Manso

The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in ‘realtime’ and the more interested I become in ‘over time.’ When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set - especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don’t think it’s really so much about ‘what are you doing right now’ as it is ‘what have you done that’s interesting to me right now?’…and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing.

The Best Albums of 2008

Now that 2009 is almost over, I’m finally confident enough to proclaim the five best albums of 2008. I’ve lived with each of these albums for over a year, and they’ve stood the test of time—noting that a year has become an almost incomprehensibly large metric in a music world where new best-album-evers are blogged about every 15 minutes.

I hate writing about music, and these aren’t in order:

Saint Dymphna – Gang Gang Dance

Saint Dymphna feels like an emergent force, a hurricane made of voices and guitars and synthesizers and lots and lots of drums.

Microcastles / Weird Era Cont. – Deerhunter

Deerhunter and I probably listened to the same music growing up. The difference between us is that they loved it more and are better musicians. I’m really glad they’re making music. All 82 minutes of this double album are good and worth listening to all the way through.

(k)no(w)here – Wilderness

If I put this list in order, this would go at the top. (k)no(w)here is a short album that should be listened from start to finish. I think it’s about the apocalypse (I think all Wilderness albums are about the apocalypse). For some reason, I think they’re libertarians too. The closing track, “<….^….>,” cannot be played loud enough.

Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill – Grouper

The cover art and title make this album seem more morbid and creepy than it really is—Focus on the rain and the forest instead. It’s a beautiful and quiet album.

Devotion – Beach House

This album is much heavier and harder than it sounds.

Draft Blog Posts

I want to blog more, but I’m very bad at finishing posts.

I’ve built a significant catalog of drafts with working titles that now merit a post of their own. Behold the things that light up my brain:

This list may or may not say something about the clarity of my thoughts.

Note: Interview with Destroyer and Regarding Live Music are published.

Most app discovery comes from viral word of mouth among customers, not from people searching app stores for something to download.