rob’s blog

Musician M.I.A. released a song titled “Space Odyssey” this past week that has become notable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was her reaction to a New York Times travel guide spotlighting Sri Lanka as a travel destination in 2010.

First, new work from M.I.A. is eagerly anticipated as she went on hiatus following a tour for her Grammy nominated record, Kaya. I was at the far edges of the crowd with my sister when she told the audience at Bonnaroo in 2008 that it would be her last performance.  Since then, M.I.A. has largely kept away from music creation.

Second, M.I.A. chose to deliver “Space Odyssey” to fans via a twitter update, where she shared the video via TwitVid, a popular 3rd party service for video hosting that competes directly with Vidly.  While M.I.A’s choice of TwitVid as the media player allowed her to use her Twitter feed to deliver new music directly to her fans, it also has forced everyone to listen to this critically important release in terrible quality video and audio.  Check out the embed above.

Most notably, following the surprise release of the song, M.I.A.’s publicist confirmed that “Space Odyssey”  was released specifically in reaction to a recent New York Times story on the Top 31 Places to Go in 2010 written by Lionel Beehner.  In the NYT piece, Beehner acknowledges that the country has been “plagued by misfortune…but the conflict ended last May.” and goes on to suggest that “miles of sugary white sand flanked by bamboo groves that were off-limits until recently are a happy, if unintended byproduct of the war.”

If you are unfamiliar, a brutal civil war was being fought between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).  Leading up to the end of major conflict in May of 2009, many civilians were killed in efforts by the government to put down the rebel group.  The US State Department has issued a report outlining areas of concern (pdf) where International Humanitarian Law is believed to have been violated.

For some time following the end of combat, a quarter million people from the Tamil minority were forced to remain in refugee camps for months.  Between the brutality on both sides during the war and subsequent forced confinement afterwards, Sri Lanka’s international standing is quite low.  M.I.A. is of Tamil ancestry and fled the country as a refugee.  She has specifically decried (see her explanation at 3:25) the violence on both sides of the war.

M.I.A’s made a bold move in connecting her new artistry directly to a major US news publication’s pithy and embarrassing portrayal of Sri Lanka as a top tourist destination.  She did so using her platform of roughly 82,000 Twitter followers, all eager to hear what she would follow Paper Planes with.  M.I.A. has hit upon a near perfect mix of social networking, social action and artistic expression, most certainly setting her apart as an artist to watch in 2010.

Haiti was devastated by an earthquake this week, resulting in the loss of countless lives and suffering among many.  A quick read reveals how much this country has suffered before this natural disaster.

The area we call Haiti today has been through some very difficult times, going all the way back to a brutal colonization by the Spanish.  Most recently, the United States nearly invaded the country to evict dictators.  You can learn more from the wikipedia entry on the country.

If you are capable of giving money to assist in the rescue and recovery efforts, please consider a donation to one of the following organizations:

Using your cell phone:

• Text “Haiti” 90999 to be billed a $10 donation to the Red Cross.

On the web:

• Donate to Catholic Relief Services.
• Donate to the Red Cross’s Haiti Relief and Development Fund.
• Donate to the Mercy Corps.
• Donate to Doctors without Borders.

Thank you.   Rob

My friend Elissa turned me on to an article by William Deresiewicz titled The End of Solitude that addresses the culture of celebrity and connectivity as symptoms of an impulse for becoming known.  Much of the article offers an overview of the historical concept of Self and what we get out of it.

Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

I struggled with April’s song of the month, “Gifted,” which appears on the album  Spirit of Apollo by N.A.S.A.  N.A.S.A (North America / South America) is a project of Sam Spiegel aka Squeak E. Clean and  Brazilian DJ Zego spent five years assembling a gang of artists spilling across genres.

Performers on this record include:  George Clinton, David Byrne, Cee-Lo, Seu Jorge, Sean Lennon, RHCP, Tom Waits, Ol’ Dirty, RZA, Method Man, oh and Kanye West. Continue Reading »

Despite my passions for software, live music and clean technology, which I regularly blog about here, I’m privately a civic minded person.  This post serves as a record of the effort I’ve put in for Senator Barack Obama and concludes with an endorsement of the man as our next President of the United States.  The journey begins over two years ago.

Peering into my Gmail history for the keyword ‘obama,’ I can see the first time I talked about him was in a chat session with my friend Ala on 10/16/06 at 10:35 AM PST:

me: goodmorning
Ala: good morning
me: how are you this morning?
Ala: fine, and you?
me: fine.   obama huh?
Ala: made the cover of Time

And that’s how it started.

In November of 2006, I did phone banking in Portland for the Oregon Democrats, and took to the street like a crazy person, holding up my Vote sign on Burnside. About 11 months later, I was living in Boston, starting work on my MBA at Babson College.  Politics are a little more interesting for Democrats on the East coast and by then I was looking to get a bit closer to the candidate, in an email to my brother on 10/19/07 I wrote:

Continue Reading »

The modern software development process is sort of out in the open. Any sizeable project like a new version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop is discussed widely in technology forums and blogs. Although beta testers generally sign NDAs with companies, details or full copies of beta software leaks regularly.

Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”

Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?

Know Your Mario History

A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.

The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs. Continue Reading »

Walt Disney has become the first Hollywood studio to take smoking out of all of its films.

I didn’t notice any smokers in Ratatouille, and I couldn’t see them in a new traditional film from Disney either. But the FT article goes on to state that Bob Iger’s position is that “the company would also ‘discourage’ depictions of smoking in films made by its other studio labels.”

Disney’s owns Bob Weinstein’s Miramax Films which has released a ton of adult-oriented features including Tarantino’s, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs. Quentin Tarantino makes including cigarettes in his movies a recurrent presence. Iger goes on to say that argueing with filmmakers working under his roof about excluding cigarette smoking is a “confrontation we are certainly willing to have.” Continue Reading »

I have been ordained as a minister! Yes! I now am qualified for the following:

1. Perform Baptisms
2. Performing Weddings
3. Performing and Speaking at Funerals
4. Visiting the sick
5. Counseling
6. Establishing New Congregations
7. Ordaining others

I have already done items two, three, four and five–which leaves baptisms, creating a congregation and ordaining my own clergymen and women.

So, to my friends and those I do not know, please let me sprinkle water on your child. I will say some nice words too. I haven’t decided what to name my church yet, but I expect all of you to show up on Sunday for the prayer and the basket passing.

I’ve had some pretty awesome New Years Eve’s.  Last year I was with close friends at a great house party, the year before we were at Kells.  This year we decided to try out Pioneer Courthouse Square–big mistake!  It sucked.  Someone is to blame! 

Read this article to get a taste of exactly how lame our city commisioner’s office is.  Probably the worst part of the article is the author’s attempt to make it sound like the one arrest from last year justifies canceling the event.

I sent the following letter to the editors of the Portland Tribune, Oregonian and Portland Monthly:

UPDATE 1/ 11/05: The Portland Tribune published my letter in the 1/10/05 edition. 

Continue Reading »

About ten minutes ago about two hundred santas descended on 23rd avenue on their way to the Gypsy lounge. They’re part of the 2005 Portland Cacophony Society.

According to their official webpage, anyone can join in the herd, so long as you wear a santa suit. Includes “A coat, a hat, a beard, red pants and accessories. Gifts and candy for the kids, cash for bars and strippers.”

At their last stop before hitting the bar, I snagged a video of them chanting, “Santa needs a drink!” at the top of their lungs.

Check out a few pictures of Portland Santacon 2005 on my flickr page.