Archive for September, 2003

On the Edge

Tuesday, September 30th, 2003

Nice Article reproduced on a mailing list here

Its about Pirate radio stations and how popular they are. A cool lil thing is how listeners ring the stations mobile and hang up while some song they like is playing. It gets logged as a missed call. This missed call is a way for the kids listening in to say they like that song without paying money to tell them. Cheap and handy. The station gets to see which songs are popular and so can stick em on a heavier rotation.

Major labels know that if they sign an artist that is big on pirate radio,
they also acquire a guaranteed fan base. BMG, whose roster includes the
urban superstars the Neptunes and Whitney Houston, has courted pirate
stations for 10 years. “We were among the first to set up ‘street teams’,
whose job is to find out what is going on on pirate radio,” explains Mervyn
Lyn, BMG vice-president of European marketing and promotion. “Now all the
majors do the same. Pirates are simply too influential to ignore.”

Find this pretty fucking Ironic (yes thats a big I ) that the major record labels who sue 12 year old girls and 80 yer old grannies over file-sharing and take all the money off college students who share music so that they end up not being able to finish their course and they are the same ones that are sucking down all this information as to what the kids really want.

“We switch on and we hear the nucleus of what black Britain has to offer,”
he says. “And it will remain that way until we are properly included. It
will end when the BBC has black people in positions of power and when
record companies and mainstream organisations have enough black people in
place. Until then, there will always be pirate radio.”

Jazzy B (Soul II Soul dude ) said that and he is wrong. Theres always going to be an underground. Be it in radio, television, writing, music, art or… Theres going to be the most popular thing almost force fed to us nowadays and people will happily go along with this like sheep until interest wanes and then the marketing giants will find out what will appeal to the masses next and give us that.

Some people will not want to be associated with that which is bland and mainstream and they will seek out something on the edges, something underground and all along they probably hope it will be the next big thing so they can say “ahh yeah sure I read his work years before it was popular” or ” ah I heard her when she was underground”

We’ll get status in our community for being someone that can spot future trends and we’ll be happy but this will fade when we realise that the beautiful thing we thought we discovered becomes over-played and too common and cheapens and will be tarnished for life. So we’ll move on to something else and find another up and coming trend.

Theres people that do this a lot and theres people that hunt these people down and watch them and see how they can define cool.

It’d be cool to be on the edge though all the time. High entropy and constant churn. Possibly tiring too but never bland and never the same. I started this post with the intention of thinking out loud why we take stuff from the edge and make it mainstream and how the people that can do that are very powerful. But I’m not sure is that the point I made.

haha Brian !

Tuesday, September 30th, 2003

2003.09.29 23:40:53 213.202.165.102 Search: query for damien milk tray man *cough*

Yeah yeah. Funny.

Things are going to change I can feel it …

Tuesday, September 30th, 2003

Grassroots Politics. Mob spots..

Steven Johnson writes about people creating their own campaign ads. These ads can become with group involvement very polished and popular. I’m just thinking about all those internet jokes and phenomena that start off on blogs and slowly filter up to mainstream news in papers and on TV. The web is the source/momentum for more and more mainstream ads. Fucks sake I saw an article in the Examiner that was practically lifted word from word from Aint It Cool News.

Now I’ve also been reading about Emergent Democracy , Liquid Democracy and Open Source Democracy and they all seem to mention how online collaboration will change the face of democracy and maybe empower the people more. ( I do need to read some of the docs on these more though)

Reading about these and things like the Howard Dean campaign give me that feeling I used to have years ago as a kid where I thought I had the power to change the world. I think we can create some sort of Hybrid version of this for Ireland.

Get some of those kiddies off boards (and by kiddies I mean anyone since we are all kids at heart. Immature is what I really mean. ) get people to come up with anti-ff, anti-fg or anti-labour or whoever the hell else and get them to come up with some good ads. Theres bound to be some good video makers about too who could help out. With the upsurge of broadband and people emailing bigger and bigger files via email in work daily, the vids and pics will easily get circulated at a lightning speed throughout the country and the world. Couple that with an online archive and central core where people can discuss and contribute and you can start allowing people to become more empowered.

You’d be surprised that once people get the feeling that they can make an impact you’ll have some pretty motivated people. .. Or am I just ranting.

As a sidenote I have to sya the net is great. Reading Stevens site I’m thinking “this guy is making lots of sense I’m adding him to my aggregator” and I realise he is the same guy that has a book published that I wanted to read. Billions of webpages online and the some six degrees thing is still in effect.

In my next post I’ll add some picture to keep people happy. 🙂

Edit: Jason has more of the same idea here.

logs logs logs

Monday, September 29th, 2003

I was alerted to these in my blog logs. See anytime you do a search for something it gets put into a log file on the server.

excerpt:

2003.09.26 18:22:35 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘***’
2003.09.26 18:22:51 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘***’
2003.09.26 18:23:05 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘***’
2003.09.26 18:23:09 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘***’
2003.09.26 18:23:13 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘***’
2003.09.26 18:23:20 143.239.128.38 Search: query for ‘boyfriend’

Hermes2.ucc.ie webproxy, so someone from the open access labs was doing a search for his name and name variations or the name of someone I used to date.

Anything you do online is logged. EVERYTHING. Its a little scary. A friend thats going to college in Dublin was telling me the computers in the labs even have keyloggers installed so they record what you do. I think thats just FUD they’re telling the freshers to keep them on their feet. Bloody great rumour to spread though.


Even if you use google to get here I know which search query was used in google or any other search engine to reach me. Its well fun to see how people happen upon here.

Sliding Scales

Thursday, September 25th, 2003

Interesting pricing model. Allow people to pay for your item (say a cd) within a range. Not one strict price. So price it at between 5 and 10 dollars and let the person choose which price.

Read more here. Its more stuff from Scott Andrews website.

Back on air

Thursday, September 25th, 2003

Radio Damiens useless writings about his life and the world is back. Theres no big launch party or anything just yet. 🙂

I must go around now and configure this thingy.

mulley.net is moving

Saturday, September 13th, 2003

I’m moving mulley.net mulley.info mulley.org buyanorgan.net peoplesrepublicofcock.com digihive.com and a good few other websites over this weekend. Expect MAJOR disruption. You can reach me by my old email address cz at esatclear dot ie

See you in a few days

Interesting google thingy

Friday, September 12th, 2003

I’m noticing that the other Mulley Website I have is fairly high up on the google rankings. I think I just have one link pointing to it and thats from this website. In the mini-snapshot that google does of the page under the link to it it shows that the date and it shows 2 days ago. Seems the forum software displaying the date is enough for google to think the website has been updated. One of the pageranking conditions for higher page rank is how fresh the website is.

Must do more tests.

The dodgylist comes soon

Friday, September 12th, 2003

Dodgylist.com will be going live some time this weekend I hope. I got some software thats like the one that metafilter use and I hope to be able to configure it so that we can have loads of posters post tot he website with all their softcore links.

I can just see the comments now. “What kind of filth can I post Damien ? ” Mr. Mulley hasn’t decided thanks.

damien gets to bed before midnight

Wednesday, September 10th, 2003

In a huge shock to the world Damien Mulley gets to bed (and sleep) before 12. The world is in a panic.