Friday: rocking Caracas

I don't know how it happened but about a year ago I started to stay up on Fridays, past Jen's sleepy departure, and watch music shows on TV.

Captivating re-runs of the great reggae outfits coming to London in the early 70's on The Old Grey Whistle Test (which I'm ashamed to say I had not heard of before)... An evening of live sets of Glastonbury in the summer and tonight, my favourite, and the reason for this post.

I have been captivated, enthralled, moved and uplifted by the rock 'n roll energy of Gustavo Dudamel's 2007 New Years Eve concert Mambo! live in Caracas. The Venezualan social outreach programme, El Sistema, has yielded some amazing results and perhaps their apogee is manifested in Gustavo Dudamel's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra and its music. I doubt a worthy cause has simultaneously satisfied both the classical music intellectuals and the kick-ass kids before. Just check out the video below.

Watching it again after posting this I am so struck by the energy... of everyone! 8 year old kids throwing shapes in the audience (when did you last see that at the proms? When did you last see a 8 year old at the proms?!) to the strings section dancing on the stage with bows in the air whilst the 50-person troupe carry on behind them.

And then the entire orchestra, without missing a beat, leaps up in an uno, dos, tres of parts in a Mexican wave (Venezualan Mambo, surely - ed) while the music plays on. Royal Phil eat your heart out ;-)

I'm not sure who the joke's on

So said Banky's ex-spokesman in the fabulous documentary on Street Art, Exit through the Gift Shop, shown tonight on 4.

It told the tale of the mad-cap French dweeb Thierry Guetta who mortgages his house to shoot a thousand tapes of film in the company of LA street artists. He hangs out with Shepard Fairey, his French cousin Space Invader and... eventually... Banksy. And so begins his transformation from loony hanger-on to multi-million dollar artist as he believes his own hype and rips off the stylistic innovations of his idols. His show in LA, "Life is Beautiful" by Mister Brainwash, became enormous and left Banksy, amongst others, to lament his seemingly precocious, johnny-come-lately commercial epiphany.

But the beauty of the film is that Guetta simply played their games harder, faster and with more daring than any of the others but with less integrity - it leaves Banksy literally saying "he didn't play by the rules [beat] But, then, there aren't meant to be any rules"...

For anyone who has walked round a modern art gallery wondering who the con is on it is refreshing to know that even at modern art's funkiest (and to my simple mind, best) edge the question about its real worth is unanswerable even to its practicioners.

[Exit through the Gift Shop was directed by Banksy which shows, I suppose, that after all he remains in charge of both the moral & artistic high ground given how impressive his work, his film-making & his awareness really is.]

Snake-oil SEO

I am by no means an SEO (search-engine optimisation) expert but one thing’s for sure: a lot of the so-called SEO specialists are snake-oil salesmen and you shouldn’t go near them.

The bottom line is that Google doesn’t want to be ‘gamed’ - i.e. they are constantly tweaking their algorithms to promote results from sites that are deemed more humanly relevant to a search query. As such optimisation is a cat & mouse game where a site owner is artificially attempting to increase the search engine’s impression of their relevance.

So: the best SEO advice is to write copy, include diagrams & pictures about your subject in a way that would be genuinely helpful to someone investigating your area. This is what Google wants and what it rewards most highly.

There is, of course, much more to this and for an in-depth analysis I’ve not seen a clearer or more detailed brief that has been put together by the folks at SearchEngineLand. Have a look at the downloadable PDF of their Periodic Table of SEO.

"The fun of Playmobil & the hubris of Apple"

Curl up with a good book

Interesting article from the wonderful Information is Beautiful site on the books that everyone should read.

(Click on the image for the large size)

The underlying data is available here.

Black Eyed Perfection

Thank you @justcookit (also known as the brilliant Alex Rushmer of Masterchef fame)

Web-journalism vs print journalism

Is one intrinsically better? I am a fan of the web, and news on the web. I am not a fan of newspapers, at least in the UK as the main papers are IMHO too sensationalist, biased & often inaccurate.

However, I am a big fan of journalism in its best sense: investigative, unbiased, accurate, wide-ranging.

John Gruber quoted the CEO of Flipboard talking in December about the decline of journalism on the web. Notably McClure made two key points:

The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it’s being contaminated by the Web form factor.

and

what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it’s also hard to present that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for every page to load.

This is interesting stuff from someone in McClure's position because his app, Flipboard, is widely hailed as one of the best news aggregators on the iPad, which in turn is meant to be the saviour of news/books/TV, you name it.

Flipboard has the ability to bring in news from traditional sources (edited sites like BBC News, The NY Times etc) but it also allows very simple aggregation of the news & links that one's friends flag up (or write about) on Facebook and Twitter. Check out this video for a better understanding.

As such McClure's livelihood and professional reputation depend on people finding interesting journalism on the web and using his app to read it. If the web is just flighty, light-weight and insignificant gossip-mongering then his app, by association, is insubstantial and irrelevant. Not what a man wants to think when he toils & invests daily to promote it.

In particular he criticises the use of "slideshows" on the web where a longer story by a journalist is deliberately split over many pages so that the viewer has to click through it and each page reload counts as another set of ad impressions (the metric by which the web site gets paid by those advertising on it). This 'stuttered' delivery makes the consumption of the article harder, reduces enjoyment and is infuriating (I'm thinking particularly of you CEPro).

Anyway, the reason that Gruber's post is particularly piquant is his final comment:

By the way, have you heard that AOL bought the Huffington Post?

The Huffington Post is an exclusively online news organisation noted for its ability to deliver quality, hard-hitting and 'grown-up' journalism even though it is web-based. AOL is best known in internet history for not having a clue what to do with media assets. Gruber is suggesting that AOL will devalue the valuable HuffPo journalism through ad saturation of its webpages and just these sort of slideshow tricks - and I believe he may be right.

As such there is an interesting contradiction: digital delivery of news is widely seen as the future (therefore the broken business models of newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV) but at the same time the best news on the web is being deliberately devalued by the web business model & presentation.

Markdown (warning: mildly geeky post)

I've been a fan of John Gruber at Daring Fireball for a while because of his incisive and (mostly) accurate analysis of all things Apple.

However, what he is less widely known for is his work on Markdown, which is a very useful set of simple codes that can be used to write in a way that plain text can easily be converted into fully formatted HTML without remembering all the coding.

Now, I am absolutely no expert in this. Indeed, I only started playing around with it seriously this weekend. For an overview I really urge people to check out Don McAllister's excellent video tutorial on it at ScreenCastsOnline.

But its simplicity is very attractive, as is its speed and the fact that the textual output will flow properly into almost any blog platform with all the formatting intact.

Anyway, this may be of interest only to the 1% of my readership who actually care about this sort of thing and don't know about Markdown already.

PS. Props to the fabulous fork of Notational Velocity called NValt for being a great markdown writing environment and also a wonderful ubiquitous capture tool for notes which can then sync (through Simplenote) across Mac, iPhone, iPad and even Android.