Send As SMS

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Web 2.0? Try Web 1.0.

The new buzzword 'Web 2.0' has been gaining momentum and is becoming slapped onto every new website that rears its head. I don't think there's any doubt that as a useful term, it's quickly losing any meaning. In fact, it's a bit of a misnomer to begin with. Things are being positioned as if they are some kind of new and revolutionary development, when a better way to describe these developments would be 'mature'. As a 'platform', the web has finally reached a level of maturity and stability that actually makes it a viable platform for application development. Up until this point, it was a mish-mash of ideas, standards, and technologies that really hadn't been defined either by an organization or its users.

Technology is socially constructed - and this applies to the web moreso than many other technologies. The whole mythology of the web was that it was a distributed, open, and free space that allowed for open publishing and a vast exchange of ideas and interaction between people. However, just what people wanted to publish and how they wanted to do it was yet to be defined. The idea that it could be thrown up overnight and be a fully realized environment was naive. It takes time to develop a stable platform of this magnitude, and for the idea to penetrate the public consciousness - because it's the users that make the platform viable.

All of the core ideas that are being flagged as 'Web 2.0' have been there from the start, they're just now at a point that they're mature enough to actually deliver on some of the promises that they made. Take a few examples:

1. Personal publishing. Free publishing systems (Blogger,WordPress,etc.), free web hosting, and popular acceptance have brought blogging to the fore. Truth be told though, people have been putting their ideas onto web pages from the very beginning - the idea has just become interesting to a wider audience, and works better now.

2. Application platform. Developers have been jury-rigging 'applications' on the web since the beginning as well. It's only recently though that there's been enough bandwidth, expertise, and stability amongst platforms to make truly rich applications possible. AJAX apps could have been done 10 years ago, but browsers were too flaky, and bandwidth was too thin. Imagine Google Maps on your 14.4k modem.

3. Social Networking/Participation. This has everything to do with technology penetration. Up until this point, there just weren't enough people engaged in the web culture to make it a viable platform for any of these things. It took time for people to understand the technology, to get interested and excited about it, for broadband to become widespread, and for the kids to whom this stuff is second nature to grow up a bit.

And of course, there's the 'perpetual beta'. An apt way to close this little blurb, as I think that it accurately describes what the web as a whole has been undergoing for the past decade or so. The entire experiment has been evolving and improving and being refined as developers gain experience with the technologies and users become familiar with the ideas and culture. 'Web 2.0' is being used to describe the new emerging web "after the bust", but the bust is just what happens when you launch with pre-release software that's buggy as hell. It fails! In 1997, it was more like Web 0.5Alpha. So, rather than calling it 'Web 2.0', maybe we should be calling it Web 1.0, since it may just deliver on all the promises it made originally.

---
Like this article? Digg it!

Friday, January 27, 2006

Nettwerk takes on the RIAA

Finally. Some sense comes out of the record industry. In this press release, Nettwerk records announces it is defending a music fan who downloaded their songs from the RIAA. Rather than side with the RIAA in their assinine fight to assault anyone who dares listen to music without paying THE $MAN$, Nettwerk records has struck back saying that, "Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem."

Rather than accepting the new reality and supporting those who act as free ambassadors of the music that makes them money, the RIAA chooses to attack anyone who refuses to accept their "traditional" model of distribution. Of course, in another moment of clarity, Nettwerk points out that "Litigation is not 'artist development.'"

Last year, profits were way up for the music industry. So what are those greedy bastards at the RIAA complaining about?

So, the first week of posting is over here at The Trawler and I'm pleased to say it was a success. We had quite a few visitors, and a growing number of folks coming back for a second look. I hope that it continues in the coming weeks. Tell your friends, link back to us, post about us on your blog, subscribe to the RSS feed!

And if you have suggestions, praise, complaints, feel free to drop a line at trawler.info at gmail dot com. You'll notice that we have occasional music posts, so if you're an indie band looking for some exposure and you're good, you can submit mp3s to that same address. No guarantees about reponses or getting posted though. Keep an eye out here to get an idea of the kind of stuff we like to listen to.

And for technology posts, if you're a digg user, make sure you digg the articles!

Keep readin' - there's gonna be plenty more to come.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Graham Coxon - Love Travels At Illegal Speeds

In a recent NME interview, Graham Coxon basically shat all over Damon Albarn, and essentially called Blur immature and boyish. Coxon maintains that he's thoroughly over Blur and has moved on. From where I sit, it's also pretty obvious that he was a large part of the talent driving that band, as their lone record without him, Think Tank, tanked horribly. Blur are desperate to get him back in the fold, but he's not biting.

And nor should he! His latest album, Love Travels At Illegal Speeds, the follow up to Happiness in Magazines is another gem, with songs as catchy as anything Blur ever did. Most of the album is upbeat, punky guitar numbers, but songs like "Just a state of mind" echo some of the more meandering moments of Blur (see: "Badhead" from Parklife).

Following on from the genius "Freakin' Out" off Magazines, the songs here have a rollicking energy and a more mature pop sensibility. The production has also taken another notch upwards, and wide radio play (at least in the UK) has got to be in his future. And, I say punky in the most traditional sense of the word - The Sex Pistols are probably one of the major touchstones on this album: "Gimme Some Love", "I Can't Look At Your Skin", "I Don't Wanna Go Out". He draws in some mod influences on "You Always Let Me Down", and unleashes some delicious radio-pop with "Tell It Like It Is" and "Standing On My Own". And of course, there's the requisite set of downtempo numbers, all of which have a sophistication and melodic content that former 'rival' Noel Gallagher would kill to have on his failing band's latest album.

Seems to me that Coxon knew just when to jump ship on the aging Britpop monsters - and if these past few albums are any indication, he's definitely on the right track. Highly recommended.

Again, for a limited time, here's a couple of tracks to whet your appetite. To be released March 13 on Parlophone.

Graham Coxon - Standing On My Own

Graham Coxon - Flights In The Sea (Lovely Rain)

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Behold the next-generation of rock stars

This week, the Arctic Monkeys are poised to have the biggest selling debut album in the history of the UK. Their debut album "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" sold 100,000 copies on its first day. And this is from a band that had a strew of hit singles and sold out tours, all without proper recordings or a label. They're just the first in what will be a new wave of bands that come from nowhere, the Internet superstars as it were.

Brooklyn indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! is another success story from 2005, where they acted as their own label and distributor, selling thousands of their self-made debut and becoming a sensation all without ever touring widely. It's obvious to those 'in the loop' that the 'pitchfork effect' is at play in a lot of these cases. The Arcade Fire saw their debut album Funeral sell in record numbers, spurred on from a spectacular review from Pitchfork.

What's going on here? I think there are a few things at work here:


  1. Rapid dissemination of information. Before, the only way for the buzz of a band to spread was via local rags, word of mouth, home-made mix tapes for friends, and grueling tour schedules. Now, a host of music bloggers, review sites, online magazines, chat rooms and P2P networks can spread news, trends, and influence at an almost instantaneous pace.

  2. File sharing. Legality/morality aside, the fact that you can download new material from artists before it is released in seconds has a profound impact on the ability for new acts to be discovered and spread their music. You no longer need a 'hip' local record shop to stock the most obscure new band, or have a good local radio station. You can download anything you want at any time.

  3. Social Networks/Data Aggregators. Myspace.com has become a revolutionary hot spot for band networking and discovery, allowing people to share their favourite artists with their friends and build networks of fans. At the same time, sites like Last.fm (Audioscrobbler) and their ability to analyze listening patterns and propose new artists introduces an untold number of people to artists that they would have previously never discovered.

Now that these services and sites have entered the mainstream, they are poised to have an even greater impact for the artists who use them. However, it is important to distinguish that unlike the popular mythology that the Internet will usher in some kind of holy union of artists and fans without the need for the seedy middlemen, it's obvious that rather than 'disintermediation', we're seeing a kind of surrogate intermediation.

P2P networks, Myspace, or Audioscrobbler become the mediators and occupy the roles previously held by labels and radio. However, rather than fully replacing them, we're seeing a growing number of indie bands leap from the springboard of these services into the arms of a more welcoming major label. Indie 'darlings' Death Cab For Cutie signed to a major, and more recently The Decemberists also hitched up with Capitol records. Even after their auspicious start distributing all their songs for free to their fans, the Arctic Monkeys now have a label.

It's been said a lot, but the music industry is in the middle of a revolution and it's clear that the mediators are the ones that are slowest to adapt, and as a result they're seeing themselves displaced either by new types of mediation, or by new mediators who are eager to recognize the value provided by this new generation of superstars.

PS: If you liked this article, Digg it!



And for a limited time, a different mix of "From The Ritz To The Rubble" I came across:

Arctic Monkeys - From The Ritz To The Rubble

Monday, January 23, 2006

Video games need professional writers

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting article that highlights the importance of writing in video games. Video games have notoriously horrible writing and acting in them, and the recognition of the importance of good writers is something that has yet to be addressed in the industry. Obviously, there is a recognition of how important top notch artists are to the success of a game, and in recent years, audio has made it onto producers' radar and as a result, game soundtracks are now being sold in record stores.

Even voice acting has come a long way as games like Grand Theft Auto recruit top-notch Hollywood actors to record their voiceovers resulting in less-wooden dialogue for games. Sports games use professional commentators for their commentary - seemingly every aspect of game development uses dedicated professionals for the task. Except of course, writing.

As the article states, writing is often left to game designers, producers, or even programmers to do as it is not seen as a specialized task worthy of a professional. This misconception comes from the fact that everyone at this level can 'write' (meaning they can string a sentence together). Of course nobody is under the impression that anyone can sit down and write a piece of literature. Or are they?

That brings up an entirely different argument of course, and that's whether or not games are in fact a narrative medium. It's obvious that writing for a game is markedly different than writing a novel or a screenplay. Those media are linear and have defined structures, temporal pacing, and even defined output formats. Games have no such structures.

So, is game writing even the same kind of activity as writing a novel? They clearly share similarities: character development, plot, conflict, resolution, etc. However, in a game, there can be a plurality of each of those, and they can theoretically occur in any sequence. Game writers are faced with having to create an 'interchangeable' story that works in a variety of ways, as well as exploring multiple routes of character development and plot that traditional linear writers don't have to deal with.

Which brings me back to the question: is this even really the same activity? Novels have a thematic element and an authorial vision which makes them cohesive. But in a game, the user is part author of the story, as are the programmers, artists, sound designers, and producers. There may be a 'vision' in there, but it's often not a single person's vision. As the article points out, there's no writer holed up in a cottage banging away on a typewriter to 'write' the latest installment of Halo.

What about Tetris? Is there a narrative to Tetris? Is there a narrative to Super Mario Bros? Obviously there are narrative elements to many games (archetypal stores of rescue and heroism), but if you stripped these away, would the games cease to be? Would they be fundamentally altered? Or could you strip out all the cutscenes and dialogue and still have a fun game to play?

We're delving into an area of study called Ludology (the study of games) now, and these are many of the questions that this discipline asks. Writers obviously have an important role to play in the development of video games, and the involvement of professional writers can definitely elevate the quality of the product that is being released. I suppose that the more interesting questions revolve around whether or not what writers contribute is merely to the presentation of the game, to the surface, or whether they actually bring depth to the medium, if the narratives form an essential part of the gaming experience, or whether they are simply a device that brings us to the next level so that we can get back to shooting things.

PS: Hi Diggers, if you liked this post, Digg it!

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Welcome to The Trawler

Welcome to The Trawler. Let's answer a few questions right off the bat:

1. Another blog? Come on.

Well, yeah, but no. Personally, I'm not that keen on diary blogs and have no interest in reading about what you had for lunch today. So I'm pretty sure you don't give a rats ass what I ate for lunch either. But I am always desperate for a new site to read that updates regularly - with varied and interesting content. Like most of you, I'm essentially addicted to information and always have room for one more site on my daily route. Hopefully you do too.

2. So, what are you going to put on here anyway?

Anything that is interesting. And that isn't limited to any particular genre or type of post. You'll see things like:
  • music features (about cool 'chunes)
  • book features (like a book report)
  • game features (fun things to play)
  • feature articles (about other stuff)
  • links (to cool stuff)
  • fiction (like, to read)
  • music (like, to download)
Essentially, we're steering away from the diary style and more towards a magazine style. Except without issues, or a schedule, or glossy pages.

3. So how often will you update?

As often as we feel like it. Maybe weekly, maybe daily, maybe more. I guess you'll just have to come back often and check!

Ok, that's a few. And that's it for now.
free stats