be the change you want to see in the world

I can’t help but feel like I’m seeing something fundamental and ground-breaking when I watch the video of Sven König demonstrating his music video reassembly software. I’ve never seen anything use the voice of an MC to query a database and build not only music, but music video out of it. The result is remarkable. I can only imagine where it will lead, but I know it will be somewhere cool.

The first thing I can think of would be to use it strip out the video and use it to drive GarageBand. Pick an idom and a spectrum of samples and start humming. Instant composition. Imagine instantly turning your voice into a symphony. Make it respond to the volume of your voice by adding instruments.

Or, one could build a database of video imagery that coincides with sounds that we know evoke a certain emotional response. Mastering that spectrum with the voice and enhancing it with video using Scrambled Hackz would be a powerful therapeutic or (gulp) non-therapeutic tool.

I could keep coming up with applications, but I have client who needs a website…click to go to youtube and watch the video. This is a clear mark on the timeline folks. Enjoy.

Oh, I smell a Bobby McFerrin comeback…

The Bowerbird collects a sometimes incredibly beautiful array of objects to decorate the bower it builds. It builds this bower for mating purposes, in the hopes that its grandeur and aesthetic mastery will attract a female. When a female arrives, the Bowerbird will do a dance [rm|wmv]. If all goes well, the two will procreate. Nature is beautiful and fun, though sometimes heartbreaking as well.

This reminds me of the growing inventory of Web 2.0 applications. Every day a collection of newly minted companies trot out another mashup or social software application that leverages a new (or sometimes not so new) aggregation of data from the growing list of open APIs. Then, not unlike the original dotcom bubble, they hope to get laid (attract an investor).

This is not a bad thing. Sex is good. Money is good. I like both, and the dance of investor and start-up is very much like courtship and seduction.

The thing I find funny is the way these start-ups are just like Bowerbirds. APIs are the shiny objects, the bower is the application or mashup, and the dance is, well, the dance - the beautiful swirl of data intermingling and synthesizing to make something meaningful and useful. Gyrations that amuse and excite.

Good luck to you all. I honor you.

Is there a better place to quickly see what people are up to in the world of mashups than ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix? This thing is truly amazing.

If you want to see what the beginnings of fluid information synthesis (the holy grail) looks like, check out what is really the equivalent of the open prairie in the time of homesteader. These little plots are going to grow into something quite incredible and life-altering.

Shillery that knows no bounds.

[cross-posted at drupal.org]
[thread started at civicspacelabs.com as well]

In various threads, like http://drupal.org/node/56972 and http://drupal.org/node/43712 there is very intense discussion about how to patch a problem with paths.module that causes sites with a lot of path aliases to eventually slow to a crawl as more and more paths are added.

I have one of those sites. It is a growing number of path aliases generated by path auto, and it is slowing down…. I need this fix. How do I fix it? I see various patches posted in these threads, but I also need to apply 4.6.6 for security reasons. I note that there will be no upgrade to the 4.6.x Drupal. One of the Drupal Gods (Killes? Dries?) dropped in on one of the threads briefly to point out that 4.6 is frozen. Well a lot of people are still choosing Drupal 4.6 to deploy right now, since 4.7 isn’t done and the modules haven’t nearly caught up with the core.

Apologies if this has become a non-issue since April 3rd when the last post on 56972 was made, but I don’t see a resolution, and the community as a whole should know about this problem before choosing Drupal 4.6.x if it isn’t going to be fixed. Path alias is an important component. The fact that it will eventually choke your site isn’t widely known.

Thanks

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