tijs.org

Not sure how relevant this is, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

We are happy, it’s not logic!

Scott Andrew lays out a simple plan for the new world musician, with new world being a world in which you don’t make your money of CD sales. It simply states that if you manage to persuade 5000 fans to spend 20 dollars on your stuff (downloads, t-shirt, concert tickets) you make 100k a year and can quit your day job. So… as a musician you really don’t need your record company and you should probably support MP3 downloads of your music since they get your name out there and drive your online and ticket sales.

if you really like a particular artist and want to support them without paying for yet another piece of plastic, the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts.

In a manifesto for the new web of sorts Ryan King introduces microformats in a few short paragraphs. I wasn’t thinking of all the tag enabled services and the new uses of RSS (i.e. podcasting) as part of an evolutionary path of the web but it makes perfect sense now. Blogs and Flickr and all these new tools do not only bring us rants and cat pictures they also bring us classified content, or meaning if you will. I never really bought into the whole Web 2.0 idea anyway since i can’t really imagine the web in it’s current form and scale just fading away like the BBS systems and Gopher did back in their day. Old content does not die, it gets tagged!

Michael Yang’s new venture Become just went live. Really simple idea: specific search site combined with google ads for the income. Resulting in comparitively low maintainence and, possibly, high revenue. The only trouble is that it is a bit hard to differentiate a search engine like this from say… google itself. The fact that they chose a layout similar to google is not a pro i think, it makes it even harder to notice that Become is returning different results.

As long as you keep your costs low Google ads can be a really efficient money maker. This wan’t true a year ago b.t.w. but the scheme has really taken off since then with a huge advertising network and very high recognition among advertisers.

Since i switched to a Mac i’ve been spending a lot of time finding solutions to simple problems that ex-windows users everywhere seem to run in to. Since i don’t want this blog to become an Apple exclusive blog i moved all my findings to a new weblog titled mactips.nl. As the domain name suggests this new weblog is Dutch, mostly because there are already more than enough Apple related blogs in English out there. If you have a Mac i hope it may be of help to you and if you have a PC and are thinking about switching the problems i run in too might give you an idea of what wou”l likely run into yourself. Upcoming are a guide on must have Mac software and more as time permits.