San Francisco Music Blog

We saw this in Techmeme CEO Gabe Rivera's Twitter stream a while back and were puzzled and downright confused; his infi-tweet was so meta it hurts. Our first inclination was to believe that Gabe had someone at Twitter set up the nerd magic trick for him, something along the lines of predicting the URL of his next tweet so he could tweet from the future, as it were.

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And so we let it go. But when our co-worker thought we had sent her a lengthened link to the SFWeekly.com homepage this morning, we were reminded of this Ouroboros-inspired tweet and set out to solve it. Our process, below:

1. Hit up a URL shortener site that allows you to customize URL like Bit.ly and Tinyurl. In this case we used Tinyurl because it seemed easiest.

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(Credit: eShopAfrica.com)

Death goes mobile.

​ We spend a lot of time protecting our online identity; namely, making sure our passwords are secure so nobody can hack our accounts. (Hey you, maybe it's time to chuck that Post-it with all of your passwords written on it. You'll thank us later.) But what happens when you actually NEED to let others have access to your accounts? Namely, what happens to your online identity and assets when you log off for the final time? A San Francisco-based business, LegacyLocker.com, is helping you tackle this most morbid - yet important - of subjects. When we make a will, we ensure that our physical assets are accounted for. Houses, cars, bank accounts, offspring. Tangible parts of our lives that will need tending to when we're no longer around to do it ourselves. But with much of our life now happening online, many people are overlooking a huge part of their assets: their digital ones.

Legacy Locker aims to make this easy, by transferring your login credentials to your named beneficiaries in the event of your death. You can choose who would receive access to each account; perhaps you send your spouse your eBay information but your work passwords to your colleague. And it's not only online services; you can also keep encrypted versions of important documents - such as stock certificates, the deed to your house, contracts, and even a "Legacy Letter" or video to your loved ones - safeguarded to be sent to your beneficiaries posthumously. Because you always have access to this information, this service doubles as an easy way to keep a safe copy of your personal artifacts, such as your ID or credit cards, for quick access should they get lost or stolen. For those of us prone to 'misplacing' our wallets, this feature is worth the $30/year (or $300 for a lifetime account) price tag alone.

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Tomorrow's Flux Summit promises to be a watershed event for SF's electronic music scene. Held at Pyramind Studios, it's an industry mixer, panel discussion, and music review session all rolled into one. The inaugural event in what could be an annual happening, the Flux Summit will address a hot topic: "21st Century PR for Independent Labels and Artists," moderated by Tomas Palermo, Managing Editor of WireTap magazine and KUSF DJ. According to the press release, "The discussion will cover effective marketing and promotion campaigns, online tools, how to engage media outlets, what methods are relevant these days, and what a decent campaign should cost. The discussion will also touch on digital promo servicing, web presence, social networks as well as the differences between doing PR independently and using professional services." The Flux Summit also includes a music review session run by TestPress and software demos by PreSonus . Best of all, the Flux Summit is free to attend, though an RSVP is required. Click here to register.

Who's Makin' Love?: The Lovemakers

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Oakland indie-pop darlings and double-entendre addicts The Lovemakers hit the jackpot when their new single "Love is Dead" registered more than 400,000 digital downloads on iTunes -- in just one week. With numbers like that, who needs brick-and-mortar retailers, major-label infrastructure, or commercial radio? The new Lovemakers album, Let's Be Friends, was released in physical form yesterday (September 15). Listen to the entire CD online here .

​Do you like Twitter? How about charity? And booze - you love booze, don't you? Have I got the event for you! On September 11th a "tweet-up" (ugh) for charity (yay!) begins at 8pm, lasting until the wee small hours of the morning - or 1am - whichever comes first.

The original Twestival (held on February 12th of this year) was a global affair with 202 cities participating. September's event brings Twestival local and has been organized almost exclusively online and through Twitter. 100% of the proceeds will go to Operation Smile - an organization founded to help children born with cleft palates get the surgery they need and can't afford.

Although there are lots of details about the event at the TwestivalSF website, I personally found the amiando.com page to be the most accessible and concise of the two, although the whereabouts of the space were mysteriously NOT LISTED.

Appropriately enough, I turned to Twitter for the answer to this question and received this @reply from TwestivalSF's coordinator Krystyl.

​While most of us live on the outskirts of the social media landscape, tweeting the occasional brain fart and using facebook to update our relationship status, there are a select few who choose to take their engagement with the networks that be to a whole new level. For those special people who throw a fit when Twitter is down for five minutes, who get most of their news from the front page of fark or reddit or digg (and obsessively watch their "digg status" rise on the Top 1000 list), there is now a new place to rub virtual elbows with like-minded folk and maybe learn a thing or three.

We speak of the Social Blade Show, which, as of tonight, will be in its fifth week. The show is loosely divvied up into sections in which social media stories of the week are dissected and knowledge is gleaned from the guest of the week. It's largely interactive, with visitors and hosts dropping comments into a chat room below the live stream.

California resident and show host JD Rucker (also a social media powerhouse - just check out the links on his profile) took some time to chat with us about the Social Blade Show - which runs Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. Pacific.

Whose idea was the Social Blade Show? How did that get started? (And for the digg n00bs in the house, where did the name come from?)

JD: Patrick Parise wanted to do a show. We talked about it and decided that the best niche for our "skills and opinions" was social media. Patricks' a killer Digg user three times over and I dangle my own wares on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon - basically anywhere that people listen (or at least pretend to listen) to what we have to offer.

The name was one that Urgo and I came up with almost two years ago. The idea is that the site "slices through" the data flowing through the front pages of social news sites. Digg is the primary (well, only) site that it focuses on for now, but I'm sure it will eventually cover every social media site in existence. There's three or four, last time I checked.

Is the show too inside-baseball? Will a regular Joe who diggs or stumbles the occasional story and uses facebook now and then feel lost watching it?
 
JD: The show definitely caters to the heavy users of social media, but the topics can have a general appeal. Viewers who know nothing about social media other than "I've heard of that tweeter and facespace thing, but I don't know much about them" will still be able to benefit from the "insider knowledge" they can gain. We don't discuss advanced strategies or topics, as those discussions are saved for those of us in the "Evil Social Media Power User Fraternity." I can't say much beyond that until the FBI investigation is concluded.

​ Image Source: Juliale on Flickr

I have been trying to get someone from Sightglass Coffee (270 Seventh Street @ Folsom) to talk to me for well over a month now - to no avail. Who does a person have to touch inappropriately to get in contact with these guys? 

Sightglass, according to Twitter, appears to be the darling of the SOMA/web 2.0 set  - frequented by the likes of Kevin Rose, Jack Dorsey, and Alex Payne. My guess is the owners are friends of these internet superstars. They even have their own Flickr group (Sightglass be all cloud computing and s**t)! I haven't had a chance to get down to the space in person because I'm a tech blogger and I don't get out of my pajamas for less than 6,000,000 hits a day, but from the pics it looks great with marbled cement floors, shiny expensive machinery, and the requisite exposed brick of all 2.0 ventures. It appears to be everything a Twitter/Digg clientele would want in a schmancy coffee shop. Unfortunately, they must have placed some sort of Kiala Kazebee embargo on the place because, as I stated before, no one will get back to me. Therefore, in lieu of a proper interview, I've created a list of possible reasons the Sightglass people continue to shun me.

Pissed Off: Bruce Springsteen

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The proposed merger between concert venue conglomerate Live Nation and ticket hub mecca Ticketmaster (announced last February) has already resulted in catcalls from The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, who wrote an open letter to his fans after Ticket Master upsold tickets for his "Workin' On a Dream" tour , basically accusing the nation's largest concert vendor of scalping. Now lawmakers are joining in the refrain.

As reported today by Rolling Stone, Reuters, and Billboard, the chair of the Senate antitrust subcommittee and 50 U.S. House representatives have sounded the alarm to the Justice Department about the deal, raising potentially grave concerns about the impact of the merger on the music industry.

According to Senator Herb Kohl, the merger is a monster whose creation would result in "an enormous, vertically integrated entertainment giant, which will control everything from artist management, concert promotion, concert venues, and merchandise sales to primary and secondary market ticket sales...The combined entities would be a company of unparalleled size and scope without equal in the market."

In other words, fair competition and competitive pricing for concert tickets could become a casualty if the deal goes through as planned. It's not immediately known what the impact will be in the Bay Area, where independent promoter Another Planet Entertainment and  AEG subsidiary Goldenvoice collectively control more local venues than LiveNation, but it stands to reason that LiveNation's 360 deals with big-ticket artists like Madonna, when combined with Ticketmaster's virtual stranglehold on ticket sales, could effectively squeeze the smaller players out of the market by attrition.

 Craigslist will get you killed, Ebay could rip you off, and estate sales require putting on pants and leaving the house. The horror.

So what is an internerd with too many USB cables and not enough, I don't know, other nerd junk to do? My advice is to beg, plead, and cajole your way into Steven Frank's Internet Garage Sale a "members-only, trust-based online auction site" created to help honest people buy and sell stuff on the web.

Frank is the co-founder of Panic- an insanely popular Portland, OR based Mac software company. On his blog Frank says  "as a gadget hound I accumulate tons of tech that I eventually need to get rid of to fund the purchase of newer tech. Tired of Craigslist and eBay, I put up a static HTML page with a few items, and asked people on Twitter to check it out and place bids if interested."

via webhamster.com

The Hamster Dance

 Back when the Hamster Dance - a series of animated hamsters dancing to Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop" -  hit the Internet in 1998, few people thought it would be the first of a slew of Internet memes that bounce around our collective consciousness with little hope of escape. Here are eight more Internet memes that we can't seem to get rid of to this day...
 1. LOLCats
I'll admit it. I never thought LOLCats, which first became a sensation in 2007, would last that long. Yet these images of cats in human situations accompanied by LOLCat speak (i.e. I'm in ur bed, zleeping) just won't die.

 2. Rickrolling
Poor Rick Astley. The pop star probably thought his 1987 single "Never Gonna Give You Up" was ancient history until some 4chan pranksters decided to revive it in a bait-and-switch meme that involves the user clicking on a link they think takes them one place, but in reality sends them to Astley's music video of the song. One example: On April Fools Day in 2008, YouTube sent anyone who clicked on their featured vidoes to Astley's song.

Before an angry mob of Snapes and Dementors attacks my apartment with giant goblets of fire (note to mob:I do NOT live in the Castro so you should probably mosey on down to the Mission or anywhere that is again, NOT THE CASTRO) I should say I really enjoyed myself at Azkatraz, this year's Harry Potter "Symposium" held in downtown SF. My expectations of costumed, lonely nerds with little to no social skills were, while not blown out of the water, diminished somewhat by the infectious and genuine enthusiasm of the participants. Read: kids in Hogwarts uniforms performing line dances.

This year marks the sixth incarnation of the Harry Potter Con. Each year the convention (and name) changes cities in order to allow fans from all over a chance to attend without paying too much in travel costs. The event is volunteer-run and totally internet-communicated. These guys tweet A LOT.

GIRAFA by Plug1 of whatimseeing.com

So we new media dinosaurs at the SFW have finally made the leap into the Flickr-verse with the creation of our very own photo pool! And we hope the many fine Bay Area photographers out there will consider contributing their respective angles of this gorgeous city to the mix.

We'll be sure to feature the best images right here on All Shook Down (with proper links and attribution - all that good stuff) and perhaps run a Best of Flickr slideshow at the end of the month as well.

Thanks much and see you there!

I've long considered YouTube to be the bargain basement of the social web - a repository for funny kitten videos, egregious spelling errors and hilariously profane insults. Recently, however, I've found myself nervously hovering around the edges of a kind of underground sub-culture found only on the YouTubes - the beauty tutorial culture.
 
Women of all ages are "how to" vlogging (curse that word!) the art of makeup and hair. Some seem to be doing it for fun or as a kind of therapy, others appear to be sponsored (Pursebuzz is linked to BeautyChoice.com) and still others are hawking products in a brave new marketing strategy. (Image Via.)