Great video for Goldfrapp’s “Happiness” by Colonel Blimp. I also urge you to read the copy on their biog page. Best analogy ever.

Video originally picked up at the CR Blog.

I'm not going to talk about this at length as Paul Glazowski has already done the job at Mashable, but I would like to express my concern at the recent trend in bands and artists creating their own social networks. The most high profile of these have been Radiohead's W.A.S.T.E. Central and 50 Cent’s thisis50.com.

I'm all in favour of bands creating and nurturing communities around their official sites – this has been happening for years with artist forums, and has grown to include commenting and user generated content such as photos and fan remixes.

It's possible that if OpenSocial takes off then this kind of fragmentation of the social web will be easier to manage – but until then it makes sense to engage with your fan base on the existing (and hugely popular) social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. We only just got everyone together in one place – why leave so soon?

French artist Gregory Chatonsky made this piece of audio art which generates sound via some sensors placed on a broken hard disk. The amount of vibration is picked up and changed into sound via a program running on a PC. Hit the play button below to listen – it sounds kind of beautiful but eerie and reminds me of the ambient music of German glitch pioneers Oval.



Original article at Make: Blog

An interesting twist on the usually oh-so-hip graphic design tome, Band ID looks at over 1,000 of what the authors consider to be the most powerful examples of band and artist logos. Unlike the likes of my Stefan Sagmeister book, there’s a small chance that if I put this on my coffee table my friends might actually pick it up. It’s not out till June but you can pre-order it from Amazon or the publisher Chronicle Books. I'm going to order it – stand by for a review soon.

The 80s–tastic “Video Killed The Radio Star” by Buggles.

Great motion graphics in this video for DVNO by french electro types Justice.

I was in the pub last night, when a heated discussion broke out. It centered around which, with hindsight, were your top 5 albums of the 90’s. The discussion ended with a challenge – to produce by 12am today, a definitive top 5. I've recently been fooling around with Mixwit, so I suggested that not only should each of us produce a list, but that we should also create a digital mixtape of 5 tracks, one from each of our chosen records.

So here's mine...

...and those top 5 albums in order are:

Portishead – Dummy
Autechre – Tri Repeatae
A Guy Called Gerald – Black Secret Technology
Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy
Weezer – Weezer

Mixwit is powered by Seeqpod, a music search and streaming service which indexes any mp3s it finds publicly available on the web. The Mixwit service itself is in the very early stages of beta, and while it's definitely a bit ropey, it's simple and fun. There's also the problem that none of the artists whose tracks are currently available on Seeqpod will ever see any money for their use. Assuming these legal issues get ironed out, however, I reckon the mixtape has a bright future online. It gets back to the heart of why people love music and why they want to share it with their friends.