(Note: clicking on the ‘read more’ link will lead you to what looks like a broken page, this is due to the embedded music player, everything still works as it should its just the layout thats screwy. Wordpress can’t handle the <object> and <embed> tags. If anyone has any suggestions for fixing this feel free to let me know in the comments)

Trent Reznor has finally left interzone, after describing them as ‘greedy assholes’ and encouraging fans to steal his music during his last tour. The Nine Inch nails have released part of their new instrumental album Ghosts I-IV for free through their website and for a nominal payment of $5 (US Dollars, which is £2.50 in my money) you can download the whole thing DRM free. The popularity of this move was demonstrated when the NIN website went down due to high traffic over the weekend.

Ghosts I-IV is also the first offering from a fairly big name I’ve seen to carry a creative commons license. Released under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license, you can basically do whatever you want with it as long as you credit the creator, don’t sell it and do it under the same license. This brings up some interesting possibilities, especially as you can order a version of the album which includes all the tracks in multi-track format encouraging remixes and sampling (its $75 though, or I would have ordered that one). I look forward to hearing some fan remixes in the future, let me know if you’re planning any and I’ll promote them here (if I deem them worthy of course :P)

This is indicative of a growing trend in the music industry as more artists become disillusioned with the traditional music industry and release their work online. With the recent controversy over the RIAA not passing on money made from suing those who copied music to the artists, whose interests they claim to be representing, I can only see this as being another nail in the coffin of a dying industry. The men in suits have lined their pockets for long enough and the artists are taking control.

Good on you Mr Reznor, I salute you.

Here is a selection of tracks from Ghosts to whet your appetite:

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Entrecard is a social link-swapping service where you earn credits for clicking on the widget on others sites and use those credits to get your125×125 ad shown for a day on other peoples. You’ll notice the widget at the top of my sidebar there. Over the past week or so I’ve been using it daily, and the results have been quite something.

Previous to the 9th of February, I was averaging between 15-30 hits daily. From the 9th, when I started using an Entrecard dropping technique suggested at powerdropping.com, my hit rate has pretty much doubled. I’ve been getting more visits just from dropping my card on other people’s sites. I’ve had real spikes from buying ads with my Entrecard credits with a peak of 102 hits on the 22nd. My Entrecard ad price, the number of credits I recieve when someone buys an ad on my widget, is 5 times higher than when I started. Which means that I don’t have to drop as much.

The only problem with this technique is that it is quite laborious. First of all you have to bookmark the 300 sites suggested by powerdropping and organise them into batches (opening them all at once would take your browser hours). I’m not sure how other browsers do it but in Firefox you can open all the BMs in a folder in tabs at once, I’ve got 10 folders of 30 BM’s each. I open on folders worth of pages at a time and work my way through, dropping as I go. I’d love to be able to automate the process. Maybe with a greasemonkey script which clicks drop buttons automatically, though I don’t even know if that’s possible (or ethical). I’d also like to be able to automatically return drops on people who drop on me. Not being a coder I don’t even know where to start developing something like this.

In conclusion, if you want to build traffic, and keep it, use Entrecard. I’m no longer dropping on the 300 daily (I still drop on them every couple of days when I’ve got a spare 20 mins though) and have discovered a few blogs which I’d never have come across other wise. I’ve built traffic and expanded my intake, wins all round I reckon.

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Yesterday when trying to read the first message in my inbox, firefox would do its loading thing in the status bar, get to done, and the little loading thingy in the top right corner (the Gmail one) would still be there, and it wouldn’t let me read the mail. Also when clicking on a contact to compose a mail the same would happen.

Another glitch is the fact that it won’t let me send emails. When I click one of my contacts to send them a mail, the above happens. When going the long way round using my full contacts pag, selecting the contact and hitting compose, the same happens. When hitting reply on a mail that I happen to be reading the box comes up but the formatting buttons aren’t displayed and the text box for the body of the reply cannot be selected and typed in

There are a couple of graphical glitches too. My contacts online/offline indicators are displaying the standard placeholder images as are the formatting buttons when I click the reply button on a mail I’m reading.

I have no idea whether this could be a problem on my end or theirs but its beginning to interfere with my work.

If anyone out there has experienced the same problem I’d appreciate them letting me know.

Update: This problem only seems to manifest in Firefox, If I use an IE tab in firefox it works fine.

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Google Shared Items is a great little app that sits on your Facebook profile and lets people know what you’ve been reading in Google Reader. That’s all well and good but you have to manually share the items in the first place. What I’d like to be able to do is automatically share anything I post here and on Gaming Moments (which reminds me I must get the tech boys over there to add the twitter plugin to the blog, anything that spreads the word, right?)

Google reader lets you do this quite easily, you tag the feeds you want to share under a separate tag (eg. Shared) and then in the Tags tab in your google reader settings you click the little share icon next to it and presto you’ve got a feed built from all the feeds in that tag/folder.

Then you hit the problem, the Facebook app doesn’t seem to share folders, only items.

So, to get around this I thought there must be something that lets you display a feed on your Facebook profile, I was right, up to a point. There are supposedly three apps for facebook which allow you to display a feed on your profile they are Feeds, Feed Invasion, and My RSS.

Feeds doesn’t work, and someone should get around to deleting it from the available applications on Facebook.
Feed Invasion also doesn’t work, and only displays one feed
myRSS does but has formatting issues. It takes up too much space and the headlines’ font size is too big. Nothing that can’t be fixed though.

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This is the beginnings of chaos and entropy, and requires the input of energy to rectify. That’s thermodynamic that is.

I’ve never been the most organised of people, I have however always had a liking for the idea of being organised. Unfortunately organisation is something that generally happens to other people, without them seeming to make any effort.

There are a multitude of solutions out there which claim to make you’re life (online at any rate) more organised, but all the ones I’ve tried need far too much work.  Google Calendar, Reader and Mail are very good at what they do but I’m not organised enough (ironically) to set aside the time to learn how to use them more effectively. Take Calendar for instance, for my other writing project I often have to remember dates, whether they’re release dates or announcements or conferences. At the moment I have to open up a separate window/tab and enter the details of event I want to remember manually. Surely it would be easier if I could simply click the date, and have everything done for me so I’ve automatically got an entry in my Google Calendar. There may be a Greasmonkey script that could do that, but I’m not organised enough to set aside the time to look for it.

There are also the online task management solutions, like Remember The Milk but again, the time required to actually enter stuff on your lists is greater than the time you save by doing it. Again, I’m sure that if I took the time to learn how to use it properly I’d find it quite useful. I’d like to be able to do it without having to think about it too much though.

When it comes to notes, Google Notebook is quite good and integrates quite well with the other Google apps. It lets you make notes on pages that you come across and any other random notes. I have used it for making review notes, storing links to interesting sites for future use in blog posts, and jotting down random ideas. What I’d like to be able to do though is use Google Calendar as a filing system for those notes. Say I make a note on a certain day, I’d like if that note was automatically given an entry in Google Calendar (and optionally in Remember the Milk, but only if I choose to) on the date it was made. Another thing I’d like Google Notebook to do is use hotkeys, so that when I’m browsing and want to annotate a page I can just hit a hotkey and it’ll do the same as ‘note this’ in the context menu.

I’m the first one to admit that I’m quite lazy, at least when it comes to organizing myself. I’d basically like something to do it for me and not have to worry about setting it up and learning to use it, whatever it is. I aspire to the lazyness of the man who goes to thegym every day and works out for an hour because carrying around any extra weight it too much effort. Now I’m going to spend an hour or so clearing out my gmail inbox, sorting through my reader feeds and removing the ones I haven’t read in a while, and deleting drafts from my Wordpress dashboard (after backing up the best). I hope I don’t get distracted…

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Now we have a new scandal in the making, according to Neil Patel over at Pronet Advertising Digg are internally burying stories they object to. Now I personally can’t see why the story Patel references would be buried, unless it is for some nefarious corporate reason (which just makes the fact that they did it worse) but if it turns out that this is happening as part of a deliberate strategy then Digg are going to lose in the long run. People use digg because it tells us what people are interested in as a tool for marketing it is invaluable, through sites like Digg we denizens of the web can get an instant snapshot of what’s hot and what’s not. People trust it because it reflects the voice of the people.

I use Digg to find out what the latest buzz in the videogaming world is for my posts over at Gaming Moments, granted alot of it is rubbish but then I only use a feed reader to check the latest posts, I should really check the site itself to see what people are digging, but I may not do that now. If Digg are covertly burying posts in an effort to censor its users then I can see people dropping it as a reliable source of news and going elsewhere. This may be the beginning of the end for Digg.

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“Yeah,” she said, “its the same every year. For about a month you get irritable, restless, and are unable to focus your attention on any one thing for very long.” Theres also the feeling of futility and uselessness of it all which I don’t mention to her. I have the feeling its slightly better this year because I’ve got Arthur to look after. Its possibly somehting to do with a vitamin D deficiency brought on by not enough sunlight (I should maybe visit a tanning salon). I’ll get over it though so its nothing to worry about really.

The upshot of this is I tend not to sleep very well and lie awake letting my mind wander where it will. Last night I had an Idea (I think it deserves capitalisation)….

The Rise of the Social Web.

It seems that the latest fashion on the internet is for social websites, especially social websites which recommend other websites based upon user ratings (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and others). We also have various other forms of social interaction on the web from fora on all manner of subjects, the oft demonised chatrooms, and information repositories such as wikis (Wikipedia being the most famous example). These things all have something in common, they require the input of large groups of people to be successful. Surely the same rule can be applied to government, and the same technology.

Government and the Web

Current administrations have been woeful in the degree to which they embrace this new technology and the way the present their use of it. Most simply use it to gather and disseminate information from those who interact with it, not actually using it as part of the mechanism of democracy. They tell you how its going to be, get you to fill in a form online to do your tax return or pay your council tax, but don’t actually ask your opinion. Its a combination if ignorance and age. In the UK the majority of our MP’s are not part of the internet generation. Even the youngest members didn’t have the internet in their home until the mid nineties, that same as everyone else. Its seen as a toy, or a giant virtual shopping mall. The only concession I have seen so far has been the petition system on our Prime Minister’s website. Depending on how seriously the holder of the office takes it, it is either a very good thing or simply something that they can ignore. I haven’t seen them paying any attention to the petitions (apart from the Green Road tax petition, which they only took notice of because the press made a big fuss about it). It is still an impersonal and detached way of getting the government’s attention and relies quite heavily on people knowing that a petition you submit is there. There’s no feed of new petitions so you can’t simply use a newsreader to find out what people are petitioning about. They are slowly making use of the new technology but are yet to realise its full potential.

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Write about a life event in one sentence. Harder than it sounds. There are some really touching ones on there if you take the time to look.

The link is to mine btw.

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