425 Nanometers

New job

2007-06-15T21:22:00.000-05:00

I broke down and paid some 300 bucks for the A+ certification exams, and the day after I passed them I got a contract position in Nashville for a company I'm not allowed to disclose. You've heard of them, though.

I start Monday. I still haven't quite adjusted to everything, though. After a year of being laid off, watching my unemployment checks dwindle and disappear, freelancing, going into debt, and having to hustle for almost every dollar, it seems almost crazy that I could think of something (certification as an IT technician) and then have it succeed in less than two weeks.

Oh well, I'm not complaining. I can move to a nice place in August and (finally) afford to splurge on some stuff, with enough left over to sack some away for a rainy day. I no longer have to ask my folks for help with bills. I'm pretty much set, even if I don't manage to go contract to full time, because the contract is almost a year and frankly the only reason I took it was because they were first in line. I turned down two other offers that were just as good, and I'm not going to sit still. I'm already looking for a MCSE or vendor neutral networking program. From there it's open source development, preferably AJAX. I'm already dabbling in .NET, but I don't want to be locked into the clutches of the Blue Monster. I guess it's the teenage angst that I haven't quite outgrown. Maybe it's that all the cool kid use open source. Whatever. I just want to make cool things, and tools are tools. I have a long way to go before I even need to worry about it.

About the job: something in me feels like it was too easy. That nothing changed between then and now. How could I not get the time of day from an employer a month ago, and be turning down offers now?

I didn't do anything special other than take a test.

And then I realized that I went from Clarksville to Nashville, and I went from a guy who had a lot of extraneous crap on his resume to a guy who was well qualified. All with a half hour of planning, a week of brushing up, and an afternoon of exams.

So I learned a lesson: you can be doing the right thing and be in the wrong place. You can also be doing the right thing and going about it the wrong way. I just wish it hadn't taken so long to figure that out.

Gnarly.

2007-06-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

We have a new song on our Myspace. Recorded on four track tape as God intended.

The politics of ceaseless old man bitching

2007-06-04T21:35:00.000-05:00

I live in a town with a lot going for it.

We have a huge military base, Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne and more than 30,000 troops. We also have a pretty nice college, Austin Peay State University, with more than 9,000 students. We have a wonderful historic downtown chock full of Victorian architecture. The current Miss America is from here. Clarksville, Tennessee is larger than Berkley, California, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Clearwater, Florida, and is about the same size as New Haven, Connecticut.

You've probably heard of all those places, yet people as close as Memphis (a three hour drive from here) have never heard of Clarksville. We had to wait until last year before we even had a fucking Starbucks, for Christ's sake. Our median income is abysmal, with some jobs getting paid up to $20,000 less annually than their counterparts in Nashville, a 45 minute drive away.

That link above takes you to a story by the Leaf Chronicle, our hometown newspaper of record. I like to rag on them because they read like a newspaper from a town one-third our size, but I have to give them props for attempting to understand the whole Internet thing. They have eight bloggers last time I checked, and they just launched a feature that lets you search through the public records of Clarksville online. They obviously get networked culture, down to the fact that readers can comment in forums on every story. Too bad they still have a paywall around old articles.

Which brings us to my point.

Look at the article referenced above. It has a whole paragraph devoted to saying that managers and IT pros are getting shafted out of tens of thousands of dollars annually compared to their counterparts a county away. You'd expect someone to be angry about this, right? I mean, it hits right in the paycheck, no matter how much the writer tries to bury it in the story.

That story has no comments. Nobody's curious as to why the disparity exists, nor is anyone curious as to the impact on the town's economy and tax base. A lot of people live here and work in Nashville for the higher salaries, but a lot just move to Nashville unless they have something keeping them here. That's revenue and white collar jobs leaving our area, and yet nobody has anything to say. More than that, the story points to a disturbing trend of economic dependance on the military. If Uncle Sam pulls up stakes at some point (and it was a very real possibility in the 90's when I was growing up) the economy will collapse. We'll look a lot like Flint, Michigan, another famous town that's about our size. And still nobody has anything to say.

Compare it to this story, outlining a planning retreat scheduled this weekend for the mayor and city council. It's a $5,000 trip, including the fees for seminars and speakers. Considering Clarksville's annual operating budget is in the tens of millions of dollars, five grand to get a little fresh air and hear some seminars is a drop in the bucket. Amortized over everyone who participated, the cost of the trip wasn't even a week's pay.

This story has loads of comments, all of which are of a style I like to refer to as "old man bitching."

All of them insinuate that this meeting is to raise taxes, ostensibly because of the cost of all these trips.

All of them seem to sound perfectly natural if you imagine an elderly gentleman on his front porch in the middle of a long rant about how stuff costs more than it used to.

And these voices are far from the minority. This town is years behind in infrastructure and planning, but nobody wants to piss on the third rail and try to do things which will improve the town, because everybody just bitches and bitches about how much it will cost.

Take our recent vote on Clarksville Dept. of Electricity's new fiber initiative. This is the most progressive thing this town's seen in 30 years. A community-owned nonprofit broadband ISP using the latest fiber technology is a thing of beauty. Charter Communications, our local cable monopoly, spent untold amounts fighting it using every dirty trick they could, because they knew it spelled the end for them. When you can get fiber optic internet and IPTV for twenty bucks a month, who's going to want cable?

The vote passed three to one. The one is still bitching about how this will raise our taxes (it won't) or that CDE should stick to electricity (fuck you old man, I should have had fiber five years ago) or that nobody will use it. They miss the point that big pipes to the Web are as much a public trust as water or electricity, and the current profit-oriented business model has succeeded in getting premium pay for woefully substandard service. To them it's all an encroachment on whatever crusty misinformed worldview they've managed to develop, and they're going to have to end up paying for it.

I wouldn't worry about it, except this kind of thinking is epidemic, and it has been toxic to our community, our economy, and even our view of our town. All the smart kids leave, and all the jobs are bottom-barrel unless you work on post as a contractor, and even then nobody's getting rich. And instead of investing in ways to maximize our town, our community, our economy, we instead endlessly look for ways to minimize taxes, services, planning, costs. That is how you get Flints instead of Clearwaters.

Oh well. Old men on the front porch eventually forget what they were talking about, and we can go on with what we were doing.

Every rock band

2007-06-02T23:22:00.000-05:00

needs a good album cover. Like this one, for instance.

Of course . . .

2007-06-01T01:11:00.000-05:00

Ten minutes after bitching about how I need a job I stumble across Emma, a wonderful Web 2.0-centered email marketing firm in Nashville, not more than a 45 minute drive from where I live. I wrote them a fawning letter saying that I didn't care if I was mopping the floors as long as I was mopping their floors. They are that cool.

I was almost slackjawed when I read their site. I didn't think anything like that was happening in Nashville. I thought Web 2.0 was something Google handed down from Mountain View, and my job was to sit there like I was Wayne Campbell in front of Madonna and chant "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!" as I bowed before its awesomeness.

They also asked, in their job application, if I had a blog or online profile, so I gave them this URL to check out. If you're reading this, hi guys. Your company rocks, and I stand by my floor mopping statement. Poke around a bit. I usually just talk about music, but I hit quite a few other topics as well. I'd also like to give props to Seth Godin, whose blog mentioned Emma some time ago, and whose post just happened to be in my feed reader when I was cleaning it out.

Back In Black

2007-05-31T20:12:00.001-05:00

Or red, as the case may be. More on that in a bit. Hi folks.

My first bit of news is that Walking Into Cars is going pretty smashingly. We had our first show Tuesday night and a lot of people came out. They all had positive things to say, too. Phillip has joined up permanently, and we've been asked to appear on Local Acoustic Quirks, a podcast produced by Ben Wilson. Ben himself is a pretty prolific songwriter and an all around good guy, and if you get a chance listen to "Naked" on his MySpace. It reminds me of Revolver era Beatles with a twinge of country and western in the verses. Good Stuff!

My second bit of news is that my broke ass needs a steady-paying gig. I've been a bit of a bum this past semester, because between freelancing, my mad eBay hustle, and mortgaging my future vis-a-vis student loans I've managed pretty well. However, I want to take some time off and get some real world experience (not to mention some real world pay) in Web 2.0, as I've been chomping at the bit to apply what I've been feverishly following in my spare time. I spent most of last semester either explaining networked communication (my pet term for Web 2.0) to my professors or (more often) sitting there wishing I could catch up on my RSS feeds while we go over material that seems like it was written in 1993. For all the bitching I hear from various corners about how Big Business doesn't get this whole Web thing, I notice nobody seems to mention how hard of a time universities are having keeping up with it. It's driving me crazy, and I want to pull a Bill Gates or Michael Dell and just do it my damn self.

But I don't have the capital. At this point just paying the bills is a struggle. Anybody out there want to hire an Internet geek? I'll boggle your mind and double your business, or failing that I'll at least make you look cool. Please?

Oh well. Moving onward . . .

My last post of substance had to do with inexplicable and annoying MySpace spam. We've all seen it, and we all hate it. Well, I got an interesting comment on that article by a certain melinda5610ml, whose Blogger profile just happens to be hidden. I wonder why?

She says:

Wonderful photos! I suggest you to check out here. My friend told me he found his love on this site and there are many lovely girls.

So, in summation, a post bitching about spam gets spammed. Oh well. I guess I'm doing OK if I stir up enough traffic to generate spam. :-)

Solar air conditioning

2007-05-07T19:00:00.000-05:00

I've been a bit busy lately, but this is so cool that I have to mention it. There's a company in Plano, TX making solar-powered heating and cooling units.

Why is this awesome? Well, heating and air conditioning are energy hogs. About half of your energy bills go to climate control, so a solar-powered, self contained unit that can heat and cool could conceivably do things such as, I dunno, end global warming and dependance on foreign oil. It also makes having an off-the-grid house more realistic in my neck of the woods, where air conditioning is mandatory several months out of the year.

In conclusion, I want one really bad. I guess I'll have to put it in the wish list. Does Amazon sell air conditioners?

You will see hot beautiful girl! Click Here!

2007-03-30T01:22:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of Copyranter, because the guy's spot on and his color commentary about advertising is hilarious. One of the most entertaining things he talks about is the ads for True, a dating site that like to sell itself with bikini girls and upskirt shots. Real classy outfit, that True.

So, anyway, I go to log into MySpace because my email keeps pestering me that 4 new people want to be my friend. Who doesn't like new friends?

This is what greets me as I sign in to MySpace. Hey, some cute girls like me. I'm seeing someone right now, but who doesn't want to meet some more cute girls? (Platonically. I really like my current girlfriend.)

Here's the first one. Her name is Monique, and she's in a bikini. She wants me to go to her website to see her naked. This is, of course, total spam. Moving on . . .

This is Gloria. She has a picture of her ass in what appears to be some sort of lacy ass-enhancing contraption. She wants me to go to her site, where I can see her naked. Spam, spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam, marvelous spam . . .

This is Lynette. She's nude, somewhere, and I'm supposed to visit her boob emporium for a glimpse of her girly parts arranged in enticing positions for my boner. Yep, more spam.

At this point I am mildly pissed. It would be one thing if I was getting spammed with actual nudity, but this is just annoying. I want to know who is behind all of this. So, I take three completely different profiles, with nothing tying them together except the fact that they're spam for porn sites, and I click on them to see what kind of browser-destroying monstrosity they unleash.

All three, after a redirect, take me to the exact same signup page. Not for a porn site, but for our friends at True.

Good job guys! Not only are you unleashing a (not completely unwelcome) breast assault on me when I go look for new bands to listen to, but you're making fake profiles on MySpace to hawk your dating site. What's sad is that each of these "girls" has at least ten friends. Some poor delusional dude from Michigan was actually hitting on Monique in the comments, which just goes to show the power of boners in obliterating all reason whatsoever from the male brain.

I mentioned this all to Copyranter, and I hope I can hear his take on it. It'll be funny. In the meantime. I'm adding him to my links sidebar.

College students break the law

2007-03-23T00:48:00.000-05:00

And if it isn't hashish or vandalism, its at least piracy.

But one pirate happens to be proud of it, and considers himself on the front line of the growing battle over copyright in the networked age. The question at hand is over Boston University's actions concerning a DMCA notice. I'll let Rich explain it.

A few days ago I went to check my BU webmail and noticed I had received a letter titled “COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: PLEASE READ IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID DISCIPLINARY ACTION”. I didn’t have time to deal with it, closed the window and figured I’d deal with it once spring break was over. When I get back to school, though, I find I can’t log in to my email, can’t look at my financial status, can’t look at my course materials. This makes it essentially impossible to continue as a Boston University student. I went to the IT office to get it sorted out . . . I’m ushered into the messy office of a man with slicked back gray hair, a police plaque on the wall and bottle of Johnny Walker Blue on his desk. There is a ten inch stack of papers with the blue RIAA logo on the top. The man is James H. Stone, Director, Consulting Services, High Technology Crime Investigator, and as he later claims, “DMCA Enforcer.”

Rich is a programming student and Creative Commons/open source/free information advocate, so it's not too surprising that when a course he is taking required proprietary software he pirated it instead of coughing up the cash.

In fact, I'm surprised that there isn't more of a problem with textbook piracy, just because college students are, after all, the demographic most like to steal. There should be a bunch of guys slinking around campus with stacks of photocopied texts at the start of every semester, especially if college students are the pirates that some people think we are. But we all know that $20 Xeroxed textbook doesn't exist. I wonder if anything should be inferred from that? Hrm, we're willing to pay extortion rates on textbooks, but we are killing the music industry. Something doesn't jive here.

Rich maintains his position is one of civil disobedience, and I empathize. In a world where lots of money is sunk into equating downloading MP3s with robbing banks (that's seriously in the comments section of Rich's blog entry, by the way) a student being unrepentant about downloading a personal copy of software his university has already paid for is met with a crowd of detractors calling him a thief and accusing him of stealing food out of software developers' mouths. I wonder if any of them read enough of his blog to realize that he's a developer and he knows exactly what's up.

I left a long, overly detailed comment about the ins and outs of copyright law (and why infringement and stealing are two very different things) and offered my support. He's pretty much getting a slap on the wrist, but his experience was noteworthy enough to get a mention on Boing Boing, which is blogging's version of a story on the front page of the New York Times.

Rich, just use open source. You don't have to deal with licenses and nobody will ever sue you for it. But Keep Fighting The Good Fight.

A Meeting with Jim Stone, DMCA Enforcer @ The New Freedom

Design geek-out

2007-03-22T23:58:00.000-05:00

It's a chair that turns into a roadie case when nobody's sitting in it. From Treehugger, an environmental/sustainability blog.

The Auburn University Rural Studio is what would happen if Frank Lloyd Wright was reincarnated as a Southerner. I like all of their work.

Rocio Romero's LV line of prefab housing. Why buy a $100k tract home in a subdivision (if such a thing exists anymore, more like $150k and where I am is cheap) when you can get something like this for the same money?

Blogs do not write themselves

2007-03-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

Or do they?

A bit of background: I actually started this blog as part of a project on blogging I did for my Mass Communication class. I'm currently in college, majoring in Communications with an emphasis in Media Technologies. Damned if I know what Media Technologies is, but the course sequence lets me play with radio, television, theatre, interactive media, and print design, which is just the thing for a multimedia artist. Anyway, one of the key points of the presentation was establishing that if you could type, you could blog. Its that simple. To prove my point I took an afternoon, made a Blogger account, and wrote some posts. I took a template, modified it in a quick and dirty fashion to make it suit my needs, and had a pretty slick blog before dinner. I could finally subject the reader to my verbose profundity. Or they could say I was a wordy jackass. Whatever. They could read what I wrote, and that was the main point.

"But John, " you say, "you're a nerd. You know a bunch of stuff about the Internet and didn't lose your virginity until you were 20. You still play 8 bit Nintendo for fuck's sake. What if the rest of us want to say something?"

Well, for those of you who don't want to write 500 words every day or tweak arcane DHTML, there's Tumblr. Lifehacker covers how to use Tumblr pretty well, so I'll just hit the high points. Basically, its blogging stripped down to its absolute core. You can post a picture, a video, a quote, a conversation, or a link. So if you have something to share you can put it up for the world to view, whether its a neat new site or a funny clip from the YouTubes. Pretty cool.

Long term goals

2007-03-17T02:38:00.000-05:00

I'm drinking beer late on Friday night when I start thinking about what I'd like to do in the near future. This leads to three ideas, off the top of my head.

1. Attend SXSW next year. I have no excuse not to go if I plan this far ahead. The more I read about it, the more I'm convinced South by Southwest is like a Mardi Gras for the Internet that somehow magically transforms to Coachella with barbecue instead of a massive hangover on Ash Wednesday. Bonnaroo has smelly hippies and Tool, while SXSW has giftbags by David Byrne and hand-stitched requests to not sniff coke. I think SXSW is by far the better festival to save up for. Plus, everybody needs an excuse to go to Austin.

2. Play a gig with Walking Into Cars sometime in May. We're still trying to find a suitable replacement for our whiny, overly serious, and immature lead singer, who, despite our best efforts, drug us toward sucking at every possible opportunity due to the sheer force of his terrible, arbitrary, and capricious taste in music. I think we can make something happen now that he's not around to fight us on everything, and a friend of mine wants to jam with us. He's a good entertainer, and I play with him sometimes at open mics and such. You can actually watch Phillip at one of my favorite bars here, although the sound quality isn't that great.

3. I've been interested in HTML since high school, but lately I've gotten into web development thanks to Microsoft's Beginning Developer Learning Center. There's a big difference between making a good looking static Web page and making even a simple dynamic page (this blog is dynamic but Blogger does all the heavy lifting) and I see money to be made if I can acquire the skillset to make a Flickr or a Digg.

Please . . .

2007-03-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

forgive the static.

Not static as in noise, but static as in I haven't written anything for you in a while, so nothing's changed.

Static, as opposed to dynamic.

I've been working on some CSS/HTML to move the blog from "cleanly designed" to "ass-kickingly designed." I'm a design junky. I gibber and drool at Dwell. I've always used Apple hardware when I've had the choice. I have an antiquated TV just for the wood paneling and the zinc-colored knobs. Since this blog is a reflection of me in the digital sense, I'm obsessing over the web equivalents of bent plywood and stainless steel.

I probably should be focusing on content, since I've seen some ugly-ass pages do really well, but this is Notes from the Internet Generation, not Notes from the Myspace Generation. I have a little pride.

Speaking of Notes from the Myspace Generation, has anyone heard of Ultragrrrl? I found her thru Idolator, Gawker Media's music blog. (I like Idolator so much that it's in my links bar. If you are a music snob it's a good read.) Apparently, the girl has had her hands in a lot of college rock pies. Here's what the Village Voice had to say:

Lewitinn first got national attention in 2003 via her blog, Sarah's So Boring Ever Since She Stopped Drinking (now located at ultragrrrl.com). Then came Making Out With Ultragrrrl, her minuscule but influential column in Spin that ran from 2003 to 2004. She's won Paper magazine's People's Choice award for Best Party and Best DJ (sharing the latter honor with her DJ partner, Karen Plus One) two years running, and in 2005 wrote The Pocket DJ, a book of playlists for different genres, moods, and occasions. It sold 38,000 copies—successful enough that she's signed to do a second book, The Pocket Karaoke. She's working with a screenwriter on a movie script partially based on her life. Her growing profile nabbed her a recent write-up in Vanity Fair (written by her good friend and former Spin mentor Marc Spitz, which spurred a bit of controversy) and more media attention than any other a&r rep in town when she started Stolen Transmission, a subsidiary of the Island/Def Jam label empire. But her main claim to fame is the early discovery of New Jersey goth punkers My Chemical Romance—a band she briefly managed—and her similarly prescient championing of Las Vegas dance-rock sensations the Killers. She also provided early support for such bands as Muse, Franz Ferdinand, Fall Out Boy, and Stellastarr(whom she also briefly managed). She has shown an unsettling ability to call the next big thing—a soothsayer for teenage girls, middle-American music fans, and even hipsters who would like to think they know better.

And here's what I posted in the comments section of the article:

Let me state, for the record, that I'm a kid from Nashville and my tastes are more Uncle Tupelo than the Killers. I'm pretty eclectic, though, and I'm no redneck.

Let me also state that Sarah is good looking, quite disarming, highly intelligent, and articulate without being self-conscious. It's easy to see how she got where she is.

But Sarah suffers from Myspace Syndrome. Or, as famed Microsoft nerd Robert Scoble puts it, she is in an echo chamber. She has her ear to the ground, sure, but "buzz" is a very incestuous thing. All of her pet projects are the sort of "alternative" MTV2-friendly bands that we've been inundated with since everybody took a second to think about Korn and said in unison "This nu-metal shit sucks."

Of course these bands generated buzz. They sound cool, but sounding cool is a quite different thing than sounding good.

Sounding "cool" is about aping post-punk and hoping kids don't realize that Franz Ferdinand is Gang of Four run thru Pro Tools. It's about having just edgy enough of a sound so that you can get shelf space in Hot Topic, but not enough to alienate the 14 year old girls who spend their days on Livejournal slavishly posting back and forth. Its about stylization over musical substance. It's about a sound that's "different" but still homogenized.

Sounding cool is what Sarah is good at, but what about sounding interesting? Or, heaven forbid, finding sounds outside this "cool" orthodoxy? Taking risks in order to bring forward performers who generate buzz based on the power of their music rather than the power of their image, or (more truthfully) the power of their image to give their listeners a sense of elitism?

Don't get me wrong; I'm a snob. One of the joys of living in flyover country is getting to look at people like they're dumb when you ask why they've never heard of Pavement. (Insert any well-celebrated indie act for Pavement. The gag still works.) But Sarah, dear, elitism is the double-edged sword that makes Ultragrrrl possible and also makes her a pretty target for all that vitriol. (If there's anything snobs love to do, it's hating.) It might even be her undoing. The joy of that elitism, however, is that right now you've got more mindshare than Jay-Z. You're the cover story in the Village Voice, for fuck's sake. Why sit at the right hand of a guy whose greatest artistic triumph was getting ripped off by Danger Mouse? That seems awfully stifling for someone who prides her label on being an incubator for the next big thing. Break out of that tiny box and see what happens.

I hope I wasn't too mean, because she obviously cares about this music. Reading her blog convinced me of that. However (and this is a big however) I can't stand to listen to half of it, and I'm a pretty with-it guy. I may be geographically disadvantaged, and I may not listen to what the cool kids are on this week, but damn. I mean, damn.

I think I've made my point.

The long plastic hallway

2007-02-27T18:10:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a lot about DRM lately, and it has made me think about the music business more than I would like.

Here are some places where I'm getting hung up.

1. I am a drummer, and I've been in and out of bands since I was 17. One of the guys I play with, a bassist I've known since middle school, is really gung-ho about being a musician. He wants to be able to quit his job, pack up his kids, move to a town with a lot of studios, and play music for a living. He asked the rest of the band once if we wanted to be rock stars, and everybody else said something to the effect of "oh hell yes." I said no. I don't want to be a rock star. Rock stars are boring, predictable anachronisms, a sweaty amalgamation of strippers, substance abuse, and bullshit so thick it squishes when they walk. They are dissected, poked, prodded, glossed over and dumbed down; their sound, their look, and their identity tweaked by market analysis, as if they were tennis shoes or blue jeans. They are an artifact from the times where it took the machinery of a large corporation to make compelling records. Now all you need is music worth listening to and a MySpace account. Pro Tools will do the rest.

2. Emusic is a shining example of that trend. Why even bother with albums from enormous, faceless conglomerates, whose catalogs are picked by the marketing department, whose music is locked down by DRM in order to ensure the broadest possible revenue streams, when you can just get MP3 files that work on everything imaginable? Sure, they may not have that new Justin Timberlake CD, but you can get that anywhere. Which leads to . . .

3. Today, I read "Courtney Love Does The Math" for the first time. Yes, I know I live under a rock. Yes, I know it's 7 years old. It's still relevant, as long as you replace "Napster" with "BitTorrent." Anyway, she said something that go me thinking.

Record companies don't understand the intimacy between artists and their fans. They put records on the radio and buy some advertising and hope for the best. Digital distribution gives everyone worldwide, instant access to music.

And filters are replacing gatekeepers. In a world where we can get anything we want, whenever we want it, how does a company create value? By filtering. In a world without friction, the only friction people value is editing. A filter is valuable when it understands the needs of both artists and the public. New companies should be conduits between musicians and their fans.

The Nashville market has over 40 FM stations, and I listen to only one of them: WRVU. Why do I listen to WRVU? Well, WRVU is a college station run by Vanderbilt University, so right away it has the dual advantages of being non-commercial and having to serve a diverse, discerning community. That's not why I listen, though. Hell, NPR has the same advantages. I listen because every song that goes on the air was handpicked by a DJ who happens to be playing the song because he or she likes it and wants to share it with other people. Couple this with the ~~elitism and pretense~~ eclectic taste of your usual college DJ and the fact that the people making the radio are the same type of people that I hang out with, and the experience becomes a powerful filter in which all kinds of music is dug out of obscurity by its devoted fans and shared in a way that make me feel like we're digging through MP3s over beers on Saturday night.

Commercial radio could be like this. It should be like this. But, alas, Clear Channel and its ilk have so homogenized the airwaves in their scramble to maximize profit that people are paying monthly fees and buying expensive equipment just to get radio that doesn't suck. If you had said in 1992 that in fifteen years people would be paying for satellite radio just so they didn't have to listen to their hometown stations, you would have been laughed out of the room. The problem is compounded by payola, in which record companies get the same things played over and over again, which leads to those songs getting higher chart position, which leads to them getting played more, which leads to more song that sound similar, etc. until it becomes an narrowly incestuous loop. The marketing tail is wagging the music dog at the exact same moment technologies emerge to offer choices so broad even those of us who grew up with them are baffled.

So, what happens when your business plan narrows at the exact same time your audience becomes accustomed to unimagined width? I can't imagine it bodes well.

Humble beginnings

2007-02-26T12:45:00.001-06:00

All my life, I've noticed that I was a little bit different.

I used to shrug my shoulders at it. Most of us have at least seen an episode of Freaks and Geeks, and some of us got hit over the head with enough peer pressure to think they were members of one of those two groups (he raised his hand cringingly) or at least enough to feel a bit odd and out of place.

Luckily, as a child of the 90's, I had a pretty good coping mechanism. In third grade, my father brought home a 386 PC. In fifth grade, my teacher made me finish assignments in record time by promising I could play with the first Power Mac. (With video-in and video-out, so I could make movies. Movies! Imagine a ten year old being given something that can make a movie. I was enthralled.)

I discovered the Internet in 7th grade with an AOL account my mother had gotten. Being a 7th grade boy it took about 30 minutes until I was flirting with a girl in Long Beach. From a farm in Tennessee no less, keeping in mind that before this I had asked one girl out ever, and the rejection was soul-crushing in its vehemence.

However, on the Internet I wasn't a bespectacled geek. I wasn't dressed in button down shirts, shirts that earned me constant derision from the guys wearing faux skater T's. (Until I got a few T's of my own, at which point they made fun of me for wearing them. 7th grade sucks.) Online I was the guy who wondered how he was going to afford Weezer tickets. I was the guy whose ska band couldn't find a drummer until he gave up and tried to learn drums. I was the guy who liked Shakespeare but hated English class because of my teacher's hideous neckbeard. I kicked ass on the Internet. Of course, my mother had to come home and find me talking to (gasp!) strangers, and a huge bucket of cold water got dumped on all that enthusiasm.

If I had to put my finger on where all this enthusiasm came from, I'd put it like this.

On the Internet, I wasn't so weird.

Not because I was any different, but rather because on the Internet I could connect with people who were like me. Who hadn't been homogenized by brow-beating or shame or fear or any of the other myriad reasons kids tend to hide who they are in a desperate quest for acceptance, but rather had found a place where being who they were was a bonus. Instead of fitting in, putting ourselves in a mold shaped by others, we were fitting out, pushing out to find those we clicked with.

My mother, on the other hand, saw how I was different than the kids I went to school with and came to a more metaphysical conclusion. She said that I am an "indigo child," a New Age concept describing young people with special traits. Some of the more loopy ones include such things as telepathy, clairvoyance, and other such paranormal abilities, but the meat and potato descriptions are intriguing.

Take this description from a Wikipedia article on indigo children:

* They come into the world with a feeling of royalty (and often act like it).
* They have a feeling of "deserving to be here," and are surprised when others do not share that.
* Self-worth is not a big issue; they often tell the parents "who they are."
* They have difficulty with absolute authority (authority without explanation or choice).
* They simply will not do certain things; for example, waiting in line is difficult for them.
* They get frustrated with systems that are ritually oriented and do not require creative thought.
* They often see better ways of doing things, both at home and in school, which makes them seem like "system busters" (non-conforming to any system).
* They seem antisocial unless they are with their own kind. If there are no others of like consciousness around them, they often turn inward, feeling like no other human understands them. School is often extremely difficult for them socially.
* They will not respond to "guilt" discipline ("Wait till your father gets home and finds out what you did").
* They are not shy in letting it be known what they need.

Now do any of those seem familiar? The Cluetrain Manefesto talks about how hyperlinking, the structural component that the World Wide Web is based upon, subverts hierarchy in favor of merit. It talks about how the Internet takes the ossified and the pompous and instantly deconstructs and deflates them. It talks about how people are broadcasting their hopes and desires to entire networks, and how it's as easy as typing them out. It talks about how speaking in a human voice, having confidence in that voice and being true to it, will be the differentiator between success and failure. Those are trends seen almost ten years ago, and such developments as blogging and wikis are making them more and more obvious.

I think the reason that the New Age spirit guide om-shanti type folk are seeing these kids, in numbers that support publishing books and taking at least financial risks on identifying them, is that these people don't have a lot of friction when it comes to new ideas. They're willing to accept anything that they find plausible, and some of them don't find much that's implausible.

But I don't think metaphysics is behind this one.

From the same Wikipedia article:

Some critics feel that it is possible to use the traits assigned to Indigo children as an observation of social trends, rather than as a signifier of a new race or form of consciousness.

I think what they're finding is the first hyperlinked, Web-enabled, standards-compliant crop of Internet kids. Impatient, raised in a world where anything is possible, constantly connected to the like-minded, and I was part of the first wave. I have yet to see my 25th birthday, and the bunch behind me? Well, if what I'm seeing is any indication the change is exponential. The curve shoots off the charts into territory unknown. If you're having trouble now, with people who are just now discovering what can happen after ten years with an infinite toolbox, you're going to have your hands full with kids who have never lived in a world without the Internet.

Indigo (or spectral indigo) is the color on the spectrum between 440 and 420 nanometres in wavelength, placing it between blue and violet.

So, this is my new blog. 425 nanometers, or 425nm for short, in which I finally can articulate and describe what has been happening and, hopefully, what is to come. I have a lot of people to thank for giving me the tools I needed to understand what is so powerful about the thing I have used since childhood, but two stand out. First mention goes to GapingVoid, where Hugh threw out a career in advertising for the "Global Microbrand" powered by the Internet. Not in a showy, Flash-animated, bread and circus sort of way, but rather by leveraging the relationships and transparency that the Internet makes possible to do business in new, interesting, and compelling ways. The second is The Cluetrain Manefesto, which will probably go down in history as the most future-proof book on the Internet ever written. Seven years is enough time for entire companies to rise and fall in the Internet era, but this book is just as relevant as it was in 2000.

Stick around. Things will get interesting.