Newspaper sites = troll magnets

Check out the unadulterated, inhuman crap being posted at the Sun-Sentinel after Springsteen postponed his show in the wake of ... oh, just the death of his bandmate and friend of 40 years, Danny Federici.

Here's an idea: Let's use the IP addresses and track these people down, then have them stand before a live national TV audience as we read their comments out loud. Wonder if they'd still call Springsteen a liberal crybaby.

(Obviously, I'm not speaking for my employer. Nor do I really think that's the best way to handle Web trolls. It'd be fun, though, wouldn't it?)

Live-blogging Last.fm

It's been a while since I live-blogged anything, in part because I'm no longer idle on weekdays and in part because we finally pulled the plug on XM.

But I'm giving Last.fm another chance. I've even downloaded the player and "scrobbled," which I still think is a hip way of saying "uploaded all of your marketing preferences and occasional accidental stumbling onto porn sites to a database shared by a giant telemarketing firm and Homeland Security." But anyway ...

Hmmm ... chose an artist or tag. I'll choose "rock." And we get ...

Alanis Morissette, You Learn: The song from which her staggeringly popular debut Jagged Little Pill takes its title, but not even the top half of the songs from that release if I ranked them. Cute song with a few good hooks, but overproduced like some old Tiffany release.

Counting Crows, Round Here: Hate the band, love this song. Adam Duritz could sing anything from Louie Louie to Close to the Edge and still come across as the pretentious college-DJ type who hooks up with a succession of the campus' most eligible women because they all think they'll be the one to rescue him from those dark clouds following him. (Yeah, those dark clouds? They're the stench of erratic bathing and pot smoke.) Except on this recording, where he gives just the right emotional lift to an enigmatic, interesting song.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Wind Cries Mary: Like You Learn, this one isn't bad, but it's a little flimsier than some of the vital work produced by the same artist. Surely a good change of pace for a live show.

The Troggs, Wild Thing: I'd much rather hear the Hendrix version. Or the Sam Kinison version.



Yes, that's Jessica Hahn, of Jim Bakker scandal fame, in the video.

OK, so where was I? Oh, right ...

Toto, Selfish: For some reason, I want to work in some sort of joke along the lines of "Kansas? I don't think we're in Toto anymore." Surely Steve Morse managed to be in both bands somewhere along the way. I have no idea where to place this song -- clearly years and years after the band was any semblance of its platinum days -- so I'm relying on Popdose to fill me in. Really, it's what you'd expect -- a vocalist screaming to try to get some sort of attention while everyone else is focusing on the endless noodling of the overly skilled musicians in the rest of the band.

Billy Idol, Sweet Sixteen: When is Billy going to pull a Rod Stewart or Brian Setzer and start paying homage to the 40s and 50? He could pull it off, and it'd be better than utterly forgettable 80s relics like this.

My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade: I don't know. Maybe if I were 19, getting rejected by all the women who were hanging out with Adam Duritz-type DJs, looking forward to financial independence even if I had no idea what to do career-wise, reading tedious academic prose and all that, I might appreciate this with the correct level of irony. Since I'm now officially 2x19, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel sympathy for the unfortunates mentioned in the song or to view them with cynical detachment or what. I just maintain Natalie Merchant could kick all their asses.

I'll have to wrap there for now. Interesting mix of music, at least.

Weird and wonderful traditions

According to the legend at the Wikipedia entry and this CBC broadcast, NORAD took over as the official Santa Claus tracker when a newspaper accidentally confused a store's "Santa hotline" with a secret phone line at the height of the Cold War. Great timing.

All I can verify first-hand is that I've been checking NORAD's Santa tracker since I first went online in 1996, and it never ceases to amaze me. (Granted, it's slightly disappointing to know that the people doing all these charming videos aren't in the nuclear blast-proof mountain in Colorado anymore, but it's still fascinating stuff.)

I'm clearly not the only one watching. This year, the videos are going up on YouTube, and you can see the hundreds of thousands of page views tonight alone.

It's one of the most incongruous productions imaginable. It's hard to imagine a job grimmer than watching the sky for impending Armageddon, and yet these folks have the sense of humor to animate Santa's sleigh doing flips past world landmarks.

Great stuff.

Merry Christmas to all, and may Santa pass through your airspace safely.

The radio verdict

Following up "Launch vs. Last" ...

I gave Last.fm a good solid try. I gave Pandora a whirl.

Tonight, while fighting a case of writer's block (story will ... run ... Thursday), I figured out how to make my Launch player run in Firefox.

So I'm listening to Sarah Blackwood's soothing voice on the great, non-downloadable Dubstar song Just a Girl She Said. Last.fm is uninstalled. Pandora ... well, I haven't done much with it, though I'll give it the occasional listen just to see what artists it thinks most closely resemble Tori Amos and Rush. (Van Halen? Yeah, guess again.)

Apologies to the Web hipsters, but I'm sticking with Launch/Yahoo. It's better than Last. It's better than Pandora. Deal with it.

Launch vs. Last

I'm a longtime Launch.com devotee. Just check out my station. Before I joined the iPod ranks a couple of years ago, Launch was the soundtrack of my workday. I discovered so much good music -- Carbon Leaf, Rachael Yamagata, Stereophonics, Dubstar, newer Los Lobos, Blue Man Group, Hayseed Dixie, newer Dylan, Mary Lou Lord, newer Big Country, some Jonatha Brooke -- and some Chris Rock and Steve Martin comedy bits.

I've listened less at work these days. My job is a little more social than it used to be, and for the moments I need to crank up the volume and ignore my co-workers' incessant yammering on movies, I have the iPod.

So I've been thinking of cancelling my $3/month subscription to Launch -- you can use it for free, but I pay to get it without ads. Mrs. MMM and I are fanatical about keeping subscription costs low. Many of our magazines are freebies, including the two I get for networking through MediaBistro. We do NOT get HBO, so don't ask us about The Sopranos.

Yahoo! also isn't doing much to develop the Launch service. I haven't noticed a new feature in, oh, three years or so. They're focused on developing Yahoo! Music, which puzzles me. (Pay $6/month to listen to music on my computer but not my iPod? Where do I sign up?!)

And I've noticed Last.fm widgets popping up everywhere. Curious, I checked it out with Wikipedia -- the 2007 equivalent of asking a neighbor -- and I was impressed with what I read.

I signed up for it, and ... I'm not really impressed.

I'm using the free service, and it seems I have to pay $3/month just to bring it up to the level of Launch. And I'd still miss a few features such as song rankings. Yes, Last.fm has "love" and "ban," but there's nothing in between. Launch gives you a number ranking and sets your playlist according to your preferences. You can even set up a couple of different "stations," some ignoring your rankings and some relying on them almost exclusively, though that may be a subscriber-only feature.

I've also found it's a good way to check out a new album. When Carbon Leaf and Paul McCartney released albums in the past couple of years, I ranked the artist and the album 100, guaranteeing I'd hear a couple of songs in a couple of typical listening hours.

Last.fm seems a lot less interactive. Sure, you can share your preferences with others, but Launch also has that. (They're called "influencers.") I haven't figured out how to do anything other than naming an artist and hearing similar artists. Even that's a little sketchy -- when I entered "Rolling Stones," my playlist was stuck in the '60s. What about the new Stones stuff?

So, Last.fm users, what do you like about it? What am I doing wrong? I'm sure I can grow to like it, but is it worth canceling Launch to rely on this instead?

And have you guys ever considered Launch?

Reasons why I'm becoming less and less enamored of the Web

1. Less information-sharing, more shouting at each other. That's the big one. I could and probably should write a book on the subject. But I'd have to call it something like "A$$holes: How Special Interests Are Hijacking Your Freedom" to get anyone to read it.

2. When I do a Technorati search on my work blog, I get a bunch of automated aggregators pulling in anything that mentions a keyword -- soccer, Andy Roddick, HGH, etc. I think I'll work in the word "nudity" tomorrow just to see what happens. (Because I mention a lot of Olympic athletes, I do get the occasional search for "gretchen bleiler nude" and so forth.)

If you go by sheer readership, I write a very successful blog, but I get far less feedback on it and have far less impact than I did when I was scratching out a column for a mid-sized paper almost 15 years ago.

3. The waves of the future are (A) blogs that harness all the shouting and (B) multimedia projects that will undoubtedly win all sorts of awards but tell me nothing and give me no narrative cues.

If you could go back in time and tell the 14-year-old computer geek I once was that the future would revolve around a giant information-sharing network in which skill with words and programming would be highly valued, I would have been thrilled. "Geek" as a compliment? That'll be great!

I'm venting a little here, but the optimist in me has a question. What can we do to reclaim the Web? Should we just hang out in outposts of sanity like the music blogs I'm frequenting more and more these days? Or do we need some sort of grass-roots movement to change the whole bloody thing?

Let's join the movement ...

... to rid the Web of the overused, outdated, lazy-crutch of an insult: "... on crack."

As in "He runs like Jesse Owens on crack!" Or the more pejorative "Are you on crack?" That's sometimes cleverly disguised as "You must be on crack" or "Put down the crack pipe."

I know I'm turning into an old fart before I'm 40, but I happen to be right about this. Right?

Profound thoughts on the Web

I have to share with you the most earth-shattering, mind-blowing, vision-changing, perception-challenging statement ever uttered on the Web. I should warn you that reading this simple statement may be the equivalent of Jim Morrison's first experimentation with LSD, taking you down roads you never envisioned before, forcing you to quote Rimbaud and Aldous Huxley while channeling dead Native Americans and borrowing heavily from the blues.

This revelation can be found in response to a YouTube clip of Maria Sharapova dropping an f-bomb during the Australian Open (in her defense, it was 375 degrees on the court, and she was clearly done). Our wise man (or possibly woman) uses the pseudonym "whosyourdado7," surely to evade capture by government agents who would seek to use his knowledge to plot the overthrow of Switzerland. (They're next, you know.)

The statement follows. If you are unwilling or unable to have your life forever changed, read no further. The comment is ...

I'd tap that

I'll pause to let that soak in ...

I can only hope Sharapova herself is able to see this. I'm sure she often sits around thinking, "Sure, I'm good at tennis. But would an anonymous guy on the Web sleep with me if I gave him the choice?"

We all can name Sharapova's major victories, and I'm sure that's the first thing everyone thinks about when searching for her on the Web. But at last we have an answer to the question, "Is Maria Sharapova hot?"

So thank you, whosyourdado7, for sharing this invaluable knowledge. The world is a brighter place now that we know there is at least one man who, if presented with the option of a brief, ramification-free tryst with Maria Sharapova, would "tap that."

"And I'd join the movement if there was one I could believe in"

Attention Spynotebook-ers -- note two bits of Athens and Athens Academy content below ...

One of the frustrations I have with the blogosphere is that there's little respect for good old-fashioned intellectual back-and-forth.

In academia, here's how it's supposed to work: Someone raises a hypothesis and tests it. Others test it as well, perhaps offering refinements or even outright refutations. The person who raised the hypothesis then answers, conceding some points and defending others. Ideally, this is all done with mutual respect and honesty.

I can't say how often this actually happens in academia -- maybe Quinn can answer, since we share an alma mater and all. All I know is that it never happens in the blogosphere.

Two examples, both coincidentally linked from Down With Snark. (Michael does none of the damage here -- I agree with what he posted about each of these.)

1. The Noka chocolate controversy. Michael sums it up well. A food blogger (mmmm ... food blog ...) started to wonder how this relatively new chocolate company could get away with outrageous prices on its chocolate, and he wrote a 10-part series that could double as a business-school course (BUS 302: Intro to Chocolate). Criminals are put away for life with less evidence than he compiles here.

And yet I have some sympathy for the company here. I could just imagine a happy couple enjoying the holidays, then coming back and finding that a blogger has destroyed their business. Besides, they're hardly the first entrepreneurs to trump up their products with creative marketing. What the hell is "Corinthian leather," anyway, other than something nice for Ricardo Montalban to pronounce?

That hasn't happened, as far as I can tell. The only mention of Noka in the news is that they offering new keepsake packaging. That's also the newest info on their official site and the only news posted since an August photo of the owners with Michael Gross. (Yes, the dad from Family Ties.)

In the blogosphere, you'll find some discussion of an exuberant defender of the Noka brand who has since been hired by the Noka brand. Perhaps that's shady, but you'd have to concede he's being open about the ethical issues.

Up to a point, the discussion remains civil. The blogger -- who doesn't have comments on his blog but does run a messy message board -- gives Noka a chance to defend itself.

Inevitably, the comments descend to the "gotcha" level, and I can't help wondering why anyone would take such delight in taking these people down a peg.

The original investigation is impressive and informative. But Noka doesn't owe anyone a retraction, an apology or an out-of-court settlement. I don't see anything Noka's doing here that differs from typical luxury branding. I'm sure someone could do the same investigation on Prada, finding that they use the same components as cheaper competitors. For better or for worse, creating status around a brand is a skill. The message behind Noka never really was "I care so much about you that I bought chocolate 10 times better than Godiva's." The message is, "I have money and will spend it on you."

Besides, it's chocolate. It's subjective. Some people like Special Dark; some like Krackel.

(And yes, someone made a comparison of Krackel and Nestle Crunch, though it's a little less serious.)

2. Goatse-ing the MySpace crowd. I'd never heard of "Goatse" until today, having wandered onto the Internet for the first time in 1995, just after the Usenet craze. If I had ever seen that word in the past, I would have assumed it was a misspelling of Goetze -- Vicki Goetze, a schoolmate of mine and possibly the best amateur golfer of the past 30 years.

The link above is a safe Wikipedia entry, but if you'd rather skip any and all description, we'll just say it's a disgusting image that you'd have to be tricked into seeing. Unless you're preparing it for someone else to see, which is a variant of the Teabaggers' Dilemma -- why should the teabagging recipient be any more embarrassed than the the teabagger?

So it seems one Jason Scott got ticked that a MySpace template was nicking one of his images. His post is full of techie condescension, but he has a point. He pays to host his images, and his bill ran up quickly when a template-maker made it available for MySpace users.

His solution: Substitute the "Goetse" image for his own. That'll show 'em.

We'd all agree the response was hysterical. The people who made the template told him he should take down the image.

Let's repeat and recast: The people who "borrowed" his image without permission are asking him to change it. That's like Vanilla Ice asking Queen to remix Under Pressure for better sampling.

Funny stuff. But when you read the comments on his site and at Digg, it's easy to jump off the bandwagon. A sample:

If you have a child who browses MySpace... Kill them. You've made a terrible
mistake bringing them into the world, and society as a whole should not have to
pay for that mistake. Just stuff them in a burlap sack with a few bricks and
drop them in a river. No law enforcement agency would begrudge you. You've taken
a future scumbag off the streets and in so doing have saved them a lot of work.

Lovely.

In this case, Scott set the tone. He compares pre-1993 (in other words, pre-AOL newbie avalanche) Internet usage to the early days of air travel, when most people on a plane knew how to fly it. Today, he says, most people are like airline passengers and have no clue. Isn't that a bit like saying the cavemen who invented the wheel should be the best race-car drivers?

Besides, MySpace isn't totally useless, even if you can blame it for the decline of Dane Cook's career. Just today, I found a nice archive of a great forgotten Athens band, Dreams So Real. (You may not find a better four-song blast of '80s guitar pop than this.)

So once again, I'm stuck with reservations that keep me from joining the fun. I'm like the guy at the party who's worried the cops are going to show up. (One day, I'll tell the story of how a couple of us back in the office with the police scanner saved half my newspaper's staff from certain arrest.)

Limit the blogosphere to a few safe areas, and I'm fine. I'm perfectly happy talking music with the music bloggers listed here and talking parenting with a few others. Like Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, we're mostly harmless. I don't see Blender going out of business because of my last few posts.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Is it "the more, the messier" on the Web?