Entries Tagged 'Social Networking' ↓

A couple of weeks ago I created a new Tower Grove South group on Facebook, and last night I did the same over on Flickr. If you live in or just have interest in this incredibly dynamic, vibrant neighborhood in South St. Louis, please join both, share information, events, news, photos, etc. I’m about to head over to the Facebook group right now, in fact, to post about a community garden or yardshare (wouldn’t that be cool? [I mean, the garden, not me posting about it]).

Steve Buscemi, ca. 1996

The other day I found Steve Buscemi on Twitter, and since he’s one of my favorite actors (c’mon, he was “the Last Guy Standing” in Reservoir Dogs!), I thought what the hell, I’ll start following him. One of the first tweets I saw from him was to inform everyone about some “amazing” band called Abe Vigoda and then he asked, “Where are the good emerging New York DIY bands?” After first checking out the artsy “alternative” band he was hyping (not to my surprise, they’re not that “amazing” at all… ” in fact, I think they pretty much suck, but then again I could tell that from their list of influences: 311, At the Drive-In, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Fleetwood Mac, Nine Inch Nails). So I replied, sending a couple of links, one to the GaragePunkNYC site and the other to the Victim of Time NYC venues listing. I thought those sites might clue him into a part of the NYC “underground” garage rock’n'roll scene that he may be totally unaware of, such as DMZ playing tonight at the Southpaw, or the Fleshtones/A-Bones/Twistaroos/Demands next Friday night. To my surprise, he replied later via DM, not once, but twice! The second one contained his e-mail address and he said I could e-mail him for his top 10 list of current favorite songs. “That’s kinda weird,” I thought to myself. “Why would I want to know what your current list of favorite songs is? Oh yeah, I guess it’s because you’re Steve Buscemi.” Whatever. So I went ahead and e-mailed the guy, more to try to promote GaragePunk.com to him than anything else (especially since the latest episode of my very own podcast was going up the next day), but to be nice, I asked him to go ahead and send me that list of songs. So that’s what I have for you below. It’s not that I really find his list all that interesting or anything, but it is what it is. And, after all, he did give me permission to post it on my blog.

Here are my top 10 songs that I’ve really been into lately. There’s a few legacies in there, as well as some smaller LA bands I’ve really been into after receiving submissions from fans on Twitter. I have many more but these are songs that have really stuck with me in the past week. Roy Orbison is a classic, loved the usage of “In Dreams” in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Joe Strummer’s cover of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song is a really touching piece to me. Both men were fucking legends. A fan sent me Halloween Swim Team and the entire debut album “The End Of The Sky” is ace plus. They pull off the vintage synth sound better than most bands of the vintage synth era. Keep your eye out for them…I’ve chosen to feature them as the sole weekly followed band on my Twitter account. Bing Crosby’s Guilty has always been a favorite and really struck me in the Amelie soundtrack. Santo & Jonny’s Sleepwalk is one of those songs that I can’t ever quite get over. It’s one of the best “driving by myself to go get coffee at 11 AM after a hangover” songs of all time. The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” is the most fucking romantic and passionate songs ever written (besides Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”). I didn’t double check the facts on Meho Plaza but this song “The Beach” sent by a fan recently is really an amazing track; somehow it manages to have rich production while maintaining a lo-fi sound. Radiohead “Creep”? Where do I start? Story of my life. I only kid. Kind of. Last of the Shadow Puppets has to be one of the best pop bands to come out of the UK since Oasis. Wasn’t a big fan of Arctic Monkeys but these guys just kill it. Fleet Foxes is at the end of the list because they’re one of my favorite new folk bands at the end of the night. When all is said and done, Fleet Foxes take me into the night.

1. Roy Orbison – In Dreams
2. Joe Strummer – Redemption Song (Bob Marley)
3. Bing Crosby – Guilty
4. Halloween Swim Team – Coincidence
5. Santo & Jonny – Sleepwalk
6. Righteous Brothers – Unchained Melody
7. Meho Plaza – The Beach
8. Radiohead – Creep
9. Last of the Shadow Puppets – Standing Next To Me
10. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal

Cheers!
-Steve B.

I wish Harry Dean Stanton was on Twitter. I’d kinda like to get his list of current favorite songs.

Probably my biggest personal accomplishment of the past week was the creation of a new and improved Twitter account that I took it upon myself to create for our wonderful local community radio station, KDHX FM 88.1. If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you may have noticed that KDHX already had a Twitter account, but it wasn’t really getting used to promote anything going on at the station, and in fact, had a grand total of three tweets, with none newer than April 27, 2008.

At the same time, I’d been following what is probably the most popular independent community radio station in the nation, WFMU from the New York City metro area. I’d been really impressed with the way in which they updated Twitter with all kinds of cool stuff going on at their station. WFMU’s Twitter account had over 2,000 followers and was getting updated several times each day, helping to promote the station to its fans all around the world at a time when Twitter appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. Genius!

“Damn,” I thought to myself, “it’d be nice if KDHX had something like that.” That was when the proverbial light bulb sputtered on over my head and I suddenly realized I could quite easily set something up for the station my own damn self that would do even more than what WFMU was doing for its fans, and that was to create an account that automatically updated everyone (sorry, “tweeted”) every time a new show was about to come on the air, plus include tweets from the KDHX blog. Any additional information could always be tweeted manually by myself or someone at the station (who I’ve yet to really talk to in great detail about this) anytime they had an announcement they’d like to make.

The way I went about doing this was to go and gather up all of the pertinent information about KDHX’s daily program schedule and create a new program calendar using Google Calendar. The reason I wanted to use Google Calendar was because it has a way of sending out reminder e-mails for every event, or, in this case, program. I would have these e-mails sent directly to my e-mail address in Gmail, and I would use a filter to have those e-mails automatically forwarded to a special “e-mail to Twitter” address that I got after signing up with a free service called TwitterMail. TwitterMail would then, in turn, automatically update the station’s new Twitter account a couple of minutes before the start of every program. After a bit of tweaking with the input fields and whatnot, I finally got it to work the way I wanted it. I discovered, for example, that the outgoing Google Calender reminders were limited to about 60 characters for the Subject field, which was the one that I wanted to contain the name of the show, the name of the host or DJ, and a quick link for people to tune in online. Some shows simply had too long of a show/host name combo to make that work, so a shortened direct link to KDHX’s website was used instead of the slightly longer direct link to the streaming audio (live.ram) file. The longer link file got truncated if it, along with the show/host names, extended beyond 60 characters, and that truncated link didn’t work at all, so I had to ensure that each show’s reminder didn’t have too many characters in the subject field, lest someone not be able to get a good link they could click on from the tweet. Make sense? Well, if not, don’t sweat it. The bottom line is I got it working pretty well and even those shows that are tweeted with the shortened “www.kdhx.org” link will still take people to the station’s website where there is a “Listen Live” link right there on the front page. Pretty easy to figure out. And so far I have to admit that it’s been working great and I’m even seeing people retweeting their favorite shows when they come on. It’s also great for me, personally, because now I am also reminded of when my favorite shows are about to come on, so I can quickly turn the station on to hear ‘em, something I wasn’t doing much of lately because most of the time I’d completely forget about them. So that was the main point of doing this, to help others such as myself get reminders via Twitter about KDHX’s programs. I think it’ll work great for the station and may even help expose it to some new listeners, not only locally but all over the world as well. So if you’re on Twitter, by all means, please follow KDHX! And while you’re at it, feel free to go ahead and follow me as well. Thanks.

I’ve been digging the hell out of this site lately. Basically, if you haven’t checked it out and joined up yet, what you do is create a profile for yourself and then start “blipping” songs. The way it’s set up is very similar to Twitter (in fact, you can also set it to automatically send updates to your Twitter account each time you blip). You basically invite people to start following your blips (listed as “Listeners”) and then you seek out other people to follow (as “Favorite DJs”). And you give each other “props” whenever someone you follow blips a song you happen to really dig. You simply use the search function to search for a song you’d like to share with the rest of the world. The search function somehow searches all linked MP3s on the Web for your song, and if it’s out there (and indexable on search engines, naturally), it’ll find it. Now, this poses an obvious dilemma: Not all songs are obviously “out there” for you to find and blip. Well, there’s a way to fix that! If you have access to a server (like if you own your own domain, for example) you can simply create a directory and upload some of your favorite MP3s to it, and then go into the “settings” area, click “music” and then simply enter the URL of the song file, which will add it to their searchable database. Cool, huh? The only thing cooler than this is having your own podcast… which is why I’m not spending a whole hell of a lot of time uploading songs and then blipping them. There’s really no point in doing that if I’m doing my podcast. But for those of you NOT doing a podcast, it’s hella cool (and IMHO better more fun that Pandora or Last.fm), so check it out and start DJing.

Don’t look now (oh, OK, go ahead) but there’s talk on FACEBOOK of all places of bringing KYMC back from the dead. Now, obviously, it wouldn’t really be KYMC… no one is planning on starting a new brick & mortar public radio station in suburban West St. Louis County (and they’d be big ol’ fools for trying to do such a thing, especially in this economy), but it would instead be a more modernized version, with an exciting new name, and operating online as a streaming-audio “Internet” station and/or podcast. I’m kinda, sorta part of this as I used to be a programmer at KYMC back in the 1980s (I still haven’t gotten around to posting any of my old air-check tapes, but SOON, I promise…) and am friends with the girl that set up this KYMC FM 89.7 Alumni Facebook group.

What the hell is KYMC, you may be asking at this point? KYMC was a small public radio station out in Ballwin, MO, that was owned by the YMCA of Greater St. Louis (the ONLY YMCA-owned radio station in the world), and it’s where I got introduced to the world of broadcasting after first joining up there with my friend, Bruce Clayton, during my senior year of high school. The station existed for about twenty-nine years until the YMCA finally axed it in January of 2007. When I first joined KYMC, I think it was only a 10-watt station. Later it was upgraded to 20 watts and I think at the most it may have been around a hundred watts, broadcasting as far east as Creve Coeur and west as St. Peters.

So am I excited about it? Eh. Not really. I mean, I guess it’s cool that they’re coming together to work on a project like this, and I’m in no way intending to throw any water on their fire, but honestly, with KDHX (struggling to stay afloat) in town as well as thousands (millions?) of other online “stations” out there begging for more ears (and dollars), is it going to be worth the effort? Did KYMC have that big of a following to easily and seemlessly translate that listenership into instant listeners today? Probably not, but hey, who am I to criticize them for their efforts? More power to ‘em!

So, anyway, with all that said, I wanted to post about it here in case some of you may know someone who used to be a DJ at the station… or maybe you know someone that was just a big fan or supporter. In that case it would be great if you could pass the info along to them about that Facebook group. The more people they can round up to get involved with this, the better the outcome will probably be. Thanks!

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, not long after posting this entry I happened to check out KYMC’s entry on Wikipedia, and read the following:

In July 2008 and with the final remain silent authority about to expire, the YMCA of Greater St. Louis reached an agreement to sell this station to Missouri River Christian Broadcasting, Inc. The deal was approved by the FCC on August 22, 2008, and the transaction was consummated on September 19, 2008. The new owners announced plans to return KYMC to the air with religious programming as a member of the Moody Broadcasting Network, including some programming as a simulcast of KGNV in Washington, Missouri. On October 30, 2008, KYMC was granted a main studio waiver allowing the station to be run from facilities far outside the station’s community of license.

Ha! Looks like the “resurrection” (pardon the pun) has already begun! Moody’s motto, by the way: “Think Biblically, Live Christianly, Serve Effectively, Evangelize Constantly”

Oy vey…

My new social network on GaragePunk.com seems to have gotten the attention of Ning.com’s CEO.

The next generation of GaragePunk.com is a social network called The Hideout… kinda like GaragePunk.com’s own little Myspace, if you will. It’s got everything the site could possibly need, and what it doesn’t have we can probably add pretty easily since it’s open source. Just like Myspace, bands can join and upload MP3s and customize profiles with CSS and all that. There’s even a podcast player there and the RSS feed from the playlists delivers those there, too. There’s a forum for discussions and events listings (shows, festivals, parties, whatever), a place to upload video, groups, blogs, etc. I’m hoping most of our current forums users migrate over there (my plan is to have this completely replace the antiquated forums at some point) but I’m afraid we may lose some people due to the fact that this sort of thing is pretty new and a lot of our forum users are pretty old-school when it comes to the Web. I guess time will tell if it’ll be successful or not.

There’s a link to it from the GaragePunk.com blog now, too. Please check it out.

Oh, but I am. Last night I created a new chat room for GaragePunk.com. I just figured it was something at least some people might find useful. It allows for video chatting, too, which is kinda fun. Click here.

Getting back into this Twitter thing. Checked it out yet? If so, follow my updates at the link below…

www.twitter.com/kopper

Post your links here, too, if ya want.

I am. And wouldn’t it be swell if we could be colleagues? We could stand around the virtual water cooler shootin’ the shit about our favorite reality TV programs and boasting about what fancy new SUV we’re buying our spouses for Christmas whilst staring at that hot new secretary’s ass in Human Resources… WOW!

So yes, join me, won’t you?

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kopper