Changelog

This past weekend was a quick trip up to the mountatins before my friend Dave Van Wie left for Costa Rica. So, we took a huge ol’ crew up to Guanella Pass for the night, then took sunday morning and hiked Mt. Bierstadt (’,060 ft). Almost everyone made it up the trail (new boots took out one hiker). The trail is a lot easier than expected. It looks like the forest service has done a lot of trail improvement lately, the famous willows have been tamed with bridges, and there is a very nice trail the whole way up.

New system has passed the DVD test. I watched Go with some friends (Erica Tsai, Cyrus Hall, Dave Van Wie) using a borrowed copy of PowerDVD and it worked flawlessly. No skips, pretty good image too. Therefor my old Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus is being put out to pasture (though it may be added to my Debian box later). Very happy with the system so far. I’ve been playing some Deus Ex to feel the speed =) Still looking for someone local who sells 2-port KVM switches. May break down and go for the 4-port. Though that may encourage my packrat tendancies (I’ve saved 2 486s from the dumpster now).

Vitals

• Iwill KK266 Motherboard (VIA KT133A, no RAID)
• AMD Athlon-C 1.2GHz (266MHz FSB, AXIA)
• 256MB Crucial PC133 CL2 ECC SDRAM
• Toshiba 6X EIDE DVD-Rom
• Plextor 8/4/32X EIDE CD-RW
• IBM 60GXP 40GB EIDE HD
• IBM 22GXP 22GB EIDE HD
• Creative Labs SB Live X-Gamer 5.1
• Matrox 32MB G400 Max
• 3Com 905B-TX NIC
• Viewsonic PS790 19″ CRT
• Enlight 7237 Mid-Tower w/300W Enlight PS

Maybe Salon really is going about this all wrong. Indie media on the web will be hard to keep afloat, especially with the names that Salon has attached. So what do we do? Well, I think that a viable indie news/media/content site will need to be more low key. Take the real world indies as an example. Keep things simple and focus on the good stuff. Of course, that probably means nothing on the scale of Salon as those people aren’t gonna come and post all by there lonesomes. Though I hope they would =) Of course, I may be describing Feed or Suck. And we’ve seen where they are. Of course, most of thse sites have had 4+ year runs on the web. Not bad really. I think that any just overreached. Of course, it’s also possible that 4 to 6 years is just how long these kind of sites will EVER last. Maybe this is the sign for the next generation to step up and give it a try. Maybe bring in some innovation or fresh ideas. I keep thinking that Plastic, Slashdot, and Kuro5hin are this next generation. Except some of those have been around as long as Salon has. Also, I can’t say that I get the same quality of content. Plastic and K5 aren’t bad. Plastic does a better Slashdot then Slashdot, at least for non-geek stuff. Slashdot has gotten pretty dull, and never had any real content to begin with. Of course neither does Plastic. K5 does have content, submitted and peer reviewed, but it has glacial turnover on the frontpage. I don’t know, K5 just has never really pulled me in like Salon has. Time to ponder some more…

update: Fixed bad links

Ok, now that blogger ate the top of that post…

So the issue is what to do about indie news/content/media sites. It seems to me that sites like Feed, Salon and Suck may have reached to far. but not really, except maybe Salon. Suck was pretty low key. Feed didn’t have any big names on the roster. But all have or will bite the dust real soon now. That’s a shame. Salon in particular has been a massive addiction for some years now, Suck as well. Never read Feed much though. Maybe it’s time to go back to basics and borrow a page from real world indies. Keep it simple. Ditch the names and stick with people who write good stuff for cheap (the up-and-comers of the world). Don’t try to grab Griel Marcus, find his succesor! Of course, that;s a pretty tall order isn’t it. But go back to basics, and then look at how to innovate!

update: Oops, blogger didn’t eat it after all… I messed up my anchors…

Ok… Building on my last big idea… We also include Napster style kung-fu and allow music swapping! We would need this to be pretty legit so as not to get our asses handed to us by legions of lawyers. This means only sharing music that is ok to share. This means some sort of copyright management… Hmmm… I like the idea of allowing artists to set the price of their music. If an artist wants to make his music free, he can…. If he wants to sell music he can… Freedom of choice!!! Power to the people…

People are going to bitch and moan about not being able trade the music they bought… Of course not you whining babies! Just because you bought it doesn’t mean you can give it away to anyone you want! Music s the product of an artist.. An artist who may be getting hosed by his label but an artist still… They should have some say in this! So only trading music that’s been ok’ed by the artist! The music you buy you can rip and burn and do whatever… But keep it to yourself pal… You can of course transfer ownership of the music… But no stealing!

Vision time! I see a network of music sites… All running on the same backend software, but each independent of the others. They are all tied together by a central portal, which tracks all the sites in the network. The common backend provides several services, including an Mp3 locker for online storage, chatting/bbs functionality, and e-commerce. Think emusic meets mp3.com meets all the niche sites meets all music guide. It would be cool. All the sites would be able to determine their own focus and looks. They would set their own prices for downloads, could sell cds or not. Yet the music I buy or get for free or whatever is always in one place…. My central locker…

New big idea… Ok, so I really dig task-centered user interface design, it makes sense to me that design should concentrate on what people really do rather than what designers think they do. Keep it simple people. I like the new task stuff in Windows XP Beta, though the presentation is ugly… I think the new built-in cd burning is a good example of something damn usefull and damn easy to use. I don’t like the stupid boxes in web explorer view, I always ditch those. Same with the thumbnail view, useful, and easy to use.

So anyways… My new big idea is to expand this whole idea and build an entire OS interface around it. These means getting rid of the whole application idea and moving the focus of the UI to the document. Admittedly, I don’t think this is for everyone… But I think it would be a huge leap in usability. It would shorten the cognitive gap people must cross in fitting UI paradigms into their world view.