06.17.07
Posted in site news at 11:04 pm by Matthew Reinbold
I feel like this is something akin to the show that could have been good but never really hit its stride having its series finale. As I mentioned on the organizational parent blog, BloomBurst, recent events have had me take a long, hard look at where I was spending my time. A result has been some difficult choices.
The point of the painful exercise was deciding what I could really put all my passion into and make great and that which needed to stop slowly burning resources. An archive dating back to 2002 (and an online presence of one sort or another since 1999) is hard to walk away from. During that time mutednoise has been an electronic music act (at the forefront of the failed glitchcore movement, I delude myself to think), a geek forum, a repository for gears, games, and music news, and finally an online culture blog. At each reinvention I continued to contribute but never really enough to make this place a destination. I suppose the information super highway needs the odd curio shop here and there but manning the counter in that type of joint – and not having the passion or resources to make it something more – means it gets kind of lonely.
If time were limitless it would be fun to continue posting assumptions at what the geek hath wrought. However, what the glaring revelations of the last few weeks have cast in sharp relief is that I’m trying to do too much. I was well on my way to launching a number of new blogs around an ever increasing list of interest points. I want my own ‘new culture niche’ media network (Next New Networks be damned). But while technology has made it so incredibly easy and cheap to start those ventures making them powerful successes is a whole different matter.
So now my effort is narrowly channeled into carefully chosen pursuits which have the best chance – given devotion, time, and intellectual sweat – to do more than exist; the goal is to make an impact.
The archive will stay up till March of next year (2008) at which point the hosting will not be renewed. The domain name is paid up for the next several years. I will return to mutednoise if (1) I come up with a new angle that is powerful enough to get behind and/or (2) operations across the other sites are humming along nicely and I’m ready to apply what I’ve learned under the hood here.
However, barring those things it is time to close the book on mutednoise. Thank you for reading, for making comments, and (for those of you that have been here long enough) downloading tracks.
I’ll be seeing you online.
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03.27.07
Posted in site news at 10:53 pm by Matthew Reinbold
Well, if you’re reading this you’re seeing the product of a successful server move. The challenge of moving 5+ years of cruft from one end of cyberspace to the other is not something for the faint of heart. However, I’m hopeful that the effort was worth it. Now that the messiness of moving vans along the information superhighway is behind us, lets get back to what we’re all about – commenting on the code that is creating culture. 
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02.16.07
Posted in site news at 3:59 pm by Matthew Reinbold
I’ve begun the inevitable task of finding appropriate advertising to support the bandwidth and hosting costs for mutednoise. The previous format had a couple slots for Google Adsense sections. While they occasionally got a click I was greatly disappointed in the ‘contextual’ appropriateness for the site – more often than not they would seem to pick up on the strangest keyword and produce ‘relevant’ content in only the most tenuous sense.
On the Militant Geek Propoganda site I’ve been using affiliate programs provided by Commission Junction. Those ads aren’t contextual (or they aren’t automated to try and fit the site’s content) but I can pick and choose the vendors to display. Overall, pre-selecting shops with overall relevance seems to perform much better that Google Adsense’s best day.
The crux, however, is what vendors to ‘build into’ mutednoise. Suppose, for a minute, that we could place ads for any kind of product or service here – anything from consumer electronics to male pattern baldness solutions. What do you think is appropriate? Or more accurately, what online shops or services are you looking to use? I’d love any and all suggestions here…
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02.10.07
Posted in blogs, site news, web working at 1:47 am by Matthew Reinbold
Much of what we’ve been observing on mutednoise is the tectonic shifts in culture brought about by the information age (the ‘code creating culture’ bit in the site tag, *natch). Embedded somewhere within this shaping of new societal norms is a changing relationship that we have with work. The information age has seen the ascension of the knowledge worker; someone who’s stock and trade is being a nodal point for ideas. It’s very much the modus operandi that I’m in: have wifi’d laptop, will make a living.
The power behind this movement and my personal involvement make me pleased to announce a new side gig as contributing writer for Web Worker Daily. That’s a site from Om Malik, a fan favorite and frequent linkee of mutednoise.
Om is an award winning technology journalist and former senior writer for Business 2.0. He’s since struck out on his own and is building his own ‘online media publisher’ (the mechanics of which I hope to also learn from this vantage point). Most importantly, he (so far) is a great guy. I initially was a little nervous about the time commitment the gig would require and if there were article quotas that had to be met. Om’s response on what to post?
No expectations – just the posts which come from your heart and your brain, not from your wallet.
He’s also got a interview with Robert Scoble, for those interested.
And what does this mean for mutednoise? Probably not much. There might be some cross linking for relevant pieces but for the most part we’ll keep chugging along here. As long as time permits, I’ll be writing.
Also Semantically Marked Up on CodeAway.org and BloomBurst.com.
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01.28.07
Posted in site news at 10:30 pm by libel_vox
While I didn’t entirely get everything done this weekend that I had hoped there have been changes. Mainly, if you’re reading this, I have successfully avoided nuking five years of posts to high heaven and this hair brained scheme to haul mutednoise into the ‘Web 2.0 era’ (*shudder) might actually work.
Some quick things I’ve noticed:
- For some reason the posts aren’t saying who the topics are by – they just lead up to white space and fail. I need to look into that
- While the form categories are correctly marked on the posts they aren’t showing up in the sidebar to the right – I’ll also have to look into that.
- Most of the laggards from the old db have been deleted. However, if I remotely recognized your name from the last year you will be able to log in and post using the same user id and password as before. Of course, one of the big reasons for moving to Wordpress (or a blog at all) was so that you didn’t have to log in if you wanted to post.
- The ’special articles’ (if special is code word for infrequent) still need to be imported.
- mutednoise has gone through several corrections in focus. I’ll graudually be going through and weeding out the less relevant posts while improving the tagging. That may take some time, however.
- Image links seem to have ported only the url over without putting the <image …> syntax around them. Since we really didn’t have that many I’ll probably just modify them over time as I come across them.
- Some of the old [bbcode] references for lists also seem to have slipped through the regular expressions that I cooked up. Again, they were pretty rarely used and I’ll deal with them as I find them.
- The old phpbb forums and bookmarks to them will work for a little while longer; or at least until I can create pages to reroute visitors to the newly transfered pages. They are currently locked down so that only administrators can post anyway. Since everything has been pulled over here this the phpbb portion can be considered expendible at any time.
- ?
If you see anything else that looks out of place let me know. Moving to the new web host will probably be next weekend. I’ll post something quick with more info as it comes up.
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01.26.07
Posted in site news at 2:56 am by Matthew Reinbold
Having a deadline, even if it is self imposed, is a wonderful tool for prying even the most stationary object into motion. This weekend I will be tempting not one, but two fates as mutednoise not only jumps from PHPBB to Wordpress but from Uplinkearth to CrystalTech.
There is no guarantee that the harming of innocent bits may not occur. While the forum is all packed up in shiny bubblewrap moderators can still post; posts made after this Friday are not promised to survive the rigors of moving at the high speeds required on the information superhighway.
Please remain browsing with your laptops in the upright and locked position for the duration of this weekend. With any luck we’ll have touchdown Monday morning.
In the case of emergency your laptop makes a piss poor flotation device. If mutednoise should crack under pressure oxygen will be required to revive its author.
We know you have a number of options for your entertainment purposes and we’d like to thank you for choosing mutednoise.
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01.23.07
Posted in blogs, business, site news at 2:07 am by Matthew Reinbold
I am libel_vox, and non-rumors of my un-demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Rather than take the trite path of profusely apologizing for the lack of posts and making hollow promises to do better lets take a different tack. For now, I’d like to outline a grander vision at which I will have no time for.
mutednoise has been an entity of various focuses since 1999. At that time it was an electronic act. Since then it has been a private forum, a tech new bb, and most recently a slapdash series of posts on social media.
Back in December I almost managed to successfully transfer five years of posts over to a WordPress blogging platform. The reason was that modern blogging platforms have significantly reduced barriers to participation; in effect, they are a graceful refinement of what I was trying to do with the phpbb software here. There are still errors, however, and then vanity projects had to take a back seat to things like ‘making the mortgage’ and ‘personal hygiene’.
Well, that’s not entirely true. http://MilitantGeek.com, an experiment in barbed tech humor and feigned ambivalence in clothing, is going swimmingly. Whereas mutednoise has always been a concept that I’ve tried to build a site around MilitantGeek was/is a pure e-commerce play and the numbers reflect it.
A rock that I tried tackling at one of the first CodeAway’s collaborative idea sessions was what to do with mutednoise. The small panel that evening was about as stumped as I had been to that point. With further reflection it seems that mutednoise has always, in some way or another, gravitated around changes in culture brought on by technology. Whether it was “gear, games, and music” from a few years ago or “The Sound-Off on Social Media” I’ve always been deeply interested in the ripple affects across our collective well being that all these gadgets and gewgaws have.
Its because of this thinking that I know I need to subtly shift mutednoise’s focus again. mutednoise is about Code Changing Culture. I hope to find time (eventually) for a site redesign and a change of hosting companies to help renew the vigor.
But just slapping a new moniker on old product is not enough. mutednoise really needs the support of a like minded network. I’ve been sitting on the domain name ‘Opinuendo’ for awhile. It is not only a perfect wrapper for the sublime and silly, the pity and the profane; it is a great name for a new media company. Opinuendo will become the parent for a host of online efforts.
Hmmm…. it is late and this post has been far too self indulgent already. As always, more as I have time.
For now the tentative Opinuendo properties:
* Militant Geek, Tech Culture Criticism Amok
* mutednoise, Code Creating Culture
* BloomBurst, Growing Software with Pop
* CodeAway.org, Tech Co-Working Events and Commentary
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