arc of time

okay this just might be the silliest thing ever, but minicities allow you to create a little villiage and spread the link around. anytime someone clicks the link you get another person as part of your population.

check mine out, arcoftime which currently has one resident, me!

h/t to google blogosocped for pointing it, and go ahead and vists their minicity too at blogoscopia.

YAY! for silly pointless web2.0 apps.

at least you don’t have to register.

okay, time to geek out for a second, but perhaps one of the biggest stories in net nerdom over the last few weeks has been the slow roll-out of imap support for gmail.

not a big deal you would think, but it actually makes gmail a much more powerful mail tool. the main reason is that it makes client-side (that means running on your computer for the uninitiated) email programs viable for gmail.

the problem with gmail’s pop access has always been that it downloads EVERYTHING to your inbox; new mail, spam, sent mail, stuff you have automatically set to move out of your inbox, etc. and of course there was no coordination of folders with the client-side mail program.

in fact using gmail with an iphone was almost painful.

now all that changes. after setting up my iphone for gmail the next thing i did was download mozilla’s thunderbird which has all the benefits of firefox; open source; secure and extentable.

it’s working great so far and i’ll let you know what i find out.

google’s official help for imap with gmail
wired’s coverage of imap for gmail
lifehacker post on using thunderbird with gmail on imap

i watched the documentary this film is not yet rated this week, and i enjoyed it. it’s a funny, irreverent look at the way that the mpaa rates movies under a veil of secrecy.

unfortunately a good movie could have been a great one if it hadn’t been so preachy, and if the filmmakers and ‘critics’ being interviewed hadn’t taken themselves so seriously. two things bugged me. first, it drives me nuts when anyone calls private censorship a violation of the first amendment or a ‘freedom of speech’ issue. the first amendment has no effect of law over private conduct. example, i own this web site and i can censor it until the cows come home (and i have on occasion done just that.) nothing in the first amendment prohibits that.

the other annoying thing was the drumbeat of “90 per cent of media is owned by three companies,” or “7 companies control all of the informatio distribution.” this went on and on and on. sometimes i wonder if people in the film industry live under a rock. seriously, have they not noticed the youtube revolution? the proliferation of blogs? don’t they visit daily kos, or little green footballs or engadget or deadspin?

we live in an age where an associate professor of sociology at kansas state can upload a draft of a video to youtube and have it watched by over a million people in the space of a few weeks.

anyway, i think my next web remix column is going to focus on that. how while news corp and time-warner and sony can buy all the media properties they want and still more and more niche content floods out around the edges of the dam.

last night, am and i went to listen to tim westergren, the founder of pandora internet radio give a presentation at the defoor center.

you may remember i got the chance to interview tim for a post on the atlanta metroblog (here) a week or so ago so even though i was exhausted from the trip to vegas i felt obligated to go.

tim did not disappoint. he told a great story about how pandora and the music genome project was created. but more importantly he totally responded to the passion of the users/listeners. and they were passionate. one guy described pandora as ‘leveling the playing field’ for artists and genres that don’t attract big marketing attention.

i’ll probably discuss in more detail in a web remix column about it and cover in more detail, but figured i could dump initial impressions here.

in the meantime i am motivated to try to interact with pandora at a deeper level.

right now i am trying to create a pop punk fun station.

my descent in full-blown web2.0 addiction all started with one article. i can remember vividly being home at my parents in dc and reading a wired magazine piece that changed the whole way i thought about the internet and careened me on the course that would eventually lead to all of this; the blog; the flickr photos; the del.icio.us account; etc, etc, etc.

anyway, i dug out the article that started it all after seeing it in the brilliant video by mike wesch i posted yesterday.

anyway, here is the piece; a brilliant kevin kelly article called “we are the web.” read it, interesting and prescient.

h/t to chris anderson.

i am working on a piece about how the internet is changing the way music is marketed, specifically looking at the influence of music blogs, recommendation services like pandora, social music networking sites like last.fm and myspace and new sales avenues like sellaband.com.

if you are a music lover or in a band and have some perspective on the topic, please drop it in the comments to this post or email it to me at jeherv@thearcoftime.com.

my first soulpress.net. check it out, its an introduction to my life 2.0.

a quick quote:

So that’s how i ended up on Web2.0. Wired and MySpace. Here I am now, writing my blog, writing here, writing on the Atlanta Metroblog. I have discovered music on blogs and on Last.Fm that I never would have known about, found friends and new ideas on 43Things. I’ve found many amazing sites to waste time with on del.icio.us. Hell, I am composing this article on Google Docs.

hope you enjoy it. and poke around soulpress for a bit. there is some great content on there.

so i have to post this, mainly because one of the actors and writers is a fraternity brother of mine, but it’s also pretty funny and i am betting there is a subset of you that are actually going to really enjoy this.

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i am at my parents for the thanksgiving holiday in beautiful washington dc (the link is a shout out to my friends at the dc metblog) and i left the power cord to my stupid dell inspiron in atlanta, of course. this presents an interesting challenge in regards to instant messaging for me.

see i am an im freak. i have four different im accounts and use them all to talk to different people. in order to maintain some sanity, i have to use a multi-client im application because toggling between four different application drives me nuts (as an aside, i use adium on my mac and trillian on the aforementioned stupid dell inspiron.)

well of course i don’t want to install all these apps on my parents computers, set up log-ins, etc etc. so meebo to the rescue.

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