Tag: 2008

Music of the Year

“Best of the year” pronouncements are particularly silly when they come before the end of the year, let alone before a decent interval has elapsed in which to digest the music/film/whatever. Feb 14 would seem a good date on which to decide on the best, or favorite, from the previous year. But of course to wait that long would to be scooped by the premature evaluators.

Mayhap me protest too much. Village Voice waited until a few days ago to come to the standard hipster conclusion about album of the year. Looking at the Pazz + Jop 2008 list, I see that they listed my album of 2008, albeit at 34. It’s unlikely that a wait of a few weeks would have changed their wrongheaded minds much.

The current premature evaluation leaders are those who have anointed Merriweather Post Pavilion as album of 2009. It’s certainly cool and catchy…

… and now I give my music video of 2009 for “My Girls.”

Largehearted Lists

If you, like me, enjoy best-of-the-year music lists, I recommend Largehearted Boy’s list of such lists. He started it about a month ago, which shows how foolishly early some of these lists get published.

My list would still be headed by Frightened Rabbit. But I won’t be making such a list, and I’m taking a year off from voting in best of the year polls, whether they be for music, books, web services, or whatever.

Not at WordCamp

I’m not at WordCamp in San Francisco, but Andrew Mager is, and he’s liveblogging the one-day event like there’s no tomorrow. Henry Work concentrates on Matt’s State of the Word address. To summarize 2008 so far: impressive growth.

To summarize 2009: easier upgrades are the focus. I’m glad to hear that. Being easy to install in the first place is all very well, but upgrades are often trickier than installations.

So I was in Boston today (and lunch was dim sum rather than bbq). I look forward to a day when I can be in Boston and at a WordCamp.

Looking Ahead to 2008

It´s tough to make predictions, especially about the future, said Yogi Berra, and Sam Goldwyn, and Niels Bohr. So I’m not making predictions about the year ahead.

But I will identify a few things I’ll be watching or looking forward to. I’m old-fashioned enough to be interested in many aspects of blogging. I expect WordPress.com to be my main blogging residence for 2008 and beyond. So I’m interested in Automattic, and how its 2008 will turn out.

I’m also interested in a couple of rivals to WordPress/Automattic. I recently noted ways in which Drupal/Acquia is similar. (By the way, I applaud Acquia’s determination not to employ spambots, and assume that Automattic has a similar policy.) Then there’s Habari, which is under development by a group including some former WordPress developers.

I’m looking forward to music in 2008. I’m not referring to any specific release, but to the state of the music industry. There’s a lot of tremendous music coming out these days, and the web makes it easier to find, try, and buy (or not) than it ever has been.

I just found out that a book I’ve been looking forward to as a 2008 release won’t be out until 2009. It’s Free, by Chris Anderson. I’ve just (re?)subscribed to his blog. Here’s a recent post musing on the complications of free.

Chris’ book is about free as in price of zero or as in beer, not free as in speech. But free/open source software also has an interesting year ahead of it. If I was brave enough to ignore the warning at the top of this post, I’d say that 2008 will see the tipping point for the mainstreaming of free software, and that the tipping will be due to devices such as the Eee PC.