At first, I was planning on gently describing some of the building blocks of the social web, like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and so on. This would then lead into some of the more tricky stuff like FriendFeed. However, as my posting is somewhat irregular, I have decided to immediately go to some of the more fun stuff. If you think I'm going too fast, let me know and I will fill in some of those intermediate steps (and who knows, I might get to them later on anyway...).
28.10.08
VirtualPresence: FriendFeed - Basics
24.10.08
Graspop 2009 dates announced
Mark your calendars!
- The Black Dahlia Murder
- Amon Amarth
- Slipknot
- Crimson Falls
- Neurosis
- Deathstars
- All Shall Perish
- Anaal Nathrakh
- Saattue
- Aborted
- Cradle Of Filth
16.10.08
VirtualPresence: Do you have that URL in Small?
- TinyURL: This is about the first one I remember seeing online. Basic stuff, convert a long url into a short one. As a bonus, they'll let you choose an extension if you want to (good luck finding something readable that's not yet used).
- icanhaz: A URL shortener based on the lolcats. They also let you suggest an extension yourself.
- bit.ly: A newer URL shortener that took the idea further. If you shorten a URL with bit.ly, you can later on go and see how often it was clicked. They also download the page you referred to and archive it, so you can still see it if it would go down.
14.10.08
Murder Manifest is following you
Two days ago, I noticed a new follower on my Twitter account. It was none other than Dutch death thrash formation, Murder Manifest. It looks like they got their online presence well established through their own website, and Twitter, Last.fm, and YouTube accounts (among a few others). They appear to be a good example of what I try to describe with the VirtualPresence posts.
9.10.08
An automatic lyrics evocifier.
- Would it be possible to build a tool that could take a (first draft) of the lyrics to a song and propose more evocative words, or maybe introduce certain figures of speech?
- Would someone want to use it?
- A thesaurus: I would probably start with this. Easiest way of getting synonyms. I can envision a tool where you paste in your text, it gets analysed and you get a smart ui for displaying the results. Maybe the original text with possible word replacements in a different colour and when you hover over them, you get a pop-up with possible replacement words.
- Smart replacement algorithms: You can't just blindly replace words in a song as the timing of the song needs to be respected. Therefore, you need more or less the same number of syllables when you replace something or you have to replace multiple words. You might need to take phonetics into account as well to make sure replacement words sound "correct" next to the other words.
- Figures of speech: Now we get into more tricky territory. Working figures of speech into lyrics will be hard. Some of the more technical ones (like an alliteration) seem doable, even though you will be working on multiple words at once. But it doesn't take long before you need your tool to be able to understand the meaning of words, which brings us to...
- Semantics: The joy and trouble with English words is that you usually have several synonyms for a word that mean more or less the same, but convey slightly different nuances of that concept. Unfortunately songs can be about anything, which means your tool needs to know about the general meaning of words as well. There isn't one specific domain that you could try to model. You basically have to do them all.
- Automatic translation: There exist a lot of bands whose members do not natively speak English. If they could write in their mother tongue and have tool translate it correctly to English and introduce more descriptive words and figures of speech while all the time maintaining the underlining meaning and atmosphere... Killer feature, I'd say.
8.10.08
Lyrical Analysis: Nocturnal by The Black Dahlia Murder
- A minimalist booklet design: Apart from the front page, the booklet does not contain any artwork or pictures. Each song has its lyrics printed on a separate page in a light font on a dark background. With the lyrics before you and nothing to distract you, your own imagination will draw up visions of what is being sung about. This is a trick that horror writers sometimes use as well. Instead of meticulously describing every physical aspect of a monster, they stay silent on specifics. This way, the reader will imagine the monster as something which is particularly frightening to him personally.
- Free flowing text: The lyrics of a single song are printed as a continuous sentence. There is no punctuation to break up the text. No indentation indicating the start of a chorus. It puts your brain into a higher gear because it is harder to follow the lines. But it also has the side effect of keeping you better focused on what is going. Your mind is less likely to drift away.
- A dark ritual: I read from the lyrics the description of a dark ritual going on: a sacrifice, a forbidden book, the calling upon an unholy master, blotting out the sun, ... Good stuff!!
- Figures of speech: The choice of words used to compose these lyrics was not done haphazardly. Serious effort went into provoking a sense of dread through vocabulary and style.
between the lines of dead language tonguesbefore the dawn our hearts they shall huntthe smell of blood excites the nostrilsat first cut the sanguinary worship of
red spraying punctures a sight so divineclutching her carcass face frozen in time
a distorted dialect for the draining of veins
to the flooding of bedsheets with sick crimson rain
a warped diction of scriptures befouledtraditions steeped within disgraces reviledfather, unholy one, to your nightrealm we bownocturnal majesty, sworn to black we'll always bedamnation's diction, a deadly disclosure our poisons in their goblets drip
How perfectly hideous, so eloquently scribed each scripture so skillfully sick
parchment scabbed over with plasmatic prose, prophesize permanent night
the words of sheer blackness paint ebony my soul and bestow me with infernal might
A warped diction of scriptures befouledtraditions steeped within disgraces reviledFather, unholy one, to your nightrealm we bownocturnal majesty, sworn to black we'll always be
hatred and persistancedestined to seea complete eclipseof that hated sphere the sun
by the light unspokenthis language of brutalityenraptured I have becomeunholy night's arms welcome menocturnal majesty, sworn to black we'll always behatred and persistancedestined to seea complete eclipseof that hated sphere the sun
6.10.08
VirtualPresence: Hashing up some more Twitter
1.10.08
VirtualPresence: Twitter
First of all, I changed the name of this series from "Social Sites for Bands" to "VirtualPresence", while the former was kind of a bland description, the latter has a better ring to it and is shorter to write.
- A_Band: Touring Germany for the time next month, anyone know about a good tourbus company?
- Dafmetal: @A_Band You should have a look at Bunny&Devil-buses.
- Gigs you're going to do or just played.
- Recordings you're doing.
- New merchandise that you're bringing out.
- Post about the equipment you use.
- ...
Decide what your following strategy will be. A Twitter account for a band will mostly be about getting info to some of your most loyal fans. Once you start being followed, there is the temptation to follow those who are following you. But when you follow someone, they'll partly expect you to be interested in what they post, and you might not be able to keep up. If this means that you no longer add people to your follow list, you are essentially breaking up your follower base into two camps. With one side feeling let down and possibly giving you a bad rep. My advice is to decide up front what your following strategy will be and choose:
- Follow no one.
- Follow everyone that follows you.