Category: interweb
A long time hockey blogger steps aside
Perhaps you heard a hockey blogger quit covering the Tampa Bay Lightning for SB Nation. Maybe you heard, maybe you didn’t hear. You are on his blog at the moment, by the way. Maybe if you ask him, he’ll tell you.
The story of two Internet Radio streaming services
Internet radio… I don’t even know if that’s truly the proper title to use for this. It’s audio streaming of music and perhaps there is advertising but it’s not like traditional radio. Certainly not when you take in the aspect that computers and choices (by the listener and the software programming) are in control of the broadcasting and what’s airing and such. Oh, that is still a truth in traditional radio airplay, but disc jockeys and local advertising isn’t as ardent a factor. No, you’re the disc jockey ultimately and advertising is a different beast online. But I digress, this isn’t about ads.
I’ve been using Pandora casually for a few years. I know its power and influence… So it was a chance I took trying to help prop up the local garage rock/pop band that I’ve been helping out since summer of this year, the Pretty Voices. As someone who has worked in the distant, distant past for search engine submissions when they were a slower process, I thought the challenge of Pandora was a throwback. It was also intimidating.
Pandora has standards and a large audience. They’re not going to just take random submissions / they’re going to have standards that need to be reached and exceeded, applying to both the music and the actual submission form process. My first effort to get the band on the services proved quality mattered. The submission song (Scenius Genius, a rocker with foul language) and submission form came up short in the eyes of Pandora. Disappointing? Sure, but not a total surprise. It had taken a full week of review on their part and that could have been inspired by internal debate to go along with competition from other potential artists submitting new content to the network, but it still came up short. Close, though. Much closer than I realized.
It took me a second submission only a few days later, using another song as an example (Crackle Pop) and an elaboration on the form regarding the band itself and details on the song example used in the submission to get the accepted status. Yes, Pandora accepted the Pretty Voices and that was three days after that second submission! The album, Jangular, by the band went live on Pandora on October 4th and you can find it here. Quite the accomplishment for the group and a feat for the submitter!
This process seems a hell of a lot more complex-yet-involved than the one utilized by Jango and its formal audio administration area, Radio Airplay.
Simple enough, Radio Airplay lets musicians upload music to the network, but you have to have a paying membership; a monthly fee. While that comes off like an immediate downside the fact that it airs audio to international locations (Canada, Europe, the Russian Federation, Asia, etc) makes up for it. Limits on exposure do exist though; if you’re not paying the top level monthly fees, you only have so many credits per month to expose listeners to your music, and top ranked songs earn more credits from the network. This is another flaw of the system, but not such a big flaw as its weekly “top songs” list.
In concept, it’s a simple standard that’s known in the music industry: The song that was most well liked in major musical genres such as rock, metal, alternative, country, pop, dance, rhythm and blues (R&B), etc. All the songs get ranked by the listeners on Jango and it reflects music popularity… You can’t go wrong with having a top-ranked song list, can you?
In this case, yes…. Yes you can.
I’m not sure if it’s just the change of the music world or what, but I’m pretty sure there’s something going on when an instrumental, mid-tempo song is ranked top “Rock” song for a week, especially when it lacks guitar music. Case in point: Week 39 on Radio Airplay had an instrumental named Martha’s Vinyard as the top ranked “Rock” song.
You cannot tell me that’s rock. And my venting here isn’t just over the fact this is a mislabeled genre but also the fact this guy routinely gets ranked tops for his instrumentals in rock or pop. That and the weekly top list isn’t top songs by genre as-so-much singular songs that are weekly best per genre. Here’s the top list for Week 39 (where Martha’s Vinyard was ranked top Rocker)..
Weekly with these top ranked songs, you’ll find genre defying music as the top ranked numbers from Jango/Radio Airplay. It gets ridiculous. Fan reaction to music is one thing, wrongly categorization is another, but mismanagement from the host company to the point it allows this to go on and on and on tops it all.
A conflict of Pinterest
I’ve been on Pinterest the past few months, using it more to try to spread information / pop culture type items and such than to do what is common: Tout personal photos and wants. Maybe this is a sign how little I know about Pinterest or how I vary from the bulk of Pinterest users, but whatever…
One board I’ve set up is rather generic and yet rather necessary for broadening web exposure. It’s simply touting hockey blogs. That’s playing up the sport of hockey as well as playing up coverage coming from either the media or the fans themselves who drive blog coverage. It’s also a really, really tough feet to accomplish.
There are so many hockey blogs out there; that aspect I’m not trying to play down when I say it’s tough to accomplish what I’m trying. Massive amounts of coverage for the Canadian based teams and other franchises throughout the US (especially northeast market and elder clubs) are not surprising at all. What is surprising is the difficulty of trying to pin said-blogs to the Hockey Bloggers board with thanks to the inability to pin site logos from the individual blogs.
The pin attempts aren’t for specific posts on the sites, it’s linking generically to the sites… And for one coding reason or another I just can’t pin certain site logos (unable, I don’t mean that as by choice). I’m not doing the postings to just show off logos – I make sure to link to the sites and play up what they do in the Pinterest posts – but I’m also trying to play up the individual entity that is the site. What’s better to do when highlighting a web site in general than to show off their site logo?
So, I‘ve got to figure out a way to link to more logos. I’ve been trying to focus on a broader array of blogs than just SB Nation sites (…where the logo pinning is not an issue). At this rate though, I’ll either have to manually download and upload blog logos (which I have in one instance) or wave a white flag and give up on the entire concept.
Whatever the case, there are only 17 blogs listed at this point… And I can tell you quite easily that there is a hell of a lot more out there in hockey blogdom than 16.
Seeking blog contributors for Raw Charge
Raw Charge is looking for writers to add to the staff of their SB Nation blog covering the Tampa Bay Lightning. How would I know? I run the damn place, that is how I would know.
I bring this up on my personal blog site that gets next-to-no web traffic (but a gargantuan number of bot driven spam comments) because it’s a chance to talk about the aspiration to add staff. Well, it’s not just adding staff, per se. It’s about trying to find writing teammates to work with. This is a quest to find guys and girls who love the sport, and the team but also want to be part of something bigger.
Things have changed in the past calendar year (or a bit longer) on Raw Charge with people leaving the site, self-driven writers who didn’t want to fit a format (be it site use or grammar), and college influence / professional aspirations stopping others from writing in a casual format.
While the site has taken on some very capable writers the past few months, there is still missing elements and consistency in contributions.
I’m looking for a Tampa Bay based element for new contributors. I don’t mean relocated-for-college-but-originally-from-TB people… I mean folks who are here.
You can access the official post about looking-for-writers at this link.
Creatively writing a fiction anecdote
Reddit has a pretty interesting creative writing subreddit. Someone just proposes a very generalized idea for a piece of creative writing and you’re allowed to do and say what you may in order to flesh out the generalized concept. It’s a practice and a way to both inspire as well as hone one’s writing skills.
An example of things is the below piece of creative writing. The Subreddit entry went on the concept of thus: “You wake up in an unknown place, tied to a seemingly random stranger. You have no clue what is going on, but the stranger does.” Rather ambiguous, no? But it also opens the doors to whatever your imagination kicks up to why things were that way. Here’s what I came up with:
The “interests” failings of Plenty of Fish
Months ago, I went after some online dating sites because of shortcomings of the platform. Years ago, I took shots at Plenty of Fish for shortcomings of some of the participants of the site. Plenty of Fish, for those who don’t know online dating sites, is a bare-bones service that’s just a mite more involved than Craigslist… Well, write ups can be shorter than Craigslist but the point is that it’s a minimalist dating service (now owned by Match.com).
One of what should be a nice guide for the site is an interest listing that’s able to be used with the service by its members. It’s sort of like keywords or topics, but applied to life. Of course this does lead to shortcomings by a segment of the user base on POF who don’t use detailed terms or words to describe what interests them. Others will make the error of using phrases and sentences like it’s a continuing conversation arm… But there is a segment that is just fine with showing thins that truly interest them or entertain them.
This is where Plenty of Fish screws up.
It’s not the aspect of having the tool that makes it fall short, to say the least, it’s how it doesn’t work easily or properly that is the problem. See, just to click on the topic of interest on a profile will give you a very generalized list of users on the site. I don’t mean linked to the interest, I mean you get a generalized list of users in a certain timeframe and nothing more.
Now, hold on there! What about Google searches and finding an actual page that shows users on POF who do use the tag? That’s got to work, right? Indeed, it does!!… and the list is of every gender and age group in the site DB who uses said tag, making it just a bit more difficult to find those who cater to your romantic wants, meaning the proper gender that matches your wants, the proper age range too. Oh and there is the silly little aspect of profiles being ancient in some cases.
Let me give you an example page here: I’m a Tampa Bay Lightning fan. Hell, I’m a known Tampa Bay Lightning blogger. Using the team and the sport as an interest to meet people would be wise, no? S, here you go! Interest page Tampa Bay Lightning gives you thousands of results (marked as “700+”) from the network with all genders using the term. That’s one hell of a tough pile to sort through. Especially because the profiles aren’t just unsorted by gender but also by profile age… A neglected or unused profile created years ago comes up in the search results and can show up in a primary position on search results pages.
But wait! There’s a search field at the very top of that page! Let’s try sorting through ages and genders to get it so a guy like me can find a woman. That’s where the next aspect of futility rises in Plenty of Fish; to use the sort field to search through the interest list brings inconsistent results and gives you general listings of the age group within the distance you sought. You also get hit, again, in that profile results may be ancient results from days gone by… Meaning those who didn’t delete their profile can come up as a search result despite the fact they no longer use the service. Yeah, that’s an aspect that can happen on just about any dating site… The thing is that Plenty of Fish gives you the recent-users option on other searches on the site. Just not within interest searches.
To list interests is just an attempt to show you a bit about the person listed on a dating site. It can spark curiosity or interest, or it can shy you away from a person if they’re keen on things you can’t stand. It’s useful subject matter that should be better utilized on that dating network. It’d just be better if the damn thing could actually produce a quality and detailed search result like it can with other aspects on the site.
My foray into Pinterest
The truth is that while I’ve been on Pinterest (actively) for six months now, I still haven’t picked up a legit follower yet. I also don’t know anyone to follow on there. I’ve been aware of the platform for years, but I don’t socialize much on it (exploring, interacting, etc).
But I am active on there in my own little neck of the wood. I’m just not posting photos I’ve taken or recipes or clothing (sans some custom shirt designs). I’ve stuck with the entertainment field in what I’ve posted. Maybe in time I’ll evolve to something of more significance and extravagance but for now in my lonely life, it’s this.
That brings us to the whole reason I write a blog post on the subject… My most active board on Pinterest is a little project in film reflection… it’s simply looking at some of my favorite movie bad guys/antagonists. I can’t say I break any ground on descriptions / why I list certain characters. I can say I’m entertained by trying to remember villians/challengers that I like from cinema.
So! For the sake of exposing my account on Pinterest and what not… I give you “Favorite Movie Villains”:
Do you do cabinet work in the Tampa Bay area? I’m selling a domain name
I have a domain name for sale that was purchased for marketing sake for a web site I used to work on. The company has been gone for years and they never much took to the regional domain name. Heck, even the field – wood work and cabinetry – makes it feel like a regional domain name isn’t a necessity for marketing.
That being said, TampaBayCabinets.com is available for purchase through Sedo. The site it was purchased for had cabinetry and woodworking in mind catering to customers in the Tampa Bay metro area. While the price isn’t cheap, the regional branding for a company is a good marketing point (as long as the domain name is clearly listed on company branded material).
Film memories, lasting legacies, and songs from forgotten films
John Travolta is not the subject of this entry, but he is the starting point to get to what I want to speak about. It’s the way I tend to write – to segue into the point/subject. The subject is tied to Travolta and his work but Travolta isn’t supposed to be the main topic.
I got introduced to Travolta with “Look Who’s Talking” in 1990. I was a kid and the film got a lot of exposure in pop culture by way of the cutesy aspect and the fact stars Kristy Alley (Cheers among other things) and Bruce Willis had their hands in the film (among others). John Travolta was considered an also-ran at that point, or at least that’s how things seem to reflect now. It was a long way from Saturday Night Fever as well as his TV role in Welcome Back, Kotter. If there’s other stuff that was a large success for Travolta between those 70’s entries and his late 80’s/early 90’s stuff… well, I fail there (Urban Cowboy is an exception, I think). I just know Staying Alive was forgettable and we’ll leave it at that.
Between Look Who’s Talking and its sequels, Travolta found himself back in film culture. This ruffled feathers, which is actually my second memory of Travolta that stands out: Quentin Tarantino talking down about Travolta being in “a baby movie” either after his casting for Pulp Fiction or after the film aired at one film festival or another. It was repeated a few times, Tarantino couldn’t believe someone like Travolta had been in a baby movie! How could this happen?! It’s a quirk of cinema in general, for actors to be brushed off or working in roles that seem beneath them because of a lack of offers form the high. Heck, actor Dom Ameche was working dinner-acting jobs because no one would call him and offer work opportunities. It was what he’d already achieved professionally that got him cast as one of the Duke Bros. in Trading Places without even having to read for the role… But it was the first role in a feature film in 13 years.
Travolta had roles though. One of them, his pre-Look Who’s Talking film, is what I’m trying to segue to. I don’t recall exactly when I got exposed to The Experts, but I did catch it on HBO and it’s a quirky spy-comedy that has one immense quirk driving me nuts lately: an intangible soundtrack.
To summarize the movie: Two (Travolta and Arye Gross as Travis and Wendell) unlucky hipsters who keep failing at starting a club in New York agree to trying to launch a club in a small town. They find themselves in a reclusive, socially stunted (read: 1950’s down-home style) place without a lot of normal, modern aspects of society. They don’t find out until much, much later it’s actually a spy town within the Soviet Union. It’s a play on the Cold War and a contrast of culture. The flick didn’t exactly set any precedence but it’s not bad either. Maybe now it seems extra dated – Travolta had a mullet, which should tell you enough – because the Cold War isn’t a driving factor in society.
All of this leads to that aspect about the soundtrack that is driving me nuts: how you can’t find it. While I say the movie comes off dated now, one song promoting Americana can stand the test of time as it’s a nationalism/pop culture ditty called “Hometown U.S.A.”. The song was part of the closing of the film, I’m not going to give spoilers on that… It was quite fitting for when it was played, I’ll just say that.
Yet you can’t find the song in digital music stores. The lyrics aren’t posted anywhere that can be found on a Google search. The song itself is posted on YouTube but the quality of the copy is suspect (at least from my hearing). The artist, for the curious, is credited as David Morgan, with writing credits going to Harold Payne, Pete Luboff, and Pat Luboff. It got posted on July 4th, 2011 – 22 years after the film’s release and yet again fitting as it was the 4th of July.
How common is this in film, where songs just disappear? Ones that stand out to you and yet you can’t find them anywhere besides in the film itself? I’m not talking about Matthew Broderick’s clarinet playing during Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; I mean specifically songs crafted for films that just slip away. Another 1980’s film song that I was searching for in the last year (just to find the full performance of it) was “Paradise” by Kaylee Adams, which you can hear a snippet of in the movie White Water Summer. The only thing I had luck in finding was the movie clip itself and some employ pages / other Kaylee Adams songs.
A song is something that lasts in your mind if you connect to it or what images it’s tied to, or what feelings are around when you hear it. Songs tied to movies are especially going to leave a mark with you if you like the scene they’re part of… And that’s a fact even if the film is a bomb in cinema – the music can still leave a mark and a memory, which can still draw interest (and make the entertainment industry a dime) years and years later.
Hockey blogging and blog aggregation
I used to depend on Hockey Blogs — an RSS aggregation web site — for one-stop coverage of the web log world for the NHL and the sport of hockey. A decade ago, when there weren’t many blogs but some great blog writing, that site was a killer tool to have, especially during the 2004-05 NHL lockout.
Yeah, and then it got killed because of what it was aggregating. I won’t name names but a certain blog that was doing aggregation of its own got its RSS listed on the site and inundated the page with its shared-content, making it hard to find actual writing efforts from notable blogs of the time. Now it’s even worse as a feed of pro-news sites and another, singular, mass-content blog over-dominates the feed.
I still rely on RSS (Sputnik RSS reader) but one thing that my RSS reader can’t do is discover other hockey blogs from indie writers. In days of yore, those indie web loggers lusted to get themselves listed on Hockey Blogs. That doesn’t happen any more.
I don’t know… I once helped run a aggregator aimed specifically at Tampa Bay blogs… Maybe I could start a WordPress powered hockey blog aggregator comparable to Hockeyblogs.org, run independently by someone devoted to the sport? Who knows… It’s tough finding independent blogs these days; SB Nation, Fansided, The Nation Network and Bloguin dominate with individual sites/blogs, while The Hockey Writers, Today’s Slapshot and a few others try to cover things widely under one franchise/site name. It’s that one-site, mass content aspect that ruined Hockey Blogs
My occasional social media habit: Musical Therapy
There’s a little habit I have on Twitter, usually in the hockey off-season but rarely too. It’s great form my end but I think it likely sucks from a Twitter follower’s end because I’m not sharing media as I do it. I just announce it. I call it Music Therapy or Musical Therapy (#MusicTherapy or #MusicalTherapy in Twitter hashttag terms).
The habit actually inspired some creative writing in 2014 but I never finished what I started or even found finality to work towards… That’s going off on a different subject than I was trying to aim at here, but oddly the not-going-to-be-completed story and my musings on Twitter had one thing in common: Music heals and pushes you forward. It gives you something to revel in and celebrate.
My therapy sessions on Twitter, running on summer nights mostly, were just me announcing songs I was playing and yammering out facts and thoughts and feelings brought on by the song at play, or the band in question. It drew in some very good chatter from friends and ran off a lot of people following me for hockey purposes (that’s my day job, so to speak). Maybe that was opinion derived from what I was listening to at the time – 50 years worth of pop and rock with a habit of 60’s and 90’s stuff being dominant, and without a broad palette of songs. Not heavy metal, not hair metal, not rap, not balladeers (okay, actually those pop in at times but still…), no country, some bluegrass (basically just Credence Clearwater Revival), too little Motown, etc, etc. I only have somewhere above 1,250 songs in my personal library (music I choose to listen to) and not that many playlists, so there is repetition going on there that concerns me. Heck, this whole paragraph is tilted to the negative of my mind because I’m concerned I’m running people off when I’m trying to gain some release.
In another universe, I’m a late night deejay who’s been married five times, has a torrid affair with hi-if going and it helps stymie his bitterness at the world… Music soothes the soul.
It does have a worthwhile DJ feel to it, though, and it’s fun when people are there with me (well — through Twitter) to talk up the songs or suggest music. Some actually consider themselves informed by what i say about songs, be they facts or opinions.
When it’s about attendane and not competitiveness (or costs) in the sport of hockey
Sports are a business, the fan is a consumer, and mediocrity of a team doesn’t earn high turnout (nor should it earn judgment of a market). Click the title to go to the article.
Better Know a Blogger: Raw Charge’s John Fontana
A 2010 interview that this long-time hockey blogger did with SB Nation founder Tyler Bleszinski. Click the post title to be magically whisked away to SB Nation and the interview article.
The Unpublished Works
Everyone likes seeing their name in print.
Well, unless of course it’s trash tabloid-ism or an arrest warrant… But I’m not talking just-printed-on-paper but I mean a by-line of one sort or another. I can say that from experience as I’ve gotten that kick — seeing “John Fontana” linked to letters-to-the-editor, or being sourced/interviewed by USA Today, being quoted in The Hockey News, The New York Times Slap Shot blog and la-de-da.
But I can also say that wasn’t where I intended to go with writing when I started out as a kid. My intention wasn’t to be a face-in-the-crowd (though no matter what you write or publish, you are another face in the crowd of literature) in the newspaper. Not another source for magazines and what not. Not a weblogger. I planned on doing things creatively and having my own book. Or books — plural. Take your pick.
But that never happened. See, when i was a teen I got away from story writing so much and was writing poetry most of the time… a habit that’s followed me into adulthood. Lyrical verse more-so than deep observations and perspectives.. Well, yeah they are perspectives but they are my perspectives. Sometimes just pop, sometimes inspired by events or people or feelings in my life.
Over the years, I’ve had some of them available to the masses through the web… Certainly you can find a couple of them on this site and probably elsewhere on the web… But they’ve never really been published in the sense of print. Never published in the sense of being out there for any traditional form of mass consumption. I haven’t bothered to take the time with sending out poems to magazines who have niches all of their own (and aren’t available unless you pay for a subscription or pay for a copy — while you’re not getting paid for your contribution).
I ought to put together a manuscript and do something with it. But I’m hesistant.
Catherine Durkin Robinson, local blogger and Creative Loafing contributor, has written two book manuscripts. Her first one is being published, chapter-by-chapter, on a blogspot site. The other, a more recent work based on her life as a teacher in Hillsborough County, is being sent around to literary agents in hopes someone will pick up the work and mass-market it. Sadly, that has not been the case and the rejections have been comical at best.
Their loss. I’ve read the book and it’s not only a good read, it’s provocative and controversial enough to be read widely by those fearing school-district scandals.
I also have another friend, in the Pacific Northwest this time, who went out and self-published her first novel. The book, Steel Goddesses, is currently available on Amazon.com for purchase. It takes a lot of courage to go out on a limb like that and self-publish any work… But it sort of cuts out the middle-man of having to appease literary agents who tell you what a proper market for your writing is-or-isn’t and tells you to change your work to fit that niche. At least that’s what I’ve seen with rejections served up to Catherine.
So the idea I am kicking around is actually putting together a manuscript of poetry I’ve written over the past decade and self-publishing it. I realize that poetry is not exactly a hot seller and not going to lead me to riches… It’d cost me more to publish than the commissions I’d get in the long run from doing it… But it does what I have long sought to do — take the writings jammed in Mead notebooks that I’ve carried around since High School and take some of those verses and show them to the masses. Will people connect? I have doubts. Will strangers read what I’ve written? Even more doubts… But it’s mine, and it’d be out there. My claim. My piece of literature.
My book.
It’s a thought, at least.
