Leave a comment
Essays

http://www.melophobe.com/audio/Highs_N_Lows_Produced_by_Dot_Da_Genius.mp3?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
http://kanyi.tumblr.com/post/480956175/audio_player_iframe/kanyi/tumblr_l00wtg8yWA1qatcg0?audio_file=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.melophobe.com%2Faudio%2FHighs_N_Lows_Produced_by_Dot_Da_Genius.mp3

My favorite Dylan song is getting love from all sides lately. That melancholic twang gets me, man. Anyway, Kid Cudi does a wonderful sample of it here, and Gemma Hayes covers it nicely here.

On Tumblr Entering the Fashion Game

Leave a comment
Essays

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I was chatting with an investor friend about how it’s surprising how underdeveloped the fashion blogging community seems, considering how young, energetic, influential, and tech-savvy they have become. Tumblr is making a play at it as a static middleman. I like where their head’s at, and I think there’s a lot of interesting technology plays that can be made in the fashion blogging industry, but I don’t think this is the coolest one. I want to see something that aggregates trends. Fashion will benefit from that much more than music does, which is saying a lot, since hypem.com and elbo.ws are just about all anyone talks about these days.

And on that note, why has nobody come up with a web crawler that measures the spread of memes? I’ve always been interested to see a heat map of where and how memes spread, the way Netflix wonderfully did in their NYT Interactive piece. There must be somebody out there looking at trends about where videos originate, and how they move geographically over some sort of timeline. I want to see!

Facebook’s New Privacy Plans Will Cause Uproar

Leave a comment
Essays

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/27/facebook-privacy-connect/

But I don’t necessarily know if they should. We’re weird, as internet users. (Now, I think I’m referring primarily to the power users here, but I’m not even sure about that given some of the statistics about who tends to share what, and use what apps, on Facebook. The younger and later adopters seem to be the people who fret Less about both privacy and noise.) We want ultimate connectivity, with entity disambiguation to the max, and the ability to syndicate seamlessly across platforms, and to both create content and access others’ content from ours mobile devices wherever and however we want to.

But for some reason when the providers try and capitalize on this undeniable addiction from their power users, we immediately raise hell, reactively, as though it’s something morally corrupt and unconscionable. Is it really? I remember freaking out about News Feed. I got over it. I remember freaking out about Google profiles. I got over it. I remember freaking out about Buzz. I got over it. I have the sense that transparency is like gravity when it comes to the internet. Why fight it? Just change your behavior.

Unrelated, it’s unclear to me whether or not these companies (Google and Facebook primarily, but Microsoft seems to be positioning themselves to enter this deeply integrated social search game too) give two shits anyway. They’ve been steamrolling us on this front.

-KM

Facebook’s New Privacy Plans Will Cause Uproar

Thoughts on going back to blogging.

Leave a comment
Essays

I’ve been remiss in blogging over the last couple years. I tried out Blogger, tried out WordPress, and settled on Tumblr near the end of last year, but never got around to posting with any regularity. I’ve been prioritizing other consumption, and syndication, more highly.

In fact, I am wondering as I get it going again, how does one decide which is the most important way to spend time? Should I read blogs or books? Contemporary culture or classics? Chat with friends on GChat, or wax philosophical more, err, unidirectionally on my life stream? There’s an excess of sharing opportunities, and of consumable media, to the point that I actually need a strategy for processing it. I’ll be keeping you updated on how I attempt to solve this problem, if you care to listen. But in the meantime, I’m back!

-KM