TaylorBirkey.com » Web

Twitter and The Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2009

Taylor — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:51:29 +0000

Greetings from sunny South Barrington, IL. I’m over at Willow Creek Community Church for the Leadership Summit 2009, working with the Willow Creek Association and helping run all the viral stuff throughout the conference. This year’s Summit has so much in store: TONS of great speakers including Tony Blair, Bono, Bill Hybels, Gary Hamel, Tim Keller, and many many more!

Almost simultaneous with the start of the first session, thousands of Twitter users (myself included!) were online sharing thoughts and dialoging about the Summit. Twitter’s service, however, underwent the beginning of a continuing hacker attack, one of Twitter’s worst ever. Currently Twitter is still down, and millions of “Tweeters” all over the world are without their precious Tweets!

It’s funny that this “attack” has coincided with the Leadership Summit at a time when Twitter users have made the Summit the TOP trending topic on Twitter. Hopefully Twitter will be back online soon, and we’ll be able to get back to business! If you’re curious to follow the Summit on Twitter, see twitter.com/leadersummit. If you’re tweeting, join the dialog with the #TLS09 hash tag.

Creative Viral Web: thotbomb.com

Taylor — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:31:24 +0000

I stumbled upon this tight website a couple of days ago: thotbomb.com. Talk about a creative viral idea for raising awareness and involvement with social justice & compassion! It’s all about Everyday Explosive Compassion. From the website’s About page:

what is thotbomb? a 50-day web experiement? art? social action? pseudo-cyber? thotbomb is a daily interaction that asks the dumb questions we hate to ask.

thotbomb has been created by jason pearson + crosssection (a media concept company). jason likes to make stuff, stuff like magazines (Blender magazine), stuff for non-profits (onlinegiving.com), stuff for movies (call + response, narnia, the passion), and stuff for technology (pearpod)…

You can get on a thotbomb newsletter list if you want to know more.

Yearbook Yourself

Taylor — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:29:33 +0000

There’s a nifty little viral movement going on surrounding yearbookyourself.com, which basically lets you upload a pic and place your face into a bunch of ridiculous yearbook photos from the past few decades. The widget lets you manipulate your face within the photo (zoom in, zoom out, move up/down/left/right, and rotate cw/ccw). If you have five minutes, you should go check this site out. As you can see, there is a lot of fun to be had there. Obviously, the site also allows you to share (what good site doesn’t these days) these photos with your friends/enemies, as well as download them to your computer.

It’s likely that a vast majority of you already know about this site, but for those of you who don’t, and have not yet spent countless hours on the site, this post is for you.

Kitsune Noir. You should go.

Taylor — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:56:53 +0000

I was just going to add Kitsune Noir to my blogroll, but then I accidentally (not so much, actually) spent a million hours on the site, so now we’re writing a postie. +KN is one of the coolest websites/blogs I’ve been to in a long time. I first visited the site when I was browsing the internet for cool desktop wallpapers, which I have been known to do every now and then. The site is run by a fella named Bobby Solomon. He likes both Japanese and French culture, so he came up with “Kitsune” (Japanese for fox) “Noir” (French for black) as a rad website name. You have to admit, it is a pretty cool name. Anyway, Bobby’s site is a rising star in the design world. Everything on +KN is pretty organized – it’s the content that is so interesting. My favorite elements are of course The Desktop Wallpaper Project (DWP), which features talented artists and designers from all over the world – Solomon recruits these people to submit original art, and then posts it with his comments and downloadables (including many screen sizes for computers, game consoles, and the iPhone!). The other part of the site I love is his mixtapes – Bobby makes these creatively themed mixtapes, complete with original front/back cover art.

In any case, you should check out Kitsune Noir. As I love art, music, film, and design (in varying amounts), I really dig it. Great work, Bobby!

“Ses” Amie Street?

Taylor — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:06:44 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time on AmieStreet.com, which is one of the coolest online music communities I have ever seen. Way cooler, in my opinion, than iTunes. That’s not to bash Apple, though – iTunes serves an important purpose. Being a musician myself, however, and often dreaming of leaving it all behind for a chance to make music for a living, Amie Street provides a glimmer of hope in an otherwise unmusical future. This is a website that needs to be known! Hopefully if you’ve never heard of Amie Street, this post will direct you there, and your mind will be blown apart. I will always be grateful to my buddy Michael, who first told me about Amie Street. First, some history. Wikipedia describes Amie Street as “an indie online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Bultuch, in Providence, Rhode Island.” They have of course graduated, and the company now works out of Long Island City in Queens, New York. Their vision for the company is to become “the most fun way to discover and buy music online”, keep music social, and support the artists.

The basic idea, as I understand it, can be explained from two different perspectives: the artist and the user. First, the artist.

If you’re a budding musician and have very minimal funds with which to market or share your music, Amie Street provides you with a platform to be discovered for no cost at all, as well as an opportunity to actually make $$$. All you need is a digital recording, album, etc. Similar to social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, on Amie Street you first create a profile for yourself as an artist or band. You have a number of different options for customizing your profile, listing your website if you have one, uploading a picture, and telling more about yourself and/or your music. Let’s make clear again one thing: signing up is absolutely free. Gratis. It costs nothing. Once you’ve created a profile, you can upload your music to the Amie Street servers, and add it to your artist profile. Every song becomes available (by individual purchase or as a complete album) to the rest of Amie Street users. Your songs begin their Amie Street lives as free downloads. But do not panic! Every time your songs are downloaded or recommended by users who like them (“REC” will be explained in the user section), they go up in value, as far as 98 cents each (take that, iTunes). As the artist, you receive 70% of the royalties on your music, as it earns money, after each song has earned $5.00 (to cover the site’s carrying costs). The awesome perks continue: in signing up with Amie Street, you maintain total control and all legal rights of your music. There is also no binding contract or anything of the sort – you can sell your music elsewhere if you want. They don’t usurp you in any way at all. I don’t see why every single musician isn’t on this site. It is indie to the core.

You can also experience Amie Street as a user, or fan. Signing up and creating a profile is again totally free, with no fees. As a user you have access to all the music being sold on the site, which is much cheaper than iTunes. Many hundreds of popular bands post music on this site, so it’s not just little-known artists (even though so many little-knowns are so good). I’ve gotten tons of cheap music from bands like Sigur Rós, Modest Mouse, Thom Yorke, RJD2, Mogwai, and many many more. Another aspect of usership is the “fan” element, with which you can “become a fan” of any group or artists you want. In order to purchase music on Amie Street, you buy credit on the site using your credit or debit card, in a number of different amounts. Not surprisingly, the more you’re willing to spend, the more credit you’ll get for your money. For example, if you spend $50, you’ll actually get $75 worth of Amie Street credit, or something like that. Along with the credit, you’ll get a number of RECs. RECs (recommendations) can be used to “recommend” a certain song that you enjoy or think will become popular. RECs also allow Amie Street users to make money as well. If you REC a song when it is free to download, and it then becomes more popular and raises in price to 98 cents, you make 98 cents! This revenue is placed as credit into your account. Pretty stinkin’ awesome if you ask me. I’ve already bought tons of music and made a ton of RECs, and have the option to “cash out” all the credit I’ve made just by RECing songs.

All in all, this website is phenomenal. It combines the social networking of Facebook (profiles, messaging, adding friends, etc) with the music store platform, a combination that is going to totally change the face of the music industry. If you are a music junkie, Amie Street is an online resource you cannot afford to miss.