Minutiae

Until just two days ago, I had successfully avoided the cultural juggernaut known as MySpace, despite queries from any of my friends on the service about my absence. I knew the advantages of having MySpace, namely, being able to friend my favorite bands and explore new music. I joined a few weeks ago and was immediately turned off by the look of my profile page. The default profile design is just hideous. I spent so much time customizing the page you're looking at right now (despite its simplicity, there's a lot of code behind it) that I didn't want to ever see CSS code again. Besides, I thought the design on MySpace was beyond reproach, and beyond saving.

Then, two days after I re-joined the MySpace revolution, an article appeared on Lifehacker as if it was handed down to me from the heavens. Someone had created a clean "hacked" MySpace design, complete with pretty simple-to-follow CSS code. I was in heaven. I changed a few things in Mike D.'s code and made adjusted images, and now my space is sufficiently hacked. Check it out. I'm even going to add a button down at the bottom of the sidebar, so you can go see my space whenever you want. Heck, I'm so pleased with how this MySpace venture turned out, I'll put a button-link to my Facebook up there too, for those of you who are on that waste of time.

Now I just need to add a few friends.

In addition to being able to get to my last.fm profile by clicking the link at the bottom of the sidebar, I've included a new item, "Weekly Top Artists." This is a chart based on the artists I've played most over the past week, and, if I understand correctly, it updates every Sunday. You can click on the chart image and reach my last.fm profile page.

I recently signed up for Last.fm, a social music service that recommends tracks for you based on what you listen to. Combined with Pandora, it will hopefully help me discover a lot of new music.

One of the neat features of Last.fm is that it has a plugin for iTunes that tracks what you listen to and publishes it to your profile page. By going there, anyone can see the last ten songs I've listened to (if I've listened to any in the last hour or so) and, eventually, check out what artists are most popular in my player, that is, when I've been doing this long enough for the service to generate charts.

Scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar on this site, click on the Last.fm button, and you'll be taken to my page, then come back here and make fun of my music taste any time you want. Think of it as a way to do your own Friday Random Ten for me any time you want.

There is really no excuse why you shouldn't watch these commercials. Just do it. Priceless.

Tip of the hat to mareegirl for this amazing link.

Link: 'Sexiest woman': Scarlett Johansson (CNN.com)

Keira is #5 on the list, and Maria Sharapova is #8. Let's hear it for the girls who look normal. The question is...if Kiera is #5, why isn't lookalike Natalie Portman #6?

Quick Sunday morning update...the weekends are times to be out and about, living what you'll be blogging about during the week...but I need to give a welcome back shoutout to Matt Durso, author of There It Is, a fine Philadelphia blogger who dabbles a bit in baseball, hockey, politics, and pop culture. After a four-month disappearance, Matt is back on the job. if you want the Flyers coverage that I never get around to giving you because I'm too busy writing movie reviews, There It Is.

That's from the front page of ESPN.com...

Okay, I think we can officially say "That's quite enough Barry Bonds, thank you very much."

I rarely read Gawker anymore, for reasons I'll discuss in the next paragraph, but stopping by there this morning and finding this post on a recent lashing out against blogs in Big Media really left me scratching my head. Are we on the verge of seeing blogs become passe, or is this Gawker's way of telling us that these articles are ludicrous? I'm not entirely sure, but either way, I have a rebuttal.

Blogs like those in Gawker Media embrace what blogs "should be," but, in my opinion, they try to do it too hard. The rogue aspect of citizen-driven journalism essentially builds in the snarky tone of most blogs, but Gawker bloggers go out there and try to find a way to snark about the snark, or something like that. Weblogging (who ever thought that term would seem archaic?) started out as a way for people to point out interesting newsbits and other whatnots that were floating around the Interwebs. Gawker and sites like it turned that into something akin to reporting on the news, and their sites have even broken stories. This isn't a bad thing in most cases - many blogs that do this are extremely interesting - but in a way, they have become closer to the establishment than they started out, more holding the hand that feeds them than biting it.

Establishment blogging is not a good thing. Newspapers assigning reporters to write like bloggers is an important development, because it quickens the release of news to the general public, but that river flows only one way. Bloggers aren't newspaper reporters, even if they have that job title part-time. We are commentators. We are reactionaries. Blogging-for-profit may die, as one of the articles that the Gawker post points out, but there will always be people monitoring the news, or, as I do, offering commentary online.

That is, unless somebody wants to pay me for my movie reviews.

Three new sites to add to the ol' blogroll.

When I migrated back here to LiveJournal, I "lost" a good chunk of the links on my blogroll; not because I didn't copy them from my old site, but because the list was antiquated and I didn't read some of the blogs anymore that I had featured on the old list. So, on your right, you see a pretty comprehensive list of the blogs that I read on a daily basis. Today, I add three more to that list:

Lifehacker, Gawker Media's guide to making your life easier, in and outside of the Internet, is quickly becoming my favorite Gawker blog. It bypasses the sometimes overly snarky tone that the Gawker blogs take, and it has a broad range of topics to talk about, instead of letting the most recent Paris Hilton sighting turn into a days-long storyline. I'm also adding Deadspin, Gawker's sports blog, which has quite a bit of snark attached, but I know that when my RSS reader tells me that Deadspin has updated, 8 times out of 10 it's with something I'll read. Besides, I just signed up for a commenting account over there.

Also add to the list Adfreak, which I found on TypePad's "featured blogs" section. Adfreak takes a look at advertising, marketing, and consumerism in general with the twist of cynicism that is oh so crucial to blogging. I can't say I want to read every post, but I can't say that about my own blog or any of the ones that I currently read, but it's worth you time to check it out.

Note: I was going to work on this post later, and it would have been more well written, but when the song you see next to "Current Music" came up, I knew I had to get it on the record.