The Gong Show

Girl Talk started the set in a full suit (coat, tie, vest, and all the trimmings) and ended in only boxers, screaming to Nirvana while crowd surfing and choking himself with his mic cable. And he was the first opening act… he danced like a whirlwind, tearing up the stage with audacious spasms. 20 people stormed the stage by the end, and stayed up there for at least 10 minutes. Girl Talk defined new levels of awesomeness tonight.

Quote of the night:”We need all the lawyers to get the fuck out of the way. I’m a lawyer, so I’m going to get the fuck off the stage for Diplo” said Larry Lessig while on stage. To be fair, it’s a paraphrase, but it pretty damn close and he definitely dropped “fuck” left and right.

My blog has been quiet lately because I typically write at night, but I’m in the middle of a concert binge. I went to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Architecture in Helsinki and Takka Takka opened) yesterday at Summerstage in the park. I’m going to Diplo, Girl Talk, and Peeping Tom tonight at Irving Plaza (to benefit Creative Commons). And, I’m seeing Cyrus Chestnut with a wide variety of other jazz musicians at Columbia tomorrow.

Needless to say, this is a very good problem to have. I’m always willing to take on a culture overload.

The CYHSY show was terrific. The highlight of the CYHSY set was a song I never heard before. I’m guessing it was called “Satan” because they repeated it over and over again, but I’m not certain. I bought the tour EP, but I haven’t listened to it yet, so maybe it’s on that. However, the highlight of the whole night was easily the Architecture in Helsinki set. The crowd seemed pretty confused… AIH is not as listenable as the other bands on the billing, but they played with 10x the passion and gusto. “Neverevereverdid” played live is a tidal wave of twee… totally awesome. You can hear it streaming when you load AIH’s site.

I’m excited for Cyrus Chestnut because he and James Carter (who is also playing at Columbia) recently released a series of Pavement covers. I got to see Cyrus play at the Newport Jazz Festival this year, and they he was the best set of the day.

Hear Cyrus and James’s rendition of Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair”. Then watch the Pavement video for “Cut Your Hair”. Cool contrast.

Finally, I can’t believe my luck over the Diplo, Peeping Tom, Girl Talk concert tonight. I went to a Creative Commons session today at the Warhol Foundation today. With the schwag pack, they gave out free tix to the show tonight because it is a benefit for Creative Commons. I have been a big Diplo and Girl Talk fan since their respective pitchfork reviews, so I am stoked about the tix.

The Creative Commons session itself was great, but I’ll follow up on that in a more tech-oriented future post.

At Stanford I heard a guest lecture by Danah Boyd on the failures and lessons learned from Friendster about social networks in general. The important points from the talk are captured in this paper. This guest lecture was easily one of the best I heard during my undergrad career.

The reason why I bring this guest lecture up is because Danah has impressed me again. This paper on the Facebook privacy mess is both comprehensive and creative. She nails it right on the head. I know this subject matter is a bit stale at this point, but this paper is a must read for anyone interested in privacy on the net.

Key Quote:

Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there’s a privacy issue.

A number of people asked me why did you name your blog “The Gong Show?”

My answer is contained within the awesomeness of this video:

(A link for people reading in an aggregator that doesn’t display YouTube embeds)

My commute from home to work is 30 minutes. A few of my friends around the city have commutes closer to 3 minutes, but I don’t envy them. I treat my commute as a buffer between work and home where I can chill with my iPod and people-watch in the subway.  Therefore, my commute has caused me dig through my music collection for lost gems in order to keep my iPod feeling fresh. If it wasn’t for my commute, I wouldn’t have recently rediscovered Boards of Canada’s “Music Has the Right to Children.”

Though it was published in ‘98, I didn’t pick it up until about ‘02… but even once I found it, the timing was bad. I was into the Boston indie-metal scene at the time, and the subtle grace of looping ambient music was lost on me. I didn’t really get into it until a few weeks ago on the subway.

“Music Has the Right to Children” is ideal subway music. It’s the perfect soundtrack to darting through a concrete maze in a tin tube, colors and lights blazing by like the ending to Kubrik’s 2001. Electronica meets post-rock with pinch of emotion (so oftening missing from electronica).

If this sounds like it’s up your alley, check out some songs from Boards of Canada on the hype machine.

The lack of iPod scrobbling support “out of the box” in Last.fm is killing me. So, when Fred’s commentors mentioned a way to enable scrobbling on an iPod, it caught my attention.

Scrobbling in Last.fm is virtually useless to me because I listen to all my music on my iPod, not my computer. Doesn’t everyone have this problem? I thought I was just missing some obvious feature until I saw Fred’s post.  This has to be one of the top barriers to adoption of Last.fm.

Nonetheless, I love last.fm for turning tags into radio stations. Awesome.

There has been a lot of commotion on the web today over TechMeme’s new advertising. Michael Arrington’s headline goes so far as to say, “TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertising”

How is TechMeme’s new ad model so revolutionary? I don’t see it.  It’s a section of real-estate on a page reserved for ads. Granted, ads in the past often feel stale quickly because the content is not updated often enough, and the RSS delivery vehicle for the TechMeme ads will help fix this problem… but that’s not a new ad model. That’s just a new means by which TechMeme is getting content from advertisers. It’s still a chunk of text content on a page with a call-to-action (the link). When those fundamentals change, then I think “a new kind of advertising” will be invented.

Google AdSense was a new kind of advertising when it was released because no one else (except Overture) was doing simple, plain text ads at the time. Same with popups and banner ads at their respective times of invention because they were such a radical change to the way a user interacted and engaged advertising. Oddcast’s Monk-e-mail deserves the heading “A New Kind Of Advertising” long before TechMeme does.  TechMeme’s RSS ads afford no new user interaction… It’s just fresher content in the same old interaction.

I’m also not a big fan of the fact that TechMeme’s “new model” is based on CPM-like structure (It’s essentially a CPM of $5-$8, but it’s actually based on a fixed cost for a month-long run… it’s TechMeme’s traffic was fixed over time, then it would be identical to CPM). By contrast, CPC is great because it measures just how useful an ad is to the end user.  I don’t care how many time a user sees an ad; if the user is not clicking on the ad then the user can’t be all that engaged.  CPC requires that the ad be engaging and useful to customers.  If it’s not valuable to end-users, then the ad doesn’t run because the publisher has no incentive to run it. No clicks = no incentive. Usefulness to the end-user is built into the business model.

TechMeme could have chosen to build their RSS ad delivery system on top of a CPC model, but they didn’t, and I’m not certain why.  My best guess is that in the CPM model, TechMeme is guaranteed a payday.  They are not dependent on the quality of the content that the sponsors write.  Plus, it’s consistent revenue that they can count out.  But, I have to reiterate that their desire for guaranteed money and consistent revenue comes at a price to consumers whose interest in the ad is not required for TechMeme’s payday.

I don’t mean to champion Google AdSense over all other options.  Note that on my own blog I don’t run AdSense, but I do run FeedBurner’s Ad Network (which is CPM, not CPC).  I think AdSense delivery and UI comes off flat, and I have been trained by past experience that the content behind an AdSense click is generally useless.  The main point I’m trying to make is that TechMeme’s new advertising isn’t worth all the praise it’s getting, and I used some of the aspects that Google AdSense does well as a counter-example to TechMeme’s missteps.

Description doesn’t do this site justice… just go: Complexification.net.

The site is by Jared Tarbell of Etsy.

Update: Thanks to David Chen for pointing out that I completely blew the URL and all the links. That’s the last time I write URLs by hand… only copy and pasting for me from now on. Sorry to all who were confused.

The Serena Maneesh self-titled album has been in heavy rotation on my iPod for about nine monthes, and I don’t see my listening waning anytime soon.

They’re like an edgy My Bloody Valentine with more variety in instrumentation and less looping.  I wouldn’t dare compare Serena Maneesh to Loveless, but they definitely beat Kevin Shield’s latest shoddy remixes and work on the Lost in Translation soundtrack.

It you have a taste for harminous noise, layered delays, and artistic distortion and listen to Serena Maneesh now (hype machine link).

Also, they’re playing at the Warsaw in Brooklyn on Oct 6th.