I Finally Saw Jane’s Addiction Live

Back in 1991 I remember asking — begging — my parents to let me go downtown to see Jane’s Addiction at the Metro. I believe Nirvana was opening. Finally, 18 years later, I saw Jane’s at an even smaller venue and the result was well worth the wait. Jane’s Addiction and their small body of work from 1988-1991 more or less was the best music that I had ever heard and to this day the raw power and authenticity of those songs remain vital and fresh to my ears.

So I felt like a 15-year-old last Monday night when I got to see Jane’s Addiction with a few hundred others at the Echoplex, down the street from where I live. And I’m still buzzing about the show nearly a week later.

Feel what I’m feeling by rockin’ to these great multi-camera video clips with soundboard audio that the band posted to Pitchfork.tv this weekend.

Stop!

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The Credit Crisis Visualized

Please take 11 minutes out of your day to appreciate [part of] Jonathan Jarvis‘s Master’s thesis, “The Crisis of Credit Visualized.” Jarvis is a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. May his grad school debt vanish with great haste.

The context:

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here.

Visualization was also a part of my Master’s thesis, though only in theory.

Facebook’s Walled Garden a Gulag?

share on facebookOn February 4 Facebook revised their Terms of Service, removing a clause stating that user content would no longer be under license to Facebook.

Well, now the terms indicate that anything you ever upload or share to your facebook profile — regardless of whether your account is active — is Facebook’s property to do whatever they want with.

UPDATE: Facebook did an about face and reverted to its previous ToS per a blog post on feb 17.

Did anyone receive notification to review the new Terms of Service before someone finally stumbled upon it — an outrageous 11 days after the fact? What if major publishers decide to boycott by removing “share on facebook” links? That’s not happening, not with the increasing traffic these blogs/sites receive via Facebook referrals.

This is the Internet, folks, and this is nothing new and hardly a surprise from Facebook — it was only a matter of time that they reworded the terms of content ownership (check out my previous posts on Facebook privacy here, here, and here).

If you’re someone who openly shares details and content on the Internet (as I do), you’re only fooling yourself if you believe said content cannot be “stolen” or used against you. Think you’re pre-February 4th content is protected (if you have since deleted your Facebook profile? Not likely. Facebook is the model for a walled garden online network. Now we’ll see how far they go with their power to abuse, sell, sublicense and manipulate user data and content.

The key passages of the ToS are below (new ToS / old ToS)

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Twestival: Around the World in a Day for charity: water

Twestival is on — it’s an event taking place in 200 cities worldwide to raise money for charity: water. If the goal of $1 million dollars is reached — as many as 200 communities, or 80,000 people will get access to clean drinking water. One in six people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. And the message is getting out there.

twestival banner live earth
Please visit the Live Earth video site — we are the global video partner for Twestival — and learn more + watch live streams from over 100 cities on this 12th of February, 2009.


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