2009-09-01 The Tweet Suite
From Walkerpedia
I heard an interesting statistic today:
Every 9.5 seconds, somewhere in the world, a journalist is asked to write a thousand words about Twitter.
Because most of them don't use Twitter, they tend to open up the public timeline to see what people are saying. That's the equivalent of opening the door of a football stadium to hear what people are talking about. You're just going to hear babble.
(By the way, how are you doing? If this is the first time I've sent you one of my emails you've probably been kind enough to download some of my music recently. Thanks! I send out these emails occasionally to let people know how to be involved in the most exciting things going on in the worlds of music and the internet.)
My latest project: The Tweet Suite
So I made up that 9.5 seconds statistic. Just like the statistics journalists endlessly quote about Twitter are made up. Twitter's very easy to explain, really: it's a conversation. It's people talking to each other. About whatever they want.
Remember last year, when I wrote 50 songs in 90 days for a challenge? (Don't worry if you don't. I'm just trying to get you excited. Roll with it.) Well, I'm doing it again! But this time I've made the challenge even more weirdly specific:
I'm setting 50 tweets to music in 90 days.
http://tweetsuite.ihatemornings.com
I like to think that by setting Twitter messages to music I'm giving them the context and weight they only usually get from being part of a conversation. And just maybe, a 50-movement suite of Twitter messages will be enough to persuade a few more people that Twitter is more than narcissistic babble. Check out my latest blog post for a bit more about context and babble:
http://ihatemornings.com/babble-context-conversation/
In other news
- I'm heading down to Dorset next weekend to play for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at the River Cottage Autumn Festival. Hugh heard my song about him, and invited me to play. It's going to be AWESOME. I'll be recording some video, and twittering away as usual. I'll let you know how it went next month.
- I've been featured on a new website about Free Culture and creativity. Karunya is studying for a Masters in Online Journalism, and emailed me to ask if she could come up to Oxford and interview me. She hung out with us while we recorded the Poshcast, and took a load of video. The short film on Karunya's new website features me and Paul Stokes, the editor of the NME, talking about 'Music 2.0 and the Digital Download'.
- I launched http://oxfordbloggers.com the other day, with a couple of other local geeks. There are some great bloggers in Oxford, writing about academia, geekery, music, photography, local life, travel and more. If you're not much of a blog reader, it might be an easy way for you to taste test a few quality local blogs.
- I'm working on a couple of music-related websites, both of which are very exciting. One is for A Silent Film (my brother's band), who have been playing to thousands in Portugal over the summer. The other is for Organ Grinder Records (a small independent record label) who are releasing some great new albums later in the year. It seems that by endlessly fiddling with http://ihatemornings.com I've become somewhat of a specialist in muso websites.
Until next time
That's all for now. Have a great end of summer, and I'll write to you sometime in September with news of the River Cottage adventure (check the blog if you can't wait that long ;).
Apart from the Tweet Suite, oxfordbloggers.com, the websites and the blog I'm hoping to come up with some clever t-shirts this month. One will definitely say "I wanna be rock'n'roll like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall". If you can think of any other bits of my songs that would make great t-shirts, let me know...
Talk soon,
Ben
PS. I just installed a new commenting system on the Tweet Suite site, and it's looking a bit lonely. Why don't you have a look and leave me a message? ;)
