I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be the Guest of Honor at the 67th Westercon, in Salt Lake City, Utah, July 3-6, 2014. The hotel is the Marriott Downtown at City Creek, and memberships are currently $50 for attending, $25 for supporting. The website linked in the previous sentence is just a placeholder, though the real site should be up shortly.
My latest Locus colum, “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin,” asks why music copyright is such a hot potato on the Internet, even in the post-DRM age, when most tunes are $0.99 on Amazon in MP3. The short answer: music’s ancient compact is not entirely compatible with contemporary commerce, and the industry has tried to “fix” this by just telling us that everything we know about the legitimate way to enjoy, produce and share music is wrong.
Let’s start with music’s age. Movies are still in their infancy. Books are in their middle age. Stories themselves are ancient. But music is primal. Books may predate commerce, but music predates language. Our relationship with music, and our social contracts around it, are woven into many other parts of our culture, parts that are considered more important than mere laws or businesses. The idea that music is something that you hear and then sing may even be inherent to our biology. I know that when I hear a catchy tune, I find myself humming it or singing it, and it takes a serious effort of will to stop myself. It doesn’t really matter what the law says about whether I am ‘‘authorized’’ to ‘‘perform’’ a song. Once it’s in my head, I’m singing it, and often singing it with my friends. If my friends and I sing together by means of video-sharing on YouTube, well, you’re going to have a hard time convincing us that this is somehow wrong.
The very last episode of TVOntario’s Search Engine’s just went out (MP3), and I’m honored to say that it’s an interview with me. I started out with Search Engine when it was a broadcast on CBC radio, and I’ve been pleased to appear on the show several times since it moved to TVO. Host Jesse Brown is thinking hard about what he’ll do next, and he’s created a mailing list for people who want to know where he lands. He promises he’ll send exactly one message to the list and then destroy it.
Here’s a podcast of my recent Guardian column, Google admits that Plato’s cave doesn’t exist:
Google’s official communiques tell the world that SEO isn’t necessary – so long as you “make great content”, you’ll get higher rankings. The implication is that Google has discovered a mathematical model of relevance, a way of measuring some objective criteria that allows a computer to score and compare the relevance of different web-pages.
But there is no such mathematics. Relevance is a subjective attribute. The satisfaction you experience in regards to a search-results page is generated by your mind, and it reflects the internal state of your neurons just as much as it reflects the external reality of the results.
A magazine’s editor-in-chief looks at her table of contents as it is being formed through the month, moving things around, commissioning new items, deleting things and shifting others to greater prominence.
The judgments she makes are aesthetic ones. They reflect her distinctive expertise and vision for the publication, a vision and expertise that is honed from month to month by feedback from readers and colleagues, sales figures, public review, and pageviews in the online edition. Magazines rise and fall based on their e-i-cs, and a change in leadership can utterly transform the experience of reading the magazine.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
I did a series of interviews with Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson, as part of my involvement in The Tomorrow Project, which resulted in my writing Knights of the Rainbow Table. Here they are!
Supreet Kaur made this delightful C# remix of a pivotal scene in Makers, as part of the coursework for a Game Design degree in London. The remix scored an A+ — congrats, Supreet!
Supreet Kaur made this delightful C# remix of a pivotal scene in Makers, as part of the coursework for a Game Design degree in London. The remix scored an A+ — congrats, Supreet!
Nemo Folkitz has graciously undertaken a German fan-translation of my short-short story Printcrime. The PDF is here, and the text is below.
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