Juicy Butt Sweats
A few years ago I noticed this new paradigm in logo placement on clothing. I think it was the Company Juicy Couture that first put their logo right on the ass of the customer. I’m not sure if they were indeed the first, but the word “Juicy” is the first word I remember actually reading from the seat of the pants of a young lady walking in front of me on the street.
I don’t need to explain why the the word “juicy” is so provocative when placed prominently on a woman’s rear end, and perhaps this is why I remember it as the beginning of this era, whether or not the credit (or blame) is really owed to the JC clothing line for making this a trend.
Fast forward a few years and many colleges and indeed even my twelve-year-old niece’s junior high school’s athletic clothing line has the institution’s name featured in this manner.
But not on the men’s/boy’s shorts and sweats. Only on the women’s/girl’s.
Hairy Butt Jeans
I have therefore decided to examine the cultural subtext of this phenomenon further by adding a twist to it, which I shall be wearing around town in search of truth.
Behold, the unveiling of the Hairy Butt Jean by Andrew A. Peterson.
Sorry for the camera-phone pic. I’ll have better photos as soon as I’m ready to do a proper shoot for this amazing new addition to my artistic legacy.
Also, I know I’m not the best butt-model but I work with what I have.
OK so I have to admit that I’ve overestimated the popularity of Last.FM. At least, I am realizing how different LastFM is for a user like me that mostly has mp3s on my hard drive, and users who stream music from lastfm.
PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure. I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something. Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like). Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.
In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.
On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.
The music industry is a mess. The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).
And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.
Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that. I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.
OH! If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google. Hmmm…
The following is a bunch of predictions. Mark my words. Three areas to pull out your wallet for.
On par with Radiohead and Bjork, Xiu Xiu is an amazing project.
I had a hard time with it at first. Remember when you were a kid and didn’t like onions? or coffee? Xiu Xiu is a savory experience.
I borrowed all of Xiu Xiu’s albums from friends. It’s definitely going to inform my own art.
Production-wise, Xiu Xiu is some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard that isn’t clearly “avant garde.”
Just google it. Great music vids on YOuTube too.
The following is a little illustration in the form of a hypothetical scenario of why I think that individual behavior makes a big difference. I end up giving this example to just about everyone that I end up discussing my personal philosophy with. The hypothetical scenario is not something I invented, but I can’t remember where I got the idea. I’ve surely altered it a bit but the point is what is important.
[beginning of story]
Imagine a small town. In this small town, everyone has more or less the same ideas about how to behave and treat one another.
In this town, it’s understood that if you were to find money on the ground outside the local grocery, you would turn it in because that’s what everyone has always done. And in turn, if a citizen of the town got home from the market and realized that she didn’t have in her pocket the twenty-dollar bill she had left the store with, she would likely call or return to the store, quite confident that one of her neighbors would have noticed the bill on the ground in the parking lot and turned it in to the management of the store.
Now imagine that you [addressed to you the reader] moved to this nice little town. And one day you come across a twenty dollar bill on the ground outside of the local grocery. You pick it up and stick it in your pocket. That’s how things are done where you’re from. You just got lucky!
A while later, one of the town natives calls over to the store and is quite surprised to find out that no one has turned in the money he surely must have dropped between the market and his car.
At this point, in his mind, it is no longer necessarily an active custom of the culture of the town to turn in found money. In fact, later on, he reinforces this by not turning in money that he finds outside the market since he no longer believes that it is the normal thing to do.
Since you moved to this town, a chain-reaction has begun that will change what people think is the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ thing to do when they come across their neighbor’s accidentally misplaced money.
[end of story]
I know this is a fairly silly narrative, and I swear it comes across as much more believable and compelling in verbal communication, and I’m sure I could have written it more interestingly, but bare with me,
The idea is this:
The number of interactions we have with other humans in our lives that give us a real sense of how people behave is small. If you’ve ever visited a foreign place for a few days and left with the idea that “The people there are so friendly and helpful..” remember that it was probably only one or two interactions that gave you that idea. Maybe you were confused about a train map and someone offered to explain it to you. Maybe it was something else like that.
Later today, or tomorrow or next week, you might see someone who obviously could benefit from the help of a stranger, but you might be inclined to not help them because that’s not really how we do it around here. But if you do help them, in their mind, it’s likely that it will become the way we do it around here, and in turn they will be more likely to do the same kind of thing for others.
I believe that a lot of the time, people behave according to how they think other people behave. The good news (or bad news) is that the opportunities that people have to really get a sense of how people behave are few and far between.
So in the next 24 hours, something you do in your interaction with a complete stranger could actually have a fairly large ripple effect.
You can change how people act just by treating people differently.
As a major intaker of information about leading technologies, I am proud to say that at the time of the creation of this blog post, I am ahead of the game as far as declaring a change in the language we use to refer to the next phase of web evolution.
The term “web” has never been stronger. The “internet” goes on as something we mention almost every day. And the technologies that comprise the realm of what we have been calling semantic web, mainly markup standards, aren’t going anywhere.
But semantic web just fell out of favor as a [canditate for a] useful euphemism in our language. The moment this became obvious to me was a few weeks ago when I heard that Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED and didn’t mention ‘the semantic web.’ A few weeks later I saw the video for myself and felt a certain sadness or abandonment when TBL talked about the geekiest dream ever, one that he created, without using the name I thought we had all agreed on for it, The Semantic Web. Instead, he used a different euphemism for the most awesome library system ever conceived. He called it “Linked Data.”
If you are a Semantic Web apologist like myself you might feel slightly deflated by a sudden change in terminology. I’m sorry. I’m sure TBL is sorry too.
But the reality is that “Semantic Web” is always going to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which is also a field of technology that is growing fast in its own right.
No sustaining buzz has really caught on with “the semantic web,” as a catch phrase, beyond us geeks that are already sold on the idea. Instead, we’ve recently heard more and more announcements (made usually by search companies) that include the word semantic as if the mere use of the word means that the company is doing something right.
The battle we’ve been fighting as SemWeb advocates is largely a battle for widespread awareness. TBL has said himself that the phrase semantic web wasn’t the best choice of words.
I’m sure TBL spent at least an afternoon considering what he might say to the audience at TED which arguably consists some of the most influential people in the world. I’ve concluded that he intentionally abandoned the phrase, in preparation for a brighter future in which the SemWeb technologies are no longer so easily confused with other technologies. We’ve changed our name.
If you feel the re-branding is unfair, consider who has more right to the word semantic, the Natural Language people or the Interchangeable Data Format people?
We lose.
Sorry. We need to move on.
The Semantic Web is now called Linked Data. It’s official. Take a deep breath, change your notes. And let’s move on as Linked Data enthusiasts, not Semantic Web enthusiasts.
I will lead this effort by removing the category of “The Semantic Web” from this site and replacing it with “Linked Data.” I’ll do it later this week. I need some time to say goodbye.
The music most people seem to accept as “Post-Rock” is instrumental music with long songs featuring rock-ish musicians grooving on a few chords and/or a motif, with a lot of dynamic variation and intensity for as long as an hour at a time.
For most people, the term “Post-Rock” has become synonymous with a certain aesthetic, long, slow-moving guitar-centric (largely diatonic) songs that swell and die out with musical sensibilities largely created in the seventies and eighties.
I want to extend the meaning of Post-Rock.
I think that Post-Rock might include (just a few ideas):
On the other hand, when a friend mentions “post-rock,” I usually assume what they mean is ‘long-boring-electric-guitar-music.’
If Post-Rock is a useful genre, I think we should include bands like The Fiery Furnaces. Otherwise we should just call it “Bedtime Music…”
I think Bjork is post-rock.
If you make Art, you should watch this. If you don’t make Art, you should still watch it.
If you haven’t played around with EtherPad, and you have a few friends you can get to screw around with you on this thing, do yourself a favor and try it out.
At first, it’s very simple:
EtherPad is a Collaborative Text-Editing environment. It’s real-time though, so it’s not as much like Google Docs (remember Writely?) as it is like IM. Yes, it’s like Instant Messaging only more instant. Every character typed or removed by anyone working on the text is seen in real-time by everyone else editing the document. The page never has to reload or anything! Ah, the beauty of Javascript.
Be warned though, this means that the people you’re working with can see how slow you type! And as of yet, there’s no spellcheck, so you’re basically letting it all hang out.
I heard about this from the Technometria Podcast, and it’s clear to me that, as they discussed in the show, for students taking notes during a lecture, nothing I’ve ever seen in my life could ever be as valuable as this technology is, even in its youngest form, that is, as long as the students in question have computers and friends.
Before I go any further, I should mention that my techie friends are all telling me about JQuery… I’m not a programmer, so that doesn’t mean anything to me (yet)… Also, EtherPad is only one of several spotlight applications running on a new platform called AppJet, which I guess is a Javascript-based development platform that’s really visual/browser-oriented. Maybe even a sort of WordPress for Ajax?
Well whatever. I’m not a dev so I’m not qualified to criticise that stuff, but the mention of JQuery seems timely given what I’ve been hearing, all-hype though, as far as I’m qualified to say, as a non-programmer. The use of Javascript in general, is not all-hype, my instincts tell me… We better move on because I don’t know shit about Javascript. But I do think it’s the future, if you’re asking my nose.
I would like to see EtherPad with TinyMCE because at the very least, UL’s and OL’s (un-ordered and ordered lists), Bold and Italics, Links Etc, would make the collaboration so much more useful!
Beyond that, I’d love to see an app that can be installed anywhere that allows people to run controlled instances of ET, while controlling certain parameters like the maximum number of characters or lines per document… Etc…
I have a lot of ideas about the possibilities of this kind of real-time text-editing. Big ideas.
Hey AppJet! Wanna talk?
From the “Availability Notes” that appeared when I checked Hulu for new episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia…”
Apparently, they took down many of the episodes (they had a few seasons of the show up in entirety) all at once without warning.
The tone I get from this, is that Hulu may even be thinking along the lines of posting ‘expiration dates” for the content… That would be smart. It would be another way to browse (browse by what’s about to expire), and it would give Hulu users more of a sense that Hulu is almost like their free, ad-supported DVR, a good place for Hulu to be in people’s minds, I think. The message is an apology from Hulu… All and all, I say, good going, Hulu. You guy’s are rockin’ it!
Availability Notes:
Hulu can provide five episodes of this series at a time. We’ll add a new episode each week as we take down an older one, following the same schedule as the official site.Customer trust is hard won, easily lost. On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we’ve added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.
This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ”Sunny” episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.
Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.
The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.
Sincerely,
Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu
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