Disqus - Latest Comments for catbirdseat

Re: Op-Ed: An Entrepreneur’s Take on Building a Great Design Team

Ryan Catbird — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:31:38 -0000

Thanks for sharing this, Noah-- always interesting to hear people's personal approaches to design! I was actually struggling with how to articulate what I wanted to say in response when I realized I should just do what we designers always do to communicate-- draw a picture :-)

This is how *I* would interpret what you're describing to make it also jibe with how my colleagues and I might think of it...

http://designmap.com/ryan/N...

Re: http://chainofknives.tumblr.com/post/1310493177

Ryan Catbird — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:31:53 -0000

Reminds me of that apocryphal story of the time Joaquin Phoenix crashed his car in the Hollywood Hills, and then Werner Herzog suddenly appeared, pulled him from the wreckage, and then disappeared again.

Re: http://bajillionhits.biz/post/1163130406

Ryan Catbird — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:36:03 -0000

I enjoyed your list, but would have enjoyed it much more if you would have maximized my pageviewjoyment by making me click-through 12 times, i.e. you should have listed these 1 site per page

Re: http://bajillionhits.biz/post/1127350254

Ryan Catbird — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:59:22 -0000

You are so crushing it so much harder. You are the Kanye of killer strat, these guys are just the Sugarhill Gang.

Re: Gawker’s Next Redesign Thinks Big–Like Big-Screen TV

Ryan Catbird — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:31:43 -0000

So terribly, terribly ill-conceived...

Re: http://chainofknives.tumblr.com/post/722749737

Ryan Catbird — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:19:15 -0000

Just don't get him started on Destroyer

Re: http://perpetua.tumblr.com/post/678775405

Ryan Catbird — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:18:28 -0000

The general public really doesn't seem to know how the sausage gets made...

Re: http://tedr.tumblr.com/post/507709328

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:21:16 -0000

It's not TEH BEST TO DO TEH GOOD WORK IS TO PLAY TEH VIDEO GAMES, it's "I look around and I see an incredible number of people always engrossed in their iPhone screens, just burning the minutes off of their lives-- could this be turned into something useful?"

Yes, of course, actively volunteering your time and money is an obvious (and great) way to help, but what I was talking about is utilizing an already-existant "wasteful" behavior and trying to bring something productive from it. Way more people are going to play Farmville than are going to volunteer on a farm; I'm saying that rather than bemoaning that fact, let's try to spin it into something constructive.

Re: The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers

Ryan Catbird — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:17:20 -0000

(Fred, this is not directed at you -- I know you're a man of integrity, and do not blog/tweet shadily... )

With regard to the Hype Machine's Twitter list, I understand what you are saying about it having "game dynamics," but at the same time, I certainly hope that people DO NOT start thinking of it as "a game." Anthony created the Hype Machine Twitter list, just as he created Hype Machine proper, as a tool to help people discover the music that others felt passionate about. It's a social tool created to provide a real value, and as such needs to be founded on true, accurate data. Hype Machine (regardless of what the name may imply) was NOT created as a tool for bands or PR people to use to game promotion, nor was it created a means for blogs (or now, Twitterers) to brand-build for themselves. Exploiting Hype Machine like this lessens its value to *everybody*, and is the root of Anthony's recent problems with Hypem "spam" detailed in his "On Chart Integrity" blog posts ( blog.hypem.com ). In the same way that Black Hat SEO tricks devalue the search experience for everyone, so blogging/tweeting a song from a gaming/promotion motivation devalues Hype Machine entirely. I don't think there's any sort of fine line between spamming and informing-- it always seems perfectly obvious to me which is which.

I think that those of us who grow to wield more influence than the average online Joe need to be much more aware of what we're posting and why. We should be adding value to the online experience-- and not value for the one (the one asking you to post/tweet), but value for everybody.

Re: SoundCtrl Speech: Change in Music Industry

Ryan Catbird — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:17:45 -0000

As someone who's been observing this stuff from a waist-deep perspective for years now, I have to say that for an "outsider," you certainly talk a lot of perfect sense and insight!

Sadly, it looks like they're not letting any more people in for this event tonight, so do a favor for those of us that can't attend: keep blogging about music here on continuations. :-)

(Between you and Fred, it's starting to look like USV must be one of the most music-intelligent and -saavy VC firms out there-- which makes it all the more unfortunate that no music ventures seem to have a good solid plan for revenue as yet)

Re: Mike Barthel's Tumblr - You know what? Hiring some kids to revolutionize...

Ryan Catbird — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:53:57 -0000

I guess unless you are familiar with Umair's ongoing and consistently brilliant writing, it's easy to take this quote out of context and assume he's saying something to the effect of, "GET DEM TWITTER KIDZ AND TUBMLR BOYZ AND FACEBOOKERS, DEY CAN FIX TEH ECONOMY." In fact, what he is saying is that Obama took the presidency in part because he was willing to look outside all the established channels of campaign ing, and instead do something 'revolutionary'-- while w/r/t this economy, he is doing nothing *remotely close* to doing anything 'revolutionary,' he is still try to fix a broken old system by using broken old system methods. Haque doesn't want Obama to look to "tech" or "online" people to fix the economy-- he wants him to take on a "new" approach to the economy instead of trying to use "old" rules to fix it.

Re: offnotesnotes - Is This The Worst Blog Post Of All Time?

Ryan Catbird — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:21:19 -0000

That sounds exactly like something that would come out of Gary Vaynerchuk's mouth. It's almost as good as this:

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/p...

Almost.

Re: disqus

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:12:34 -0000

Your comments just killed my dog.

Re: offnotesnotes - “The perception of music criticism seems to have...

Ryan Catbird — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:16:27 -0000

Actually, people really do seem to want Carles to be some sort of top-secret fake identity/pseudonym, as in Gerard Vs. Bear, but he's a *real* dude-- it says right in one of the comments of the HRO site that his name is Carlos Lopez, and, FWIW, he's a 2007 Tulane graduate with a degree in business.

Re: yvynyl

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:24:46 -0000

I'm a little bit totally freaked out right now because this song, inexplicably, popped into my head a few hours ago despite me not having listened to the record for a good 6 months. So the odds of you posting this seem kind of out there. Please stop fucking with me psychically.

Re: offnotesnotes - the frustrating overabundance of unnecessarily...

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:07:56 -0000

B-but where would RCRD LBL be without those endless remixes?

(Answer: it wouldn't)

Re: offnotesnotes - Japandroids: "Young Hearts Spark Fire" [MP3/Stream] | Pitchfork

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:53:50 -0000

I wanted to like this, but to me, that drumming sounds very much not good-- so much so that I thought I'd accidentally opened 2 copies of the file that were playing out of sync.

Also, "David Prowse" is the guy who played Darth Vader-- this probably ain't the same guy, huh?

Re: offnotesnotes - One of the most unique sounding new bands of the...

Ryan Catbird — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:44:54 -0000

I've avoided bands for worse reasons, I guess....

- their top Myspace friends
- being hyped by the blogs ______, ______, or ______
- being from L.A.

Re: offnotesnotes - One of the most unique sounding new bands of the...

Ryan Catbird — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:23:12 -0000

Now there's a band who (very unfairly, I'm sure) I've steered clear of solely because of their name.

I feel a bit bad about that, but know that I would likely do the same for "Zissou and the Life Aquatics," "Diablo and the Junos," or "Miranda and the Me and You and Everyone We Know."

Re: Mike Barthel's Tumblr - When gasoline prices peaked in July, says Edmunds,...

Ryan Catbird — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:07:19 -0000

Businessweek is an asshole, then.

Re: incidentals and accidentals - DJ Martian's Page: Uncut Magazine Top 50 Albums of 2008

Ryan Catbird — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:52:35 -0000

I don't know how you can possibly resist the inexorable pleasantness of "Skinny Love!"

Re: I Guess I'm Doing Something Wrong

Ryan Catbird — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:22:07 -0000

Kidmercury is 100% correct. We will not see the "revolution" until we get past this CPM/CPC pricing fixation. In this day and age, I can't see how valuing something based solely on the gross number of eyeballs looking at it could possibly be the best methodology. I would think that having 100 users who were really interested, active, and engaged with an advertiser would be worth a lot more than having 10,000 DISinterested users briefly glancing at an obnoxious banner ad.

Believing in CPM as a great model isn't far from believing in mass spam mailing as a great model; they're both based on the same principle: club as many people as possible over the head with your message, and hope you can get 1% to respond. The advertisers who recognize that the future isn't about brute force -- it's about targeting and engaging the consumers who *want* to be engaged -- those are the advertisers who will survive and thrive. The rest can go live in our spam boxes.

Re: muxfind

Ryan Catbird — Sun, 25 May 2008 11:35:53 -0000

One has to assume that 'Search' is such an obvious and easy-to-implement feature for Muxtape that Justin must have *intentionally* left it out of the feature set. Sure, Search is a great tool for us users, but isn't this just going to attract more industry heat on Muxtape?

Re: Fluxtumblr

Ryan Catbird — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:39:45 -0000

These are all fair points, but if an album is a 9 it should get a 9

Execept for those times when the Pitchfork higher-ups declare that the writer isn't "allowed" to give it a 9.

Re: Joe Lazarus

Ryan Catbird — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:09:50 -0000

That's actually a pretty cool way to parse the news. Good idea

( much better than my latest Lazyweb request: http://catbird.tumblr.com/p... )