Posts Tagged ‘flickr’

You need a blog, not just a web site

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, this is what I tell them. Many of my friends who are internet professionals or general hipsters are already sneering at this and saying something like, “Blogging is so five minutes ago.” Maybe at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, that’s true. But I deal in my freelance and personal life with plenty of people who are resistant to blogs, Twitter and what have you, and it’s my job to help get these folks on board.

If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do it from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do it from a cell phone.

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The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral

Friday, May 29th, 2009

As part of the research for my book, I’ve been making sample maps, diagrams showing what songs include samples of what other songs. I’m a big sample geek. I like knowing where my music comes from the same way I like knowing where my food comes from. This map shows many, probably not nearly all, of the songs that sample Michael Jackson’s solo work. Click to see it bigger.

MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing. (more…)

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Visual outlining with Flickr

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I love everything about Flickr except its name. First of all, creative misspelling is so five minutes ago. Second of all, the word ‘flicker’ has no conceptual connection to a photo-sharing social network that I can think of, except, I guess, in the very literal sense that a computer image flickers thirty times a second to produce the illusion of motion. And there my griping ends. Once you’re past the name, Flickr is everything you could want in an image site and more.

As I develop my book, I gather a lot of images. I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. (more…)

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