Fernando Gros

Best Of The Blogosphere

Twit­ter To Go: How one local coffee shop used Twit­ter to double their cli­en­tele. — Great account of how Hou­s­ton cof­feeshop, Cof­fee­Groundz, used their twit­ter account (@coffeegroundz) to increase sales, provide better (and deeper) cus­tomer ser­vice and build mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions with their community.

Steps Towards a More Sus­tain­able Life of Less — Zen­Life is a blog I’ve just star­ted read­ing and I’m enjoyed the simple and groun­ded reas­on­ing. There’s a number of themes here I’ve been con­sid­er­ing and writ­ing on for some time — invest­ing in a better cul­ture of food, rely­ing less on motor­ised trans­port, get­ting off­line in larger and longer chunks, buying qual­ity rather than quant­ity and look­ing for last­ing eth­ical value.

The Mis­sional Makeover #4 Get­ting People On Board — A telling set of the reas­ons some give for lock­ing the church in pro­gramme and main­ten­ance mode (yes, I’ve heard all of them). The one that stood out most was the idea of the church as “shel­ter” from the world. I’m not totally opposed to the concept of reli­gious sanc­tu­ary, but I think we have done ourselves tre­mend­ous harm by let­ting the life of faith become a meta­phor for ther­apy and redemp­tion an ana­logy for psy­cho­lo­gical wholeness.

Expat Tribes — Great post on the tribes that make up the Hong Kong Expat scene (Bank­ing Tribe,
TESL Tribe, Mixes Tribe, Sports Tribe, Church Tribe). That said the church tribe here is nowhere near as ecu­men­ical and open as in Delhi, where the lack of options and smal­ler scene forces people to be a little less, um, tribal.

Can Rhythmic Ana­lysis Demon­strate the Use of Robotic Beats? — Yes, the rhythmic ana­lysis does high­light some­thing a lot of people have been com­plain­ing about for some time, mono­ton­ous timing. Add to that song struc­ture that follow rigid 2, 4, 8 bar pat­terns and you have a recipe for mono­tony. Of course, there is no excuse now for such, well, lazi­ness, since it is so easy to draw tempo maps in the latest Digital Audio soft­ware and the com­plex­ity of song struc­ture is really only lim­ited by the writer and producer’s ima­gin­a­tion. Still, it is fas­cin­at­ing to see how much tempo vari­ation there was in pop music a gen­er­a­tion or two ago and how much ran­dom­ness there was in song struc­tures and bars per sec­tion in the pre-computer record­ing days.

John Stack­house on Wor­ship Music — Thought­ful reflec­tion on con­tem­por­ary wor­ship that also ques­tions some of the assump­tions about the “old great hymns.”

Instruct­able: How to Build a Music Studio in an Apart­ment — For both prac­tical and geeky reas­ons, I’m fas­cin­ated by any examples of people build­ing small pro­ject stu­dios and this is one of the best step by step case stud­ies I’ve read. Not just the nuts and bolts (and fantasctic hinges) but also just enough theory to explain the crit­ical issues. Filed away for my future “taller.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm. It is filed under Blogging, Creativity, Delhi, Expatriate, Globalisation, Hong Kong, Jazz, Marketing, Missional Church, Music and Music Technology, Theology and Culture, Trends, Worship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.