Closer To The Ideal

Chris Makarsky (who I used to work with at Category4) says goodbye to MySpace. I appreciated his scathing critique of the hype surrounding this badly designed site:

I registered for my account two years ago to see what all the commotion was about. I resisted for a few years prior to that, but after Rupert Murdoch’s $550 million spending spree and the site’s continued appearance in mainstream media outlets, I finally started to wonder if perhaps my unfounded prejudices against the site were unwarranted, that the site perhaps did provide some sort of benefit to its users.

However, I quickly discovered I wasn’t wrong at all, and after putting minimal effort into branding my user page, I happily left the site, destined to never return.

I was good on that claim until recently. Just a few months ago, my profile listed my last login date as October 22, 2005 — a badge of superiority I wore with pride. But then someone else using my computer logged in on my behalf one night, stripping me of my distinction. (The form was auto-filled by the browser… boo.)

Interesting bit from the New York Times on the changing relationship between musicians and their fans:

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans’ avid attention; indeed, he relies on his fans in an almost symbiotic way.