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Oh Widget, Where Art Thou?
2007-07-06 22:26:00
As I’m sure you know, the Internet has gone widget-crazy over the last year or two. It seems like everyone and their grandmother has their own widget these days, which is why it seems so weird that I can’t seem to find a widget for what I want to do with this blog (and my other blog). Specifically, I want a widget that I can drop in my blog sidebar that will display 5 to 10 (or more) of my favorite news or blog posts of the day. I want the widget to be dynamic, so that if I’m on a blog, oh, say Valleywag, and I really like some article they have about Fake Steve Jobs, I just click a button and automatically that article (or at least the headline) is displayed in the widget back on my blog. Readers of my blog could then easily click through to the original article. I’d use this in a second over Digg, Delicious or the like. I used to do a lot of posts on my other blog that were essentially “roundups” of interesting articles I’d found aroun...
More About: Widget , Where

Meet Le Firm
2007-07-02 03:08:00
As you might have picked up by now, I’m kind of the music guy around Rogomo. What you may not know, though, is that in addition to running my music blog, I also help manage (well, advise would be a better word) a great young rock and roll band called Le Firm. Le Firm is based here in New York and has been playing together for about a year and a half now. Their debut EP, called Flugsport, came out at the end of last year, and has gotten a bunch of good reviews across the Internet. Their show schedule has slowed down a bit lately due to a couple of marriages in the band, but the band is entering the studio this month to start working on a new disc. You can bet that I’ll be posting info about the new disc, and new concert dates, when it becomes available. For now, though, take a listen (for free!) to the Flugsport EP through their ReverbNation widget. If you like the album, you can buy it at their website or via iTunes.
More About: Meet

Congress Gets WOXY-fied
2007-06-28 23:29:00
This morning, Bryan Jay Miller from WOXY.com testified before Congress about the Copyright Royalty Board’s recent rate hikes. Check out his testimony: Read more about this morning’s proceedings here, and watch the rest of the testimony here. Bookmark at: | Digg | Del.icio.us | Newsvine | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb

America’s Best Live Band?
2007-06-27 07:25:00
There are a few bands I could probably give this label to (My Morning Jacket, The Figgs, Guided By Voices before they broke up, etc.), but I think I’m pretty comfortable saying that Wilco may be my favorite live band in America right now. (Caveat - the best live band in the world, hands down, is Ireland’s The Frames.) I was lucky enough to catch Wilco three times over the last couple of weeks, first in Cincinnati, then in New Jersey, and then last night here in New York. If you’ve never seen them before, be sure to catch them when they’re in your town. Bookmark at: | Digg | Del.icio.us | Newsvine | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
More About: Band , Live

Music For a Day Without Radio
2007-06-26 19:57:00
Today’s Internet Radio Day of Silence has taken WOXY away from me for the first time since the station’s temporary demise last Fall. Being without WOXY got me thinking about all of the bands that I’ve been introduced to by the station over the years, and that I might never have heard otherwise. Given that I’ve listened to WOXY since the late 80’s (I grew up in outside of Cincinnati, near where the station use to transmit its radio signal), that’s a LOT of bands. To give you an idea how important WOXY, and all Internet radio, is to me and other music fans, I figured I’d post some of my favorite songs that WOXY has introduced me to over the years. (I’ve also labeled each song by the approximate year I first heard it on WOXY.) Enjoy. 1992 - Dada, “Dim” [BUY] 2005 - Devin Davis, “Canons At The Courthouse” [BUY] 2006 - The Dears, “Ticket to Immortality” [BUY] 1990 - Ride, “Vapour Trail” [BU...
More About: Music , Adio

Internet Radio Goes Silent
2007-06-25 19:19:00
In case you hadn’t heard, hundreds of Intern et -based broadcasters are going silent tomorrow to draw attention to the controversy surrounding new royalty rates put in place by the United States Copyright Royalty Board. I wrote about this situation on my other blog a few months ago. In short, the Copyright Board has decided that Internet-based broadcasters - which includes everyone from Pandora to WOXY to the teenage kid who creates a streaming radio station on his home computer - will be required to pay sound recording royalties that (a) are higher than those paid by satellite radio, and (b) even more egregiously, are not paid at all by regular terrestrial radio stations. These new royalties threaten to put many webcasters, even larger established players, completely out of business. Pandora has estimated that the new rates, which are retroactive to 2006, will force it to pay more than $2 billion. No matter how you look at it (and, personally, I see the Copyright Board&rsquo...
More About: Radio , Silent , Internet radio

A Very Buenos Aires Adventure
2007-06-25 17:35:00
As Steve mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was down in Argentina at the beginning of the month working with our developers on the Rogomo product. Between Rogomo and the fact that my wife is originally from Buenos Aires , I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Argentina over the last couple of years. Buenos Aires has quickly become one of my favorite cities, and I figured it would be a good idea to share some of my favorite aspects of the city with you. For today, we’ll focus on food. Steak. No trip to Argentina is complete without steak. My favorite parilla (i.e., steakhouse) is Cabana Las Lilas (located at Alicia Moreau de Justo 516 in Puerto Madero). I can’t recommend the “lomo” (tenderloin) enough. [Edited by Steve: This is where Neil and I differ. I thought Cabana Las Lilas was very good, but not great, and a little too “mass produced” feeling for my taste. My favorite steak restaurant, whose name I completely forget, was just around ...
More About: Adventure , Vent , Advent

WOXY Rocks
2007-06-22 21:33:00
While we were having one of our daily iChat video sessions about the business today, Neil asked me what the word “WOXY” meant.  He kept seeing it pop up next to my name on iChat and had no idea what it meant. If you haven’t heard of it, WOXY.com is one of the best radio stations around. WOXY used to be known as 97X, a terrestrial radio station based out of Oxford, Ohio (northwest of Cincinnati) that played “alternative” rock before “alternative” became cool. You may remember that, in the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman’s character kept repeating the phrase “97X. Bam! The future of rock and roll.” That was 97X he was talking about. When the station’s owners decided to retire in 2004, they sold the terrestrial signal, and the station closed down. Soon thereafter, a few secretive angel investors showed up and helped the station come back as an internet-only station, and after a second brush with disaster a year a...
More About: Rocks

Why Join a Startup?
2007-06-20 03:06:00
Marc Andreessen’s post on “Why Not to Do a Startup ” inspired me to comment on why, for me, startups are far superior to well established companies. Mark’s reasons “why not to do a startup” provide some compelling reasons why not to work for a modern large public company (lets call all modern large public companies Initech for purposes of this post). 1. The Rollercoaster Ride — Both the startup and Initech will put you on an emotional rollercoaster, and the ride isn’t very scary at either place if it’s successful. The differences appear when your car is offtrack and racing quickly down the slope. In a startup, you have a chance to put the car back on track. At Initech, the consultants, reorgs, shifts in strategy, layoffs, etc, will burn the car and the tracks before you have a chance to help save the children. 2. Nothing Happens Unless You Make it Happen — At a startup, nothing gets done unless you do it but you also have...
More About: Join

The Netscape Guide to Personal Productivity
2007-06-13 06:23:00
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape , launched his own blog this month and I have to admit that I really enjoy reading it. I especially enjoyed one of his posts, The Pmarca Guide to Persona l Productivity . In my opinion, the biggest problem facing most people (or maybe just me) is that they have too many things to do and not enough time to do it (in other words, they aren’t productive enough to accomplish their goals on a daily basis). It’s not because they don’t try hard enough, but because they’re overwhelmed, don’t know where to start first or can’t focus for long enough to get things done. Technology, which has kept us “always on,” has greatly exacerbated the problem because it’s too easy to get interrupted, the biggest offenders being IM, e-Mail and cell phones. My advice, and Marc echoed this in his post, is that what works for me will probably not work for you. In fact, I can almost guarantee that if you try to ...

So How’s the Product Coming?
2007-06-08 01:22:00
You may have noticed that Neil hasn’t posted on the blog in a little while. That’s because he’s been down in Argentina for the last week working with our developers on the Rogomo website. While we still can’t say a whole lot about the product — we should be filing our patent applications soon, and can reveal all then — Neil tells me that things are going very well. We’re on target with the original development timeline, and we hope to have a beta up and running in early September. What’s amazing about this process is that it really did not feel during the last week that Neil was halfway around the world. We’ve used Apple’s iChat quite a bit, and have been able to communicate just as easily as if he were here in the States. Even better, Neil set up his Mac during a presentation yesterday by our lead developer, turned on iChat, and I was able to watch the entire presentation from my living room in New York (and even ask ...
More About: Product , Prod , Ming

Interpol Play New York
2007-06-06 07:20:00
Interpol played a small show here in New York tonight as a “warm up” for what is sure to be a lengthy tour this summer and fall in support of their new album, Our Love to Admire [Pre-order]. While most of the new songs the band played seemed just ok - although, to be fair, it’s hard to judge a song hearing it for the first time live - I really enjoyed the band’s performance of its new song “The Heinrich Maneuver”. Interpol, “The Heinrich Maneuver” Bookmark at: | Digg | Del.icio.us | Newsvine | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
More About: Play , Interpol , New-York

Finally… an iPhone Release Date
2007-06-04 02:35:00
June 29th it is. I can only imagine how much fun it’s going to be trying to get one of these suckers, especially here in New York, where it seems like 50% of the world’s Mac users are based. Still, though, I’m running on a 3 1/2 year old CDMA phone from LG which I would like nothing more than to set on fire and do a celebration dance around. Bookmark at: | Digg | Del.icio.us | Newsvine | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
More About: Iphone , Release , Finally , Lease , Ease