…a joke. A bad joke, I might add.

As I previously wrote, I’m currently spending no small amount of effort to ‘push content’—timeless prose such as this—onto various ‘social networking’ sites. The idea being that many people now ‘live’ inside portals such as Facebook and can’t be buggered to visit individual sites such as mine.

If that is the case, then, in all seriousness, I need someone to educate me as to why I would want to live in such a virtual Newark, NJ. And by that, I mean that nothing works very well.

First off, and this in itself is fatal: It’s slow.  I mean really slow. I cannot even imagine using it over dial-up. Or maybe I can because it responds over broadband like Compuserve used to over dial-up. Now that’s progress!

And then there are the crashes. Various ‘apps’ crash all the time. To their marketing credit, they don’t feel all that bad because you get these nice calm messages saying that ‘something went wrong’, which is, I guess, progress over […]

OK, so I recently broke down and got a Twitter account (see: The Twitter Thing).

What’s next? Spreading out! Facebook. MySpace. iLike. etc. etc. etc. Yes, I am currently working on pushing my manifold activities onto all these platforms. (OK, some of you already know I technically do have accounts on all these places, but they are all about as lively as a <insert Dan Rather style metaphor here>.  In short, they don’t do anything for me.) I talk about my objections to all this sort of thing over at the main site under FAQs.

But I’ve decided that hitting all these sites is the only way to reach the masses who need what I’ve got but don’t know they need it.The market has become so fragmented that there is no universal way to get one’s message out. In short, you have to shotgun spray all the big media sites with your message. The trick is going to be how to bloody do it?

I sure don’t have the […]

Well, it’s come to this:

http://twitter.com/jchmusic

Follow me! Follow me!

Learn what I had for lunch.

What I’m doing.

What I’m saying. About what I’m saying. To someone else entirely.

You’re like a fly on the wall. Except that the person I’m talking with sees me type, Type, TYPING. Instead of paying attention to what they’re saying. No problem. She’s texting her boyfriend while I do this. AND WE’RE HAVING A CONVERSATION!

I love the multi-tasking world.

But this way, those who care can get updates on shows and various doings without having to check into the web site. So I guess that’s handy. If you find anything worth ‘tweeting’ (twitting? twatting?) about, please let me know as my phone does -not- ‘twit’ and I follow no one but the Lord, baby.

I’m in the process of adding ads to this thing, strictly as a means of survival. I’m sort of opposed to it, but obviously not enough to shut ‘er down. Nevertheless I am a bit sad about it in some ways and thought that some clarification was in order.

Everyone that blogs is to some degree narcissistic. I have to be, because I’m an entertainer. And because I’m an entertainer I have no problem asking people to pay for my “deep thoughts.”

But ads are a bit insidious, first of all because they seem so innocuous. Just having the things sitting there subtly changes the experience. Even if I tell you (and you believe) that I have no investment in any of the specific companies (and in fact, may have no idea which ads are being “served” at any given moment.) Their presence changes the game, just like billboards in the outfield of a baseball field change the game a bit.

The second point is that they will help make up for a […]

A while back I ranted on the enormous number of ‘free’ downloads of my stuff.

Now here is a very interesting article about how at least one company is making serious money helping record companies convert some of this activity into sales.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html

In short, Big Champagne gathers stats on P2P file sharing data as demographic marketing information; the frequency by which songs and artists are being downloaded in various cities, states and countries. They then sell this in digestible chart and spreadsheet form to record companies so they can determine which artists to push in which markets.

So while the record companies are trying like crazy to shut down P2P sites, they are also not above getting whatever benefit they can out of their predicament.

I’m sure you’re at least vaguely aware of all the valuable medical information that came out of those Nazi experiments during the war. Same deal. People have to hold their nose to use such data, but it’s just  too valuable to ignore simply because the source was so reprehensible. […]