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Manufacturing Celebrity

Great story about how musician Matt Tuozo grappled with frustration trying to get people to listen to his music on MP3.com, AudioGalaxy etc. until he came up with a brilliant idea: Manufacture a hot female persona to “live” behind the music, in the same way that mega-stars like Brittney are manufactured by producers. With the creation of Joy Reid, Matt’s music took off. Same music as before, now with breasts! Joy’s face was generated by morphing images of Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder gathered from FTP servers.

“Joy” made the front page of MP3.com. A thriving fan base developed, and Matt made thousands selling “her” music online, until he could no longer maintain the ruse and had to kill her off in a larger-than-life manner befitting a faux pop icon.

It’s comforting to know that modern publishing tools not only empower the proletariat to make and sell its own music without help from The Man, but to manufacture celebrity itself, cost free. We now not only need to wonder whether a star is popular by virtue of their own talents or by pure marketing muscle, but whether the star even exists at all.

Thanks Michael Bazeley.

Music: The Leaves :: Hey Joe
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Homeless Tales

In traffic court this morning to see what I could do about a lame speeding ticket (31 in a 25 zone, so sue me). Thought I could pop in quickly before work and take care of it. Show up at 9:15, they said. Two hours later, courtroom still full of cases, people trying to excuse themselves for driving without licenses, insurance, registration. Maddening. Finally gave up and paid the damn thing. Would have taken forever, and my case seemed so freeze-dried compared to the “edge cases” that were being handled.

During the proceedings a homeless man took the stand. Scruffy, hair sticking up, dirty Halvoline jacket, original Sony Walkman on his hip. Looked permanently drunk. His crime: Riding a bicycle without a helmet. When it was his turn to testify, the sum of his testimony for the judge was: “I was born without a helmet, why should I wear one now?” Judge fined him $53. Man said he couldn’t pay, asked to do community service. Judge said no, gave him an extra month to scrape together the money.

Another man lives on the streets near my work. Usually friendly, occasionally rants. Sweeps the sidewalks for all of us. Sweeping is “his thing.” Recently learned that he had planted a few stalks of corn next to a nearby parking garage – his own little public garden. One of my many bosses apparently suggested that he tell the government about his corn, because they would pay him to stop growing it. Pretty brilliant when you think about it. I wonder if our homeless friend got the joke.

Music: Shuggie Otis :: Aht Uh Mi Hed
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New Domains on Birdhouse

Birdhouse is happy to be hosting some great new sites:

journalist.org: “The Online News Association was founded in 1999 by several working members of the online press. ONA is open to journalists from around the world who produce news on the Internet and other digital platforms.” This nicely designed site is actually driven by four separate-but-related Movable Type weblogs, though you probably wouldn’t guess it by looking – they’ve dispensed with the MT templates altogether (why is this so rare?) The News section looks a bit more like a “traditional” blog. Also accessible via journalists.org and onlinenewsassociation.org.

landwater.com: A San Francisco-based environmental defense law firm. One of my good friends works here, humbly and skillfully championing some of California’s and Nevada’s most pressing environmental cases. Straight to The Supremes! We’ll be overhauling this site soon – watch for updates.

milesabovethemovie.com : “4 stories above the ground.” A film project by J-School student Michael Welt. I love seeing the kinds of sites our students come up with after emerging from our multimedia skills classes. Some of them go from zero to 60 very quickly.

… and one more I’ll save for another day…

Music: Tom Zé :: Chamegá
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Printed

Wired printed my letter to the editor on the ridiculousness of calling RSS a “push” technology. July 2004 issue (12.07).

Update: I have come up with what I think is a fair definition of “push” :

A) The content provider initiates the transmission

B) In order to do that, the content provider knows
1) That you want the transmission
2) Something about you – at least your address

RSS satisfies neither of these criteria.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
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User Spam Preferences

Over the past few evenings, set up WebUserPrefs on birdhouse hosting to allow users to configure their own SpamAssassin sensitivity thresholds as well as whitelists/blacklists. In the process, ended up contributing my bug fixes and new features back to both WebUserPrefs and the Communigate Pro plugin for it.

Birdhouse has deleted 84,982 spams for 40 mail users in the past 7 days alone. Now up to 98-99% spam blockage for users with filters on stun. One of our power users receives 13,000 spams per week to a single user account. The vast majority of them were to made-up names on the domain; rejecting mail to unknown names brought that down to around 1,000. Satisfying progress.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
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My Lame Powers of Prediction

In January 2003, I predicted that major browsers would have RSS readers built into them within six months, which would have put the first release of such a feature at around July 2003. Obviously, that didn’t happen. At WWDC today, Apple unveiled the major features in Tiger (OS X 10.4). Among them is an integrated RSS reader for Safari. That puts my prediction off by a year. Except that Tiger won’t be out until 2005, so make that 18 months. My crystal ball must have been hit by a stray neutrino.

A few readers have written me over the past week speculating about whether HFS+Finder in Tiger would more closely resemble BeOS’ spectacular BFS+Tracker combination, given that Dominic and Pavel have been working at Apple for the past year and a half. The answer is… sort of. Spotlight is going after metadata in a big way, and is making system-wide, instantaneous search on any type of heterogenous data seamless. The “Keywords” feature may or may not be similar to BFS’ Attributes. The key to making Spotlight as fast and flexible as BFS+Tracker will be, for me, whether attributes, er, keywords, are 100% customizable into arbitrary metadata forms, whether the metadata indexing is fast, automatic and efficient, and whether Apple finally releases a complete cousin to Be’s incredibly powerful FileTypes panel.

Also cool in Tiger: The very slick Dashboard (did Apple purchase Konfabulator?), full videoconferencing in iChat, and a powerful-looking scripting front-end called Automator. Oh, I wouldn’t mind a 30-inch aluminum-encrusted display, either.

Update: The Register confirms that Apple didn’t buy Konfabulator – they pulled a Watson on it (thanks Michael). I got a kick out of one of the propaganda posters Apple apparently has out at the WWDC: “Redmond, start your photocopiers.” Which is especially ironic given all the copying that Cupertino is apparently doing.

Music: Pat Kelly :: I Wish It Would Rain
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Root Balls

Digging out the rootballs of four 15-ft. Lilly Pillies in our yard, a nightmare. Big thick roots entangled with those of a 15-ft. Laurel – be sure to cut the right roots. What’s that? A pipe from the defunct sprinkler system, don’t mess with it. Oops, up against the foundation. Soil hard as clay (because it is). Saw blade clogged and dulled with dirt. Two weekends on this now, and still not done. Some home improvement jobs just thankless. Making way for a new and improved, less Euclidean front yard.

What I love about Home Despot is the fact that they’ll take anything on return. Last week bought a Mutt for chopping out rootballs – like a hoe with a thicker, sharp blade that’s straight rather than L-shaped. Of course couldn’t resist using it as a prybar, and promptly broke the handle. Didn’t have the receipt. HD took it back no questions asked. Now I’m part of the problem. The woman in front of me brought back three houseplants she hadn’t watered. They were dead, Jim, dead, but HD took them back no questions asked. Now that’s customer service.

Music: Paul Desmond :: Indian Summer
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Bush Compares Dems to Hitler

Bizarre and frightening. At georgewbush.com, a new Republican campaign ad features faces and speeches of various Democrats, intercut with a snippet of Adolf Hitler spieling at a rally. I guess this is what Bush meant by “changing the tone in Washington.”

Is this an effective ad? Does anybody even understand what point they’re trying to make here? That both Democrats and Hitler have spoken excitedly at rallies? I’m speechless. Sign the petition at democrats.org to demand bushco to talk about issues.

Music: Liz Phair :: Only Son
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Space Elevator

Arthur C. Clarke proposed the idea in his 1978 book Fountains of Paradise — build a 50km tower on Earth near the equator, put a big mass (like a tamed asteroid) into geosynchronous orbit, and connect the two with a massive cable. The whole assembly stays upright, essentially attached to space itself. Run electromagnetic elevators up and down the cable, and you can lift payloads or people into space for a fraction the cost of rockets or shuttles. Amazingly, NASA is now taking the idea seriously, although the idea is going to take a while to get off the ground (think late 21st century).

Music: Poj Masta :: Rapturous Revolution
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MT3

Spent much of the day upgrading the J-School’s MT installation to 3.0d, and experimenting with comment moderation + TypeKey. Since my bitter MT3 Sting post a few weeks ago, Six Apart has released an educational pricing model that turned out to be perfect for us. We ended up purchasing a site license that will cover as many blogs as we need (the previous pricing model looked prohibitive for our 17 blogs and 270 users).

My first attempt to get up and running with MT3’s comment control features on birdhouse was a bust, but I know realize that A) I needed deeper changes to comment templates than I had made and B) TypeKey was having indigestion that night, causing authentication to fail. Today’s experiments were smooth as glass, and I was once again impressed at how clean Six Apart’s code and methodologies are. No, we didn’t get the raft of features we were looking forward to, but they’ve done an amazing job on what they did release.

I’m flip-flopping re: questions of true open source (WordPad, etc.) vs. “free enough.” The diveintomark piece makes an excellent case for why hitching your wagon to a commercial entity leaves you vulnerable to tectonic licensing shifts. But yesterday I read Jay Allen’s Collective Deep Breath, which makes the counter-argument just as convincingly — exceptional software is worth paying for. Great developers are hard to find, their efforts deserve reward, and users benefit by supporting them.

The parallel for me of course is to how BeOS users saw the world when both BeOS and Linux looked like universes of equal potential. Those of us who used both systems knew that Linux on the desktop was a miserable joke compared to BeOS. But that was an impossible point to make to the open source advocates. In the end, they were right in one sense — we hitched our horses to a commercial wagon, and eventually all the wheels fell off. But in another sense, we were right — we were using a system that was in many ways better on the desktop than Linux is even today. Be’s commercial backing brought BeOS a level of cohesion and vision the open source community just hasn’t been able to muster (and of course the excellence of Mac OS X on the desktop compared to Linux reinforces this point).

That’s how some of my WordPress experiments felt – Hey, wow, this is cool, and free to boot. But some of the edges were so rough that I was put off (for example, the image upload + thumbnailing + popup window) features were just pathetic compared to Movable Type’s. Part of me wants to rewrite WP’s image upload functions and give my changes to the community. The other part of me is saying, “With what time? Just pay Six Apart their small bounty and get on with your life.”

At this point I’m leaning more toward sticking with MT on birdhouse as well (though I am still interested in WP to eliminate rebuilds, though that question is separate from licensing and philosophical aspects).

Music: David Thomas and Wooden Birds :: My Town