Some of you were smitten by Line Rider, enough to bother to comment on my post :-)

You may find the wikipedia entry for Line Rider of some interest.

And if that doesn’t ring your bell, maybe this video will…..

My son Isaac showed me this site: It’s called Line Rider.

Take a look at it, play with it and see what you think. What it says is what it is. A tool that lets you draw lines, and then “play” what you’ve drawn; you get to watch while some squiggly creature “rides” the “line” that you drew.

After you’ve tried it a few times, and failed miserably, check your age. You must be over 25. That’s my guess.

Then go to this link, and choose any of the videos made, so that you can see what people have been able to do.

Somebody, I can’t remember who it was, called it Etch-A-Sketch for the YouTube Generation; for sure it is Web 2.0 meets simple graphics. What they don’t tell you is just how much fun you can have.

When I saw the video, the first thing that came to mind was Super Mario or Sonic The Hedgehog, there was something about the way the squiggle rode the line that was very reminiscent of the early video games. Maybe Generation M is already tuned in to expect those movements and I’m not.

But hey, there’s a weekend coming, a whole New Year to come after that, and I have only allowed myself four weeks to learn Spanish.

Enjoy Line Riding.

Quite a few people tagged me, but I felt it was reasonable to try the 5 Things thing out just once. And, amongst others, I tagged Ron Silliman. And Ron chose Jordan Davis as one of his 5.

Jordan has this to say, exercising his right by declining to pass the 5 Things on:

….forgive me for asking: who are you, anyway? who am I to you. That’s the flaw in the premise of the meme that gets me. Can’t say what someone doesn’t know if you don’t know who someone is.

I don’t think it’s just a flaw in the premise of the meme; it’s a flaw in the premise of how people, particularly in the West, perceive things like identity.

I spoke about it at reboot earlier this year during the Graveyard Slot, talking about things destined for death. And identity abd privacy as we knew them were on the list.

In many cultures identity is defined by what you stand for, what groups you belong to. Some of these groups may be based on simple things like geography or blood, but most such groupings are complex and form an integral part of identity.

As Chris and Doc and Dave reminded us many years ago, markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation. Relationship way way before transaction.

So in a way Jordan’s absolutely right. Without who are you and who am I to you the 5 things meme appears to have little meaning.

But Jordan is also slightly off track. There are many cultures that trust first, that welcome strangers into their midst, that believe in being open and transparent. These are good things to have, things we’ve lost.

We need to claw back some of the stuff we’ve lost. Stuff that hides under the bushel of identity and privacy and confidentiality.

There’s a line in one of my favourite films, Local Hero:

We don’t lock doors here.

That too is something we’ve lost. We need it all back.

When I write about search or syndication in the context of enterprise systems, I claim to have a modicum of knowledge.

I make no such claim about the music business.

Perhaps I should. In a strange way. I will probably learn more about information by telling myself I know as much about information as I do about music, making my interest completely amateurish. Time will tell.

In the meantime, some of you may remember I posted about Songbird some months ago. Ross Karchner has been kind enough to write to me with an update, and it gives people like me a rough idea of the shape of things to come. This is particularly true for Long Tail music, independent in production, in venue and club, in genre and even in audience. Here’s a link to what Ross says.

If William Gibson was right about the future, we need to keep looking around to spot the right uneven distributions. The trick, as usual, is in spotting the right ones. Continue reading “Seeing what’s happening in the music space… darkly?”

I really enjoy a good “caper story” as made famous by Donald E Westlake’s Dortmunder series. In fact I like a healthy dose of comedy in everything I read; and where it isn’t there (as in much management and technical writing) I work on the assumption the comedy is subtler. Works for me. You should try it sometime. Stops people like me from taking ourselves too seriously. [Actually, children are pretty good at making sure you don’t take yourself too seriously as well. If you let them].

Over the last few years, one of my favourite people is a guy called Serge A Storms, created by Tim Dorsey. Absolutely wonderful stuff.

How can I describe Serge? Take Banksy and Swampy and Borat, add a hefty slice of Hunter S Thompson, mix them up like discarded fluids in an airport queue, place them in deepest darkest Florida and let the state do the rest. Carl Hiaasen almost seems quiet in comparison, and I really like Hiaasen!

Serge is amazing. If you prefer, read what Wikipedia has to say about him. But do be careful, the entry discloses too many details about too many Serge plotlines, so if you intend to read any of Tim Dorsey’s wonderful rants then please desist. Rather than make you do that, here’s an excerpt:

• Serge has been diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses, and has been prescribed a “cocktail” of drugs to keep him stable. These are effective, but he often refuses to take them since he dislikes their effects. Free from the drugs’ influence, he quickly becomes manic and obsessive about trivial things; he frequently acts as an extremely eccentric tour guide for whoever happens to be handy. Despite his psychological disorders, Serge is for the most part a charismatic, likeable person (he can be viewed as a somewhat more liberal version of Joseph Heller‘s Yossarian). When an event or person offends his extremely strong (and subjective) sense of justice, however, he can quickly fly into a homicidal rage; he has committed a string of murders for which the police pursue him as a serial killer.

Imagine my glee when I found out he has a blog. It’s early days yet, I guess, but I’m waiting for the podcasts.

In the meantime, all I can do is wait for the next Serge fix, scheduled for next spring. Keep them coming, Tim.