Draw fearlessly.
Use a pen or Sharpie. No erasers, no correcting fluid. Fill the page completely as fast as you can. Use loose scribbles and gestures. Don’t sweat details. Use The Force — let go your feelings, young Skywalker. Get it right the first time or start over. Try to push each drawing to completion, but if you’re really not happy with where it’s going, toss it in the recycling and move on. Also try drawing without looking at the page. Get ready to be pleasantly surprised by the result.

Draw light, not objects.
Squint your eyes at the scene until all you can see are big blobs of light and dark. Draw those. Try to ignore boundaries of objects; let those emerge out the natural boundaries of light and shadows.

Draw repetitively.
Get a stack of 3×5 index cards. Set up a simple still-life, a bowl of fruit or whatever, and draw it on every single index card. Do it from different angles, distances, etc. Use simple lines and don’t spend more than two minutes on each one.

Draw fast.
Give yourself thirty seconds to do an entire scene. Use big newsprint and a Sharpie. Ignore details. Use wide, loopy gestures. This is an especially important exercise when you get started drawing people, where it’s easy to obsess about faces or hands or feet without ever getting to the overall pose. One out of ten 30-second drawings you do will be amazingly good.

Draw everything.
Bowls of fruit and people are always nice, but try drawing whatever’s around: rocks, tangled computer cables, a brick wall, a rumpled bedsheet, wrappers and packaging, flaking paint, a movie poster, other works of art, a comic book page, an eggbeater, the underside of a table. Imitate other artists you admire. Copy your favorites as exactly as possible.

There’s no such thing as “talent.”
Everybody who draws well got there by practicing, practicing, practicing, formally or informally. The only thing that separates you from the masters is the Gladwellian ten thousand hours. Get to it, and have fun.

Some drawings I like

• The illustrations in Roger Penrose’s book The Road To Reality are delightfully minimalist. I have no idea what the math means, but I enjoy thinking about the drawings.
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a deep dive into the nature of art through the seemingly innocuous comics medium.
• See tons of interesting art, drawn and otherwise, in my Flickr favorites.

Original post on Quora

Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?

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.

I got the idea to do the Michael Jackson map when I was walking down the street in Park Slope. This was a few months before he died and was not much on anybody’s mind. Barbara, the singer in my laptop band, was always playing his tracks, but it’s not like you were hearing him out in the world much. So I was surprised to hear a guy drive past on his motorcycle, with the speakers booming out what I thought was a crazy remix of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” It was the “Mama se, mama sa, mama coo sa” chant, but in a deep bass voice over an afro-funk beat. I thought someone had taken a sample of MJ and slowed it down or something. I looked it up on the internet to figure out who it was, and it turned out not to be a remix at all, actually the exact opposite. The song was “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, MJ’s original inspiration for the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

I started the map on March 26th and posted it on Flickr a few days later. I also talked it up a little on Facebook and Twitter. It got a few dozen views and a couple of nice comments. I had thought to include the Jackson 5 on it too, but it would have made the map too unwieldy. So a few days later I did a separate map:

My first sample map to get wider internet attention wasn’t any of the Michael Jackson ones, it was the Wu-Tang Clan one. (The hipsters on Tumblr love Wu-Tang.) Meanwhile, the MJ map continued to get a few views a week or so, more than most of the stuff I post, but not a whole lot more.

Then on May 26th, the MJ sample map was viewed over three thousand times. The next day it was viewed more than thirty-five thousand times. I had no idea why this was happening until I got a Flickr message from Forumz1:

Hi,

I was the one who originally submitted the MJ map to Reddit. I found it via a MJ forum. Just wanted to say that your maps are great! I’m a pretty big MJ fan and was excited to hear people sampling him in such creative ways in the 90′s and early 2000′s, but after a while I felt it got out of hand and this old Onion article started to become true:

www.theonion.com/content/node/32563

It didn’t take off that well on Reddit, but I think Digg’s best user found it and submitted it and it skyrocketed. I’m glad it got exposure, and your work got a lot of exposure!

The Digg user who posted it is MrBabyMan. Thank you MrBabyMan, wherever you are. The Digg post generated most of the views, directly and through aggregators. It also produced a bunch of comments that, between them, represent a perfect cross-section of the internet’s feelings about MJ in the months before his death, about sampling, and hip-hop and race relations in America generally.

The first few comments are ignorant one-liners about how hip-hop isn’t music. Then someone asks:

I confess, I need someone to explain it to me, as if I were a 4 year old.

MrBabyMan helpfully responds:

From the center out:
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson song
Song that was covered/sampled using the Jackson song
Artist who sampled said song
i.e. Public Enemy’s “911 is a joke” samples “Thriller” by MJ

A couple of people use “4 years old” as a hook for pedophile jokes. Others jump to defend MJ’s musicianship, in spite of his troubled personal life.

He might be a crazy freak show, but ya gotta admit – the man knows how to make music.

Someone announces:

I doubt highly that he is the sole composer of all that music.

He isn’t. MJ is the sole composer of some of his songs and co-composer or arranger on most of them. Quincy Jones wrote some of them. A British musician named Rod Temperton wrote “Thriller” and “Rock With You.” Two of the guys from Toto wrote “Human Nature.”

One commenter is dismayed by the current state of hip-hop:

So Michael Jackson indirectly helped spawn an entire industry of mediocre music and inflated egos? MJ’s music actually was pretty good, rappers just got lazy.

My observation is that some hip-hop musicians are lazy, some are fanatical workaholics, same as in any other profession. The ones who are really good at it tend to be the ones who practice the most, same as in any other profession. But a lot of Digg users equate sampling with plagiarism, and doubt that it takes any skill:

If you showed me how I bet I could do it pretty decently, after all, I have most of the music these guys are cutting from!

I say, go for it. The software is easy to learn. Finding musical uses for it takes a lot of trial and error.

Some commenters don’t take issue with the basic musical validity of hip-hop, but they are concerned about the violation of intellectual property rights.

It may take technical talent but there’s hardly anything musically artistic about borrowing someone else’s beats as a backer for spoken poetry. Let’s face it, if you can’t play an instrument, you can’t read or compose music and you can’t sing, then your musical talent is dubious at best. That’s not to say that rappers don’t have talent. After all, finding creative new ways to incorporate various bodily orifices and functions into spoken poetry isn’t easy. I’m just suggesting that calling them musicians might be a bit of a stretch.

I actually think talking about bodily orifices and functions is a good thing. They’re part of life, I think it’s healthy to have a sense of humor and fun about them. I’m too chicken to do it in my own music, so I’m glad Missy Elliot is willing to stick her neck out on the rest of our behalf.

Not every Digg commenter is bent out of shape about the culture of appropriation.

The old blues musicians borrowed each others riffs all the time.. and they are considered the founders of Rock music. Go listen to a few Robert Johnson recordings compared to a few Leadbelly recordings, and you’ll find that without the vocal accompaniment, there is almost nothing to distinguish between them. What it comes down to, in my mind, is artistic relevance. If you rip off a song and have nothing new to add to it, then it’s bullshit.. regardless of law. I think this market should take care of itself. Either you’re relevant, or you’re not. When you consider the fact that there are only 7 notes in the western musical scale, the argument for originality falls apart… so what it comes down to is whether people support what you’re doing or not. In other words, it’s all politics.

Amen to that.

As a musician and a songwriter, I would be pissed if someone outright stole my song.. which does happen… but as an artist, I would be ecstatic if someone took my idea to another level.

Amen to that too. When was anyone ever original?

Of course, what I’m saying is highly subjective, but I don’t see anything wrong with borrowing and expanding on ideas, so long as it isn’t outright theft… which I don’t consider most sampling artists to be doing.

Seriously. “911 Is A Joke” uses a sample of “Thriller”, but I doubt anyone is going to confuse one for the other.

Sampling makes some commenters very huffy:

You’re comparing playing a recording of someone else to actually performing on a real instrument music composed by someone else? That’s the same thing to you? You’re lost.

In my experience, choosing and sequencing samples isn’t any harder or easier than writing on an instrument. “Lost” is a revealing choice of word, like samplers are breaking some kind of religious law. Music has religious overtones for  a lot of people, me and this guy included.

Too many artists take songs from good artists like Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, etc and butcher them up. I actually become angry when they come on the radio.

The word “butcher” is pretty graphic. Like samplers are dismembering their source material? I’m going to play armchair psychiatrist and guess the anger here goes a little deeper than the state of popular music.

You don’t see 80′s bands remaking rap songs and putting them on the radio.

Which is too bad, because I’d love to hear Depeche Mode covering Kanye West.

One of my supporters is anxious about the sorry state of copyright law.

I love when information is organized like this. Hope nobody gets sued… That would be unnecessary…

I don’t think I have much to worry about. This is just factual information, nobody owns it.

The warmest pro-MJ sentiment is someone who quotes the Dave Chappelle jury duty skit.

Prosecutor: So, you don’t think Michael Jackson is guilty?
Dave Chappelle: No, man. He made Thriller.
[pause]
Dave Chappelle: Thriller.

There are requests for more sample maps. People want to see Zapp and Roger, “Amen Brother“, the Beastie Boys and Kraftwerk. There are also sarcastic requests for P Diddy and Will Smith, who are not much loved by Digg’s users. Some people don’t like my graphic presentation style:

What an awful, awful way to present this information.

Graphic design fail.

Not very graphic, I’m only seeing a lot of boring info.

Some of the design criticism is helpful.

I’m not suggesting a pie chart would be better. But maybe a legend even. Or make it bigger so it’s not all cramped. Or different colors for each section. Something. The whole point of an infographic is to make something easier to understand, but this honestly would be easier to follow in a list form.

The reason I did it so cramped is so it can all fit together on one screen. If I was going to do a wall-size print or a shower curtain, I’d use a lot more white space. What I like about it the map format is how it creates unexpected juxtapositions. [Update: I subsequently color-coded the maps.]

Digg has a humungous readership, and it feeds a ton of other blogs and aggregators. The map got reposted on Twitter, Delicious, and Tumblr, on Buzzfeed and Prefix Mag, on Highsnobiety and Posterous, on Sling Blog, Funkjelly, Laroushe, and Gearslutz. It was on Spike TV, Fiftyonefiftyone, Yepyep, a Polish blog called Infomuzyka, and Dutch and Italian MJ fan forums. Gigdoggy wrote a nice article about the sample map project generally, and even plugged my book.

While this was all starting to happen, I was reading “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I felt like I was living the book in real time. Like a lot of computer nerds, I don’t get out much. It was a lot of fun making the connection with all thsse MJ fans, and even with the haters.

Then MJ died. Not much more I can add except, rest in peace to a great musician and a complex individual.

After that the map started to really get around. Otis Taylor from South Carolina’s The State interviewed me and ran a bunch of nice quotes in his Sunday article. The map has been on the MTV and VH1 blogs, MSNBC’s Clicked, Rachel Maddow’s Map Room and MJ’s official site. As of this writing, it’s been viewed over a hundred thousand times, by people in Poland and South Africa and Japan and Russia and Iran and France and most of the rest of the internet-using world. Somebody even did a remix:

I’m grateful for all the attention, though I wish it wasn’t driven by the early death of one of my lifelong favorite artists. My friends assure me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, I did the map out of love and everything. It’s been good to hear his music so much lately, I can say that.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something Megamix by ethanhein

It amazes me now that I ever tried to organize my thoughts any other way.

Consider this image:

For most of us, music is the most familiar context for a cassette tape. But you can store any kind of data on a cassette, not just audio. Back in the seventies and early eighties, cassettes were a popular computer data storage medium. Seeing this picture on the same screen as Alan Turing led me to the insight that a cassette with an operating system stored on it is a perfect physical analogy to the concept of a Turing machine. Then I see the Apple cassette on the same screen as Run-DMC, because in the late Jam Master Jay’s hand is a cassette deck.

It brings the connection back home to music, leading me to the idea that music and computer programs might be kind of the same thing. From there it takes me to the idea that music is made of algorithms. From there, I get the idea that maybe memes are algorithms for getting themselves copied, and maybe genes are too. Like I said: useful.

The whole experience has proven to me that I can shuffle images together into a narrative way more easily than hunks of text, no matter how cool Scrivener’s index card view is. I’ll bet there are a whole lot of artsy types out there like me who would be having an easier time in their writing life if they got hip to visual outlining.

I’m finding also that I like developing my ideas in public, throwing images out there and seeing how people react to them. I used to play jazz guitar, and now I laptop DJ. I like improvising in front of an audience. Coming up with ideas is only the front half of creativity. The equally important back half is the pruning, the editing, the rejections, the natural selection. Social writing and image gathering is like social music. When you’re trying to impress other people, you instinctively prune based on what’s going to be the least annoying to everyone, what’s going to raise your social standing. The more time I spend trying out my ideas in public, the more sophisticated and adaptive they become.

You can make folders for your images, known in Flickr as sets. You can also make collections, which are sets of sets. A particular image can belong to as many different sets as you want. And Flickr also supports tags, for another layer of more associative sorting.

All the way around, Flickr is a slick piece of interface design. Anybody trying to create a dashboard for a large, complex database will find a lot of inspiration there.

Like Delicious, Flickr offers a variety of creative alternative display methods. One of its simplest and most delightful toys is the randomizing web site badge. I have mine set to choose three images at random. It chooses a different three every time you refresh the page. Here’s my most serendipitous threesome so far:

Just sitting there and playing random images against each other could keep me supplied with creative nonfiction inspiration for basically ever.

Flickr gives you a lot of nuanced feedback on your viewers. Here are my most popular photos according to Flickr’s interestingness measure, a weighted sum of page views, favorites and comments. For some reason, the image below is the internet’s favorite thing I’ve ever posted, by a large margin. This is probably because I titled it using the word “Matrix,” inadvertantly guaranteeing that it shows up in a lot of google searches.

I myself did not create this image. Some random person on the intertubes did. I found it unattributed on Ffffound. I do a lot of reblogging with Flickr, which is not exactly what the terms of use had in mind, but everything I’m doing could be reasonably characterized as fair use, so I don’t think Flickr minds. I’m not making any money whatsoever from reblogging images. (I wish!) I’m scrupulous about including links to original sites when I can find them. If I include an image from pop culture, like an M.I.A. album cover or something, it’s in the context of an enthusiastic endorsement, the kind of heartfelt word-of-mouth that drives most sales, so I doubt the artists mind either.

In your daily stat report, Flickr lists all the Google and Yahoo image searches that resulted in a view of one of your images. It does something better, actually, it links to those searches. If I post a picture of a cool molecule or interesting knot or colorful bird, a bunch of science students find their way to it immediately. Usually their searches turn up some other cool molecule or knot or bird pictures as well, a rich source of new material for me. And so the cycle continues.