Best Of The Blogosphere
Some things that caught my attention from around the interwebs.
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’m reading for it’s 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.
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.”
