songs

Jul 8 2008   11:32AM GMT

A digital nursery rhyme for online gurus and clever children of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Apple, Technology, Web services, fun, YouTube, Internet, social bookmarking, creativity, Silicon Valley, songs, tag, social networking, Vista, humor, Web applications, Windows, word meanings, geek

Amit Agarwal posted the clever, useful graphic below over at his Digital Inspiration blog. The graphic has been making the rounds online; if anyone knows who originally created and uploaded it, please let me know so that I can properly credit him or her.

If you’re a geeky parent, this might be an upgrade on “A is for Apple.” Oh, wait. That part doesn’t change.

Most of these should be familiar to most netizens but, just in case you’re mystified, here’s a digital nursery rhyme to help you remember:

A is for Apple, user-friendly as can be

B is for Bluetooth, which connects printers to me

C is for Core Duo, a faster computer chip

D is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking trip

E is eMule, a file sharing client

F is for Facebook, a social networking giant

G is for Google, which searches most knowledge

H is for Holon, an Israeli college

I is for iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone

J is for Java, a language well-honed

K is Kazaa, another file sharing service

L is for Linux, an open source OS

M is for MSN, Microsoft’s portal

N is for Napster, which made record companies mortal

O is for Office, for presenting and writing

P is for Playstation, for gaming that’s exciting

Q is for Quicktime, used for videos large and small

R is for RSS, syndicating to us all

S is for Second Life, the 3D metaverse

T is tagging, creating folksonomies of verse

U is for USB, the universal connection

V is for Vista,  Microsoft’s OS correction

W is for Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia

X is for XP, the standard OS selection

Y is for YouTube, of online video fame

Z is for Zuma, a free silly game.

Now that you’ve relearned your ABCs,  next time won’t you sing with me?

Happy naptimes, future digerati.

Mar 31 2008   9:53AM GMT

Win an iPod with a hyperlink

Posted by: Alexander Howard
fun, blog, free, MP3, music, songs, gadgets, blogging

Linking to ITKnowledgeExchange.com could be music to your ears.

Over the course of April, our sister site will be running a promotion whereby anyone that links to them or adds them to a blogroll will be eligible to win an iPod Shuffle.

All you have to do is add ITKE and then send Brent Sheets an email to let him know about it.

Good luck!

May 14 2007   2:14PM GMT

Codemonkey: The new media model for creative, Web-savvy musicians?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
fun, video, new media, Internet, commentary, cool, culture, public domain, MP3, social publishing, interesting, creativity, entrepeneurship, interactive media, music, songs, mashup, buzz

Last week, as I caught up on my backlog of podcasts, I heard a song on net@nite that Amber and Leo were laughing — hard — over. The tune was “Codemonkey” and a fan had posted a video to go along with it on YouTube. [Watch that version here.]

In fact, it turns out that there were a lot of user-created videos built around the song.

I watched several, thoroughly enjoying the catchy tune with a techie humor twist. Here are my favorites, in no particular order:

• The Codemonkey Dance
• Jocopro’s early homage
• A mashup of Codemonkey and Traders, a Canadian TV show
• Another mashup, this time of Codemonkey and the animated virtual reality of the Sims.
• There was even a WoW version of Codemonkey, perfect for MMPORG geeks like me.

Little did I know that yesterday’s Sunday New York Times Magazine would feature an article, Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog, by Clive Thompson, that would provide both a backstory for Codemonkey! The piece delves into the daily life of the musician (Jonathan Coulton) that wrote the song and explores at length the changing face of music, artistic expression and artists’ control over their work.

There’s a great video exploring how Codemonkey became a viral hit at nytimes.com as well.

Jonathan quit his job as a computer programmer 21 months ago to become a full-time singer and songwriter. Ten years ago, that might seem, on the face of it, either very ambitious, wildly inadvised (as the .com boom ramped up) and touchingly naive. Maybe all of those things. Whatever concerns he (or his wife) may have had, his discipline and passion, along with considerable talent and energy, have turned him into one of new media’s successes. Every week, he writes a new song, which he then publishes and markets online. In the process, he’s built a widespread fanbase and a reasonable income as an independent artist.

Not everyone can pull this off, of course. Just read the Wall Street Journal’s Tech section’s cover story today,”How to be a Star in a YouTube World.” It’s a great piece that drives home both the shift in the media landscape and the challenge in getting your voice heard in the increasingly-frenetic mix of artists on MySpace on YouTube. Thousands vloggers, podcasters and aspiring artists like Jonathan are all using a combination of these platforms to create, syndicate and, increasingly, monetize content. It’s not easy, but for those who have the time and talent, like Ask A Ninja, LonelyGirl15 or Rocketboom, it can work. It’s important to note the amount of writing, production, editing and marketing that is necessary for that success: the Ninjas, for instance, can take up to 18 hours for each 3-minute short.

Can the Web can allow more funny, creative artists like Jonathan to make a living? What do you think? Do you buy the premise of the articles?

And which version of the Codemonkey video is your favorite?

Apr 12 2007   12:52PM GMT

Pandora: An online music discovery platform from the Music Genome Project

Posted by: Alexander Howard
media, new media, free, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, music, streaming, songs, predictive, personalization

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, one of the most comprehensive analyses of music ever undertaken.

According to Tom Westergren, the founder of the project, the analytical engine that drives the service was created by “assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

After you’ve clicked over to the Web site, all you have to do is enter a few of your favorite songs or artists and Pandora launches “a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.” The more you listen, the more accurate Pandora becomes in predicting which other artists and tracks will be within your boundaries of taste, much as speech recognition software becomes more accurate with greater use.