Illustration Inspiration part one

The past 6 months have been an exciting time for me. Comics and drawing have found their way back into my life and not a moment too soon. Around the winter holidays Ben had brought home a large cache of old comics from his childhood. One stood out for me. An issue of "Eightball" by Daniel Clowes really opened my eyes to the possibilities that comics could hold. I started doing research on Amazon.com for different graphic novels. In the meantime, Ben brought home the book "Chloe" by Hans Rickhell, a local illustrator. This book helped me to see deeper into the worth of alternative comics. As Christmas rolled around the two of us decided it would be a graphic novel christmas. I got Ben "Wimbeldon Green" from Seth and he got me a pile of used graphic novels from the local Booksmith. I loved them all including "Paul Auster" from Karasik and Mazzuchelli, and "Burying Sandwiches"from Rob Sato. Our interest was noted by a friend who gave us "McSweeny's Quarterly Concern #13". It is filled with amazing art from a wide range of illustrators. I searched for additional comics from the artists included and found a great online comic seller Fantagraphics.com .

Startup.com

I really enjoyed the movie Startup.com. It showed how a couple of people with a new idea can make a company and fail. It seemed to embody what the whole dot com dive was all about.
A few friends got together with a new idea for an Internet company that would try to make local government more efficient in some aspects. Their company govWORKS.com was going to put local governments on the Internet so people could pay for parking tickets, fishing licenses, and potentially marriage licenses online.
Soon after they start trying to find investors one of the friends doesn’t want to be a part of it any more and wants what he feels is rightfully his: $800,000. He settles on $400,000. After the episode with the disenfranchised founder the remaining founders go on to work on finding enough investors and cities that would like to put their government on the internet. They find a few cities to make their dream happen and they are given enough money to start up. Other companies start popping up with the same idea and the wind is slightly taken out of their sail. Soon after though their offices are ransacked and important files and their computers are stolen. They seem to recoup after this and have more and more people working with them.
Eventually the friends’ feelings start to change about the company and about each other.
One of the founders, Tom, is actually asked to resign and escorted out of the building. It’s hard to see what this does to the friendship of two of the founders, Tom and Kaliel.
A few months after this falling out the business has almost completely fallen apart and the last of the people working admit defeat. It’s a sad point in the movie but it’s true. They could not keep the company together.
I thought the movie was very well made and it showed me exactly what it was like for the failed companies of the dot com boom. I want a sequel though!

Much ado about Blogging!

Web logging has come so far. I started a website: “Cinders Garbage” as a freshman in high school, in 1998. I wanted a place to keep a journal of my daily life, on the Internet. I made my own weblog by adding entries to a single page for each month of the year and separated each entry with a line break and had separate pages for months and years. It was a little time consuming though. Each time I wanted to update my journal I would actually have to go into the code of the page and update it that way. So I didn’t update very often. After awhile some web sites came along that made it easier to have a journal on the web. I started using DiaryLand.com which was not too bad but a little boring and really had no way of communicating with other bloggers on the site besides a main page that had links to the newest five entries from their users. I also tried other sites like Greymatter.com (which is now a software site) and Blogger.com which had more customizability but not the community I was looking for. After a year or so a fellow blogger and friend of mine mentioned a new site that was really getting a lot of attention named Livejournal.com. I eventually got a journal there and have been posting to it for years now and I can also read about my friends’ lives because everyone I know has one.
I have never really used my blog as a way to post news that would be relevant to the general public but I find the ones that do very interesting. Once and awhile I will take a search through journals to see what's going on in the world today and people’s opinions on what's happening. Some times it can be difficult to differentiate between the two because some people feel that their opinions are the facts and that can be misleading to people who don’t know how to look for that. It almost scares me that the media would be going to blogs to see what is happening because I only see the blogs that all opinions.
Blogs could be a good source of information for mass consumption but people must be careful to make sure they are getting the facts and not just really well written opinions.

Clash of the Namespaces

The domain name system does work well as opposed to having to remember IP addresses. Through this article though, I have seen how much trouble it has also caused among people and businesses. People using the Internet to extort money from people that would use name space for better use sounds horrible. Are these people tried in courts of law? It seems as though Jeff Burgar is getting away with it. Famous people should have to right to use their name as a trade mark and own all aspects of it, so long as they can afford it. Obviously if he registered over a thousand domain names, all of famous people, he must have had other things in mind than just honest “fan” sites. It is ridiculous really. It hardly seems he is using the names in good faith.
I think that using IP addresses is not a bad idea though. It would make it harder to find websites but it could really make search engines much more powerful over the Internet. Google seems to be doing very well but all if website names were written with numbers plus the file names people would need a way to find what they want or become familiar with the language of IP addresses. I think the old search engines would reemerge and be seen once again. People would have a choice. Google could also become more powerful than ever and earn more and more revenue.
It is hard to say what we could do to stop the fighting and legal disputes between people and companies who feel they need to own anything slightly resembling their trademark. It seems though that it will not end anytime soon and one must be careful not put up a website for their XingBake coffee company even though its based on the other side of the world and was established decades ago, because Starbucks will sue for taking their identity.
I currently want to set up my own web space but it seems that the thousands of other Ashley Moores out there, including the Christian singer/songwriter Ashley Moore and the porn star Ashley Moore, have all beaten me to it. I better find another name.

The E-Biz Surprise

The internet is constantly growing and becoming more profitable. I am amazed how eventually many e-biz’s paid off. People thought they could make millions through e-commerce and the ones that stuck it out are now making money.
There were ideas for web businesses that in no way could fly off the ground. One of the main problems with some of the ideas were that they weren’t cost effective. Sending couches and kitty litter through the mail is very expensive.
A friend of mine has an e-biz. Basically he buys web space from a server and sells it to other people. He has different packages and services available, and he doesn‘t charge very much for them. The company started out small with just a handful of customers, but now the number is over 50. He doesn’t really advertise and gets most of his business from word of mouth. He also works at a supermarket but he tells me that it is his main source of income.
I would think that companies such as UPS are doing very well. More and more people are buying items over the Internet and it creates more work for postal workers. Many websites have associations with UPS or FedEx and are always sending out packages through them. I would really like to know if e-commerce has effected them greatly, what sort of impact has the Internet made on them?
I see more and more trucks for Pea Pod every day. Originally I thought it was a bad idea and either they would be flooded with requests and not have the man power to fill the orders or no one would buy it. It but have been small at first but as time passed it may be more convenient than going to the supermarket. More people work these days (out of necessity) and may not have the time. Fresh food delivered to your house regularly may be the way to go.
People are more tuned to their computers and the Internet than ever before. Using the Internet as a tool to sell your services seems to be smarter than ever before.

Openp2p.com

I found the article on Piracy @ Openp2p.com really very interesting. I can defiantly agree with most of the points the author made.Peer to peer sharing of music files has always been viewed as a problem by large name artists such as Metallica. I once read that Metallica is one of the top five highest paid musical groups in the world. So I wonder what are they complaining about? I know for sure they are not looking out for the little guys who are just now trying to make their way in the business.

When I was in a band we had a few of our songs on the internet so people could hear us. We would check weekly to see how many people would actually download our music files. All we cared about was getting noticed. How could we make any sort of career out of being an obscure band that some local kids would see? We never got very far anyway.When I go on a peer to peer server to download music its just to listen to while I'm on the computer and if I really like what I'm listening to I'll go out and buy the CD. I want a tangible case with art and information from the artist. That is one of the best parts of CD buying, besides being out and away from the computer.

I know so many poets that have amazing work but no one hears it. There are a couple of coffee houses around that have open mics but there are many people who just don’t live near them or can’t get them for other reasons. These works should be published and widely read but not many people buy poetry books. I myself have a couple favorite famous poets. There is no large section in “Borders” of poetry books, maybe a 4 foot section or two, but the internet allows us to read these poets websites of their works. Perhaps if they find their sites are getting enough hits they can publish some books themselves and sell them to the readers.

Peer to peer sharing is just another way of communicating and getting the word across about the art and media that is in our world. We should not have to hide it or be prosecuted for it. The majority of people who share are not malicious trouble makers who are just trying to take money away from artists. We just want to hear some good music, watch a funny video, or read someone elses ideas.

I currently use Ares as my p2p manager

New Blog!

A new post in a new blog.
the internet is an interesting place and the soup next door is really good.