No Copy

Don't answer me

What makes a website a great website? No, don't answer that. It was more of a rethorical question. Nevertheless, allow me to give you one example of a website I really like at the moment: the Rock Werchter site.

A job well done by Design is Dead, the agency behind it. Great navigation, simple but enjoyable graphics, well-structured... uhm structure. What more do you need? Content? Well, I'd say it's there too. And if anything, you can still listen to the site jukebox...

See you in Werchter! And no, I don't want to read any comments about tickets prices being too high or not. There are other places you can discuss that (albeit in Dutch). :-)

PERSONAL NOTE: Am I forgetting one of the basic rules of blogging here? Allowing comments and answers from readers? In that case: let me know...

SERVICE NOTE: Ever since Andrew Wake started with song titles for posts on Eventualities, I have to admit I'm tempted to try and do the same. It doesn't always work, but Don't Answer Me ( by The Alan Parsons Project - 1984) is one of those adolescence memories you are slightly embarrassed about as you grow up, but still can't quite forget as you get older. Or am I the only one having those?

Wishing to be a bass

As far as I'm concerned, sensuality on stage has a name from now on: Aristazabal Hawkes. A sight for sore eyes: the way she plays her bass on stage with the band Guillemots...  I had never thought I'd be wishing to be an instrument.

Apart from that, the concert the band gave last Sunday night at Cactus was also excellent. The sound engineer could have done a slightly better job, but I'm not complaining. Thanks to Loes from Cactus for 'making' me the winner of one of the free tickets!

If you don't know the band yet, perhaps you should get to know them. The music they bring on their debut album 'Through The Windowpane' seems like a collection of tunes and styles coming from all modern musical history. The result is an upbeat and glorious kind of pop with a stress on keyboards yet filled with a somewhat bizarre instrumentarium that lead to references to freejazz and psychedelica. Now you hear Björk, then Scissor Sisters, then Arcade Fire... At least, I do.

Anyway: check out their MySpace, or have a look at their performance on 'Tonight with Jonathan Ross' (and don't forget to keep an eye out for the lovely appearance on bass):

This video, to finish off with, is also worth having a look at (as well as... oh well, you get the picture):

No pussy on No copy

[photo]

Nick Cave is back with a new band: Grinderman. Dark, gloomy and energetic as in the old days (at least judging from the first single No Pussy blues, which you can listen to on MySpace or the video of which you can watch here on 3voor12) but nevertheless different altogether.

According to the official bio, the band (Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos) are "foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better. [...] Born of babbling lyrics hatched from Bosch eggshells in the Hyde-bound apocalyptic margins of the Cave brain, the Grinderman sound is an instinctual yawlp that also resurrects the demons of each musician’s past: the trashcan proselytising of Birthday Party -era Nick; Sclavunos' late 70s New York no-wave noise wisdom; Martyn Casey’s ominous Triffids bass reverb; plus Ellis' avant-garde soundtrack work and his teenage love of Black Sabbath."

Heavy stuff. But looking forward for more; the debut album is to be released early March...

[hat tip to Stef]

Dirt-free gardening

I enjoy a bit of gardening from time to time. It's great to get your hands dirty and be literally 'down-to-earth' for a while. If you like to grow a garden without getting dirty fingers, however, you might consider doing so from behind your pc. Just have a look at Packet Garden.

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore. To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from the internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it's used to grow a personal landscape, a kind of 'walk-in graph' uniquely shaped by the way you use the internet. With each day of network activity a new world can be generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and visit as time goes by. You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.

Sounds like a really cool project to me. And it is not just a project; it's an artwork, commissioned by Arnolfini, the Bristol-based centre for contemporary arts. Packet Garden is developed using open source software components and can be freely downloaded. You can read more about it here .

[via Tits&Tats]

Don't miss out on this!

Spread the word: registrations for the Chair Jos Willems / EuroBlog 2007 Conference can begin!

A year ago, EuroBlog 2006 showed that interactive social media technologies – weblogs, podcasts, wikis, real simple syndication, folksomonies, social tagging, personal networks and other species of social software and services - were beginning to impact on communications in many different ways. The 2007 symposium will present insights from EuroBlog 2007, the second pan-European quantitative survey on the usage of social media by communication professionals, draw new theoretical insights and respond to industry feedback by identifying and presenting examples of best practice.

A must for every communication professional

The EuroBlog conference, which will be held on 16 and 17 March of 2007, is to take place during a larger event, starting on the 15th of March already: the Chair Jos Willems, organised by the Communications Management and Journalism departments of Artevelde College in Ghent (Belgium) and named after the man who started the college over 40 years ago. Artevelde College and the European PR Education and Research Association (Euprera) are organising the EuroBlog 2007 Conference together.

If you're interested in social media and the impact they have on the field of communications (be it in pr, marketing communications as well as journalism), the Chair Jos Willems is a must, offering a Dutch programme with a wide range of topnotch speakers as Tom De Bruyne of i-merge, Clo Willaerts of Skynet, Luc Van Braekel and (pdw) as well as many others on Thursday the 15th. The (English spoken) EuroBlog 2007 Conference on 16 and 17 March is also not to be missed, especially considering the fact that the results of the EuroBlog 2007 survey will be made public, that more than twenty speakers from nine countries are expected to present their findings and insights and that the keynote on Friday is deliverd by Neville Hobson, whom you might/should know from crayon and For Immediate Release.

Register today!

The number of seats at the Chair Jos Willems is not unlimited. So register quickly and make sure you do not miss out on this unique opportunity to sharpen your knowledge on social media as well networking with a fine selection of people with whom you share professional interests. Visit the website www.leerstoeljoswillems.be today and, should you speak English only, go to the page 'Information in English'. On the site you will find more details regarding the programme, the location, the registration fees and so on.

See you soon, in Ghent!

Holy guacamole

(pdw) is in Belgium not only famous as a former journalist and producer of comedy programmes like Comedy Casino, he also runs his own blog. And every now and then this is THE place to discover brilliance in stand-up comedy. Like this Carlos Mencia. Hilarious!

A cancer for the cure

Could it be this simple: scientists have found a cure for cancer, but since there is no money to be made from it, they do not research it any further?

Well, that is basically what this guy is telling us, and what Piet apparently has picked up on. Let's hope they are right and that the pressure of free media can create a breakthrough. But what if these scientists are wrong? Or worse: what if this is just a big hoax?

Will the 'collective intelligence' of the web in its 2.0 state reveal the truth? Or will it be proved that the World Wide Web is just "a vessel of quasi-religious longing" like Nicholas Carr once stated? I am curious...