Anti-Audience
I like any idea, no matter how crazy, that seems to have an audience. If it speaks to a group of people, whether small or large, having an audience receptive to what you have to say is important if you're interested in having people listen. What I like even better, though, are ideas that have not only an audience, but an anti-audience as well. The pet rock certainly had its share of detractors after it...
Digital Liner Notes
Song lyrics to your favorite albums are an interesting mess right now. Digital music makes sense to me. But digital booklets accompanying digital music, much less so. I don't understand them. If I google the lyrics to any song, they come up right away, but more often than not, it's a site filled with ads and popups that is trying to sell me ringtones. Means to an end, but an unpleasant one. The liner notes...
Friends and Family
Here's my own personal strategy when using social media: I represent myself. That's it. I'm dumb and probably come off as a goofball, but if you're friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, that's basically what you get: me. I've come across more than one company that asks its employees to use their own personal social media accounts to promote their product or service. I understand the thinking here...if there are large...
Well, It's a Funny Story...
I was walking through an outdoor shopping mall earlier today when I was stopped by a guy with a rubber bracelet. "Are you interested?" he asked. I looked down at the item in his hand. "What is it?" I asked, since I was curious. Turns out, the answer to that question took about 5 minutes for him to get out, and it included a demonstration involving my participation in order for me to "get it"....
Provisional Patents
My girlfriend and I spoke to a patent attorney recently regarding some intellectual property. The meeting itself was somewhat costly, but well worth it. I learned about something very interesting: provisional patent applications. (Note: I am NOT a lawyer, especially not a patent one, so none of what follows is legal advice. But I found the information, even just at face value and as a mere possibility, to be useful. For these reasons, I'm sharing...
The Labor
"Everyone is already producing anything that anybody could possibly want." This mentality kills the entrepreneur in all of us. "Everyone already has everything they need, or want and can afford." This mentality kills the salesman in all of us. "I'm not confident that I'm right, so I have no place nudging people in any particular direction." This kills the leader in all of us. Out of necessity, we are, at the core of nature, each...
Back at the Beginning
"There is no reason for nostalgia. Everything is still happening." -Devin Townsend
I've found myself dwelling on the past quite a bit lately. This means one thing, and one thing only: I don't have enough interesting things to occupy my time.
Disconnected
I was born in 1982, which means that, depending on who you ask, I'm either a very young member of Generation X or an old member of Generation Y. People born around this time are two things (according to people who study these sorts of things): 1. Old enough to remember a time before our lives were saturated with the Internet. 2. Young enough to be as comfortable using the Internet as a so-called "digital...
Demanding Payment
According to a Wired article this month, Netflix movies streaming across the Internet are now taking up more bandwidth than BitTorrent. This doesn't surprise me. In the large group of people who downloaded music without paying for it, there were very few people I ever met who said they were downloading music because they didn't want to spend money, or because they hated capitalism. On college campuses, Napster just meant you didn't have to haul...
Musicmakers
I've been listening to the album "Fallen" by Evanescence quite a bit as of late. Honestly, on the whole, the album feels somewhat contrived, but it does have its moments, and it is pretty catchy. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Amy Lee's voice or lyrics, but there are times on the album when everything comes together and just seems to work. As someone who has tried to record music, I can...