Longing for the day ...

Season's best wishes to all

Wishing you the best of your season, whatever your race, colour or creed. May your life be filled with joy and wonder now and into 2009.

10,000 hours = 3 years?

Chris Anderson, always a guy who can be counted on for an interesting thought, has just suggested people need to change jobs every 3 years. He then equates this, through some fairly tendentious maths, to Malcolm Gladwell's "it takes 10,000 hours to truly master something".

I used to work on the basis that a new job/pursuit/horizon every 3-5 years is a good way to keep fresh and keen on life, but I'm less convinced that this implies mastery of the current job. I never felt that after 3 years I had mastered my job (though Anderson's observation about journalists' writing becoming cynical is a good one) because I don't believe I've ever mastered anything. Mastery takes talent and a lifetime of application. The truly great masters will tell you there is always something new to be learned about a craft - that's what keeps it fresh.

I prefer to think that the 3-year thing is more about keeping horizons visible than about mastery. It's more intrinsic to the person than the craft. That's not to say it isn't important - it certainly is - but that it's important to understand that the benefit is internal and does not (necessarily) imply mastery.

In fact, I'd suggest that Anderson's observation about the state of reporting after three years says more about the culture of journalism in this age than it does about anything else ...

Hypebot's top Music 2.0 posts

Hypebot has posted a summary of their best Music 2.0 posts of 2008. It's got some really good stuff in it. Very important in years to come, I'm sure.

Check it out, read their literature and get into the resources they dish out.

This is filtering at its best.

Musowiki update

Right! Need to get back into updating regularly. Sorry about that.

News: I have submitted the Musowiki paper for my thesis. It's been submitted to the International Journal of Community Music, who will hopefully find it enlightening enough to publish. Time will tell.

In other Musowiki news, there are now over 500 entries and the merchandise store has black t-shirts, which look great. A friend who lives nearby got hers yesterday and they look awesome. Came up really well, just in time for Christmas. Things are moving along well there ...

But it's all too slow - need more people to get involved and spread the word. At my current rate it will take 30 years to list the venues in the Indie Venue Bible, by which time a lot of them won't be venues any more ... and then there's the rest of the world.

Help!

Now I gotta go write my theory paper.

Myspace is dead. Repeat after me: MySpace is dead.

Just got this ripper of a story about MySpace taking over the URL of a band called Mobile just because they wanted www.myspace.com/mobile as part of their strategy for entry into the mobile music marketplace. This is a classic demonstration of why i have been saying for a long time that MySpace is dead in the water. People just haven't noticed yet because of the marketing power of News Ltd, but the corpse is starting to smell.

It's not even the fact that the Myspace people wanted to do this that sucks the most. It's the way they went about it. Jackboots and ham-fists ...

What this tells the entire indie community is that MySpace is quite happy to tramp all over them if they get in the way. MySpace is not really the bastion of Indie-ness that it started out and built its reputation as. It's just a cash cow for a predatory media corporation and has just showed it's hand again. Of course, the backlash may be slow in coming, if it comes at all, but that will just make the eventual demise of MySpace even sweeter for those of us who see it for what it is.

Viva La Revolucion ...