My Blog

I’ve mentioned in passing in the past that I do crosspost across the interwebs. I’ve stated before, yet I’ll mention it again for this series that I do it so readers can access me where they want. Yesterday I posted that I was making it a goal of mine to see how many possible services. Since I’m doing this I figured that could I get my information to my readers on how to do this, the why is a little toughter to answer. While this information could theoretically be used for spam blogs, I’m in the sincere hope that you do it to keep in touch with your friends. Crossposting did start out as keeping in touch with friends in other services so I didn’t have to login into them. Very truly there are only a handful of web services that I truly interact with, I’ll leave comments or talk to users when I actually do login, but the path where I create original content on is quite narrow. My blog (where you may be reading this) of course is my primary outlet where I write, the secondary service I use incessantly is twitter. Pictures and movies of course have a completely different avenue of entries into the interwebs, but I do so much more when it comes to text. Through the course of this series I will be covering text, video, audio, and meta data crossposting. Later today I will be starting with crossposting to Vox and from there I’ll write an article per service, there will be some overlapping on techniques to get data into a service, but I won’t be using the same technique on the same day. So if I use e-mail crossposting as a method, the next will be either RSS entry or a helper site. I won’t be releasing all of my secret sauce, but just enough of it so you should be able to figure out the missing pieces for yourself. Original From: The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

I think I finally got to the point that statcounter is completely useless for me. Now I’m rolling thruogh the max log size of page views faster then I can actually read them. If I don’t read them they are lost forever. I’m too much of a cheapskate to actually pay for their service (maybe if I actually made money at this I would consider it. Checking stats mutiple times a day to actually get the data you want to read isn’t very efficient. I will say compared to google analytics or wordpress.com’s stat plugin that statcounter’s only really shining feature was the recent page load activity. If either of the other services I used actually used that it would be alot easier to dump. Regardless I think I’m leaving Statcounter by the end of the month. I’ll miss you Statcounter, you just can’t grow with me. Original From: Statcounter Lamention

So I was leaving for a smoke break and I had my headphones in, I just listened to a TWIT episode 133 which featured Jonathan Coulton the musician who released the song “Code Monkey” back in 2006. I happened to have it on my N810 and I was just going to get up for a smoke break. I started the song and reaction hit me, I almost starting singing it out loud - not just out loud, I was going to sing it very loudly. I caught myself. I had the feeling where your vocal codes start to open up and your ready to let a sound loose, well I didn’t hear it by I would assume I probably let loose a gurgle out of throat, it may have been too far gone down the pipeline to shut it off completely without leakage. Now I’m sure Xie is reading this slightly amused, to finish off the picture I on the way out of the building I was doing my little dance type walk. I’m not a teeny bopper anymore (well compared to most people here I’m sure I seem that way), but a guy in his thirties doing a jerky little head bopping dance while he’s walking out of the office is sure to garner some attention. So far though no one has said anything. The best thing I can offer you is to not listen to “Code Monkey” in your office. I do suggest you check out Jonathan’s site for more of his great music though. I’ll leave you with the “Code Monkey” WoW music video.

[youtube v4Wy7gRGgeA] Original From: Curse You Code Monkey

For those curious which wordpress plugin’s I use on creeva.com, I thought I would post my plugin page for you to check out.

Enjoy: Add Meta Tags 1.6 Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives. This operation is automatic, but the generated META tags can be fully customized. Also, the inclusion of other META tags, which do not need any computation, is possible. Please read the tips and all other info provided at the configuration panel. By George Notaras. Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button .9.1 Lets readers share, save, and bookmark your posts using any service and browser. [Settings] By MicroPat. Admin Big Width 1.0 enlarge your wordpress administration. By XoraX. Admin Management Xtended 1.0.1 Adds AJAX-driven options to some admin management pages with CMS-known functions like toggling post/page visibility without having to open the edit screens, plus changing page order with drag’n'drop. By Oliver Schlöbe. AJAXed Wordpress 1.19.2 A plugin that incorporates the best AJAX Wordpress features and wrap them in a single framework–including such features as inline posts and comments, the ability to paginate posts, submit comments, thread comments, edit comments and posts inline. The Admin panel is under presentation tab. Need Help? Visit the Official AWP support thread or try reading the full documentation. By Aaron Harun. Akismet 2.1.5 Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg. All in One Adsense and YPN 1.62 Inserts Adsense or YPN code in to your blog posts. Ad position can be random or pre-defined. By linewbie. All in One SEO Pack 1.4.6.8 Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose. Berri Technorati Reactions on Dashboard 2.0 Shows on the Dashboard the Technorati Reactions of your blog. Widget for the main admin page. By Alberto Varela. Blog Metrics 1.0 Provides blog metrics based on the blog metrics Avinash Kaushik proposed in this post, now with a widget! By Joost de Valk. Brian’s Threaded Comments 1.5.18 This gives you threaded comments and a “wandering” comment form. By Brian Meidell. Chunk Urls for WordPress 2.0 This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site. By whoo. Clean Options Beta 0.9.6 finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table By Mittineague. Comments number Restore 1.0 Hyper Cache is an extremely aggressive cache for WordPress. By Satollo. Dashboard: Draft Posts 1.0.2 Displays draft posts on your WordPress 2.5+ dashboard. By Viper007Bond. Dashboard Editor 1.1 Allows you to customise the dashboard. By Aaron Harun. Dashboard Widget Manager 1.3.0 Greatly enhances your WordPress 2.5+ dashboard by allowing widget re-ordering and storage of preferences on a per-user basis. By Viper007Bond. Different Posts Per Page 1.7.1 Show different number of posts in home, category, search or archive page. By MaxBlogPress. DJ EmailPublish 1.5 Publish your article to other blog by email. Visit Options/Email Publish after activation of the plugin. By Der-Johng Sun. Enforce www. Preference 1.3 Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www. By Mark Jaquith. Facebook Comments 0.25 Copies comments from your imported Facebook Notes back into your blog entries. Took Thomas Albright’s version (http://thomasalbright.info/index.php/2007/05/27/thomasalbrightinfo-facebook) and then edited by James Low (http://jameslow.com). Made to work with Feedburner feeds by Aaron Harp (http://www.aaronharp.com) By Adam Hill. Facebook Dashboard Widget 0.9 Display your friends latest status updates, posted items and/or notifications on your WordPress dashboard. Make sure you enter your feed details on the options page. By Chris Chrisostomou. FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1 Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner. Flickr comment Importer 0.1 Add Flickr comments to your blog posts. Configuration Page By Donncha O Caoimh. Flickr Manager 2.0.2 Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts. By Trent Gardner. Flickr Photo Gallery 0.93.2 This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts. Configure… By Silas Partners (Joe Tan). Fluency Admin 1.1 WordPress 2.5+ only. A rethink of the WordPress admin interface giving it a slightly more modern application-esque feel, inspired by Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin. Firefox, Safari and IE8 only. IE7 soon. By Dean Robinson. Forgot the Category 0.2.1 Hate forgetting to select a category when you write a new post? I know I do. This plugin won’t let you. By Dan Coulter. Front Page Excluded Categories 1.1.1 This version uses a comma separated list of *excluded* category ids. By Sean O’Steen. Genki Youtube Comments 1.2 Insert YouTube comments into your post’s comment By Genkisan. Google XML Sitemaps 3.0.3.3 This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold. Instant Upgrade 0.2 Upgrade your WordPress-Installation with one simple click (Go to Manage » Instant Upgrade) By Alex Günsche. LiveJournal Comments 1.0.3 This plugin displayes a number of comments in posts crossposted to LiveJournal. You can see how if works here. By Alexander Bishop. LiveJournal Crossposter 2.0.5 Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog. Editing or deleting a post will be replicated as well. Original plugin by Evan Broder. By Arseniy Ivanov. Live Space Sync 1.01 A Live Spaces rpc plug-in By William, priv. Maintenance Mode 3.2 Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Options ? Maintenance Mode to get started. By Michael Woehrer. Meet your commenters 0.9 When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network. By Alberto Varela. MySpace Crossposter 2.0a A plugin that enables automatic crossposting from WordPress to MySpace. By Roderick Russell. No Flash Uploader 1.0 Disables the Flash Uploader of 2.5 By Dion Hulse. NoFollow Free 1.5.5 Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc… Supports multilingual and a Top Commenters sidebar Widget. By Michele Marcucci. Official StatCounter Plugin 1.0 Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog. After uploading this plugin click ‘Activate’ (to the right) and then afterwards you must visit the options page and enter your StatCounter Project Info to enable logging. By Aodhan Cullen. Ping.fm Notifier 1.0 A plugin that send a notification to your Ping.fm space after you publish your post. By Creeva. Plugin Central 1.11 Wordpress 2.5+ only. Automatically installs and updates WordPress plugins. By Vladimir Prelovac. Postie 1.1.1 Signifigantly upgrades the posting by mail features of Word Press (See Quick Readme) By Dirk Elmendorf. Post Template 2.1.3 A plugin that allows you to create post templates in order to save time writing posts having the same structure. When activated, you can check your new template management page and the option page. This plugin makes use of the excellent other plugin “Manage Pages Custom Columns” by Edward Dale. By Vincent Prat. Reveal IDs for WP Admin 2.5 0.7.5 Reveals hidden IDs in Admin interface that have been removed with WordPress 2.5 (formerly known as Entry IDs in Manage Posts/Pages View for WP 2.5). See Options Page for options and information. By Oliver Schlöbe. Routes 2.1.6 Adds route-based geographical information to your blog. By Jennifer Hodgdon, Poplar ProductivityWare. Script Compressor 1.3.1 This plugin compresses javascript files and css files. By Regen. SEO Friendly Images 1.11 Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well. By Vladimir Prelovac. SezWho WP2.1 A plugin that improves community engagement by showing universal web-wide profiles for participants and by empowering the community to rate comments and post. You need a key to use this service. Get your key at SezWho. By SezWho. SimpleLife 1.2 SimpleLife is a fully configurable simplepie based plugin to produce a lifestream on your wordpress powered blog. Makes use of the excellent SimplePie. Either use the widget or place in a page template. By Kieran Delaney. Simple Tags 1.5.7 Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags ! By Amaury BALMER. Social Homes widget 2.2 Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons. Current services include del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Twitter, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Zooomr, Utterz, StumbleUpon, Digg, LiveJournal, MySpace, Jaiku, Pownce, VIRB°, and FriendFeed. By Elie Zananiri. Twitter Tools 1.2b1 A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Configure your settings here. By Alex King. Twitter Widget Pro 1.1.4 A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. Requires PHP5. By Aaron D. Campbell. VideoWarrior 1.0.3 Yet another plugin to include Videos from Youtube and Google Video By Sixtus. WordPress.com Stats 1.2.1 Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton. WordPress Database Backup 2.1.5 On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage ? Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko. Wordpress PDA & iPhone 1.2.1 This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda and iPhone browser. By Imthiaz Rafiq. WordPress Reports 0.87 Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data By Joe Tan. WP-PageNavi 2.30 Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. WP-Print 2.30 Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. WP-ServerInfo 1.30 Display your host’s server PHP and MYSQL information (integrated into WordPress Admin Style) on your WordPress dashboard. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. WP-SnapAvatar 1.1 This plugin puts the commentor’s website screenshot where there is no gravatar. By Neacsu Alexandru. WP-SpamFree 1.8.3 An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well. By Scott Allen, aka WebGeek. WP Contact Form III 1.4.1 WP Contact Form III is a simple drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. Go to Options -> ContactForm III to configure. Challenge (antispam) mod by Doug Karr. Original script by Ryan Duff By Kristin K. Wangen. WP Limit Posts Automatically 0.7 Limit your posts automatically. This way you don’t need the use of the more tag. You can limit posts by letter, word or paragraph and apply it to home, categories, archive and search. By Jens Törnell. WP Security Scan 2.2.64 Perform security scan of WordPress installation. By Michael Torbert. WP Super Cache 0.6.4 Very fast caching module for WordPress. Once enabled, you must enable the cache. Based on WP-Cache by Ricardo Galli Granada. By Donncha O Caoimh. Xanga Cross Post 0.6 Cross post your blog entries to a Xanga account By Joe Tan. Original From: What Wordpress Plugin’s Do I Use?

The above is what I got while pumping Creeva through the Cyborg Name Decoder. Thanks to Leah Culver’s Link on Pownce I discovered this site. Now to be fair I also pushed through my real name:

Get Your Cyborg Name Head over and let me know what your Cyborg name is decoded as. Original From: Cyborg Name Decoder

I received a recent comment that the Ping.fm beta code that I posted a few weeks as since expired. So looking up on ping.fm it seems that a new beta code has been announced. The new beta code for everyone to use is “pingsauce” - someone drop me a comment if it stops working again and I’ll try to track down the latest one. Original From: New Ping.fm Beta Code

What do I mean by out Scoble, Scoble himself? I’m not going to make as much money as he does, I’m not going to get as many followers as he does, and I’m not going to ever get to play with all the toys he does, and I’ll never have his connections. So how am I going to out do him? Data distribution. Last week someone asked me how I distribute my data across the Internet, at first I grabbed a piece of paper. After starting the diagram I realized it was way too inefficient in space requirements, so I moved on to a piece of poster board. After I had a rough diagram I was told I must surely be kidding. I assure you when it comes to my blog I never kid, and don’t call me Shirley. After relaying this story to a friend he said he would be interested in how I distribute my data. So I put this challenge on myself, to come up with an accurate diagram of how I push my data, and include passive inclusion in sites like google at the same time. The goal is to see how much data I truly generate with each post. Instead of just ramping up to include everything I’ve joined so far I’m taking it up a notch. I’m going to seehow truly far I can push the envelope on passing this data and making it grow. Sort of a tsunami of Internet data. I will only have one account per service and stick with their own functionality, I won’t do any data passing manually, nor will I use a second account (since that’s cheating). If I managed to spam my data to 5000 twitter accounts who would subscribe to any of them? No one, so I have to take the point of view I’ve always stated, this is about distributing data to my friends no matter what service they are on. It’s kind of the opposite of data portability, so with that in mind I’m calling this the data pushability project. I’m going to continue until July 1st to see how many services that I can link, crosspost, and pull in unique data from that either I create or I theoretically own (comments to my posts I have a stake in and much as my del.icio.us bookmarks). I want all the sites to automatically handle the data and use tools provided to me by web services. I’m targetting social networks and the like, but my friend asked me what am I going to do when the social network craze is over. I explained that this is more proof of concept and Internet distribution. Those are the factors that ring my bell, the friends and popularity contest really aren’t my driving factor. Getting my stuff read, that’s what I want. I don’t care if you friend me or not. So look forward to a diagram the first week of July that shows how far data can really be pushed in todays Internet era. Original From: Is is Possible to Out Scoble the Scobleizer?

On Saturday Ghoulishcharm, Xie Lanthia, and myself went to NASA’s Glenn Research Center Open house celebration. They were throwing this in celebration of 50 years of NASA. We had been planning to go for a few weeks and we managed to make it. This is out of the realm of normality for us. Xie and I woke up early (for a Saturday) and got around taking care of the pets, eating a snack, and getting out the door surprisingly well. We actually left when we were planning on leaving. We drove an hour to go pick up Ghoulish and proceeded on the hour drive to NASA, all three in a Miata (don’t ask but I can say it involved clowns and midgets). At the halfway mark we stopped at Wal-Mart in Oberlin to take a stretch and compare prices with some stuff we were considering buying online. At this point Xie realized that she forgot her wallet. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but we needed government issued identification to get into NASA. Since we were a half hour from home we boogied back down there to get her wallet. While there I managed to snarf down half a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of chips, a candy bar, and half a Pepsi (meals for the road time warrior). After a nice stretch we all greased up and squeezed into the car again. We took the highway north this time and about half way there was a tremdous down pour. At this point we were considering that this whole fiasco may be a bad idea. We proceeded though and decided we would play it by ear. We made it to the Cleveland I-X center where designated parking was and it slowed to a drizzle. We decided that the sky looked like it was clearing up and we would continue on this expedition. After going through the ID checkpoint we were instructed to wait for the next shuttle bus to take us onto the base. While waiting there a torrential downpour happened and we all got partially soak trying to stand underneath the overhang, but not trying to crowd people to much. Politeness versus being wet, the ultimate conundrum. After about ten minutes we were on the bus and driving over to the base. The first open building we wandered into turned out to be kid activities, no good. We wandered real quick to see if anything interesting was in there and there wasn’t. Moving on. The next round was trying to find bathrooms. There was porta potties, but none of us really like porta potties. We were at NASA we wanted to use astronaut restrooms. We migrated to the visitor’s center and managed to score normal every day bathrooms. I didn’t get to pee like an astronaut through, *sigh*. On a side note could you imaging the red neck shuttle that would actually have a porta potty in it? Ewwwwww. After the visitors center (Which had a Skylab capsule) we wandered into the wind tunnel, which can generate wind at three times the speed of sound. We saw the NASA bike. We went to the zero gravity research center (it’s really a big hole in the ground) and then decided it was break time. We hit the NASA cafeteria, ironically in the actual cafeteria nothing is freeze dried. We had had pop and a banana that cost a total of 6.00. I think I could get a better deal in NYC. Our feet were getting tired so we decided to skip some of the other buildings and just hit the hangar. In the hangar was a few proto type planes and battling robots. I guess the local high school robotic competition was happening that day in the hangar. There was also an inflatable life size replica of the Gemini capsule, bigger then I thought it was. Ghoulish managed to get in a discussion with someone at NASA over Pluto. We always thought Pluto got the bum rap, “The planet Pluto has become the planetoid plute”, what? It didn’t get smaller? Why did we have to change is designation. I guess the EU agrees with us. THe EU is voting to reinstate it as a planet, Americans don’t get the right to say what a planet is or isn’t. GO PLUTO! After the hangar we got back on the shuttle bus and headed back to the car leaving NASA for the day. In two weeks we are are heading out to NASA’s Plum Brook center to see the world’s largest vacuum chamber. Xie wants to go inside, but I dont’ think they will let her. Ghoulish will continue his hunt for space monkeys, though he swears they are hidden away at Glenn Research Center. So there are no space monkeys, no floating in anti gravity, and no freeze dried food in the cafeteria. We had an enjoyable time and brought home some NASA swag to boot. See you in two weeks NASA. Click the pictures to see larger images: Original From: NASA’s Glenn Research Center’s Open House With Pictures

On Saturday Ghoulishcharm, Xie Lanthia, and myself went to NASA’s Glenn Research Center Open house celebration. They were throwing this in celebration of 50 years of NASA. We had been planning to go for a few weeks and we managed to make it. This is out of the realm of normality for us. Xie and I woke up early (for a Saturday) and got around taking care of the pets, eating a snack, and getting out the door surprisingly well. We actually left when we were planning on leaving. We drove an hour to go pick up Ghoulish and proceeded on the hour drive to NASA, all three in a Miata (don’t ask but I can say it involved clowns and midgets). At the halfway mark we stopped at Wal-Mart in Oberlin to take a stretch and compare prices with some stuff we were considering buying online. At this point Xie realized that she forgot her wallet. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but we needed government issued identification to get into NASA. Since we were a half hour from home we boogied back down there to get her wallet. While there I managed to snarf down half a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of chips, a candy bar, and half a Pepsi (meals for the road time warrior). After a nice stretch we all greased up and squeezed into the car again. We took the highway north this time and about half way there was a tremdous down pour. At this point we were considering that this whole fiasco may be a bad idea. We proceeded though and decided we would play it by ear. We made it to the Cleveland I-X center where designated parking was and it slowed to a drizzle. We decided that the sky looked like it was clearing up and we would continue on this expedition. After going through the ID checkpoint we were instructed to wait for the next shuttle bus to take us onto the base. While waiting there a torrential downpour happened and we all got partially soak trying to stand underneath the overhang, but not trying to crowd people to much. Politeness versus being wet, the ultimate conundrum. After about ten minutes we were on the bus and driving over to the base. The first open building we wandered into turned out to be kid activities, no good. We wandered real quick to see if anything interesting was in there and there wasn’t. Moving on. The next round was trying to find bathrooms. There was porta potties, but none of us really like porta potties. We were at NASA we wanted to use astronaut restrooms. We migrated to the visitor’s center and managed to score normal every day bathrooms. I didn’t get to pee like an astronaut through, *sigh*. On a side note could you imaging the red neck shuttle that would actually have a porta potty in it? Ewwwwww. After the visitors center (Which had a Skylab capsule) we wandered into the wind tunnel, which can generate wind at three times the speed of sound. We saw the NASA bike. We went to the zero gravity research center (it’s really a big hole in the ground) and then decided it was break time. We hit the NASA cafeteria, ironically in the actual cafeteria nothing is freeze dried. We had had pop and a banana that cost a total of 6.00. I think I could get a better deal in NYC. Our feet were getting tired so we decided to skip some of the other buildings and just hit the hangar. In the hangar was a few proto type planes and battling robots. I guess the local high school robotic competition was happening that day in the hangar. There was also an inflatable life size replica of the Gemini capsule, bigger then I thought it was. Ghoulish managed to get in a discussion with someone at NASA over Pluto. We always thought Pluto got the bum rap, “The planet Pluto has become the planetoid plute”, what? It didn’t get smaller? Why did we have to change is designation. I guess the EU agrees with us. THe EU is voting to reinstate it as a planet, Americans don’t get the right to say what a planet is or isn’t. GO PLUTO! After the hangar we got back on the shuttle bus and headed back to the car leaving NASA for the day. In two weeks we are are heading out to NASA’s Plum Brook center to see the world’s largest vacuum chamber. Xie wants to go inside, but I dont’ think they will let her. Ghoulish will continue his hunt for space monkeys, though he swears they are hidden away at Glenn Research Center. So there are no space monkeys, no floating in anti gravity, and no freeze dried food in the cafeteria. We had an enjoyable time and brought home some NASA swag to boot. See you in two weeks NASA. Click the pictures to see larger images: Original From: NASA’s Glenn Research Center’s Open House With Pictures

A friend and I had a discussion about old technology disappearing and what gets lost in the migration. He put forth of the example of the CD single. I stated that the CD single was still around, he stated that it had completely disappeared. We were both right and wrong. He wanted to take me up to the challenge on if they still existed. My problem is that I chose the wrong store. We were at the mall following this discussion and went into a Fye Store. After browsing (and I had almost forgotten about the previous discussion) my friend asked the sales lady if they had any CD singles. She stated they were no longer made since the Internet destroyed that market. I pointed out some recent bands that released singles and she just kind of shrugged and wandered away. Score one for him. What I should have done is gone to the record exchange which deals more in specialized markets and not bulk selling fluff. I’ll concede greatly that the CD single is no longer a mass purchased item (I never purchased one in my life since singles back in the day were half the cost of a full CD). I won’t concede that they are disappearing just yet. I have argued with others before that media will all become digitally distributed. Physical media will disappear as the main stream item and move into the arena of niche collectors. Digital media will become the de facto standard once broadband is ubiquitous across the nation. The problem with the previous statement is that we currently live in a society that has niche collectors and broadband is not ubiquitous. The people in middle america that has last mile broadband issues do not buy their music on itunes any more then they stream their video on hulu. If I’m a huge Weezer fan, I want that b-side track. These things will drive the single market steadily for at leas the next few years. Searching Amazon there are a ton of CD singles announced and not yet released. This covers those markets, granted it’s more for the specialized collectors at that point over the itunes barrier, but plenty of people will still purchase them at their local store. I do wonder if the price has dropped though? CD singles won’t exist forever, but I’m fairly positive they will hang on as long as CD’s do. The question is which will disappear first, the compact disc or the modem? That is an interesting technological discussion. If you ask me though, I think the compact disc will die first. Original From: Death of the CD Single?