How has the internet affected the behaviour of music consumers?

My Answer to a Quora question found here.

I once heard someone describe the diminished perception of the value of music this way:

Once upon a time, people used to buy their music recorded on vinyl discs called "LPs" In this medium, you could of course play your music, but you could also almost SEE your music. The music was represented in little tiny grooves pressed into the platter. You could easily damage the music you loved by scratching it with the very device intended to let you enjoy it.

A few years later, the disc became smaller and shinier. The compact disc converted the visible grooves on the LP to invisible pits on a ceramic disc. The pits were read by an invisible beam of light. The disc may (or may not) have been more durable than the LP, and access to the tracks were nearly very fast, the artwork and inserts became smaller, and more information could be placed on these little discs than the larger LP counterparts.

Finally, we have progressed to a place where an individual song has been reduced to a file on a computer. Files have little value. We drag them from place to virtual place, move them from hard drive to hard drive, they can be accessed and played instantly, but they carry no artwork other than a simple icon (maybe) electronically associated with it. The file can have varying degrees of quality that the artist and producer has no control over, and can even be edited by a user with a free software.

So from one generation to the next we move from music that you can hold in your hand and see on the grooves of a disc to music that has very little intrinsic value of a computer file-- even the EXACT music that may have previously existed on an LP. Music from the internet has been reduced to an icon on your screen.

So in one way, the internet has affected the behavior of music consumers by subtly devaluing the product itself, in part because the medium on which it exists has changed so significantly.

This may be one reason why it is so hard to convince younger folks that when they transfer a file from one place to another, they are stealing--but that's a whole other discussion.

Our services are out of control

This is a screen shot from my phone via the PlanningCenter app a couple of weeks ago. Made me chuckle

The Latest from Macworld

I can't wait to check THIS out at the Apple store....

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Augmented Reality

This is pretty amazing and doesn't even seem possible, but it is! This video is from this year's TechCrunch50 conference and I heard about this company on this week's TWiT.

I set a world record

Have you ever participated in something on the scale of a world record? Well, I did! And though I didn't install Firefox 3 until two days ago, at least I downloaded my copy on the everybody-download-firefox-today day, June 17th.

I like it, it seems to run well, and I have installed it only on the laptop. Silverlight is still not compatible with it, so I can not watch streaming baseball games from MLB.TV on it, other than that, most of my most loved and oft-used extensions have been upgraded. The del.icio.us add-on is especially good. Give it a try!

Saddleback Conference, Day 3

It is very difficult to articulate the choked up feeling you get when you hear hundreds, really over a thousand voices lifting up worship with a song that is so simple, yet so well written. Such was my experience earlier today with Paul Baloche with his song "Your Name." Baloche as much as anyone seemed to understand and appreciate his audience. He led and was led by the wall of three part sound coming back at him from an enthusiastic crowd. One thing about this conference, it never lacks for worship participation nor enthusiasm. Pictures or video will never do justice, but here are some pictures of the hour we had together,


as well as the "room," completely engaged.


In a short time he encouraged worship teams, worship leaders, and spoke from the vantage point of one who knows exactly how challenging it can be to do what we do, but his words of encouragement from scripture and prayers were challenging and uplifting.

The workshop sessions today were an hour and a half each. The first one I attended was entitled "Church 2.0" which dealt with using 2.o web as an asset to not only connect our congregations and teams, but our communities and the unlimited scope of the internet gives us tools to reach the whole world. There was a lot of great content and the session was taught by Greg Atkinson, who is finishing a book of the session title.

A couple of websites of interest discussed in this session were

• lifechurch.tv
• youversion.com
• programmableweb.com
• Facebook for Pastors

The next session I attended was taught mostly by Carlos Whittaker. He talked about how he used 2.0 tools to manage his team. In particular how he "cheated time" by keeping connected with people and what they're thinking through blogging and Twitter. He said he hardly ever communicates with people by email anymore. He has his team sign up for a twitter account, encourages blogging, has everyone share a del.icio.us account, share their devotional thoughts through youversion, and encourages all of them to be on Facebook so that they have a way of staying in instant and tight contact.


There was a lot of information given in these two sessions and a lot to digest, and a lot ot process practically and philosophically. It was a great day of learning for me and I'm excited to see what kinds of things I can do to implement some of these things for our team.

The evening concerts were big. Big Daddy Weave sang the first hour,

and Kirk Franklin led the second half. Everybody should experience a Franklin concert at least once. It was high-energy but well balanced. Great singers and players-the keyboard harmonies were so cool--someday I'll learn how to play like that! Best quote of the evening from KF "I didn't fly all this way just to do Stomp!"

Facebook Chat

I awoke to find that chat has come to the Raleigh/Durham network on Facebook. Is it in your area yet?

Plaxo solves my sync issues

If you have multiple computers in several locations, and portable "smart" devices that carry a lot of the same information as your computers, you'll drive yourself crazy trying to keep the data on all devices current.

Keeping my data current has been an ongoing quest for me since working on a Windows PC at home and a Mac at work. At first it didn't matter much to me. Then I saw how valuable keeping mailboxes synchronized could be. Soon bookmarks became an issue. For a while, I would export my bookmarks from my work computer by html to a zip(!) drive, carry it home, import it into my home browser.

Over the years, my expectations have grown regarding keeping my devices in sync. My device quantity has grown as well. I currently work from a PowerBook G4, a desktop G5, a Windows XP P4, and now, thanks to my dad off-loading his Treo, a Windows Mobile device.

I have already written about the value of using the Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox. This not only uses your existing Google account to keep your bookmarks synchronized across however many computers you want, it also will sync your history, cache, and site logins and passwords. This is very handy!

I also sychronize my Mac iCal data with my Google calendar using Spanning Sync. This allows me to update shared calendars that are shared with our staff, published publicly for our volunteers to see, and personal family calendars with my wife.

Further, my iCal, Address Book, Yojimbo, Mail settings, Transmit Favorites, Notes, Dashboard Widgets, and Keychains between my two Macs are synchronized through .Mac.

All this synchronizing is a delicate balance to maintain. One innocent failure and entire calendars are duplicated, erased, or corrupted in some other way. The problem to date has been the Treo. Windows Mobile does not make any software to synchronize data with Macs. Third party apps I have tried (three to be exact) have failed miserably to sync to Windows Mobile.

I don't care about my calendar or bookmarks syncing. All I care about is my contact list. I just want to see that show up on my phone and then when I make an edit on my phone, see it reflected back into my address book on my computer(s).

After trying yet another attempt at syncing with a third party app, I decided it wasn't meant to be. I seriously began considering the iPhone. (But I'm with Sprint!)

So PLAXO steps in. A bizarre web site that syncs all of your social web apps: blogger, facebook, flickr, twitter, even Amazon wish lists and puts them into one place. It also synchronizes your calendar (perfectly, I might add) AND your contact list. This wasn't important to me, and frankly scared me a little bit when I pushed the sync button the first time (what if it disrupted my perfect little world of sync harmony?), but I like to try new gadgets and services, and couldn't resist. I pushed the "go" button.

I'm glad I did! It worked perfectly, and continues to work with no troubles. Then I discovered this little sync tab on their site that included all these other services--including Windows Mobile. Really? I thought. Since it worked so well with my Mac, I thought I'd try it. So I took my Treo cradle home, put it on my home computer, found my copy of Office 2003, installed Outlook, downloaded the updates to outlook, and ....success! I now have two-way syncing from my phone to my Address Book in a very unusual way.

Track this "signal path" for adding a new contact to my Address Book beginning with my desktop at church:

Desktop -->thru .Mac --> Laptop
Laptop --> thru Plaxo --> Outlook on PC at home
Outlook --> sync services --> Treo

The cool thing about it is that if I make an edit or a change on my phone, I can stick it in the cradle, and within 30 seconds, my laptop is updated with the new data. I feel like in some ways the whole thing is a hack, a huge bandaid that really only partially works, because it only synchronizes my contacts, (so far) nothing else.

However, if you are not on Plaxo, I would recommend checking it out--even if you only use the sync services.

My chat with Leo

The back story, for the two people reading that might be interested is this: When we bought our first house, I opted for Dish Network over cable. It was new-ish, it was 1998, and hey, we had a house! We had the basic packaging that at the time included this obscure but wonderful TV channel called Tech TV. This is where I'm losing most of you.

Well, on Tech TV there was this show called "The Screen Savers." It was hosted by Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton (among many other soon-to-become-well-known-in-the-tech-world contributors) where they would review new gear, various websites, tips, tools, etc, and would also take calls and answer questions.

I watched it regularly-- much to my wife's dismay, but Leo and Patrick became my buddies --sort of. It was a one way relationship.

Years went by, we moved, I dropped dish all together and went to "free" TV. No more Tech TV, but it turned out that once G4 bought it, it kinda became a shadow of it's former self, most of the cast either were fired or moved on and it became history.

But Leo Laporte began doing podcasts--a new medium he kind of became the pioneer of in some ways, developing this entire network of podcasts (which he actually calls "netcasts") around the central "This Week in Tech," or "TWiT" for short.

So anyway, one of his regular non-podcast gigs, (though he does make it into a podcast) is a "Tech Guy" radio call-in show. He recently started streaming video of himself while on the air (radio) answering questions for callers, then opening up a chat channel for comments of anyone who wants to watch and listen to him streaming. I happened to catch it today and I was quite interested. When the radio show went to commercial, Leo turned his attention to the chat screen and starts having conversations with all the one-liners.

So I throw my 2 cents in today and totally side tracks him--Here it is below:



He answers my question with a "because I'm totally loaded on caffeine, derjazzmeister," and the proceeds to get up our of his chair, walk across the room while he's still mumbling (of course, we can't really hear him) and talks about this great coffee he's been drinking. Here's a screen capture of him holding the product below.



He seems to take advantage of any chance he can to promote whatever product he likes, whether they support him or not. I think this is the key to why he does so well, if he likes your product or service, he'll promote it whether you're paying him to or not!

Anyway, the highlight of my Saturday. Pretty exciting, eh?

Wait, Wha.....?

I created a little space by emptying my trash and didn't see this message the rest of the day, but that still doesn't make me feel much better...

Streetview comes to Raleigh

This is really cool. And no, I'm not concerned about privace issues--not until they come into my house and start taking Panoramic pictures of my living room.

Google has updated their streetview maps in 12 new locations. Here is a screen shot of my house. Looks like I was probably at work when the Google video van came by.

Tooble - for Mac

If you've ever watched a video on YouTube and wished you had a way to keep it locally on your computer, let me introduce you to Tooble. This is a new freeware piece of software that I first heard about through this podcast.


It has an integrated search engine, as well as it's own preset categories. Once you find what you want, put check marks by the videos and click download. It will then download and convert the Youtube streams into Quicktime files and if you want, it will even import the files directly into your iTunes movie folder. Enjoy!

Is Your Computer On?

Of course it's on. You're reading this.

Do you leave your computer(s) on all night?

Read this.

I'm guilty. Four computers under my control in a day's work. I usually leave them all on. All protected, but all on--all night.

Maybe I should reconsider.

Twitter

For some reason (it's Matt's fault, really), I've signed up for a Twitter account. You can follow me here. It also syncs with my Facebook status. I'm following far more people than are following me. Probably because I haven't gotten the word out.

Word is out. What's your Twitter handle?

More computer problems

Everything's back to normal. It's ok. This news is a couple weeks old. My laptop's hard drive died. This was not as big of a crisis as the home computer discussed in previous posts. The reasons for that are these:

1. All my financial data is on my home computer. When that went down, I almost didn't know how to pay a bill, or even what money I had (not much, I assure you)
2. I use iDisk. This is a really cool service through .Mac that keeps my data syncronized between my laptop and my desktop at work. All my finale files, word docs, pdf files, and everything are kept on an Apple server somewhere, plus the files are kept locally on my desktop hard drive and my laptop hard drive so I can work off line if I want to, then when I reconnect, the data is synchronized.
3. I back up fairly regularly. I have been using SuperDuper for some time, though when I went to Leopard, it no longer functioned. I am now trying out Time Machine, however, which is very cool.
4. I use the Google Browser Sync firefox extension. This is cool because any computer that I use keeps all of my bookmarks, passwords, cache, history, everything syncronized between my browsers. After installing Firefox on this machine, then installing that extension, all my settings came back and I was at home again.
5. Applecare. I walked in to the Apple store, they tested the computer, determined the hard drive failed, and replaced my hard drive for "free." Plus my fold hard drive was discontinued for this model laptop and they had to replace it with the next model up. I went from 100GB to 120GB. Cool! If you have a Mac, Applecare is worth the extra bucks. I didn't have to do anything except tell them the machine doesn't work and they took care of it.

Computer crashes are very inconvenient, no question, but as hard drive crashes go, this was far more manageable!

Computer Crash Update

I've been away from the interweb for a while, but while I was gone typed this update for all concerned about the restoration of our home desktop:



I know you've all been wondering.

The answer is that the computer of my "crash!" post is back and running. However, I had to go through a multi-step process to see it restored. And it's honestly not fully restored, but the important data has been recovered.

After running SpinRite, I was still unable to get the computer to boot. I got further along than I had previously, but still not able to boot. A disk error was encountered in the process.

By this time, I had taken the hard drive down to my other computer and was able to retrieve important info off of it. Mostly my Quicken data. I could retreive pictures from the "my pictures" folder too, so I knew the drive was not totally lost, even though it wouldn't boot.

This began another very irritating process. The re-installation of Windows XP.

I have a hollographic XP Home Edition install disc. After getting about 50% through the installation process (did I mention I purchased a new hard drive from TigerDirect on Capitol? A Seagate 250GB for $80!), I encountered a "cyclic redundancy error." A WHAT?

Apparently a Cyclic Redundancy Error is a fancy way of saying that an error has been encountered in reading the disk, and really what is going on is that the software suspects that the disk is not authentic. I restarted and tried again, and again. Every time I got to the screen that said "39 minutes to finish the install," I got this error. VERY very frustrating.

Let me just pause and say that a few weeks prior to this incident, I received a new copy of mace os 10.5 "Leopard." My installation on this laptop took about 3 hours total time. I went from 10.4 to 10.5 and had absolutely no trouble. All my data was maintained and the OS upgrade was flawless.

Back to the Windows machine. Thom tried to help me resolve this issue. He attempted to assist me with this issue, babysitting my machine during the week of dress rehearsals and trying to get it to go. But in spite of cleaning the lens on the DVD drive, cleaning the disk itself, it became clear that the error was not able to be overcome. Either a much deeper issue existed in the hard ware, or there really was a simple error on the disk. (Neither of us had an extra home XP disk lying around).

Thom recommended I take the computer to Intrex, where for $50 I could have them run a diagnostic on the memory, CPU, HD (new HD), and motherboard. They did, and they found now trouble.

Once they began to install XP however, they encountered the same error I encountered. HA! I feel a little vindicated. The solution? They simply swapped my install disk with theirs and it worked like a charm. Stupid.

So now I have windows machine up and running again on a fresh hard drive AND my old HD in the computer primarily to retrieve my old data when needed.

I've also tried something I've never done before. I'm running everything as a user rather than as admin. I have a password protected "admin" account, a "Janet" account and a "Brian" account. Since I like to use Google's firefox bookmark plugin, keeping seperate accounts between Janet and me will allow us to bookmark our browsing separately.

Computer crashes, life goes on. Computers are becoming like cars. We're very dependent on them to the point that if they crash we almost don't know what to do!

CRASH!

"Crash" fortunately is not the sound of a bone-breaking fall, or the collision of vehicles hitting each other at high speeds.

And I'm not referring to the movie "Crash," one of my all-time favorites.

It's the sound of a hard drive. My hard drive.

Don't you just love that?

After a great time visiting family at Thanksgiving, covering parts of Pennsylvania, while passing through Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and of course, North Carolina in one four-day period, the last thing I wanted to come home to was a hard drive that was unresponsive.

But I did. And it was.

We have two computers at our house. The primary computer is the one that has the hot-running "Prescott" Intel P-IV chip in it. (and by "hot," I don't necessarily mean it is fast, I mean it runs very very hot! warms up the whole room!) It is also the machine that holds our itunes library, Picasa photos over the last four or five years, Quicken, email, etc., etc. This is not a hard drive I can afford to lose, but clearly there are some bad sectors.

Even though I had turned both the machines off while we were gone (which may have caused the problem, who knows? I leave my computers on 24/7), when we fired it up, it didn't take long for the error to reveal itself.

Well, I am attempting to recover my hard drive data with a little piece of software called Spinrite. I learned of this program because I am a regular listener of the fairly geeky Security Now podcast. This software is interesting. It is a svelte, compact little piece of machine-language software that boots from either your floppy drive or your CD-Rom drive. Once you buy it, you run it to create a little .iso file that that it runs from either source (including even a USB flash drive, though I couldn't get my computer to boot to that). My computer doesn't have a floppy drive, only a DVD drive so I knew I was going to have to get this little program onto a CD.

If I didn't have the other computer, commonly referred to as "the kid's computer," I don't think this would have worked. Fortunately, though it is several years old, it has a little 4X CDRW burner. After downloading some freeware that allows you to install .iso files to the boot sector (this is very important, otherwise the bios will not see this disc as a bootable disc, but only as a disc with an .iso file on it!), I got the Prescott computer to load the software and start working on the drive. It found the bad sectors right away and started trying to recover the data.

As I understand it, the software works literally bit by bit, flipping each bit from what it is to the the opposite, then back again (0 to 1, back to 0). If the sector is bad, it saves that bit to another part of the drive that is healthy. My drive is 160 GB. Spinrite has been running now for six days, non-stop. It is 80% finished with the drive. After this week's long investment, I hope it can salvage the drive long enough for me to copy it to a new hard drive! I'll keep anyone interested posted in this exciting saga.

An esoteric funny

While checking the web on compatibility issues between Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Finale, I stumbled upon this post from a user on a Finale message board that made me laugh out loud:

I got Leopard today too. It was a gift from my son because his pit bull ate my 10.4 system discs. The dog runs fine on 10.4.

Like Bart, I will install it on a non-essential Mac and check it out.

Bill

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

Much attention has been given to the problem of students relying on Wikipedia as a source of information, but one professor has turned that problem on its head: instead of term papers, her students now write Wikipedia entries. [Link]

This is awesome! Yes, there are still entries in Wikipedia that need to be filled. Maybe once Wikipedia gets filled up, the prof can turn her attention toward Mahalo!

Blogged with Flock

I Use Adium

There was a time, not too long ago when I first migrated to OS X (from OS 9--that was a long wait for me! but that's another story all together) that I signed up for iChat. At first I ignored it. I never used it. My reasons were simple. First, I resented being interrupted at any given moment by someone, anyone who sees me online. Second, there's the phone. There's email. There are cell phones. There were already a variety of ways to reach me. And of course, most compelling, the two people at the time with whom I would most likely share a chat were in the offices next to me. So why bother?

After moving to NC, I decided to resurrect iChat. I played with it for a while but soon discovered that some of my friends, litterally from all over the world, were on several different chat services. As it turned out, I unwittingly had accounts on many of these chat services already in place. I was an early adapter of ICQ, back in the dial up days.
I rarely used it. I have a Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AIM account (iChat works on AIM). How could I see if my friends were online without having to check all these different services?

Enter Adium. This is a great little program for MAC OS X. It combines all of your various chat accounts into one place. As you can see, you may access me from any one of these services below:


You can organize your contacts in various ways, by a custom-assigned buddy list, or by account. My list automatically resizes as people come and go. It lives in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. It may look like any of these windows at various times:


I've now decided that the reason I live with chat on so much has more to do with just knowing that I can reach someone quickly and easily. (Yes, I'll admit, email has become just too slow!). I've enjoyed the instant contact with someone who may be across the hall or half way around the world. Just like most chat clients, you can set away messages if you're busy, or sometimes, you just can't reply to someone right way--no different then not answering your phone just because someone calls.

For those of you wondering what the Windows equivalent of this program would be, I would suggest Trillian, though since I tried it last, it didn't compete with Adium's slickness.

Send me your chat address!