Virtual Thought

The person of the year, according to Time magazine is you. Aren’t you glad? ( = Time made some weird, arbitrary choices about who they actually wrote about inside the covers, but I heartily agree with their basic statement—user-generated content is huge right now and for the foreseeable future.

Wired has a neat article about crowdsourcing and user-generated content (ugencon?) in Second Life. The success of Second Life is entirely built on what its users can provide… surfing that wave is working really well for them and that makes me glad. One company, Cambrian House is even getting explicit about this idea by directly basing its business model entirely on user-generated content (UGC?) and crowdsourcing. Seems to be a sort of paid open source…

And in other news, humans smell like bacon.

A variety of truly dumb patents are romping around in IP(intellectual property) space… apparently these people are innovating within a process, but I don’t buy it:

• Linked lists (probably going to challenged because of the original linked list patent)
• Sandwiches
• Swinging side-to-side

So, yes, indeed, I am against current patent laws guarding “innovation”. Argh. So frustrating.

Recently read this ridiculous article asking if Garageband is harmful to creativity.

Musicians, those who are really passionate about what they are doing, need each other to feed off of. Jamming with friends who share your love of music is where the best ideas are inspired.

Bull. Speaking for myself, I don’t need other musicians to be inspired… and while jamming with friends is fun, and I’ve certainly been inspired by seeing other musical acts who rock, I don’t think that inspiration and creation are necessarily group activities. Just witness the variety of electronic acts out there who are bands in name only and are actually single individuals rockin’ out all on their own.

Found this fantastic link to small sample movies of Ray Harryhausen’s creatures. Apparently it’s an exhaustive list.

Mr. Harryhausen was one of my biggest influences in my love of myth and storytelling… I can’t imagine who I’d be if I hadn’t seen Clash of the Titans when I was wee. All the fantastic creatures this guy brought to life (Medusa! Pegasus! And, yeah, okay, even the damn owl!) made a big, big footprint in my brain.

Engadget reports that the CEO of Warner Music is ‘fairly certain’ his children pirate music.

He assures us, though, that they’ve “faced the consequences.”

Would those consequences include paying his dad’s industry group hundreds of dollars like everyone else?