Updated: 11/19/05; 12:34:34 PM

 Monday, October 3, 2005
Words of wisdom from Jeffrey Veen
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From afar, I've been consuming all of the great content from Web Essentials 2005 which was held last week in Sydney and mainly getting reacquanted with many of the leading minds and technical gurus who influence much my thinking when it comes to doing professional and modern web design. Obviously one of the people at the front of the fiend is Jeffrey Veen and he had a really interesting bit on his site today that web developers should really consider.

    Give up control
    All of these things are probably true of the work you do online:

  • Your web site is a tiny piece of a much larger experience.
  • Nobody sees your web site the way you expected. Few use your content the way you intended.
  • Everything you create online is being ripped apart and recombined with other stuff by thousands of curious geeks. Or at least, should be.
  • The easiest way to fail is by trying to control all this.
11:33:30 AM    
A band that really gets it in 2005
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Came across this story about a fantastic band called Harvey Danger who is absolutely in touch with their market and the way of the modern music listener.

They have released their new album, entirely free, via Bit Torrent on their website. It's billed as an experiment, prompting users to pay for the album or make a contribution if they like it. Adding to the brilliance, they are offering the album in different formats with the highest quality being the BT link with the slightly lower quality being the direct download, etc.

Best of luck to you guys, if nothing else you are no doubt going to draw a ton of publicity for the album and I really hope the web responds in kind. From the article:

Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Update: This story was picked up by Slashdot which prompted this great line in the comments:

Recording a CD: $2000 Ripping your CD: $0 Saying 'Screw you' to the RIAA's business model and getting Slashdotted for publicity: Priceless
6:36:04 AM