Projo Subterranean Homepage News

I've been making some new prototype pages for the other part of my job here, and my eyes needed something restful to look at. I stumbled on this:

"Prehistoric Spirits" by Walter King. King writes one of the art blogs at absolutearts.com.

...I’ve been on the road for 10 days now delivering a large painting to a client in El Paso TX. I then spent three nights in Tucson with my son’s family. I spent a night in the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in western New Mexico where I wanted to see the pueblos in the cliffs and do some watercolors. I took some photos of pictographs painted on a cliff face around the time that the renaissance was beginning in what is now Italy some 700 years ago (there were also some petro-glyphs that may go back to AD 100). I began wondering why they did that? From a contemporary artist’s point of view there were no collectors to buy their artwork. Selling one’s art seems to be a huge topic on the Absolutearts forum. So in that sense what was the point? There was no trade value in a painting on a cliff face that couldn’t be transported to another canyon or traded for hides or flint or copper. I suppose they could charge admission like the Parks Service does today but I can’t imagine that the Indian Artist who painted it had much of a national reputation at that point in time....

Thanks, Walter.

Two items worth noting (for good or not) over at FBQB, a radio industry site: PPM Can Track Podcasts; Podcasts Can Be Delivered To Mobile Phones

The technology known as podcasting took two giant leaps forward this week as new developments proved that podcast listening can be tracked and that podcasts can be successfully delivered to mobile phones.

First, Arbitron Inc. announced today that they were able to successfully encode and track podcasts using the Portable People Meter or PPM. During the week of July 18, Arbitron encoded several podcasts provided by Clear Channel’s WHTZ (Z100)/New York, that were then uploaded to the podcast portion of Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The Z100 podcasts were then downloaded to an MP3 player and played over headsets using the PPM headset adapter. The PPM detected and recorded the unique identification codes that were embedded in the MP3 file....

Whee, we can monetize 'em! Ratings, ads, etc.

The other podcasting news, announced yesterday by software publisher Pod2Mob, now makes it possible to deliver podcasts to mobile phones. Pod2Mob has released a podcast streaming service that uses free software to enable consumers to listen to podcasts through their mobile phones.

This is probably good news for amateur podcasters, who can get their audio out to people who don't own iPods.

Also,

Sirius Satellite Radio will launch an all-Rolling Stones channel on August 23 at 9 a.m. EST. The band will help program the channel, which will feature five decades of Rolling Stones music, rare tracks, live cuts and previews from A Bigger Bang. The channel will air nightly concert playbacks where Sirius will play album versions of the Stones' songs in the order they were performed following each U.S. tour date. Rolling Stones Radio will be available until September 29.

Does anybody really want to hear a wall of Stones? Maybe I'm just Stonesed out after all these years...

Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post takes the newsroom cliche about feeding the monster every day to blog heights (The Tail That Wags the Blog):

As an artist, my normal impulse is to write things that people don't care about and, ideally, can't even understand. Gibberish. But my freedom of expression is hampered by the blogging software that tracks every page view. In the old days, the age of print, a journalist had very little data on how many people read a particular story. Now I can track readership second by second, eyeball by eyeball. It's obvious what people want: political screeds and celebrity gossip. A few weeks back, I blogged three paragraphs on Karl Rove. Someone at Google News linked to the blog, and a Rovestorm erupted, a festival of vituperation, with a commensurately outstanding number of page views. Now I pretty much have to write about Rove all the time. (Contrary to what you may have heard, my blog item "Karl Rove Linked to Hoffa Disappearance" was completely fair.)

The continual focus-grouping explains why most bloggers write as though their primary goal is to rise in the Google search results. The more you mention people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the more readers you will have, and the more links, and the more you will rise in Google's estimation. I have nothing really to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and am not even remotely interested in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but I know that my blog will be read by more people if it mentions famous celebrities who might be secretly boinking, such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

And let me just add, purely for the sake of Google: sex, alien abduction, Oprah, Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan, jumbo hooters the size of watermelons, Dick Cheney, Mark of the Beast, Armageddon, free money.

Somewhere in the bowels of the darkside, someone is tracking my page views, too. So take that: All those Google-juicy words and the Washington Post, to boot, in this one post.