Tuesday, November 22, 2005

PERMALINK

All your Google Base are belong to -- whom? Like many others, I have been trying to figure out what Google Base is all about. Plainly most of the world sees it as a repository for classified ads, and thereby competition to both old-school businesses (newspapers etc.) and newer Web enterprises like Craigslist. But it also seems to be intended as a way for people to pump large quantities of any information at all directly into the Google searchstream. Since Google is where so many of us go first when we're looking for stuff, Google seems to be saying, give us your information directly so others can find it. In some ways this is the ultimate "Web 2.0" play -- just open up the gates to a world of users "information," see what they put in, and make it accessible. But I've now spent some time on the Google Base Help and FAQ pages and I still can't really figure out the answers to some basic questions. Like: If I post a whole lot of material and then want to remove it in bulk, can I? Can I export stuff as easily as I import it? How does Google Base know who I am and that I am who I say I am? Is there an open interface that allows other services access to the information in Google Base the way they would have access to it if it were published on my own Web site? And so on. Maybe if I were using Google Base these questions would be easier to answer. But really, this product could have used some better framing, and perhaps some better thinking. I'm all for experiments in moving the Web forward toward its programmable destiny, and it could be that Google Base's structure and openness will emerge more clearly and favorably over time. Right now, I am uncomfortable with what Google Base seems to be all about -- piling tons of information into containers owned and operated by a company that is less than fully transparent. I'd rather see a world in which a myriad of individual, independent content providers (i.e., Web users, i.e., people) publish stuff, and then mark it up with discoverable tags and XML annotations that allow Google and other third parties to organize and use that stuff in cool ways. In the latter scenario, I remain closer to what I'm publishing, I can reorganize it as necessary and control its fate more easily, and there's a plainer connection between who I am and what is connected to my name. comment [] 12:20:16 PM | permalink

Crunch, fuzz, twang I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who's "Tommy" as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it -- in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks. I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he -- always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge -- told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend's electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums. Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 "Rumble," he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier -- a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, "You Really Got Me." I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 -- thanks for the sound. In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:   The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don't have sex and violence in rock 'n' roll then you're totally done for. It might be the kind that's on an Eno-Fripp record, but it's still there -- there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there. comment [] 9:16:35 AM | permalink