Viking

Kem Nunn is a genre unto himself. Starting with Tapping the Source and leading up to “The Dogs of Winter”, perhaps his best work, Nunn has blazed a trail with “surfer noir” – down on their luck old surfers, looking for that one last wave to bring them to redemption. Tijuana Straights is his most recent novel. Fahey is the aging surfer, living in Tijuana River Valley near the Mexican border, remembering the time he rode the Mystic Peak wave before he went wrong. Nunn rages about the destruction (environmental and psychological) wrought by the factories constructed along the border on the mexican side, and their impact on Mexicans and Americans alike. Magdalena is the woman who is trying to make a difference. She and Fahey are thrown together and….

Nunn is strong prose stylist, melding biblical cadence with modern sensibilities. Consider this Faulkner-esque masterpiece:

And just for that instant, sea water seeping into his socks, gun held loosely in the crook of an arm, was thoroughly transported…and beheld the boy, not yet sixteen, hunkered at the foot of these selfsame dunes, and the old Dakota Badlander right there beside him, surfboards like graven images of wood and fiberglass set before them, tail blocks sunk into the very sand upon which Fahey now stood, and the boy watching, as the old man waves toward the sea with a stick held at the end of one long arm corded with muscle, burnt by the sun, then uses the stick to trace in the sand the route they will follow and the lineups they will use to find their way among the shifting peaks that stretch into the ocean for as far as the eye can see, wave crests capped by tongues of flame as the mist of feathering lips flies before the light of an approaching sunrise…and this when the light was still pure, before the smog, before the fence at the heart of the valley, before the shit had hit the fan.

Magdalena and Fahey adventure together, and (trust me this is not a spoiler), have what passes for happy endings in Nunn novels. Tijuana Straights has many similarities to The Dogs of Winter – I found the Dogs of Winter to be slightly stronger – but Tijuana Straights is well worth the “2 in the morning” finish it will undoubtedly provoke.

[Update: This post was begging for a soundtrack. Here it is. The Aqua Velvets, Calexico, Chris Whitley, Joe Strummer - these guys were made for Kem Nunn.]

Surf Noir Kings Ride Again – The Aqua Velvets
Crooked Road and The Briar – Calexico
Quattro (World Drifts In) – Calexico
They Drive By Night – The Aqua Velvets
The Ride (Part II) – Calexico
Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
Black Heart – Calexico
Ball Peen Hammer – Chris Whitley
Living With the Law – Chris Whitley
Crystal Frontier – Calexico
Dirt Floor – Calexico

As some of you may have heard, one of the inspirations for Goby was me missing Jack Johnson playing a concert on Oahu one time when I was there. The lack of a single place to go to find out “what’s going on” is one of the reasons why people miss great events, and missing Jack Johnson playing in his native Hawaii would have been so cool! (Aside: we feel a special bond because my wife is part Hawaiian and her aunt actually taught at Jack’s high school).

So, it was great to finally close the loop and see Jack play this weekend (albeit at the Comcast center in Marshfield, MA, not in Hawaii). It was a great show – he played pretty much all his well-known tunes (“Taylor”, “Flake” , “Breakdown”) plus a bunch of songs from his new album To The Sea. Some bands are rough when they perform live, and some bands are so tight they sound like their recordings. Jack, for all his loose-and-free Hawaii surfer-dude attitude, is tight. His live performances are almost indistinguishable from his recordings.

G-Love opened for him, and was strong in both the warm-up set as well as when he returned for a few songs with Jack later in the evening.

The 60s were in full swing as the crowd took full advantage of the recent Massachusetts law making marijuana a civil violation; tie-dye, tiaras and headbands, biblical beards and other vestiges of the 60s seemed to be everywhere – you would have thought you were at a Led Zeppelin concert. The social element of the 60s was also visible in the form of Carbon Offsets being sold by the tour to cover the tour’s carbon footprint. Jack’s admirable work starting up his own social action network was in evidence in the booths at the concert for the All At Once (allatonce.org) Foundation. But the real atmosphere was the spirit of Aloha and friendliness of the crowd as well as the performers (including other Hawaiian musicians like Paula Fuga who joined Jack on stage). A little bit of Hawaii in Massachusetts!

Randomly noticed that there was a Rush Rockumentary on TV last night, Beyond the Lighted Stage. Turns out it was just released a few weeks ago, and even won the audience choice award at Tribeca. It is pretty amazing – there is even 30 year old video footage of a high school age Alex Lifeson arguing at the dinner table (& smoking) about whether he would finish high school or become a musician!

Digging a little deeper, I realized that about a month ago, they released a two-song bundle & booklet – how did I miss that? (The singles are Caravan and Brough Up to Believe, get them here: Caravan [+Digital Booklet]). As an aside, what a failure of music marketing! Rush has been with me my whole life, and has been a constant source of energy & inspiration. How come none of digital suppliers (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Live Nation….) know I love Rush and sent me a message? Marketing FAIL. Even today, music discovery is challenge (something I want to blog about in the future). In the meantime, grab the two new singles from these deeply talented and passionate musicians.

Microsoft is apparently listening to my blog – they’ve gone and launched the search engine I said Apple should build a few months ago – a media and entertainment search engine! (Or is this their version of me saying “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea?” 8).

Bing Entertainment (http://www.bing.com/entertainment) covers Music, Movies, TV, Games, and Video Games. It has a very attractive, browsable interface with a lot of rich media – for example, the music page shows photos, links to audio clips of the artist, as well as upcoming live performances. In spirit, I love what they are trying to do. They’ve even stolen a page from the wonderful (but defunct) service Lala which Apple acquired. You can play over 5 million songs in their entirety once for free. So if you ever wondered if you’d like Miles Davis’ Flamenco Sketches, now you can find out, for free, without engaging in any piracy: http://www.bing.com/music/songs/search?q=miles+davis&go=&form=DTPMUS.

Or at least, in principle you can. If you click on the play links, you get a “coming soon” message. Seriously, Microsoft? What was the hurry to launch, that you called this out in your press release (http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/06/23/a-new-entertainment-experience-for-bing.aspx) as one of the main features, and it doesn’t work? In practice, I find the implementation of Bing Entertainment to be disappointing (in contrast, Bing Travel is done very well). So far as I can tell there is no integration whatsoever between the search bar and the browse panels that are right next to each other. For example, a search for “Lady Gaga” produces the same search results as if I’d gone to Bing proper. It’s positioned as a media search product, but in reality it appears to be an entertainment portal with hard-coded content (and not very deep content), with a disconnected search box right next to it. The catalog appears to be very shallow. A search for the “Archer” TV show was disappointing – effectively the same search as on Bing “proper”. (BTW Archer is an absolutely hysterical parody of James Bond meets Beavis & Butthead meets “The office” – check it out if you haven’t seen it). In the entertainment space, there is a very limited catalog of entities that need to be recognized – how many TV shows are there, after all? Those should be recognized as special searches and treated accordingly. My search for “Archer” should have taken me to an Archer landing page. While it is positioned as a media search product, the search angle is virtually non-existent. The positioning of the product is spot-on, but the execution is lacking. Apple has a huge opportunity here – if Apple makes this product, the user experience is going to sing (perhaps even literally!).

Does Blog Search have a future?

Blogs are one of the richest sources of information for certain classes of information. Yet they are frustratingly hard to find or extract information from, and the state of the art (Google, Technorati) feel 100% stagnant. Here are a couple of example use cases I have that aren’t well served by existing tools:

1. Recruiting. When I recruit for a particular role, I’m looking for thought leaders or people with insight and passion. Usually these people have blogs. If I could see, for example, a list of all the people in the Boston area with blogs that blog about web development, I’d probably find some rock star developers. No easy way to do this today.
2. Travel planning. I’m thinking about a stay in southern Utah at a Bed & Breakfast. Who’s blogged about their trips there that might have some good perspective for me?
3. Music Discovery. Great blogs like Aurgasm, Quietcolor or TheMusicSlut are great ways to find music. But how many others like that are out there?

The current serious choices are pretty much limited to using normal search (Google, Bing etc), or using a Blog search engine like Google Blog Search or Technorati. With Google Blog Search, you get pretty much a toned-down version of Google: a search box with 10 results – you can’t really search for *blogs*, you can only search for *posts*, with the relevance ranking determined by some version of PageRank. There’s no real sense of the authority of a blog (other than that of PageRank), and no real opportunity for discovery – just punch in your keywords and hope for the best.

With Technorati, you do get some increased power. You can search for blogs as entities distinct from an individual post, and blogs do get assigned an authority score. But the experience seems to fail as often as succeed. A search for “boston web developer” blogs on Technorati returns three blogs, all with an authority score of 1 ( the minimum) – pretty sure there are more than 3 of this kind of blog in Boston! And there’s no way to sort the blogs by their authority score, at least that I can see. The Technorati blog directory also seems to be mostly limited to “authoritative” blogs – personal blogs (for example my own) seem to have little or no representation. But on long tail topics (say, music reviews of obscure artists), blogs by “real people” are often the only place to find this kind of commentary. Most importantly, there seems to be little innovation happening in Google Blog Search, Technorati, or more generally – the field is stagnant.

What would the characteristics of a good blog search tool be? What’s lacking in today’s approaches?
1. Comprehensiveness. There’s hundreds of millions of blogs (Billions?) – yet Technorati doesn’t seem to find many of them. (Google is more comprehensive, but limited by the “search box + 10 results” interface).
2. Ranking of blogs relative to search query and/or authority of author. (Of course this ranking problem is non-trivial. There are some interesting ideas on authority for twitter accounts which could perhaps be leveraged, e.g. http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/)
3. A faceted, searchable directory of blogs supporting discovery. Categorization technology has come a long way. It ought to be possible to categorize every blog against a reasonably detained taxonomy or facet set (say, the Open Directory categories, or something better), with 80% accuracy, across some common facets: topics, locations, age of blog, date of last post, and so forth. Even at 80% accuracy, this asset would be quite effective. And with a little UGC thrown in, the 20% that matter, and are wrong, will quickly get corrected. Using a microformat like hCard, blog authors could document their blog’s metadata quickly and accurately. Blogs also typically have some consistent thematic elements, such as an “About” page or a Blogroll list, that could be mined for interesting metadata. This kind of experience would power a new way to discover fresh and interesting blogs & content.
4. Recommend other, similar blogs. Powered by the facets above, or by a blogroll analysis, or something similar, a recommendation feature for similar blogs could be implemented, based on information readily available in an “almost standard” format.

Verticalized Blog Search Engines might also provide some task-centric capabilities. As I’ve written before, the future of search is about providing task-centric search capabilities. In music for example, The Hype Machine has some very interesting behaviors it can support, simply by virtue of being focused on music.

The obvious question: what business or investment model would support this kind of vertical search engine? In the Goby world of travel and entertainment, there’s a long history of various ways to monetize that kind of content. In the “pure content” world of blog search, it’s less clear – a pure page-view based CPM ad model isn’t likely to work. If the New York Times can’t make that kind of model work, a startup probably can’t either. Perhaps some form of interest-based, downstream ad retargeting approach might get enough leverage that it could get to critical mass. Alternatively in some domains a “freemium” model might work, where additional tools (say for recruiters or brand managers looking for a competitive edge). Given the scale of the problem, it’s not clear a bootstrapped company could take this on – the infrastructure requirements (bandwidth for crawling, servers, etc) probably require a non-trivial level of investment.

What blog search tool do you use? Do you use a blog search tool? or just Google? Is anyone innovating in the area?

Have been on a binge recently of listening to contemporary African music….as mentioned in my post on seeing Angélique Kidjo in concert, African music is really fun because it’s completely accessible, and yet constantly challenges your ear because it moves in unexpected directions. Spurred on by a few recent conversations I thought I would use this post to share some of my recent favorites, plus try out the Yahoo Media Player javascript tool, which works really well.

A number of the tracks are from the Festival in the Desert (http://www.festival-au-desert.org/), which is on my list of trips to take before I die – it’s a festival held out in the desert in Mali. Mostly the performers are African musicians but Robert Plant did a cameo there once (track below). I also included a track from Toubab Krewe, who are, strictly speaking, from North Carolina! – but spent a significant amount of time in Mali. Enjoy!

I Ka Barra by Habib Koité & Bamada
Aldachan Manin by Tinariwen
Fafa by Vieux Farka Touré
Soweto Daal by Wasis Diop
Teme by Alpha Yaya Diallo
Politique by Adama Yalomba
Win My Train Fare Home (If I Ever Get Lucky) – by Robert Plant & Justin Adams
Devil Woman by Toubab Krewe

So I’m riding the train in to work on Friday and my daughter texts me and says she’s got an extra ticket to Angélique Kidjo at Somerville Theater that night and did I want to go? Let’s see, long work week, tired, my car’s 25 miles away at the train station….but some things you don’t turn down – your daughter invites you to a concert, you go!

Angélique Kidjo is a Grammy award-winning Benin-born African pop diva, and her music covers everything from traditional African music to smokey jazz that would feel right at home in a Paris nightclub to Brazilian-sounding funk. The show reminded me why I love African pop music, and why it’s so important to see it live. The energy in the show is absolutely not captured on her studio recordings, great as they are. Plus – you can’t see her dance on the cd! For two solid hours Angélique danced through every song, and I don’t think she repeated a dance move the entire night – she has more moves than a human should be allowed to have! The other reason to see African music live is that they all dance – and the audience participates in a way that western musicians usually don’t encourage. Angélique roamed both aisles up and down both ways during one song, weaving her way through the crowd. Towards the end, she invited the audience up on stage to dance while she sang – “first come first serve, it’s kind of crowded up here!”. By the end of the song, she had 40 people on stage, everything from six year olds to sixty year olds, professors and students and football players up on the stage dancing.

She started off the show with a traditional song she grew up singing, accompanied by a rhythmic clapping. I was completely unable to clap along with the rhythm – it was totally foreign to someone who grew up on Bach and Led Zeppelin – completely irregular, and yet she repeated the rhythm over and over again, so it had an internal logic for her. One of the other things I love about African music is that it is completely accessible, and yet the melodies always move in unexpected directions. One of the things I love about travel to foreign countries is that it challenges your assumptions, and African music has that same effect – you have to *listen* because it doesn’t do what you expect.

There are persistent rumors that Apple’s building a search engine. Apple does have many obvious motivations for wanting to have a search engine of some form. There’s the clash with Google over mobile dominance (iPhone vs Android), as well as the continuing need to make their devices (the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Macs) continue to be “what the cool kids have”. What’s going to sell more gadgets? Content. (and apps, of course).

More broadly, Apple’s brand identity is undergoing a shift. Apple’s core audience has always been the cool, smart, hip people – the creative industry, the doers, the builders. But they are broadening their appeal to not just creators, but consumers. CV Harquail has a great take on this trend.

Are they building something? From the outside looking in, nobody knows. But if they are building something, I doubt it’s general purpose search. Building a search engine is getting easier and cheaper than it used to be, but it’s still a very significant investment of human and computing capital. If they were going that route, they’d just buy Yahoo. Or they could buy Cuil and get pure search at a much lower cost. But the reality is nobody wants another Google – a general purpose horizontal search engine – that’s why Cuil floundered – it doesn’t solve a problem people think they have. Google solves the problem it solves, well enough.

What does all that mean for what Apple should do in search? As I and others have written elsewhere, the future of search is about task and context. Search is the purest expression of consumer intent on the web – as Chris Dixon pointed out, that’s why Facebook has 1/30th the revenue of Google, with more web traffic.

Where does Apple care about consumer intent? Aside from when they are making device decisions, it’s when consumers buy media – music, movies, books, and other content. iTunes is a $2B per year business. So my guess is Apple’s new search engine might not even feel like a search engine. It will be a rich media site for searching & exploring the world of media. It will contain a lot of branded content (think New York Times, Netflix, Entertainment Tonight, Rolling Stone), and given Apple’s penchant for closed architectures, may even have a paid inclusion/pay-to-play model. Imagine a media search engine, helping you explore the world of media & entertainment, but incorporating significant amounts of social media content, centered around music, movies, art, books and other creative content. Of course with quick and easy ways to buy or stream things from iTunes 8). Something more like The Hype Machine than Google – and of course it would leverage the purchase of Lala. It will support exploration and social search as much as pure keyword search.Given Apple’s dominance in the creative world, and it’s brand power, it would have no trouble attracting advertisers to that kind of experience. iAd, anyone?

Is Apple building a search engine? Who knows.

Should they? Hell yes.

And knowing Apple’s design philosophy, it will be clean and elegant, with lots of rich media. It might feel kind of like a certain fishy search engine we know.

Who knew? Right in my back yard, Dispatch had a concert in Cambridge a few years back, that drew 100,000 people. Never had heard of them. I’m sitting in a nice restaurant in Gloucester (http://alchemybistro.com/) after wandering the harbor, and this really hypnotic music is on…it’s Phish! No wait? It’s Al Dimeola! (e.g. “Passerby”) Who is this?? The server blandly informs me it’s Dispatch. Never heard of ‘em, but it’s pretty good. Come home, talking to my son, he’s like “Oh yeah. Check out State Radio. And check out this website: http://www.dispatchmusic.com/dispatch.html – you can listen to the whole thing”….nice. Now I just can’t turn it off 8). And, strangely enough, an acoustic guitarist I admire (but who is not well known), Phil Keaggy, is playing Al Dimeola-like electric guitar with them live. Who knew?