Rubénerd :)

The heading reads like the opening line of a terrible blues song.

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Longer time readers of my blog here would have read my lamentations about the fall of really high quality personal blogs and the rise of homogeneous, interchangeable blog networks with hundreds of writers, so when I find an amazing personal blog I have to share it!

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Trying out some of these new Whole Wheat Radio share link artist widgets, what an awesome idea!

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Spiff: Is it cool if I swear?
Jim: Yeah, we encourage it!
Spiff: Really?! Man I love this f*cking place!

A heads up in case you’ve forgotten, the Melissa Mitchell and Spiff house concert at Whole Wheat Radio will be starting 20:00 Alaska time, which translates to 13:00 Singapore and 15:30 Aussie Central Daylight Whatsit.

Recently I wanted to ask my dad if he’d got his new bicycle frame yet, but I didn’t want to confuse him into thinking I was talking about his motorbike — which he also owns but needs some repairs — so I asked about his acoustic bike. Allegedly he’s still telling his friends about his dopey son :D.

Anyway I’m frantically off down the road to get a cup of coffee before it starts!

Having just spent the last few days talking about my own social anxiety, awkwardness and questions about my point in life, the universe, everything and 42, I thought I’d stop being so inwardly focused and address someone else’s post discussing similar issues. We’re a confederacy of introverts here aren’t we? :).

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So I’d just woken up after a terrible night’s sleep and was making coffee when I tuned into The Whole Wheat Radios on my Mac, and within 20 minutes none other than Jim Kloss came online and started chatting on the mic on air with all of us! He talked about a discussion he’d had with Marian Call about Twitter recently, the music that was coming up (in his own classic and imitable style), along with the progress he was making with his nuclear wheat powered ioniser that can bend space time. Unfortunately so far he can only beam one person at a time with his voice activated command processor, but it’s a work in progress.

He also asked a few questions which come to think of it I didn’t answer in the collaboration page chat thingy. To answer them here, Elke and I are in Adelaide until November, and while not technically correct in German, when my dad’s family immigrated to Australia they started pronouncing our last name as "Shade" for English speakers, so es ist gut so :).

As for the image above, this was a photo I took of Jim Kloss himself mowing the perfect green lawns that adorn the surroundings of the Wheat Palace where the independent music Whole Wheat Radio headquarters are located. You can tell it’s not an extremely crappy Photoshop job because I actually did it in The Gimp. I’d be hilarious if I could write and deliver good jokes.

I don’t know why, but whenever I’m on Whole Wheat Radio and see this photo of Karen Collins, I always do a double take because out of the corner of my eye she looks like she’s brandishing a gun! In this case it’s even funnier because with this latest concert announcement on every page, Jim is in her firing line of sight :-)

And people say I don’t write anything constructive on this blog… sheesh.

"I wholeheartedly endorse this product, decision, service, building or idea."

UPDATE: Yes, this was an April Fools joke!

Given Last.fm’s recent commercialisation where they now force listeners from outside the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany to pay a subscription fee to listen to what was previously free music, it has got me thinking about independent singer songwriters. If they release their content for free in the hopes you’ll love their material and subsequently attend their concerts and buy their music… you know, promotion… then what right does Last.fm have to charge people to hear it?

Therefore Jim Kloss has decided to fight fire with fire, and has asked me to relay the following information. He has decided to inform the community through Google Reader that Whole Wheat Radio, the bastion of independent music online will soon become become a commercial paid site.

This would be achieved through phases in order not to alienate existing users and the artists who bought into the notion that they’re music was being sent to a non profit website that was designed to promote them and their cause instead of generate large volumes of cash for it’s proprietors and investors.

These are suggestions interim steps for Whole Wheat Radio’s commercialisation:

1. Remove any references to the Core Mission and make the chat page the main page for the site. This will allow WWR to leverage the power of social networking of the community, which is our key demographic and the largest potential source of revenue. Changing the Core Mission isn’t revisionist history because we don’t call it that.

2. Every user page on the WWR wiki will be donned with a large, non-removable box indicating what compulsory paid subscription rate they’ve chosen. This will help to guilt trip and shame people into paying more.

3. Make about 200px of room above the content for each page for banner advertisements. Each advertisement could be delivered by Google AdSense which would intelligently pick up on the text of the individual wiki page and return advertisements that are relevant and interesting to all Whole Wheat Radio listeners. For doing so, Jim Kloss would receive 0.1% of the profits from Google as a referral.

4. Monatise the audio streams themselves to deliver content that will enrich listeners lives and enhance their audio experience. Plugging into Google AdSense, the EJs will be programmed to to download the lyrics to the currently playing song from the song’s wiki page and read five to ten text advertisements after each song. Because these advertisements are relevant to the songs, listeners will appreciate them.

5. Start generating profits from the artists themselves. By banning user generated playlists and shows artists could compete for airtime by using an auction system plugged into the master WWR donation PayPal account of which PayPal would take a 92% cut of as a service fee. By rigging the auction system, Jim could still choose what songs are played but give the impression the music is being legitimately chosen by the artists.

6. Once WWR has generated large sums of cash, Jim Kloss will insure and subsequently burn down the Wheat Palace and move the WWR headquarters to Los Angeles, California to be closer to the commercial music companies.

7. Jim will then abuse his position as a trusted friend of the independent musicians to start advising them to sign with one of the major record labels and subsequently become a part of the RIAA. The record labels and the RIAA have consistently shown through their fair and reasonable music monopoly that lawsuits and their own compelling products can also generate revenue above and beyond traditional, old fashioned promotional avenues like independent music websites. As a bonus, WWR would get a commission from these record labels.

8. Once Jim Kloss has become a social networking guru, he will advise people of such by appending social-networking-guru to every profile page on every website and will proceed to charge people $10,000 per speaking appearance.

9. At this point WWR will become a publicly traded company with the stated purpose of generating enough capital to expanding their operations, when in fact they’re really setting themselves up to be bought. Once majority control is relinquished, WWR will be purchased by News Corporation or Microsoft for a substantial profit and Jim Kloss will retire to a tropical island in the Caribbean or South Pacific, secure in the knowledge that his website and actions have helped independent musicians around the world.

The Whole Wheat Radio board of directors wishes to advise that your reading of this blog post constitutes a silent, legally binding agreement in which you agree with everything that has been said to the extent that if you’re asked to provide testimony in a court of law you will be obligated to say as much.

Hummer outside the Boatdeck Cafe yesterday

Yesterday I noticed on Google Reader that Jim Kloss approved of my tweet regarding a Hummer which had parked just outside the Boatdeck Cafe I was having a coffee of all things in:

@toddtyrtle I saw a Hummer parked here in Adelaide this morning. First time I’ve ever felt the need to put a rude sticker on a car.

Well in the spirit of this message, here’s that Hummer taken with my iPhone yesterday. Granted at least it’s the smallest model I think, but it still looks like a monster compared to the little Toyota sedan next to it.

I’m not even going that far, I’m learning how to ride a motor scooter so I can zip around town on a Piaggio when I miss the bus or train here and waiting 45 minutes for the next one isn’t feasible.

My dad says a 100cc model up is safer than a 50cc despite my insistence I don’t need anything powerful at all, because he says with the extra power you can avoid messy situations.

The Aussie Piaggio website

The Aussie Piaggio website is pretty spiffy, you can check out all their models and even the licence requirements for each state! I’ve been told by friends here that depending on how you look at it, South Australia is either one of the best states to learn to drive and ride or one of the worst because they’re much stricter. I’m leaning towards the former.

I love how I can go so far off topic that I start talking about scooters when I take a photo of a Hummer. Do either even have anything to do with the internet or computer software?

This story has made me so angry I feel like… getting angry. For years I’ve been able to tune into Singapore radio from here in Adelaide to keep myself up to date with what’s going on over there while I’m over here through their internet radio feeds. Because of the negligible time zone difference, it meant I could enjoy the always hilarious Glenn Ong and The Flying Dutchman in the mornings on Class 95 [Wikipedia] and sometimes listen to Nights with Brian on Gold 90.5 [Wikipedia] in the evenings.

ASIDE: In one funny circumstance I was able to warn my dad about traffic problems near our house through text messages because I’d heard the news from Traffic Watch on Singaporean radio in Adelaide. Good times!

These feeds stopped working recently though, because the companies that run these stations have had to stop re-broadcasting their radio feeds online. ChannelNewsAsia.com has a depressingly titled article on it: Is it RIP for Singapore internet radio for which I took the title for this post.

Why is Singaporean internet radio dead or close to it? I’m going to be blunt, it’s for the same reason why internet radio has been stifled so many times in the US: arrogant old media authorities who pretend to be working in the interests of artists and the public when in fact they’re trying to milk their dying cash cows for all they’re worth and crush new technologies that could be perceived as a threat. I say "perceived" as a threat because clearly re-broadcasting a radio stream isn’t a threat, but they think it is. Or they’re just greedy as heck and want ridiculous sums of money. Probably a combination of the two.

Common sense is the least common of the senses. And media executives are arses. Two things we probably all already knew, but sometimes we need reminding.

I’m really starting to finally understand the motivation behind Whole Wheat Radio; for the longest time I thought it was a nice "stick it to the man!" kind of site and radio station that just happened to not need commercial music to operate, but now that I’ve seen the reality is even harsher and more ridiculous than I thought, I can now appreciate even more WWR’s mix of pragmatic and idealistic founding principals. In a similar way to Creative Commons and the lunacy of copyright law, Jim Kloss and the community has shown that if you can’t change stupid laws, you can just work around them and in doing so prove that they’re stupid laws.

In the meantime, to get my Singapore fix I might have to live with just listening to the podcast. Provided they don’t get killed either. Oh wait, they have been. Where’s my Seroquel?