now that iTunes has made genre such a significant feature of my music collection, I feel like there’s a big hole in my library where organization goes to die.
Bonus link: iTunes Genres Pool on Flickr.
Poni Hoax - “Antibodies”
I love iTunes Genius.
This is the first of a three-part interview with David Crystal on Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus site about his latest book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which you can probably guess looks at the myth surrounding text messaging and its supposed effect on the literacy of young people.
It was a dawning realization about how universal the myth was about texting. Virtually everywhere I went, people would come up and talk to me about it. One of the recurring questions was what my opinion was about this new disaster that was affecting all our children. People were saying how kids were unable to spell and their literacy was going down. And it’s all the fault of these mobile phones, these cell phones! So this was building up and building up, and eventually I thought I’ve just got to do something. So I sat down and started to research it. And as a result, the aim was to try and get through the urban myths about this and present some reality.
If you’re one of those “text messaging will be the downfall of the whole world” people, read this, and then read the book. It’s not just some buffoon’s conjecture on the nature of texting, it’s David Crystal, and he’s done actual research.
He’s also written a little about the book and the reactions to it on his own blog.
There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the pc operating system, I would launch a revolution that would transform society while bringing me wealth and fame. I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains.
(Via givemesomethingtoread)
ChoiceTweets launched on September 12th. Today, the Internet found out, and it wasn’t impressed.
Briefly: ChoiceTweets make t-shirts with with tweets printed on them — here’s one example, and there’s a whole collection of shirts with Merlin Mann’s tweets on.
As far as I can tell, this is probably illegal. But I’m not a lawyer. At the very least, none of the Twitterers in question were asked for permission to repurpose their tweets.
I didn’t fall into the “not happy” crowd — unethical as it is, my tweets are hardly great works of literature — but I was curious about how they were getting away with it. The answer is that they’re not, it seems. There are numerous complaints in their support forum.
Because I’m a jackass, I sent them this e-mail:
I noticed that some of your t-shirts are using tweets of mine (@nostrich). Who should I speak to about arranging payment details for my commission?
To their credit (what little they have), their reply was very nice. They say they’re working to solve ownership issues — probably should have done that before opening the site, oops — and this:
we can look through our sales record and, if any shirts have been sold from your tweets, and if so, we can have you sign up for our affiliate program and append any tweets with your username. Unfortunately, we need to do this manually right now, so we’ll need some patience and understanding from you.
So if you’re one of those with their tweets being repurposed without permission, there’s your answer. There’s also this:
if you’re really worried about us profiting from your content without you seeing a cut in the mean time, we can remove your tweets from the timeline as well.
So there you have it.
Korn’s Jonathan Davis and Slipknot’s Jim Root cover Lil Wayne’s “Got Money”.
If you ever wanted to hear a heavily-Vocodered Jonathan Davis do that “Umbrella, ella, ella” thing, now’s your chance.