#91 Fun with Photos

Pop Art Me from fotoflexer (left) and PopArt Me from befunky. Generally, Befunky gives you a lot more control over the effects than fotoflexer and results seem cleaner somehow.
Though for ease of use fotoflexer is better. I really like the solid colors of befunky's Pop Art, but the grainy/gritty look of fotoflexer is probably closer to Warhol's silkscreens.

The left is me driving in the Le Mans 24-Hour Endurance Race fifty years before I was born. Probably my proudest achievement.

#90 You Ought to be in Pictures

The features that are most important to me are ease of use and some kind of integrated photo editor like flickr has with picnik. I see that photobucket has a photo editing mobile app which sounds very cool. That would be something I would use.

Flickr seems to have adequate privacy protection and enough options that you can protect what you want to protect. I tend not to put pix on any site that I think shouldn't be shared with everybody. I don't take enough pics or keep them long enough to have much of a problem storing them on my home pc or cds.

Flickr's creative commons is what keeps me coming back to it. I routinely troll it for my hcpl blog posts. I don't bother with anything beyond the attribution license and have never been disappointed by the selection.

#89 You Oughta Be In Pictures

Of the features available, cropping and resizing are the ones I find most useful for what I do, but picnik’s color and exposure editing features are pretty handy.You can make subtle adjustments.

Of the three, Photoshop is probably better for the professional. Adobe doesn’t even try to make it user friendly. I like fotoflexer for the reasons you mentioned. The premium features on picnik look really cool but if you don’t want to pay for them you end up tripping over them all the time but I use Picnik the most. It’s sort of my default photo editing site–mainly because Flickr links straight to it.

#45 animoto video

umm...video?

http://animoto.com/play/3oPtVFXagf2VZ5sL0Yn1ew?autostart=true

#26 Making Music Together

JamStudio is supercool. I can definitely see a lost weekend of Hostess snack cakes and JamStudio in my future. While I was there, I created a rockin' little 3-chords-and-a-cloud-0'-dust masterpiece.

Of the Social sites I visited, I like the idea of eJamming the best. But the news and notes, as well as the recommendation pages on Mog were cool.

The music share sites are nice and much like librarything, etc. you can follow your tastes to find new stuff, which is a cool thing, because back in the old days we had to actually interact with living breathing people to get that kind word-0f-mouth, and fact is that most of the folks with the really good skinny didn't shower very often. (but I kinda miss the actual mouths in all this word-of-mouthing). It's all really neat, really helpful, and really sterile.

#25: Internet Piracy

Burned a CD. I must admit I've done it one or twice before. I use iTunes to catch podcast feeds from several poetry sites and occasionally burn a CD's worth of readings/interviews from those sessions.



I still do use CDs but only because I've yet to invest in an mp3 player for myself. My daughter has an iPod and she's shown me a thing or two.



As to file sharing, I'm a writer and my gut-level, first-instinct is to rant about intellectual property rights and the bloodsweatandsnot of the artist's soul being ripped from her/his chest by the xerox machine, youtube, and napster yaddayaddayadda, but the fact is that we all buy books, fall in love with them and lend them to friends so they can fall in love with them too. When some one sells his/her books at half price books and the store resells them the writer does not get an another royalty check.

Copyrights are a fairly new phenomena and on many levels make little sense. My bottom line is this: once I have paid for something it is mine to do with what I will (within reason). There should be no problem with me sharing legally purchased copies with my friends and family. The thing is that the line between sharing and distributing is real blurry on the internet.


Question: Do you think music and musicians benefit more from strict copyright protections online or free and open sharing?

I don't think there is any doubt that music benefits from the wide-open exchange of ideas that the internet and file sharing engender.

Whether or not musicians benefit is less certain. It's a pretty basic tenet of economics that s/he who controls the means of production is the one who gets paid. But the means of production are splintered on the internet; control devolves to anybody who cares to re-produce a song or performance which by any objective standard does not belong to them.

All I can tell you is what I see and I see a lot of musicians embracing the 'net and file sharing in a big way. As with all things the internet touches, the paradigms are shifting. revenue streams are drying up in one area and digging in in others. Record labels will become less and less viable, while DIY distribution will blossom. I think the ideas behind Creative Commons are the wave of the future. Letting the artist determine fair use for his product.

iHCPL NexGen #24 Sound: The Sound of Music

Howdy ya'll.

I'm back and ready to ramble.


I plowed through all the pay-to-download sites. I think I found that Napster and Rhapsody are basically the same price ( in the $13 range). The Apple/iTunes site was nearly impossible to navigate and I could not find any figure resembling user cost. I use iTunes 8 on my pc at home and like it a great deal. It collects all of my podcast feeds, shows me a playlist and lets me choose those I want to download.

The free music download sites are interesting, but the selection seems pretty much like open audition at the Sad Cafe. I'm sure there is a lot o' good stuff there, but slogging through the buckets of angst-pop and American Idol Wannabees is an off-putting thought.

I've been into internet radio for awhile. I listen to the Rice student station, ktru, quite a bit. There are also some non-broadcast services, like 1clubFM, that offer a slew of stations from garage/punk to trance to old school funk to the sound of a dripping water faucet 24/7. These are pretty good for short bursts every so often, but because they tend toward a limited playlist in fairly tight rotation, you'll get sick of even the good songs in a matter of days if you listen regularly.