blackrimglasses.com

I enjoyed this read as it outlines a lot of frustrations I have with magazines on the ipad. They are carrying over everything I hate about magazines into a device I love, which is akin to pissing in my pool. The downloads take too long, the organizations never seem to have heard of a good CDN, the layout is very “print” centric and expresses, near literally the hubris that glossy print puts forth.

The iPad was never a panacea for print. It’s a new medium, a new way of representing content, but it is not the magical device that will save print media from itself. Lateral translation of media is not what we want. We don’t want the hubris of print carried over into light, fast machines.

Rethink what it means to be a “magazine” and look at what the device at hand gives you. Stop wasting my time.

The article about Tribune Co from the NY Times, going over the excesses and problems that existed in the organization made for some chuckle worthy reading. Was all of it true? Not likely. Was a lot of it? Certainly. More than that, it’s funny to read about a dying industry digging itself to the grave.

And of course I’m aware of the irony of that statement.

Regardless, I see this post this morning defending the Tribune, linked to from Roger Ebert.

Now, I like Roger Ebert. I think he’s inspiring as a writer and a critic. But this article? It made me laugh for all the wrong reasons.

Five years ago I wrote a post about what I’d do if I bought a newspaper. A lot of it centered around streamlining, getting off ivory towers and reengaging with the community. Now some choice quotes from this Tribune apologist post:

Each morning for more than 25 years now, as I come to work at the Chicago Tribune, I engage in a private ritual.

Standing on Michigan Avenue, I look up at the magnificentTribune Tower and feel a mixture of awe and pride.

Really? Awe and pride? I’m all for the power of media to be transformative. However, the tower of Tribune is no longer a symbol of power, but a symbol of disconnection. Kass continues to talk about the building as if it is a temple to all that we should hold sacred about the media’s role in society. Maybe, but that temple has been deconstructed. We’re no longer the loose knit graph around the hub of major media.

A decentered world has no place for stone towers.

And then the kicker:

Chicago Tribune reporters work in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. They do not blog from mommy’s basement, cutting and pasting what others have reported, while putting it under a cute pen name on the Internet.

Oh, I see. So bloggers are really just overgrown adolescents who type furiously on dirty keyboards, in stained sweatpants while their mothers yell at them to take the trash out already. Never mind the transformative power of decentered journalism (a less perjorative term than “bloggers” I think).

There is no doubt that the leveling of the playing field for what it takes to be a journalist has beget the world with charlatans, and 500 reader William Randolphs. But the beauty of the complexity of the new media world is that what fights through the weight of the normal, what rises above the collective din, is inspiring and I would argue more relevant than the daily content on dead tress from stone towers.

So when we stand out on Michigan Avenue, looking up at the tower, we’re not looking at some frat house.

We’re looking at our Tribune.

Sorry Mr. Kass, but you’re also looking at a crumbling vestige of a world that has passed you by, on the very street you are now vacating.

Hypebot is running Part 1 and 2 of an interview with me, the first I’ve done since moving jobs.

In the interview, which I think will be three parts, I touch on a lot of aspects of what I do day to day, and my thoughts on how technology and music intersect.

One of the fundamental things about how I view the space I work in, and live in is that the work I do with technology is impacting something that is far more important than just my “job.” It’s people’s lives, both as fans and as artists. I have been a fan most of my life, intensely. I’ve never been a recording artist.

However through being a fan, I’ve come to befriend the band that took up most of my fandom attention, R.E.M.

That story is for another day, and I started using it as the root of my conference talks, as its somewhat compelling, in an Almost Famous/rose colored way.

What I will post about today is a note about artistry, as its the root of what I do, not technology.

A few weeks ago I was in Nashville to visit R.E.M. in the studio, where they were in the final week of finishing the record that I can now say will be called “Collapse Into Now” (their manager just spilled the beans to the BBC yesterday).

I won’t say a word about the record (it’s amazing). Beyond what I heard, it’s what I saw that really cemented the interesting place we are in in the music business, and why you can’t remove artistry from technology.

Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills (and Bertis Downs) have been doing what they do for 30 years. On April 5, 1980 they launched a career on a mushy stage in an abandoned church, playing for a friends birthday. 30 years and a few months hence, they are all sitting in a really nice studio in Nashville, each with a Mac laptop in front of them, listening to music that they just worked on for over a year played back, from another Mac. Their producer sits at the board, which is covered with plywood to act as a platform for a keyboard and a mouse as hey adjusts mixes and tones on two studio monitors.

A photo from Joseph Beuys’ performance of “I Like America and America Likes Me” from 1974 is on the desktop.

I was not at their show in 1980. I was not even a year old at the time. I don’t know how the guys were after the show, or how they were when they first sat together and jammed out what would become Radio Free Europe or Gardening at Night. If you believe the legends, 1500 people were at that show.

I had the privilege on the last record to see them in the studio twice, at the beginning and at the end. And on this record, I saw them right at the tail end. Now understand, they have come a long why since 1980, and a long way since Radio Free Europe. There were bumps, digressions, near breakups and reconciliations along the way. Some records were amazing, some not so.

But I wager that one thing hasn’t changed.

The look on three faces as I turned around after hearing a half dozen new songs, one of the first outside the band to do so.

It’s a look of naked honesty, insecurity, confidence and guardedness. And glances between them, a knowing sense of accomplishment.

At the end of the day, no matter how much I espouse on data, technology, the deference of representation and other academic concepts I use to apply what I do technologically to what I do to represent our artists, nothing ever comes as close to illustrating the why behind “what I do” than the look on three faces when I can say with confidence,

“That was fucking amazing guys. Amazing.”

The smiles returned confirm my motto: This is my job, this is their lives.

Technology does a lot of things, but it can never replace what music does to those that create it, and those that appreciate the creation.

Apple today is sending out an invite for a “Back to Mac” media event on October 20th.

The Mac itself, specifically OSX has been taking second fiddle in the last two years to iOS and the devices which use it. A lot of the updates to Mac hardware, while great, seem cursory. There has been a distinct lack of innovation in the core business of desktop computers, instead favoring (and justly so) mobile and handheld devices, and now TV set devices.

The fact is, 10.6 is long in the tooth. The Snow Leopard is old, and the innovations that are happening in the larger world around real-time web, the “instant” of everything, social frameworks and connecting the personal computing with global computing aren’t yet in the OS.

So, seeing that OSX Lion looks to make some sort of debut in a week, here are things I’d like to see addressed in this OS update:

• Changing the notion of a file system. I know its probably a dream, but back when Windows NT was still called “Cairo” there was the notion of an object oriented file system. This idea has been out there for a long time (BeOS had some parts of this, WinFS, etc), but its never become implemented en masse. I find it frustrating that in 2010 I’m still encumbered by folders of documents, with no sense of common OO tropes (polymorphism, introspection, inheritance) applied to them. The fact that I have to scroll through long lists of files still frustrates me. What I would love is to see OSX organize objects based around context and usage, and extend those objects to encompass things online and off. A Facebook object, a Twitter object that acted as API shells into services, and the same applied to local storage.
• Connecting the OS to the world out there. The notion of a desktop OS is outmoded. We live half of our computing lives, if not more within the browser. it’s time for the OS itself to attach itself to the “cloud” or network as it were as more than just a passive receiver.
• An updated GUI – this is long over due. OSX has no less than four or five different GUI interfaces, depending on the apps you use. There is the “unified” look that is common to every app but iTunes, then the “Pro” UI, the HUD UI, etc. You’d think with an OS as clean and GUI consistent as iOS, they would maybe get it right on the desktop? Certainly OSX is not taking advantage of what makes iOS great (Core Animation, etc).
• Maybe an alternative desktop metaphor? I was looking at Twitter’s iPad app and the “pane” interface, and thinking that a logical extension of that interface is to use a gesture to alter the z-order of the individual panes. Moving from this to the desktop, is it time that the “window” interface die? It’s not great for organizing the context around information or usage of applications, it creates clutter and it is hard to create good workspaces. I’d love a system where I could lay out my desktop as panes of information, and use a gesture to move laterally through them.
• An OS rooted around information organization and discovery: OSX seems like an OS without a center. It doesn’t know if its user centered, information centered, media centered or application centered. OSX Lion needs to know its center, and I think it should be around the user, and helping them connect with media, the world, their friends, family, etc.

Those are just some of my thoughts. Any others?

I realize that I haven’t posted because I am waiting for moments of inspiration to strike, which will result in a rumination about something profound. The fact is that I have a 16 month old baby and a 30 minute commute to work now, so my moments of inspiration are hard to find lately.

So versus waiting, I am vowing a post a day about what I do, which is emerging technology work at a music company. So here is something I want to post weekly: what has interested me lately.

Node.js

I am currently doing some r&d thinking about the next phase of artist websites. I have a post about this pending. One of the things that I have been learning and researching in the course of this are technologies for realtime web experiences, and C10K web servers.

Node.js I find fascinating as it extends the callback model from the browser dom into the server. With things like long polling, and especially systems like socket.io, you can create a hub and spoke model between servers, services and your clients. It’s pretty damned impressive. I imagine having a live realtime connection to everyone on an artist website. Then i imagine some visualizations of that data, leading me to Raphael.

Raphael and Unveil

My fascination with visualization outweighs my talent for making them. Never the less, I enjoy researching technologies which provide visualization capabilities. What excites me about raphael, unveil and other frameworks is that the are JavaScript frameworks, not Flash. I briefly dabbled in Flex. I no longer do.

Combined with node.js and web sockets, I envision a day when I have flat screens all over the office with realtime analytics from our artist properties on them. That day is not too far away.

Instagram

I’m fascinated by the emerging vernacular around social applications. Instragram seems to be executing perfectly on a recipe defined by Foursquare, Twitter, et al as a check-in based photo application with API relays. Instagram brings with it a competitiveness rooted in aesthetics, location awareness, and self controlled sharing. I really dig it, and the visual consistency the application. It’s the tumblr of photo sharing.