Rival Schools are back.

It’s so good when you find out one of your fave high-school bands have reformed and are hitting your shores.  These guys only released one album but were a stunning post-hardcore band with one of the best bands names going around.

 

Check the vid.

New Media Design – Obama and Syn stylez

So tommorow I head off to a weekend in lovely Healesville for SYN FM’s Strategic Planning weekend.

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I’m pretty goddamned excited because I haven’t been to anything conference-like and had much to say. Usually, like when I went to X-Media Lab ‘08 last year, I listen to smarter people with jobs speak and then wander around awkwardly during ‘networking time’ eating stacks of refreshments and desperately hoping that no-one picks me out as the smelly, unwashed student amongst the mass of new media professionals. But strategic planning should be great, there’s heaps to talk about and especially as I think we’ve kinda dropped the 8-ball (online style), it’d be great to try and get it kickstarted again.  

And thankfully the night before I ran into this post by Sacha Chua. I have no idea how Ms. Chua made it onto my RSS feed. She may have snuck in one night while I was searching YouTube for Cornish cheese rolling events but in any case she’s one super person. The type of person who has goals and plans and lists of things to do and people to meet. To someone who considers not burning his cheese on toast for breakfast as some sort of amazing achievement (hint: that someone is me), lists like this leave me going ‘eeep’.  

But apart from having Drupal skillz and doing a thousand things she also has awesome posts and has led me to the awesome analysis of Obama’s website. And judging that SYN’s online presence is something which is never far from my mind, hearing how the President-elect’s team developed communities, even if it is third hand, is damn exciting.

And it was this quote which helped put fire in my belly (figuratively speaking, I wasn’t drinking gallons of scotch at the time or petrol and then sending a lighted match down my gullet afterwards).

My key take-away from the talk was that a strong and persistent design team, backed by analytics to support decision-making, can make such a difference in the overall experience.

Scott showed us what the campaign webpage looked like before he came on board. It was not a horribly designed webpage (no blinking text, no marquees), but there were numerous typefaces and colors, and every department in the campaign office seemed to want a presence on the first screen of the page.

With some strong-arming, they settled on one palette and focused on the user experience, streamlining it to make it easier for people to get to where they want to go. That meant moving links down or into the site. It wasn’t easy for people to accept the necessary changes. Many groups were worried that if their advertisement or link wasn’t “above the fold”–visible in the first screen without scrolling–then their content might not get viewed. By testing different versions of the site with randomly-selected users (A/B testing), the design team got the hard numbers they needed to make these changes.

Awesome. While I don’t think SYN FM’s online future in 2009 will be as rigourous. Community stations generally don’t have the ‘hard numbers’ or thousand man strong new media teams of future U.S presidents. But it’s always handy to take away something from a successful campaign and streamlining is something I can definitely use. 

And hey if that fails I can always yell ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ a lot and work on my presidential profile and hope that will fill time during strat planning. 

fingers crossed.

Restart

 

*Pre-Post Warning: I’m writing this after an awesome few days down in Rye.  So therefore I’m tired, full of fish and chips, beer, books and reminiscing of swimming or painting. So I hereby stick on this post a ‘ramble’ warning of four.

After much analysis and stop-starting, I’ve decided to resuscitate this blog from internet oblivion. It spend a good six months as a research blog and I kind of figured once I finished my thesis my need for a blog dedicated to new media and the netz would die out. And for a while there it did and I started up another blog here. It’s got posts about Meredith and Robert Doyle. Very Topical. I recommend it.  But it’s dead now.

*minute’s silence*

 However I decided to return for a number of reasons.

 

1. I’m online manager at Syn FM now so instead of leaving my RSS feeds filled with new media/journalism posts for dead I’ve discovered that I’m still very much in the thick of researching and reading around the same area.
2. This has been the longest blog I’ve ever maintained. Ever.
3. The name Garage Networks is just too goddamned good.

 So in short I’d like to say to Garage Networks…

 The Velvet Underground – I’m Sticking With You

 

 Hah. How trite. So yeah I’ll write soon but at the moment I have to deal with horrendous sunburn peel (argh!), a big list of things to do (namely write, write and write again) and a half drank cup of green tea (we’ve ran out of milk).

Peace.  

The ‘feel-good’ story.

Blaregh. It’s 5am and I’m awake. It’s been a hectic few weeks with a bunch of rehearsals, gigs and recordings with various bands and half started thesis chapters and temp work which is why I’ve been not sleeping and running around in crazy circles instead. But one good thing about this lack of sleep is that I’ve been able to completely pwn my rss reader and catch up on a bunch of awesome articles which I haven’t had the time or energy to read lately.

The Future of Media conference was on in Sydney recently and there has been some great discussion about the difference between bloggers and journalists. One thing which really struck me about the difference between the two was coming across this blog. Olive was the world’s oldest blogger at 109 years old, and although I’ve only just started reading it, it’s an amazing chronicle of a woman’s life, of Australia’s history and a brilliant way to create a memoir. It me thinking that if the MSM wanted to do a story on Olive, she  would have got no more than three minutes at the end of the weather, or if she was lucky, one substantial article or an Australian Story piece. However, instead for a year she was able to tell her own story and connect with people around the world and do so much more through this new medium than was ever possible through old media channels.

Part of the discussion around FOM ‘08 and on this podcast is about the authenticity of blogs compared to trad. journalism. In terms of story telling, i don’t see Olive’s blog as being any less ‘authentic’ for being on a new media platform as opposed to having a half hour doco done on her life on ABC. The Cranky Geek’s podcast above does a wonderful semantic dissection of these words which really highlights the similarities between these two platforms. A journalist and a blogger are simlpy people who journal or write a log of the day. Both stem from that same format of diary writing, where either personally or on behalf of others, we look back at the day gone past and reflect on what’s happened and where we are going. It’s simply the production styles and formats which have distinguished for so long what is essentially the same function.

Seven + 1?

So I completely forgot my complete infatuation with MGMT – Time to Pretend. What a great song about nihilistic, life-avoidance scenester lives.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.

Hooray for beefy synth chords which pile up on each other like a drunken game of ’stacks-on’, a great hook which sounds like the smallest casio you can find screaming above an electronic choir and the best video clip i’ve seen in ages.

Seven Songs

It hasn’t been a busy month, just one of those months where copyright pales into significance compared to some massive life issues. Oh as well as being in bands, doing radio and working my guts off. Hence the lack of postings, but in any case I’ve managed to bash out a rough first chapter and I’m currently avoiding reading Senate reports, so I must be doing something right (?!?).

Thanks to (con)temporary:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

The Whitlams – Melbourne

Despite their over-wrought production and attempts at epic balladry, I am a Whitlams fan – mainly because of their over-wrought production. However, I’ve always hated this naff, trite attempt at setting my fine city towards some sort of musical accompianment, considering what The Whitlams have done previously, Melbourne pales in comparison to sterling efforts like Royal in the Afternoon. The worst offense in this song is the bridge, where a sachharine keyboard sits under some trite lyrics:

If I had three lives

I’d marry her in two

I’m dreaming of a time

That we sit when the music stops.

Then why did I get goosebumps when listening this song the other day? Because immediately following this bridge comes forth a verse which highlights Tim Freedman’s skilfull attempt at painting wonderful character sketches.

She has an aversion to conviction

She’s more confused than ever

Won’t pay her fines and wonders when the cops will get her

She calls her dog the bear and walks me with him to the corner in her pajamas

What a great summary of a person in a verse and I love that crapness and brilliance can be in such close proximity in the one song.

P.J Harvey – The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore

I miss the 90s and there’s no-one who can encapuslate this era better than P.J Harvey. The song is a wonderful bookend to a decade which held festivals, moshing and CDs up like demi-gods.  I’m tempted to simply dump the entire song in here but i’ll be satisfied with half.

Speak to me of heroin and speed
Of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed
Speak to me the language of love
The language of violence, the language of the heart
This isn’t the first time I’ve asked for money or love
Heaven and earth don’t ever mean enough
Speak to me of heroin and speed
Just give me something I can believe

The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
Too many people out of love
The whores hustler and the hustlers whore
This city’s ripped right to the core

What desperation, what imagery and what a wonderful lyrical connection to the album title Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. This is the guts of life. With a scungy guitar behind P.J’s voice giving it added impetus and authenticity by the time P.J starts her falsetto yelps at the end of the song, you’ve already ran a street scene in your head and seen the worst a city has to offer.

Joanna Newsom  -Peach, Plum, Pear

I’ve actually listening to Ms. Newsom non-stop but because I’ve got this song on two different albums, this one has stuck. It’s a bit more brittle than her other work, a bit more sad and contradictory and it’s got a certain depth of melancholy playfulness which goes deeper than any of her other work.  You can feel a scene leap out of her harp and on to the page of a children’s book but much like the Brother’s Grimm there’s adult seriousness here. The choral final lines of

Peach, plum, pear

Peach, plum

are a wonderful simplistic ending to such a complex song with it’s jarring bass and vocals which jump here, there and everywhere.

And we were galloping manic
To the mouth of the source
We were swallowing panic
In the face of it’s force

There’s something more here, which makes this such a great song.

James Brown – Sex Machine Pt. 1 and 2

I don’t really need to explain anything here but it’s simply the bravado, arrogance and the groove of James Brown. The horribly long, contrived and awesome leap to the bridge. The self-referential patter mid-song. And the groove? Again. Wow.

Against Me! – These Anarcho Punks are Mysterious

This song has aged for me immensley over the course of the year mainly because I’ve listened to it heaps, but there’s certain parts where it simply lifts. What makes this song special is that it doesn’t need production wank or driving drums to make the song lift. Regardless of the setting – acoustic, live, record – it simply does of it’s own accord because it’s one of Against Me!’s best songs. Especially when placed against the endearing but occasionally jarring Reinventing Axl Rose, this song stands superior.

Let’s try to keep
As much emotion out of this
As possible.
Let’s try not to remember any names.

All of a sudden,
People start talking about guns,
Talking like they’re going to war
‘Cause they found something to die for.

If you ever need a case against political aggression it’s these two lines. They should be remembered.

Feist – I Feel it All

Give me three simple chords, distorted to start a song and give me a groove which is undeniable to follow it up. There’s the voice with the brief whispers behind it, the descent into the chorus, the return to the theme and the high piano notes balancing against the rhythm section and Feist’s playful vocals throughout turning a simple song into an restrained exercise into space and vocal sound.

Kick drum on the bass drum floor

Good line. Don’t know why.

Mates of State – The Re-Arranger

This is an amazing song off an average album but it does what Mates of State do well. The syncopated organ bass, the vocal histrionics which fly across the song like soaring angels and the layered harmonies create a building base as the song continues. What I love about these guys is that they never settle for a simple pop song. At 2.30 the song explodes. A quiet re-arrange leaps into hundredstrongchoir territory with a thousand voices and a kick drum which tears through the centre. Then they bring it back with one of their classic restrained bridges before slowly building back up towards an elongated end which simply re-inforces what they’ve been doing amazingly all through this song. Harmonies, syncopation, beat and vocal scaling on a massive scale. Oh and I forgot the speedy start and brass intro which is in complete contradiction to the drawn out end and they manage to get there somehow. I don’t know how.

I was searching for my seventh song but I can’t believe I forgot this one. Amazing. Amazing.

cbf passing it on, I don’t think I actually know people in my blogroll apart from LF. LOLZ.

too much info

I could be wrong, though, as I’m not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, Harper’s, TLS, the New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I’m excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I’m all for cultural gatekeepers because there’s way more out there than I have time to read and it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

From Death of Criticism – salon.com

This is a great article about the death of serious literary criticism in newspapers by at the moment and the current trend towards democratisation thanks to amazon etc. It’s not at all ideological and provides a balanced look at the effect the Internet is having on declining newspaper purchases.

That being said, that phrase really stood out for me because it’s one which heaps of people parrot incessantly without much cause for thought. It’s the classic, ‘the Internet’s has way too much information OMG I can’t keep up!!!!’ argument and after much thought I don’t think it holds up.

It’s true that the internet has the potential to hold an infinite amount of information, that’s why it’s more beneficial for knowledge storing than a bookstore or a library, there’s no actual physical restrictions. However what phrases like this seem to ignore is the awesome searchability of the Internet.

…it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

This is a phrase which is becoming increasingly worn out. Amazon has an amazing recommendations system, it’s only recently that we’ve had a search engine like Google, with an algorithm so awesome and powerful that they have to feed it four times daily so it doesn’t turn loose and destroy the world, and we’re currently in the midst of a meta-revolution where everything can be tagged, ranked and filtered a thousand times over to serve anybody’s searching purposes.

This ‘too much information’ argument stopped holding weight for me when I went second hand book shopping yesterday. It was a sizable store in Carlton and there were two levels packed to the roof with books. My first thought? I’m never going to get through all this. Apart from the vague categories which books had been lumped in together, there was no guide as to which books were good, which were horrible, which classics were good classics for people like me who enjoyed Oscar Wilde but hated anything by the Bronte sisters. In actual fact, in this bookstore there was too much information and no way to sort it! I still enjoyed getting lost in a bookstore for two hours, it was awesome. But it destroyed the oft repeated fiction that somehow information was easier to find offline. If anything the better search techniques available online have just augmented the information we previously had access too.

Sure we might not read it all, but I think if we’re talking about cultural gatekeepers, I’d trust amazon after using it for a year just as much as Peter Craven.

This guy explains this much better in his book, everything is miscellaneous.

Internet, tech-determinists and copyright.

Also I think it’s important to remove web 2.0 from this discussion. Or at least I want to. To me it seems like a catch-phrase which may die in a few years and is more of a marketing concept than a valid term which can be used in academic discourse. Of course now I need to find something to replace it.

Furthermore I think it’s good to separate that term from the issues at stake. As shown in my e-book post, these are issues which are having an effect. Those problems are more vexing when considering libraries are buying more e-books in place of physical objects in their collection. Sure it’s cool if it works and more students will get access to knowledge but in situations like this one, it’s a horrible idea.

One shouldn’t bunch up advocates like Lessig, Litman and others in the tech determinist bundle. If anything it’s more tech determinist to use technology to lock down your work and not trusting people. I’d argue the copy-left crowd are way more pro-culture and pro-people than beady eyed, knowledge hoarding bastards who try and time your reading habits to the second and then ask if you’d like to continue reading.

It’s ridiculous I can write on my blog but not my thesis. ARGH.

E-book woes #2

Apparently my browsing timehas expired. WTF?! Could you imagine if a book told you that? Is this not insane?

Why copyright must be fixed. E-Book troubles.

I can’t actually write. I’ve discovered this after starting my first chapter four times. I have nothing else to do today but write and I can’t actually do that and it’s kind of depressing. I have a concept and have fleshed out a chapter but when you can’t put ideas down on paper your past few years of education feel like an extravagant waste. I’ve read so much on this topic I’ve reached breaking point and need to put something down on paper but I can’t so I’m at this massive impasse. Adding to that I’ve just been on an awesome trip to brisbane so there’s no reason why I can’t just get started. Shit.

So to make myself feel kind of productive I checked the Library catalogue. My hold was cancelled. Shit. So I checked if the book was in. It was out. Shit. So I access the electronic book which has been so lovingly paid for by Swinburne Library for poor chumps like me who have their hold cancelled and their book taken out by someone else and attempt to print out a chapter.

Me: *Tries to print out a chapter*

E-book: SOOZZZZ!!! U CAN ONLY PRINTZ OUT 6 PAGES ROFLOLZORZ!!!111!

Me: Uhhh…but I haven’t accessed this book before.

E-Book: SOOOZZZZ SIX PAGES ONLY PRINT LOLLLL!!!!!111!

Me: Fuck. I haven’t accessed this book before and I just want to learn. I mean I’ve technically already paid for this book with my university fees and in any case all I want to do is read it on a couch like if I borrowed a book from a library. It’s not like I’m going to be making counterfeit copies of Adorno’s The Culture Industry.

So I call up the Library and the response? You should just read it online.

It’s not the freakin’ point. This is what it’s all about when people talk about architectures of control. I love authors and creators and I think they are all rad and should get lots of money and high fives and maybe a few backslaps. I don’t want to rip them off. I went to a movie two weeks ago. I paid full price. But shit, I’m a student who’s paid for a book I should be able to access it in any format I choose. And in any case I should be treated like a student and not like a potential pirate or thief.

The e-book is a ugly piece of technology which locks down the most free of all technologies – the book. I love books. I have a bookcase covering one wall in my room filled with books. Some are bought new, some bought second hand, some borrowed *cough* stolen from friends and some handed down. But the point is these were transactions we were free to make, because copyright law doesn’t treat these transactions as theft or a loss of income for the copyright owner but as first-sale rights which are due to any normal human person. On the e-book however you aren’t even allowed the privilege of transferring the format in which you view a work. And that’s transferring a format not blindy counterfieting.

And don’t talk to me about photocopy rights of only allowing 10% of a work copied. That rule is enforced in society without photocopies digitally scanning every book and shutting down after 10% has been copied or photocopy police standing next to every university photocopier. Why? Because a) that would hinder the flow of information b) it’s not reasonable. Instead we rely on human respect. In fact I’ve never copied more than a chapter of a book and that’s all i wanted to do. But the e-book wouldn’t let me.