For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question 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.

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

How nice for Mark Zuckerberg that he doesn’t feel the need to keep any part of himself private. Zuckerberg doesn’t have an identity outside of his work, which is common enough in Silicon Valley startup culture but is neither possible nor desirable for most of us. When family members have illnesses, or friends are feeling down, or I’m thinking or feeling something that doesn’t reflect well on me in that moment, how is that any of my coworkers’ business? Zuckerberg understands human psychology very well within the context of college and startup culture, but Facebook is an increasingly poor fit for the complexities of my social life.

Steve Cheney writes:

Facebook is no longer a social network. They stopped being one long before the movie. Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

In her essay “Facebook and Radical Transparency,” danah boyd articulates the disconnect between Zuckerberg’s values and everyone else’s.

Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists.

In internet startup culture, typically you’re extremely proud of the work that you do, and you commit to it completely, immersing yourself in it. By the same token, you work so hard that you don’t have time left over to have other aspects to your personality. If your whole identity is wrapped up in a product that you’re proud and eager to get the word out about, what could be the harm in total personal transparency?

The problem is that most of us don’t completely identify with our jobs. We have aspects of our lives that we aren’t eager to share with everyone we encounter.

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

This sounds exactly like the privacy policy for the social networking tool I’m dreaming up in my head. And I’d rather just charge users money up front so there’s no financial incentive to share data.

In his essay “Confusing *a* public with *the* public,” Jeff Jarvis takes Facebook to task for not understanding that there are many different degrees of “public” and “private.”

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

I disagree with Jeff Jarvis about Twitter.

In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone.

Twitter does entail publishing to everyone unless you set your tweets to private. Each tweet is a page on the open web, indexed by Google. It’s a short-form blogging tool. That’s what I like about it. I’m intending my statements there to be read by any stranger who cares to tune in. I love Twitter, I enjoy it and derive tremendous practical benefit from it. But I also want something private, something for home truths and expressions of heartbreak and anxiety and frank discussion of medical issues. Twitter certainly isn’t that. Facebook could be tediously configured into that using lists, but even if it’s technically possible to use it that way, it feels wrong. It retains flavor of the dorm room, and that’s not a setting that I feel comfortable using for serious emotional issues.

I want to build something better, maybe on top of Diaspora. Who wants to join me?

The images in this post are visualizations of my Facebook friends by Ivan Kozik’s Nexus app.

The panel:

• Moderator: Jeff Leeds, Editor in Chief, Music, Buzzmedia
• Angel Laws, Founder and Editor in Chief, ConcreteLoop.com
• Jessica Suarez, Writer, Stereogum
• Tamar Anitai, Senior Editor, buzzworthy.mtv.com
• Rob Bonstein, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Epic Records
• Sarah Weiss, Head of Markting, Bowery Presents

The panel is taking place in the Buzz Media office, a grungy downtown space. The walls are hung with art made from stuff found on the ground. Being here makes me feel like an old, old man. It doesn’t help that I have a job interview later today, so I’m wearing my most conservative suit. Meanwhile, Rob Bonstein may be a Senior Director, but he looks like he’s about twelve.

Nevertheless, here I am. The setup in here is distinctly less slick than yesterday’s presentation at JWT, which is a colossal, gleaming midtown ad firm. This is a grungier downtown space with a flaky PA and flakier internet.

As far as this panel is concerned, social media is coextensive with Twitter. The word “Facebook” isn’t uttered once in the first hour. When someone finally does mention it, it’s in the context of driving traffic to Twitter. The panel considers Facebook to be like MySpace for adults, except without the music-playing functionality.

Transparency vs mystique

Should bands have separate personal and professional Twitter presences? The panel can’t agree. On the one hand, transparency is the fundamental social media value. Who doesn’t love behind-the-curtain access to their music heroes? Mystique seems like an outdated concept in the social media age. On the other hand, when rock stars reveal the mundane reality of their lives, they run the risk of puncturing the whole fantasy we’re trying to project onto them. There’s a reason you don’t see Lady Gaga posting Twitpics of her wearing sweatpants.

The panel is unanimous that a musician’s public persona needs to be “on brand.” Otherwise you get too much cognitive dissonance, like M.I.A. and her infamous truffle fries. It makes sense to expect musicians to have a consistent persona, but it asks a lot to ask someone to equate their personhood with their brand. The idea frankly creeps me out. Kanye West succeeds at admirably at inhabiting his persona at all times, but he’s either a hyperdisciplined virtuoso performance artist or a complete lunatic, or both.

Meanwhile, sometimes artists do their most meaningful work when they go “off-brand.” Miles Davis was way outside the bebop identity he helped invent when he put on his sequined lace-up bellbottoms and made Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, but that was the peak of his commercial (and arguably cultural) impact.

Regardless of whether musicians are supposed to be playing characters or just being themselves, social media best practices are the same as they are for any person or band. Self-promotion is follower repellent. Show the fans love! When they write to you, write them back. Wish them good luck on their math test or whatever. The panel cites Ciara as a good example of the personal and interactive approach. More surprisingly, the panel also mentions Ice-T, who loves to publicly argue with his critics. Just retweeting praise is as boring as any other kind of promotion; Ice-T’s stream is interesting because he’s real and unpredictable.

Planet Kanye

Angel Laws says that when she met Kanye, he told her, “I don’t need Twitter, I’m Kanye West!” That was then.

Kanye’s Twitter is a must-follow. One look at the grammar and spelling and you know that his feed isn’t written by a publicist. It’s constantly “on-brand,” but that brand is so eccentric and self-mocking and over the top that it couldn’t possibly be calculated. Maybe the specifics of Kanye’s life aren’t very relatable to the average hip-hop fan, like his difficulty in selecting the right marble table for his conference room. But Kanye’s Twitter voice is so idiosyncratic and heartfelt that I find it totally endearing.

The bottom line

Twitter is very amusing, but does it actually drive album and ticket sales? It certainly helps get you press attention, and attention generally. The journalists on the panel say if you want to get on their radar, at-replies work better than press releases. As for sales? No one really knows why people buy one album and not another, much less this panel. No one knows specifically whether a given social media effort will make anyone do anything. But attention can’t hurt, and a close connection to the fans can only help.

Guilty pleasures

This doesn’t have anything to do with social media per se, but it’s worth mentioning. Tamar Anitai from MTV kept invoking the concept of the “guilty pleasure.” This is funny to me. America is so puritan, even the hipsters of the pop music world. I love the idea that if I enjoy Justin Bieber, I’m being immoral, like I’m harming someone. Tamar Anitai breaks up the band gossip on her Twitter by talking about TV shows, and she “confesses” to “hating herself” for watching Dancing With The Stars and such. So I’m supposed to believe that that MTV’s marketing team and their Twitter followers are so highbrow and cultured normally, and that they’re being deliciously transgressive when they reveal the dirty secret that they watch crappy reality TV? Didn’t MTV give us Jersey Shore? So many contradictions.

Odds and ends

Facebook isn’t the only big social platform to be conspicuously absent from the presentation YouTube also doesn’t get mentioned until near the very end. It seems surprising, since YouTube is by far the biggest music search engine and discovery tool on the web. I guess no one’s talking about it because it isn’t much of a revenue stream for the music industry. Though how could the labels and music press not be capitalizing on it somehow? I don’t understand the music business. But apparently, neither does the music business.

Erykah Badu live-tweeted giving birth! No real comment there, just, wow.

At this point, artist web sites only exist to direct Google searchers to the appropriate social media profile or item for sale.

The panel doesn’t see much value in requiring people to enter email addresses to hear tracks or do other kinds of interaction. All kids have multiple email addresses now, one that they actually use and the rest to put into web sites to collect marketing messages and spam. Organic social media interactions, word of mouth and TV are the only way to actually get a kid’s attention.

The panel sees a bright future in the use of Foursquare check-ins as a celebrity marketing tool. Ugh.

Social media is all well and good, but no one is buying albums. If you want to make money from recordings, your best hope is to get something placed in a TV ad.

On a brighter note, the panel loves Soundcloud. So do I. No better music-sharing service exists on the web. The panel especially loves the within-song commenting. Show Soundcloud lots of love, internet, we want them to succeed.

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?

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.

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

The stats on my blog are a writerly gold mine. Anybody who clicks on one of my posts is voting for the ideas in that post. I tend to put stuff up when it’s about two thirds of the way done. Posts that get a lot of hits and comments get more attention and revision from me. My readers decide collectively what gets more attention, what gets polished up into presentable prose and what gets left as free form public note-taking. The really hot ones, about the Funky Drummer or Delicious or Auto-tune The News, are smooth and polished like the rocks in a particularly lively river.

No surprise: the internet loves Michael Jackson and Lil Wayne. Surprises: the internet loves math. Especially dividing by zero. The internet also loves quantum mechanics and its broad overlaps with musical harmonics.

Even better than the stats are the commenters. Moderating my comments is one of the most fun aspects of blogging. I get to be the editor of my own private little Atlantic Monthly. Asking for comments has been a good way for me to crowdsource research, mobilizing my smart friends and any internet stranger who happens along to gather unexpected new data.

I don’t approve all of my comments. Any blog attracts a lot of automated spam comments, some of which slip past the filter. Fortunately, spam is easily spotted. As for hate mail, I don’t get very much. Usually people who disagree with me just stop reading and move on. Long, thoughtful disagreement is even more rare. When someone does disagree with me at length, I take it as a token of respect and am happy to post and respond. This guy’s comment was an opportunity for me to practice my grownup debating skills, learning to disagree agreeably. This is a growth area for me, and the blog has been good for practicing.

Blogging from the iPhone has turned out to be an unexpected treat. I would have expected the phone to be a severely limited blogging tool compared to the full screen and keyboard. For editing HTML, the phone is not the right tool for the job, but it’s perfectly fine for writing prose. Editing and moderating from the WordPress iPhone app is still cumbersome, but the fact that it even exists and they give it away free is a near miracle. I wrote most of this post while waiting in lines. Who needs a Game Boy?

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

Imagine us sitting on stage left at Galapagos Art Space. Behind us is a huge screen. On the screen is a steadily updating feed of tweets from all over the world. People are text messaging twitter with the word #shorty in their text and is getting posted to the screen. It’s almost the main attraction. Some of the comments are about the band, that is to say, comments about us. Some texts are quite favorable, some others not-so-much! Gradually a real-time debate develops on the screen behind us about the merits of what we were doing. It was totally surreal. The brainstorm hits to begin incorporating the text from the screen behind us into the lyrics. It has an immediate impact on the screen behind us. “Did he just sing that woman’s comment?” One woman said that she was so bored she was going to slit her wrists! Clifton tells the band that he wants the next break. We give it to him. He whispers into the mike, “Please don’t slit your wrists.” In seconds, she posts again: “Sorry.” This happened over and over again creating a very different form of dialogue. There was a flurry of comments about us behind us that I would read back and put some spin on.

When I wasn’t singing or playing trumpet, I was encouraged to tweet from my iPhone from the stage! I posted things like, “The band needs beer” and “Clifton is going to start preaching. Listen now.” It appeared on the stage behind us. The world was watching and responding.

When I saw the first negative comment I had the obvious sinking emotional reaction. This was a pretty basic comment that was really the first piece of harsh criticism we had received — and in writing — and in front of an audience of the three hundred people — and in front of all the tens of thousands of people watching on line. Oh yeah, receiving written criticism about your performance while in the middle of that very same performance is a first and weird too. So, when I saw the line “This band Sux!” it kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit.

About thirty seconds later though I was excited and amused when I had a flash of insight. We had suddenly been thrust to the level where people with no personal connection to us were moved to appreciate, judge, talk about, defend, protect, haze, fall in love with, and diss . . . It felt suddenly like an enormous step in the right direction. I started to beam. And people were rallying to say great things about us too. No matter what it just started to make me happy. For the record: the positive responses to the band far far outweighed the disses. The negative stuff was good feedback too and often very funny. The positive stuff was very encouraging and we have many many more fans than we did before the event.

I’m finding myself totally intrigued by this experience. I’m especially intrigued by the idea of working people’s comments into the lyrics improvisationally. I’m sensing some big possibilities here in bringing audience participation back into music.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of music, what its evolutionary purpose is, and the awkward fit it sometimes makes with our present social circumstances. The most useful thing I’ve read on the subject is a book by Stephen Mithen called The Singing Neanderthals. This guy is a paleontologist, not a musician, but I think he hits the nail squarely on the head. He thinks, and I agree, that music predates language in humans, that it’s the bridge between the calls and body language of monkeys and modern human speech.

Monkeys communicate basic emotional states: contentment, fear, aggression. Music communicates those states in a more nuanced way — simple pitch ratios and repetitive rhythms convey pleasurable feelings, while irrational ratios and jagged rhythms convey anxiety and aggression. Language came about when the sounds and gestures of music detached themselves from specific and immediate feeling states and took on an abstract symbolic life of their own.

I devote a lot of my downtime trying to imagine what social life was like in the stone age. I learned in school like everyone else about the time scale of human evolution, but it didn’t sink in for me until recently just how brief and unusual modern civilization is in the broader context of our history. Let’s say that anatomically modern humans emerged a million years ago — that number is arbitrary, but it’s conveniently round. Agriculture and town life is ten thousand years old. That means that 99% of our history has been spent living as foragers in essentially chimpanzee-like conditions, and that our present circumstances are a bizarre little eyeblink.

Our bodies evolve a lot slower than our culture, and our emotional systems are still mostly equipped for stone age conditions. That means we expect to spend our entire lives with the small, closely-knit band of mostly blood relatives, very rarely encountering strangers. My guess is that music-making in this context mostly took place around the campfire at night, and was a group activity involving the entire tribe’s participation. I’m also guessing that it was mostly improvised. This idea of specialist musicians performing preset works for a passive audience seems to me to be a peculiar and unnatural aberration, a quirk of our present circumstances very much at odds with our emotional needs.

I care about jazz way more than I care about European classical, and I lately care more about hip-hop than jazz. For me, it’s a simple matter of audience participation. In classical music, the audience doesn’t even get to applaud at the end of a movement. In jazz, there’s more interaction, but the audience is still mostly a passive recipient of information from the band. Hip-hop is all about group participation. I’m not talking about big stadium shows or TV here; I mean hip-hop as practiced on street corners and in clubs, where the mic gets passed around the circle and anyone who has the nerve takes a turn rhyming. I think the hip-hop cypher is as close as Americans get to the group improvisation of the stone age campfire.

So when I read about Tin Pan responding in real time to messages from the audience, I get excited. For all the high-tech trappings, the Shorty Awards show feels to me like moving closer to the natural state of music-making. The big difference from the stone age is that the Shorty’s audience was mostly comprised of strangers. There’s a big yawning emotional distance there, it’s what presumably emboldened that woman to post that the band made her “want to slit her wrists.” Not the kind of thing she’d probably say to the face of her relatives, although who knows, maybe her family is that messed up. But so in the present world we’re doomed to mostly interact with strangers, or shallow acquaintances at best. At least Twitter is moving us in the direction of greater intimacy and emotional connection. That, to me, can only be a good thing.

Turning the concert experience into a literal dialog between the band and the audience feels like a big step forwards. I’m imagining a near future where concerts, karaoke, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revoution and hip-hop cyphers converge back to the group interaction that music should fundamentally be all about.