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.

From Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia entry:

A controversy arose following Santorum’s statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press that was published on April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum said the priests were engaged in “a basic homosexual relationship”, and went on to say that he had “[...] no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts”; that the right to privacy, as detailed in Griswold v. Connecticut, “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution”; that, “whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family”. When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality”.

Rick Santorum is guilty of hate speech. In a perfect world, Dan Savage would have addressed Santorum’s ignorance and bigotry in a loving, Gandhi-esque fashion, but I give Savage credit for creativity and effectiveness. His Google bombing campaign might be juvenile and vengeful in tone, but he’s fighting speech with speech in an exceptionally clever way, and has drawn a lot of attention to a worthy cause. What’s more moral than protesting hate speech nonviolently?

Santorum is a high-profile voice for one of America’s last widely acceptable forms of institutionalized bigotry. His hate speech has real-world consequences. Two days ago, a fourteen-year-old who made an “It Gets Better” video committed suicide after being bullied for being gay. Rick Santorum is in part to blame for the atmosphere of hate that gay kids have to live with. If the worst thing that happens to him is being made fun of on the internet, well, that sounds pretty just to me.

See also: Ethan Hein’s answer to Which SEO strategies could one use to get ricksantorum.com ranked #1 for “Rick Santorum”?

Original question on Quora

Historically, search engine results were ranked based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. But as the web grows, there are tons and tons of pages out there with the same or similar keywords. Any Google search on any remotely mainstream topic is going to return thousands and thousands of hits, most of which are useless to you. Another problem is that the keyword system is easy to game. Unscrupulous web designers can load up a page with invisible keywords repeated over and over, by putting them in the same color as the background off to the side of the page.

To make its results more useful, Google tries to rank its keyword-based search results in the order of their relevance. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank, the real heart of their search engine. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to a page. If more people link to your site, presumably that’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.

So the key to a higher Google rank is getting other pages to link to you. The question is, how do you get those precious inbound links?

The first step is to do a lot of linking to yourself. Using blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and other social networks, you can link to your own site with impunity. A single Twitter post is a full-fledged web page unto itself and any links within it count just as much toward your Google PageRank as any other.

Internal links from one page within your web site to another all count towards your PageRank total. This is why blogs are so great for SEO. They create tons of internal links automatically: tags, categories, previous/next post links, and so on. WordPress users can get even more SEO benefit from plugins like Random Posts, Calendar and Most Commented.

Another way to get your URL out there is to comment on other people’s blogs. Nearly all blog platforms give you a chance to add a link to yourself when you post a comment. This SEO strategy has given rise to the automated blog-commenting spambot, a program that generates a human-seeming comment from keywords in your site with a link back to some online vitamin seller or what have you.

In addition to links, you still need to make sure your keywords are in place in your page copy. What search terms are people likely to use when looking for your site? Put yourself in the shoes of a stranger out there on the internet. Do some Google searches in character as this stranger. Make sure the phrases that you’re searching with appear verbatim in your page text.

Freshness of content matters too. Google ranks newer material higher than older material. This is yet another reason why blogs are better than static web sites for getting yourself noticed. Twitter is even better for keeping your presence up-to-date.

Plain-English URLs and page titles help too. Notice that the addresses of the posts in this blog spell out what the post is about. If your page titles and URLs give some indication of what’s on the page, that helps both humans and the Google robots identify them properly.

SEO companies have all sorts of esoteric methods and tricks, technical stuff like alt tags and XML sitemaps. By all means, try these things, they can’t hurt and might marginally help. But fundamentally, SEO is all about having well-written content that’s genuinely useful or interesting to other people, and having lots of links pointing at your site. These more basic approaches take time and effort, but ultimately, they really work.

In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.

Folk music is by nature open-source (that’s folk in the “public domain/traditional” sense, not the “pop music played on acoustic guitar” sense.) You’re free to take public-domain material and rewrite or rearrange it as you see fit. There are more Frankie and Johnny and Sweet William songs than you can shake a stick at. Amazing Grace was sung to twenty different melodies before it settled into the one we’re all familiar with. Musically, the American folk tradition draws on a narrowly limited toolbox: I-IV-V chord progressions, major and minor pentatonics, circle of fifths root movements and the like.

Blues is an especially good example of an open-source form. It belongs to no one and everyone. Historically, at one point it belonged to African-Americans in the deep south, and some might feel that it still belongs to them. But as a practical matter, blues belongs to anyone who can sing or play an instrument and who’s willing to learn the vocabulary. There are a wealth of practitioners, teachers, recordings, books, videos and web sites to help. To really play blues with mastery takes a lot of practice, but there’s a low barrier to entry, and you can play it on just about any instrument, or just sing it a capella.

If you want to learn any improvisation-based music like blues, jazz or rock, an excellent strategy is to transcribe other people’s solos from recordings. Once you’re a sufficiently experienced musician, you can figure out pop songs in a few listens. But complex jazz and classical music can be impenetrable to the best of us when it’s rushing past in real time. Without a score to guide me, a lot of the inner logic of John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk would be beyond my grasp. Transcribing from recordings is a tedious, labor-intensive process. Fortunately, there’s a piece of software that helps you, called, appropriately enough, Transcribe. Click to see it bigger.

The top part of the screen shows about eight bars of “Afro Blue” as played by Coltrane. Two bars are highlighted. Once you highlight a section, you can play it back as a loop. You can also hear the loop slowed down to half or quarter speed with the pitches intact. This feature is invaluable for figuring out the twistier passages. I added the little green measure markers and red section markers by hand. You can stick these markers in from the keyboard during playback, it’s a lot like conducting. At the bottom of the screen, the software is guessing which pitches are included in the sample. The sharp peaks at the right show that the soprano sax plays A flat, B flat, C and E flat during the loop. The software has a harder time figuring out the pitches in the more crowded/muddily recorded lows and mids, but when you give it shorter samples to work with, it gets more accurate. If you give it a single cleanly-recorded piano chord, it can usually identify the individual notes  accurately. Helpful! Transcribe helps you uncover the source code of the music, so to speak, making it much easier to repurpose it for your own creative use.

Once you’ve got your bars and beats identified and looped in Transcribe, you can export them as samples with just a few mouse clicks. You can use these samples as the basis of new tracks in and of themselves. I usually drop my samples into Recycle for further slicing and dicing. It’s no coincidence that Transcribe should be such an excellent sampling tool, not just a transcription tool. It reveals the inherent similarity between both practices.

The recorded music industry is generally unfriendly to sampling, since in its present form it depends on ownership of and exclusive access to music. The software industry is coming around to more of a folk music attitude. On the Google blog, Jonathan Rosenberg says this about the virtues of openness:

The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software … expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system.

Open systems have the potential to spawn industries. They harness the intellect of the general population and spur businesses to compete, innovate, and win based on the merits of their products and not just the brilliance of their business tactics.

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term.

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

As music comes to live increasingly on the internet, it too is going to continue to become more open-source in nature, with or without the blessing of copyright holders. Any sufficiently motivated kid with a computer can find and dissect anything that’s ever been recorded with some diligent web searching and software experimentation. The result is a lot of surprising new hybrids. Sampling, the internet and mp3 player shuffle combine with immigration to completely decontextualize musical memes, freeing them to recombine in ever-more unpredictable ways. This article gives the example of Mexican-American DJs who sample Bollywood soundtracks in a mistaken attempt to get an Arabic sound, resulting in something that sounds better than if they sourced the sounds “correctly.”

Some hip-hop musicians have embraced the open-source attitude. Kanye West gives away mp3s of the stems for “Love Lockdown” conveniently separated by track for your remixing pleasure. I hope more musicians follow his example.