David Noël

Howard Lindzon's Interview Show: The Web Is Dead →

On the show so far: Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Seth Levine and Chris Dixon.

Weekend must-watch. 

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Well, hello there, Faceb… Wait. Yammer?!

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Imagine a world where instead of clicking the Watch button, you’d see a nice little preview of the SoundCloud artwork players, click Listen and enjoy. 

Yeah, that would be nice. 

Oh, and the songs are great too.

Mark: How Would I Improve Ping?

yvynyl:

Wouldn’t be hard. Apple sure did launch a half-baked idea. Here’s what I wish Ping was:

• Curated channels/stores that people could subscribe to (ie: itunes.com/yvynyl) that also give us a percentage of the revenue for hustling your wares.
• Custom playlists and mixtapes, goddamnit. How hard is that?
• Make all this accessible outside the clunky, heavy, slow iTunes app.
• Don’t try and figure out what I like based on what I bought. I haven’t purchased music in iTunes… um… ever.  But I have ~150GB of well-metadata’d MP3s in the app across two computers.  Last.fm can see that, why can’t you?
• Do NOT suggest I follow Lady fucking Gaga, Katy Perry and Linkin Park. Fuck you.
• Speaking of following, I typed in “Grizzly Bear” and it came up with no results. Um, what?
• Let me import my Twitter, Gmail and Facebook. C’mon, this is 20-freaking-10, isn’t it? I’m not going to ‘invite my friends by email’ you idiots.
• Open the music selections to include indie artists outside the iTunesland. If an artist isn’t on iTunes, why don’t YOU invite them?
• Data, data, data.  Expose it!  Its fun! Speaking of which, why didn’t you just buy Last.fm from CBS?
• Try, at least a little bit, to encourage and engage in the JOY of music… I know this is hard for your megacorporate cold, dark little hearts, but my god, this place feels like fucking Walmart more and more every day.

I’m sure I’ll be adding to these thoughts. What about you, dear reader? What else do you wish this was or will become?

For someone working in tech/music, it’s probably uncool to admit that until now, I haven’t looked at what Ping does. Heck, haven’t even updated iTunes. Also, I didn’t watch the keynote and didn’t read a lot of tech blogs today and from what Mark writes below, I won’t even bother checking it out.

Here’s how I find music today: Find a song you like on Tumblr and SoundCloud powered by ExFM, check out Hypem and then go find the album on Spotify, move to my To Listen folder and hit play. Additionally: get the vinyl version from a store, the mp3 version from Amazon (or iTunes, yes).

Nice rant, brother. 

soupsoup:

staff:

Marc LaFountain
Community Director
Richmond, Virginia

Marc gets email. A lot of email.

As Community Director, Marc manages Tumblr’s entire support infrastructure. From tackling general community issues to solving technical support requests, he’s personally read and responded to thousands upon thousands of email messages regarding browser cookies, forgotten passwords, and more.

One of the great unsung heroes of Tumblr. Thanks for all your help over the years, Marc. 

Top dude. I feel ya. 

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-8-29) →

1. The Dandy Warhols (88)
2. Jenny and Johnny (29)
3. Beck (28)
4. Anberlin (24)
5. Stars (19)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

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Right.

Arcade Fire. Last night. In Berlin.

After the show ended, I tweeted Arcade Fire is Indie Stadium Rock and I fucking love it. Good for them, well deserved. Go see them. 

The shows was amazing. They’re 9 people on stage, have a million different instruments and everyone keeps switching from one instrument to another. It’s not a big rock show, but it is intense, it’s epic (the non-internet epic kinda way) and it includes goosebumps and a lot of smiling - Indie Stadium Rock, the awesome kinda way. To me the show was so personal that I didn’t even thought about taking pictures or videos, sorry!

I’m happy for them, their success after seven years and three studio albums is well deserved. 

Build the tools, then the community.

jayparkinsonmd:

Some thoughts regarding today’s Apple announcements…

• First, build tools that make solving real problems effortless and fun (like organizing and listening to music).
• Grow the user base by tweaking an amazing product.
• Then, add a community to those tools. 

My problem with Facebook is that its tools suck.

Tumblr started out for me as a stupid simple way to power my blog. And then a community grew up around it. Flickr was the same. I wanted a place to publish my photos. Then a community grew up around it. I’ve been a music lover all my life and iTunes enabled me to easily organize my music. Now it looks like there will be a community that will form around my music interests.

There are professional photographers and professional writers. They need stupid simple tools to effectively solve their problem. If there’s a profession in need of tools, there’s a huge number of amateurs looking for the same tools. I’m worried that there aren’t professional location sharers. 

Tumblr has done the same for me. I haven’t checked it in detail yet, but from the screens I saw about iTunes community, this looks a lot like what Spotify already is to us Euros. 

Oh and these three steps have SoundCloud written all over. 

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Comparison of the four largest airplanes ever built. 

Thanks to Natalie for sending me this. 

"When a few people want a change, make sure that the change would benefit the community as a whole. Don’t let a vocal minority push a decision that isn’t in the best interest of the whole community."

—

Community Manager Tip: You Can’t Please Everyone « Fast Wonder

This. 

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From the NVCA Yearbook 2010.

Can you tell what’s wrong?