Daily moment of zen
Clear your schedule for the next 9 minutes. There are times in life when you sense the very limits of mankind’s potential, of life, of the edges of our universe - moments of perfection, flawlessness, mindblowing coolness. Summits (vertices?) of life’s multiple-dimensioned box. You sense you’ve arrived at an edge, actually touched the fabric. It’s electrifying.
As a molecular biochemist and a new media geek, I think that’s perhaps what I spend my days searching for, right at the cutting (bleeding!) edge of just two of the many dimensions of humanity’s potential (though I usually just pass it off as neophilia). I give you Freddie King, Sweden, 1973.
“This is the blues, are you listening”
This may not be such a moment for you, but one young human to another, I hope your weeks and months have plenty of others.
Related:
- 50,000 scrobbled tracks; Last.fm, I love thee!
- A minor celebration is in order - according to my profile page, I've finally passed the major milestone of 50,000 tracks played on my computer or on the Last.fm website. At 4min30 per track (guesstimate) that's approx 3700 hours of listening. That's just music from my PC, and doesn't even include my mp3 listening. Blimey. Just for the record, I believe the 50,000th track may have been one of the tracks on Elbow's fantastic new LP, The Seldom Seen Kid....
- The Big Bang (of OTCC)
- The demise of Top of The Pops (a staple of British TV since 1964) in July 2006 marked the beginning of the End - the tipping point in a huge upheaval in the music industry. Industrialisation is being reversed (in music, anyhow - will other forms of production, creative or otherwise, follow?). The warning lights flash with every RIAA lawsuit, every band that ditches their label, every gig that sells out before a band has even released a record, and of course, plummeting CD sales. No point in mincing words. The industry's being turned on it's head. This is a revolution. Whereas the music industry used to operate on a push model, it looks as though it's becoming a pull economy - where the user goes out and selects the music he is exposed to, and the music he eventually spends money on. Before I go any further, here's a beautiful feature on Edge by a very clever guy explaining why filtering is a fundamental principle behind any system (including Life!). Ignore the rest of this jibber-jabber if you must, and go spend five precious minutes with it. What we're currently seeing is the birth of a truly fascinating ecosystem....
- What’s to come: the future of social media consumption
- With broadband penetration (and capacity) increasing, and music devices increasingly connected to WiFi (iPod Touch, iPhone) or to 3G (Nokia's big music push; laptops), the general consensus is that the future lies in media streaming, not the traditional stored music collections (be it shelves of LPs, stacks of CDs and DVDs, or hard drives full of mp3s and DiVX). A few years from now, you and all your friends will be consuming music online, on demand, from a myriad of different sources. If you use Mozilla Songbird, you can already pull in all the music posted on music blogs and Hype Machine into an iTunes-like virtual music library. Even more than infinite diversity of on demand music, the killer app for free (probably ad-supported) streaming media is that anyone can access it from anywhere in the world - they just need a link to it (unlike the mp3's on your iPod). That's the simple little thing that suggests we're in for a REVOLUTION in the way we consume and discover music. The logic is simple: Someone will setup a service which, when you stream music or a video anywhere on the web, will alert all your friends (that have signed...
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