reg:exp

Paris Favorites

Restaurants/Brasseries:
Chez Prosper, 7, avenue du Trône, 75011. Metro: Nation
French brasserie. Few tourists. Try the salades composees and the chocolate tarte.

Le Cambodge, 10, avenue Richerand / 75010 Paris; Metro: Republique, Goncourt
Cambodian; always crowded - no reservations. Try the Nattin (sp?)

Cafe de l'Industrie

Bars/Lounges:
Mange Disque

L'Ile Enchantee 65, Bd de la Villette, Metro: Colonel Fabien

Pulp Metro: Grands Boulevards

Nouveau Casino
Batofar

BNF

Haircuts:
La chambre à hair - 41 rue de lappe, 75011. Metro: Bastille

Food Shopping:
Le Bon Marche Epicerie

Misc:

Paris Plage 2004

Apprently also worth a try, though I haven't been there:

Bar les Taulieres
10 rue de la fontaine du but, 75018 Paris. M: Lamarck Caulaincourt. Closed on Mondays.

Graphing online interest communities

Analogous to the co-authorship graphs that have been constructed to show collaboration patterns within academic communities, one could build general common-interest graphs that show website networks for a given topic. A first example could be the sphere of netlabels. Tools would be: google search (via API), maybe a custom web crawler, and a graph visualization toolkit.

Tracking graph changes over time and finding a meaningful way of visualizing temporal differences would be an interesting research topic.

Some relevant links:
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/
AT&T Graph Visualization Library

http://www.research.att.com/areas/visualization/
AT&T Information Visualization Group

http://www.aisee.com
Graph Visualization from Saarbruecken, Germany

http://tomsawyer.com/home/index.php
Another graph visualization software company. Used by Alias for Maya.

Tangentially related:
http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/uir/
Xerox Parc UI Group

Minimal Audio Links

New sites culled from my inbox:

http://radio.cult.bg
Radio Cult - the first independent online radio in Sofia Bulgaria.

http://www.molair.net/
"Bern and Tez" - minimal deepness from northern france:

http://www.dostreceradio.net
Dostrece - online radio from Barcelona

http://www.micro.com.es/
Showcase of minimal electronic artists. Site from Spain

http://www.audioespacio.com/
Spanish collection of eclectic reviewed audio links.

http://www.brothers-in-music.com
Berlin electronic sound initiative; organizes software workshops.

http://m50.net/
http://www.wnur.org/
M50, DJ a WNUR, "Chicago's sound experiment" FM radio station.

http://www.komputemusik.com/
http://www.elektricitymusic.com/
More Chicago links.

http://michaelnisi.com/
Michael Nisi - Graphic design, typography and sound.

http://www.instabil.org/
New german driving techno netlabel.

http://OTTbinare.net
Another netlabel, this time from Russia.

Nitpicking language

Words, words, words:

London's Sunday Times Magazine has a great column titled "The best of all possible words". My two favorites from today's issue: "neoteny" (1|2) and "nyctophoniac" (1). Words are taken from this book (apparently only available in the UK).

It is acceptable in American English to use apostrophe+s to indicate plurals of abbreviations, not just possessives of nouns and indefinite pronouns or contractions. Two examples from today's NYT:
"No Wonder C.E.O.'s Love Those Mergers"
"As Smith sang, however, the sadness that flooded his five CD's swamped the room"
It looks very awkward to me.

What is the difference between impudence and insolence?

the case for creative commons

[written for and published at textone.org]

in mid-june, i visited berlin for the launch of the german creative commons licenses. as part of the launch panel, i gave a brief presentation about how CC licenses are already pervasively used in the netlabel scene today. in preparation, thinking about how to best explain the motivations behind the quick adoption of the creative commons model by artists and labels online, i came up with three good reasons for three distinct constituencies - promotion for the artists; community building for the music scene today; and future-proofing for the scene of tomorrow - which i will describe below. while i hope to hit on some unifying themes, i do not want to overgeneralize and cannot claim to represent other artists or labels. these are my personal convictions and i do encourage everyone to contribute their own opinion in the discussion thread linked to this article. most of what follows here is based on CC's music sharing license, with exceptions explicitly noted.

reason #1: promotion
this is the most direct and self-serving motive for the producer: releasing music online and allowing listeners to share that music with others has to make sense for the artist, otherwise the model will not find widespread use. well, for independent niche music it does make sense. most of the artists creating the kind of minimal electronic music we promote at textone cannot live off the profits from releasing records alone. many, if not most, of the physical records put out by small indy labels barely break even. instead, most income from music is generated by performances in clubs or other concert venues. however, to get booked, artists needs to build a reputation through a discography first. releasing records then is more about reputation than about direct remuneration. but one can actually reach a larger audience by publishing works online for free. listeners are more likely to seek out new material if this comes at no cost to them and they will share the music with others if they are actively encouraged to pass the music on via file sharing networks, on cd, or however they want. this adds up to both wider and faster diffusion of the music. textone.org is evidence to the effectiveness of the strategy - our download numbers have by far eclipsed our previous vinyl record sales.

reason #2: community
communities live and die by the interaction between their members. innovation is facilitated by having a sense of what already exists. creativity in general never arises out of a void - it always incorporates prior experience and exposure. to build a vibrant, innovative, creative music scene we should foster interaction with each other and encourage artistic exchange. CC licenses create a positive, conducive environment for doing so. to clarify why this is the case, let me contrast the netlabel scene with the mainstream music market: we are not interested in creating the kind of artificial distinction between producers and consumers that is promoted there. we are not interested in building one-way pipelines that push out products conceived by the marketing masterminds to the lowly masses. in electronic music, where the means of production are available to nearly anyone with a computer, each listener is also likely to be a producer, or to turn into one in the future. the distribution system for such a kind of music should therefore reflect this equiposition of artists and audience. by building a system based on respect and trust rather than intimidation and litigation, a fair and open licensing scheme such as CC creates the positive base for future interaction. by contributing to the catalog of publicly available material, CC licensed material also facilitates creative exploration. one of the responses to my last article made the point that most physical records are simply not available and/or not affordable in south america. i have heard similar complaints from friends in eastern europe. by using free non-commercial distribution, we can build a truly international community where membership is not contingent upon living in the western, industrialized part of the northern hemisphere, or upon having a big bank account.

i should mention though that one of the most important steps towards true open collaboration has not been widely adopted thus far: the permission to create derivative works. a blank license for remixing and otherwise altering existing works would surely spawn a wide range of interesting projects. however, it also raises some thorny issues about attribution which especially already established artists worry about. since reputation is the the main currency in the scene, having your name attached to a re-made track that you do not approve of is not an enticing thought. maybe derivative licenses are not for every work, but we could sure use a few more offerings.

reason #3: future-proofing
time for a reality check: how many of today's netlabels will still be around in five years? hopefully a good number, but almost certainly not all of them. how about in 15 years though? or 50? the indy market has always been characterized by a high fluctuation rate brought about by economic pressures (go pro or go broke), among other factors. therefore we should already think today about what will happen to our music tomorrow, if/when particular artists or labels are no longer around. picking up the thread of art always arising from the history of prior creations, we should be interested in making sure that future generations have full access to the music we create now. creative commons licenses ensure that this happens. many works published under the restrictive traditional copyright regime are in danger of being "orphaned" for an obscenely long time if the exclusive copyright holder dies or disappears. without a legal way of distributing and sharing these works, most basically disappear from the public's collective memory for so long that they are unlikely to be remembered/retrieved after the copyright has expired. in contrast, any work released under a creative commons license that allows for non-commercial distribution is more likely to survive since any single copy can legally spawn a future "re-release". as long as some user somewhere still has one copy of a CC work, the art is not lost - no matter if the artist is still around or not. longterm initiatives like the internet archive, which only offers material in the public domain or licensed under a non-commercial distribution scheme, increase the chances of a transmission of our work through time. thus a sense of history and continuity is created and we avoid depriving the future of the achievements of today.