Google has pledged to donate $15,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation, which is the 501(c)3 that backs MusicBrainz. I’m hopeful that two things will result of this:

1. Mayhem gets a fair chunk of time to code on MB and make it lots better. I think this will definitely happen.
2. Google’s clear interest in MB will draw the interests of both donors and users alike. MusicBrainz is something that I very much believe in—I’ve added nearly 300 items to the database [mostly bootlegs]—and I think that it deserves a ton of attention.

Thanks, Google!

Photo courtesy of my dad’s first cousin, Dora, and her husband, Arnold.

Recently, the FL guys had a scheduled downtime that went far longer than they’d expected; as you might expect, not everyone was happy about it. I was among that group, but … I dealt with it. I knew that me being pissed off about it wasn’t going to help matters at all.

Things got fixed, and Alex and Scott addressed everyone’s concerns fairly well. If you read through the replies, you see that most everyone was pretty level-headed about it. Why? I think it’s because Alex and Scott have learned—probably the hard way—that they have to be personable, real, and open with their customers. Now, Alex might be looking at this and blinking a little, but I’d encourage him to read the gamut of responses that he’s made to folks as time’s gone by … and he’d see that his earlier sharp edge has definitely been broken.

Seth Godin’s entry about the culture of dissatisfaction hit home as I considered all this in retrospect:

The problem with this emerging culture, aside from the fact that we’re unhappy all the time, is that it doesn’t give marketers a chance to build products for the long haul, to invest in the processes and products and even operating systems that pay off over time. The problem is that when brands fizz out so fast, it’s hard to invest in anything except building the next hot brand.

Is there an answer?

Talk to people who live in Vegas and you’ll discover that most of the hard-working folks who have been here more than a decade (the cab drivers and the doctors and the rest) aren’t so swayed by the billboards and the promises. Instead, they embrace the qualities that come from relationships. A relationship with a front-line worker (ask for “Bob”) or a relationship with a provider or an organization that has come through for them.

It seems to me that insulation from discontent comes from building a relationship. From real people. Relationships that make us feel counted upon, respected, trusted and valued cut through the ennui of dissatisfaction. We got ourselves into this mess by acting like smart marketers, and as marketers we can get out of it by acting like people.

Consider also the case of Six Apart: back when it was just Ben and Mena, flubs and false starts were greeted with mild dissension and understanding. Then, when the MT3.0 licensing scheme was announced, the growing corporate vail around 6A ended up making the backlash easier to spew.

I think the lesson to be drawn here is damn simple: it pays to stay personal, because it’s a hell of a lot easier to be mad at “the man” than it is any individual. Note that, in every entry I write about FeedLounge, I always write it as “Alex and Scott”. If they keep on being successful, it’ll be because they continue to develop a good product and continue to be personable with their customers.

It’s a hard balance to strike, to be sure—time spent building relationships with customers is not spent quashing bugs or coding features. Users have to accept that the relationship time is fleeting, but they have to work to cultivate as they can, because any relationship is a two-way street. However, I’m fairly convinced that personality trumps commoditization. Hasn’t Apple been teaching us that all these years?

Why are the “high maintenance” and “low maintenance” tags always thrown at women and never at men?

See, honestly, I’m high maintenance. I won’t lie to you. [Well, I would lie to you if you'd let me ... yes, I'd be the worst kind: high maintenance, but pretends he's low maintenance.] I seek approval and affirmation. I can be manipulative. I’m self-aggrandizing and all those really horrible character traits that we associate with being high maintenance. It is not enough for me to know that I’m smart—I have to show you, and I need you to tell me!

Societally, though, we don’t lob the “high maintenance” pejorative at the male of the species. I wonder why…

Those who say that waiting is the hardest part are wrong.

I submit to you, humbly, that not knowing is the hardest part. I’d rather know than not know, but I’m okay with not knowing when I consider that some things are unknowable.

Yes, I’m being cryptic. Sorry. But I know where I’ll be tonight, all right?

Dear Internet Message Board Denizen:

If you’re frustrated with everyone’s inability to realize when you’ve switched from serious to sarcastic to not giving a damn, here’s a hint: your communication skills, they suck.

While this might not be a big deal to you, it is to some of us. It’s not that we’re sensitive [because we are], it’s just because we care.

:sigh:

Love,
Geof

P.S.: Responding with anger? Yeah, that doesn’t help things at all.

I’m always amused as to how often those who clamor for respect do not show it in kind to those from whom they demand it. I have ways of dealing with it, though. Because it amuses me, a selection of quotes on respect:

There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect.”

– Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 23

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.

– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Carmichael and Wiliam Short, 30 June 1793

Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables: le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer, et créer.

– Charles Baudelaire, Mon Coeur Mis à Nu [1887], XV

… I’d call Rick’s right now to wish him a Happy Birthday.

I mean, Jess is usually awake at this hour, but Rick? He’s been asleep for two hours.

I think I’ll refrain, though. He could beat me up. [I remember when he was so skinny that this wasn't an issue.]

Happy birthday, buddy. See you at dinner tonight.

I’m a big believer in the following axiom: “If you have to tell someone about one of your qualities as a person, the chances are that you’re lying.”

I believe in that axiom both from observational and personal experience. Case in point: when I went off to school at MSMS, I took the horribly audacious step of posting my ACT score on the wall above my desk in my dorm room. I wanted everyone to see what a smart person I was!!!

Looking back, I can examine my motives: I was entering a highly competitive academic environment, and while I never had any presumption that I’d be the smartest person there, I wanted to be up at the top. That posting was a warning shot across everyone’s bow.

It was also, in two words, incredibly stupid.

I think we see cases of this all the time: people claiming to be lovable when they’re really pretty prickly; people who state their hotness, when their mama had to hang a steak around their neck just to have the neighborhood dogs play with them; one who proclaims himself a great coder when he’s really just a two-bit hacker, et cetera. I mean, it’s pretty clear that the modifier “self-proclaimed” isn’t a positive thing, no?

Self-proclamations are, of late, right up there with rampant abuse of superlatives on the list of things that absolutely, utterly drive me up the wall. In fact, you might say that I consider myself to be the world’s greatest hater of self-proclaimers.

It would be interesting for the WP Links Manager to, upon entry of an URL, go and spider that URL real fast to grab relevant data—info from the <title>, autodiscovering a syndication feed URI, check for links back to the originating site for XFN data…—and dump that into the form for the user’s perusal.

Like, if I put in http://photomatt.net/, it’d spit back:

• Title: Photo Matt » Unlucky In Cards
• Feed URI: http://xml.photomatt.net/feed/
• XFN: acquaintance

All of that data is spot-on, and it would probably keep the user from making a mistake and entering bad data.

Now, you might say, “What’s the bother? It’s not like this data takes long to enter!” But user-entered data always has the propensity for failure, no?

Also, what about the concept of a way to put Image URIs in <head>? Say I provide a banner image for the Indiana Jones School of Management—such a spider could take that URI and grab either the URI or the image itself [stored in a local folder for such a purpose, probably somewhere in wp-content]—and then the whole process of grab, FTP, and data entry is all automated.

My left-leaning friends look at judges who bar kids from having abortions and claim, “This country is getting more and more conservative.”

My right-leaning friends look at judges who want to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Alleigance and claim, “This country is getting more and more conservative liberal.” [Thanks to Chris Hubbs for pointing out my gaffe.]

I look at Congress and my state Legislature and see gridlock over openness in government, accountability and ethics charges, and judicial appointments. I say, “The root of our problem is neither that this country is becoming more conservative nor more liberal; the problem is that it gets more polarized, and that’s because legislators—the ones who’re supposed to foment compromise—are forever punting on their legislative duties to bring forth those compromises, and, being scared, leave case law to the judges. Who are judges? Lawyers who like technicalities.”

When the one moderating force in government—legislative compromise—is forever shit-canned, people run to opposite sides and want to play political Red Rover: caucusing on each side, watching for trial balloons to shoot down and tackle.

Ay me.

If you feel the need to post your dinner options on a message board and have your fellow posters help you make a decision, you need more help than they can provide you.

[Lest anyone think I'm writing about a specific person, I've always thought this. I mean, come on ... it's dinner. Ask me what you should have if we're going to dinner together, but otherwise, figure it out on your own. Yeeeeeesh.]

I think the endgame of personal publishing, in some ways, will be to democratize reporting. Of course, it can only go so far, and that’s not to say that “Weblogs will replace newspapers” or anything silly like that. In arguing this discussion point with folks several times, I keep noting that Weblogging is simply another medium, and that radio didn’t kill print, TV didn’t kill radio, and the Internet didn’t kill TV.

So, this has been endlessly discussed by tons of others … what the hell am I doing blathering about it on the Monday after Easter, 2005? Simple: I want to give an example of what I’m talking about. When I interviewed my friend Derek Webb a little over a month ago, I taped it; when we published the interview, we published the transcript and an MP3 of the audio. Curious as to our tones of voice when asking or answering a question? Give it a listen and decide for yourself.

I like to think of this as open-source journalism, the kind of stuff that really takes on Fox News’s slogan of “We Report, You Decide”. I’m sorry, FNC; no broadcast medium, limited by the hourly clock of the news cycle, gets to fully report on a topic so as to let the interested viewer decide. Editorial decisions have to be made in order to cut to length, and those decisions are always tainted with some bias. That’s life. Suck it up.

Why do I call this open-source journalism, bastardizing a term from my programming friends? Well, you know who’s doing the interview—me, Geof F. Morris. You know who’s being interviewd—Derek Webb. You can hear our words and read them as well; you can compare our voices to your experiences with us—if you’ve met either or both of us, you’re reasonably sure that we are who we say we are. If you’ve not, at least you know who we purport ourselves to be so that you can give us a try.

I think that openness with sources is really important [although anonymous sources are sometimes necessary, I think that's all a huge game and a big load of crap most of the time], and I think that the Web, with its nature as a two-way, push/pull transport medium, will work. TV and radio are broadcast media limited, to their detriment, by time constraints; print is limited by cost constraints. The Web still has time and cost constraints, but they’re largely oriented towards the receiver and not the producer. [See also: drinking from a firehose.]

So, yes, Chris Smith … this is what I’d said I’d write. For further reading, Jonas Luster’s Monopolies and Monologues briefly touches on the same topic and is, on his end, a part of a larger discussion on traditional media on his site.

Dive into the long tail: See, exactly. Everybody and their brother knows about Slashdot. Recommend me someone obscure, y’know? If syndication feed recommendation engines are going to give me help, they need to let me see the full spectrum.

See, how I came to know about Hem was through Audioscrobbler [specifically a couple of the communities, Paste Music and Over The Rhine], where I saw people listening to them. I said, “I’ve never heard of this ‘Hem’; what can I find out?” I did some reading, and I said, “I’ll give that a try.”

And I’m now bad, bad, bad hooked.

But if I’d followed what was popular, I’d never have found a gem.

More long tail, please!

Bits and pieces from a conversation with Josh. We were talking about sports journalists, but then got off on broadcast media in general:

[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: Being on air is a narcotic, man.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: I’ve done it myself.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] J: No doubt — and you don’t get on air with balanced opinions!
[25-January-2005 @ 16:10] G: And nuance? As Kerry learned, nuance is lost in the soundbite.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] J: Exactly
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] G: You can get your point out, but you have to do it over the right medium. Most of us want to be fed the soundbite because we 1) have shit to do and 2) are lazy.

I think that, these days, you have to craft the message to the medium. Wonder why I segregate my Weblogs? Pretty simple—I see them as different exchange media. [Not that any of them are really good, but they make me happy, so yeah.]

I think that understanding this is important for both content producers and consumers. You’ve got to remember that, when you’re giving or receiving the soundbite, it is what it is—a soundbite! If you forget the context, you can really go off on a tangent.

Not that I’ve ever gone off on a tangent in my life.