Archive for September, 2006|Monthly archive page
this site will confuse the bejeezus out of you…
Comments (2)Alright, this website isn’t exactly web art, (or maybe it is?) but it’s definitely interesting to look at. The address of the site was shown on screen for a very quick second during the trailer of Halo 2 on the XBox. People checked it out to see if they could find out more about the game, but it turns out to have nothing to do with video games at all. It’s pretty much all jibberish, but there’s some backstory to be deciphered out of the mess.
In short – check it out.
-dan
unfair to fair use…
This idea of fair use has been taking a beating since the release of Napster. Although downloading music illegaly and mashing music have little to do with each other, lawyers and music production companies are relating the two very closely in legal terms. My biggest question to the music industry is this:
Why hate on mashups when there are many known artists out there using samples from existing songs in their new work?
To put it simply, these artists are doing exactly what amateur mashup artists are doing. Sampling from existing tracks, adding a new beat and new music to these tracks, re-releasing it as their own. Although the fact that major artists usually use only beats, they sometimes do not credit the original artist for these beats. An early verision of this can be seen in Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” versus Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.” The beat between these two songs is almost identical, but Vanilla Ice never once credited Queen for the beat. He actually goes as far as to say that the beat in his song is different than Queen/David Bowie’s. Listen to the two, you be the judge.
In a mashup, the artist may use copyrighted original lyrics and beats, but mashup artists always always credit the original artists. Also, many mashup artists do not make a profit on their work. Most of them make these mashups for the sake of looking at this music from a different direction. Stealing is when you take someones work, add a different beat and rename it as your own. Stealing is not editing existing art and crediting the original artist for their work.
user-generated content is…
In his blog, Derek Powazek immediately attacked the term “user-generated content.” He felt that the term degrades the idea of someone adding their two cents (or five dollars, depending on the person) to the internet. Powazek feels that when someone posts a picture, blog post, product review, etc… on the internet, it should not be seen as random input. Rather than this, he thinks that this input should be respected, and taken away from the frighteningly generic label of “user-generated content.” “Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online ‘user-generated content’ is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, ‘Hey baby, let’s have intercourse,'” says Powazek.
Frankly, I can’t agree with Powazek more. Using the term “user-generated content” reminds me of what happens when something drastic happens in the world, and the government needs to give it some kind of generic term that looks good in the news. It gives being a part of the internet community this feel of classification and exile, being a seperate part of the world entirely. To be realistic, the internet is becoming more and more public everyday. There’s just more experience to be had online than there ever was, and it’s going beyond being marketable. Being a generally cost-free experience aside from paying your monthly connection fee, the internet is now seen as inviting; rather than being some place that only computer nerds and sci-fi geeks can embrace. There are more people, and even more forms of input going in and out of the online community. To label the result of this interaction as “user-generated content” is synonymous to calling it “that crap people post online.”
-dan
whilst we ponder
everyone is still getting a handle on how to use wordpress, so while they do that lets discuss why i use the online tag, “danomak.”
to be honest with you, it’s not a very interesting story. it goes back to highschool though – and that ensures the emotion of embarrassment.
my friend nick decided that it would be funny to relate me to a professional wrestler. granted, the wrestler and i had nothing in common…at all… but this is what he decided to do. by taking the name of shane-o-mak, he created my nickname danomak. and then he always called me danomak from that point until graduation.
interesting stuff, huh.
-dan
dan\'s freakin\' blog 